I've been frustrated lately that my rating as a passenger in Uber is at 4.78 and falling despite my own preception of always being an excellent passenger. I can't imagine how frustrating it would be to have your entire life controlled by this type of rating system. I listened to a podcast that dug into how once you get into a hole with this type of rating system it's self-reinforcing and practically impossible to get out of. This can't be a good thing for civil liberties.
frustrated lately that my rating as a
passenger in Uber is at 4.78 and falling
Mother of God, passenger ratings? I'm glad I've never used Uber, and now I am certain I never will.
I mean, of all things, I don't even like the HN karma system. Arbitrary frowny faces for The Wrong Kind of Joke only now, scale that up first, just to taxi drivers, and then apply it to Society At Large, All Day Every Day.
Uber/Taxi drivers are people too, and their vehicles are an important part of their livelihood. They deserve the right to avoid the types of people who end up with 1 star reviews on Uber. Hint: you have the vomit in, steal from, or otherwise wreak havoc MORE THAN ONCE for it to get that bad.
It is not all that transparent. At a certain point you will end up on one or more blacklists, and there is no clear way to get off it again, or even arbitrage this act.
Then the rules system is very complex, and probably will be ever changing, being fine-tuned. There are rules in preparation (or already implemented) where your network of friends and relatives affect your credit score, etc. Very dystopic social engineering.
It will be harder and harder to check whether all rules are applied equally across all people, I imagine.
Transparency will also make it very easy to abide by some, though. Like imagine if Google's ranking algorithm was public. SEO spammers would greatly profit from that but overall the system would suffer due to their over-optimization for some things.
Every resident, or just those who don't bribe the right people to improve their ranking, or those who aren't high enough in the political pecking order?
It almost goes without saying that such a system is ripe for abuse and puts in to the hands of the powerful a new tool for control over the powerless.
The average citizen will now have to jump even higher when their masters tell them to jump, while those at the top of the political hierarchy are very likely to be exempt.
Even if the system applies equally to everyone, the biggest problem will be that civil disobedience is now completely banned. The government is now able to do whatever they want with impunity, and the citizens can't do anything about it.
Maybe they’ll be a new subculture of unrated or poorly rated people that supply their own market and services? That’s if the government doesn’t just start killing them.
We tend to think that the state of technology is the main driving force enabling this to happen, but if you look at history it is far from the truth. For good or bad, the tolerant and complacent condition of modern life means that all those previous efforts by governments or ruling classes were unsuccessful and deemed to failure. Every time a system of oppression that restrained universal rights reached a critical point it eventually met with a greater force that eradicated it -- ironically many times spawned and fed by the very same apparatus devised for control that backfired.
Naively thinking this time it will be different is not understanding human nature.
This is the same government that has killed 40-80 million of its own citizens since taking power in 1949. With impunity, if that was unclear.
The repression has lowered considerably during the economic boom of the last 3 decades, but it's naive to compare this new system to some liberal utopia. That is not what it's replacing.
I hope I'm not being too cynical by saying: the things we fear most about this system are not abuse, they're the system working as intended.
Xi is a dictator and he is riding to and fro on a tiger from which he dare not dismount. Mass surveillance and a strong police state are the tools he uses to stay in the saddle.
It you think this is dystopian, you probably have good credit. Try setting up home internet with a FICO under 600. Try renting an apartment in Williamsburg with an Experian score under 750. Try getting a civil service job while your gas bill is overdue. America invented this.
Some of these seem like really bad comparisons. If your credit score is bad, you just have to pay your ISP in advance, rather than be billed monthly in arrears, which is pretty logical. This is also just a rational response by a private company in response to a customer’s bad credit. Not that I don’t have lots of issues with the credit reporting agencies in America.
The Chinese system seems a whole lot more dystopian since it’s state run, and since they are trying to link unrelated things — i.e. penalize you for certain “anti-social” behavior that goes far beyond having poor credit.
Ironically this is what the American credit system was designed to avoid. Pre modern credit score, bank loans were given out based on things like “moral character”, the theory being that alcoholics shouldn’t get loans, but it turns out this has a high false negative rate. Most hurt were of course minorities. After the credit system access to credit exploded, whether for better or worse.
Credit scores are a gliding scale. With all peoples' purchasing data getting increasingly accessible for commercial purposes, it may well be that 'good' score is measured in purchasing power, and that poor people that never had any debts still get a 'bad' credit rating.
This is already how it works, more or less, but when such credit rating becomes (a weighted) part of a social credit system, then it hardwires wealth inequality. A rich person can do a lot more 'wrongs' before low social credit becomes a problem
Give me a break. I rent to tenants with horrible credit all the time. And unless you’re handling handling money or sensitive info or getting a security clearance, bad credit won’t stop you from getting a job. You people need to stop reading the internet echo chamber and go talk to some actual people in the world. Tens of millions of people have bad credit. You think they’re all homeless and unemployed?
Also, I know that people are bad at thinking about debt, so I don't morally fault them for taking on more than they can handle. I've spent beyond my means before! That said, society needs some level of personal accountability in order to function.
I suppose that one can argue in a hyper-capitalist society that the credit rating would be the only social score that mattered, but I suppose that there is more to it in the Chinese model, in that probably you still can't do those things in Chinese society without the financial means to do them, but now there are extra obligations on the individual rather akin to not committing Thoughtcrime.
China doesn’t have a good track record of policies: the pest control, the one child. One could also argue that their economy is also showing a crisis in the future.
This system if it is unstable and has side effects will probably screw up two generations at least.
The main issue I see is that people with low scores can “infect” other people’s scores. Considering this like a viral phenomenon the score will be impacted starting with family, friends, colleagues, strangers. I can’t see a solution except going the old route of “killing the nine family relations”.
I can see some kind of ghetto of low social score people doing barter and what not.
There are some contradictions like donating blood giving good score but what if for someone with a low score. There goes empathy if punished.
Or some exploits like colluding and creating cartels of increasing social score artificially.
Society will no longer be able to function if you can't break rules. I can easily see the people who are impacted by this system starting a revolution.
The entire point of the system is to make revolution, or any change at all, impossible. The people no longer have anything to bring in on their side of the negotiation.
Also there will be no way to organise one because the government will drop your social score for even thinking about it of talking to anyone else with a low score.
Once this phase is complete, the true manacles will come out: targeted collective punishment. If your family member or friend is a bad actor, you are guilty by association, and your score suffers.
This will also make you reachable even if you're not living in China. Say something China doesn't like? Your family and friends score suffers in China. Do it for too long and they disown you for their own self preservation.
A part of me feels like this can't possibly be a good thing.
But who knows, maybe this will work out and be a net positive for society at the cost of the few people that will fall through the cracks and be evaluated unfairly. It seems like this is going to happen one way or another, so here's hoping for the best.
Like all things this will have it's negatives and it positives. Will result in decrease in crime cleaner streets better behaved citizens. One major problem China faces is that they have advanced too quickly from rural to urban for the people habits and behaviours to have changed. Now this will force people to change. But at the same time the restrictions that people will be living under will result in mental problems in the future. My thought is taking this at face value and not considering how this will be abused as that is another argument which everyone else is doing.
In the future identities will belong to groups of people, not individuals. It will be like that episode of cracked where everyone is one of the characters on friends. Something weird is happening with society where as the internet connects us there are ways of doing things that win out on huge scales. It's like we're outsourcing our personalities, hobbies, likes and dislikes, etc. Powers that be want more control. They don't want us to be individuals. They want us to be neurons. We're taking a sick turn that's a hundred times worse than anything Orwell could have imagined.
Okay but please understand you're asking me to spend a half an hour decompressing and interleaving several different ideas I have into one. I don't mind if you really are interested but this is the internet and it wouldn't be the first time I did to his only to no response or to have it start an argument that I don't want to participate in.
Readit News
I mean, of all things, I don't even like the HN karma system. Arbitrary frowny faces for The Wrong Kind of Joke only now, scale that up first, just to taxi drivers, and then apply it to Society At Large, All Day Every Day.
Every consumer interaction now rates you as a customer. Amazon will drop you if you return too many things. Uber/Lyft have ratings systems. etc.
Until we start making the holding of personal information the equivalent of holding toxic sludge, nothing will change.
You know what you did wrongly to lose points, so that you can avoid it next time.
You also know what are good things that you can do to improve your score.
https://www.hrw.org/news/2017/12/12/chinas-chilling-social-c...
Then the rules system is very complex, and probably will be ever changing, being fine-tuned. There are rules in preparation (or already implemented) where your network of friends and relatives affect your credit score, etc. Very dystopic social engineering.
It will be harder and harder to check whether all rules are applied equally across all people, I imagine.
Except if you don't agree with the definition of "wrong" and "good".
THAT you can't correct.
Deleted Comment
Because in China, it would be the government giving you the rating, not other people.
Dead Comment
It almost goes without saying that such a system is ripe for abuse and puts in to the hands of the powerful a new tool for control over the powerless.
The average citizen will now have to jump even higher when their masters tell them to jump, while those at the top of the political hierarchy are very likely to be exempt.
Naively thinking this time it will be different is not understanding human nature.
This is the same government that has killed 40-80 million of its own citizens since taking power in 1949. With impunity, if that was unclear.
The repression has lowered considerably during the economic boom of the last 3 decades, but it's naive to compare this new system to some liberal utopia. That is not what it's replacing.
I hope I'm not being too cynical by saying: the things we fear most about this system are not abuse, they're the system working as intended.
Xi is a dictator and he is riding to and fro on a tiger from which he dare not dismount. Mass surveillance and a strong police state are the tools he uses to stay in the saddle.
You raise a good point, but I’d still be wary of both possibilities. Or some hybrid mix where it’s the worst of both worlds simultaneously.
The Chinese system seems a whole lot more dystopian since it’s state run, and since they are trying to link unrelated things — i.e. penalize you for certain “anti-social” behavior that goes far beyond having poor credit.
This is already how it works, more or less, but when such credit rating becomes (a weighted) part of a social credit system, then it hardwires wealth inequality. A rich person can do a lot more 'wrongs' before low social credit becomes a problem
Anticipating pushback — yes, our healthcare system is atrocious, but the "all bankruptcy is medical bankruptcy" thing is just a meme: https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-partisan/wp/2018/0...
Also, I know that people are bad at thinking about debt, so I don't morally fault them for taking on more than they can handle. I've spent beyond my means before! That said, society needs some level of personal accountability in order to function.
While I hate this system for privacy reasons, there is always going to be some sort rating system for businesses to avoid high risk customers.
no lease, no credit card, no nothing. America gave it to the corporations. So what difference does it make if an all mighty corp does it or the gov't?
Dead Comment
This system if it is unstable and has side effects will probably screw up two generations at least.
The main issue I see is that people with low scores can “infect” other people’s scores. Considering this like a viral phenomenon the score will be impacted starting with family, friends, colleagues, strangers. I can’t see a solution except going the old route of “killing the nine family relations”.
I can see some kind of ghetto of low social score people doing barter and what not.
There are some contradictions like donating blood giving good score but what if for someone with a low score. There goes empathy if punished.
Or some exploits like colluding and creating cartels of increasing social score artificially.
This will also make you reachable even if you're not living in China. Say something China doesn't like? Your family and friends score suffers in China. Do it for too long and they disown you for their own self preservation.
But who knows, maybe this will work out and be a net positive for society at the cost of the few people that will fall through the cracks and be evaluated unfairly. It seems like this is going to happen one way or another, so here's hoping for the best.