Sometimes the slippery slope is not a fallacy, but the natural consequence of seeking more control. This feature can be horribly misused in the future, for example, to find people who have sent/received/downloaded Tiannanmen pictures, because instant messaging pictures can be automatically added to your albums.
You can't trust a feature whose only impediment from being abused in the future is such pinky promise.
Recall that apple devices include an ML accelerator, at some point or another, the next step down this slope will be adding this to the display pipeline.
PhotoDNA and similar are done in on-premises machines, nothing on your own private phone.
Do you know how discovery works in court? I'm guessing not.
Once a hash matches, law enforcement would need a subpoena to access the raw image. If a person were to be arrested, that evidence would be turned over to the defense.
It would be very obvious that a picture of a police officer was not child pornography.
Are you under the impression people are jailed for hash collisions? Because that's not the case at all....
I don't think the suggestion is that a hash of a police uniform will be used to convict of CP but rather the idea that a new law will be passed that - in order to protect the police from 'harassment' - will outlaw taking pictures of the police.
So in that case in discovery the picture of a police officer would be evidence that you broke that hypothetical law. The technology deployed to protect the children opens up the possibility of its deployment for other things later, based on legal requirements of course.
For example don't take pictures of copyrighted material would be something people might want to work on.
I head over to my friend Midev's house with precursor chemicals for VX. You complain that having the precursors to VX lying around is not a good idea. I point out that creating VX is purely hypothetical. Sure, if that happened, it'd be terrible. But, that's not happening.
Apple is deploying a technology with few legitimate uses that makes terrible things not only possible but easy all without the voluntary consent of the device's owner.
Yes, they are. The point is that this change make this hypothetical too close to being true so the change should be abandoned. It skews the power balance too much into the hands of a small number of unknown people so the rest are protesting.
Appealing to the slippery slope is itself a fallacy.
"While this image may be insightful for understanding the character of the fallacy, it represents a misunderstanding of the nature of the causal relations between events. Every causal claim requires a separate argument. Hence, any "slipping" to be found is only in the clumsy thinking of the arguer, who has failed to provide sufficient evidence that one causally explained event can serve as an explanation for another event or for a series of events"
You need to argue things that are actually happening. Appealing to hypotheticals, especially when technically incorrect, serves no one.
What's actually happening is that a mechanism is being introduced that makes it easy to censor anything Apple wants censored. Apple promises to only use it for child pornography.
Apple, however, is still not a sovereign state, and as such must bow to the wishes of actual sovereign states. Sovereign states have proven again and again that they will grab as much power as they can, and doing it insidiously, in the form of a private database of hashes of undesired content, is especially attractive to them.
This is not a hypothetical. For a real-world example look to England where its nation-wide internet blocking system is already used beyond its original scope. Or think of what countries like China will certainly do with such a mechanism. Scope creep, in the form of power grabs by nation states, is a realistic concern, based on vast historical experience, not a fallacy.
Apart from the concern of scope creep, there is also the concern of false positives. When deployed on such a scale, there will undoubtedly be perfectly legimate images being flagged. I'm not happy about my phone containing software that's always vigilant, ready to ruin my life over a false positive.
ok first off that slippery slope referred to here is the domino theory - which is a faulty idea of the causality of events - we can say a slippery slope regarding events is likely faulty because unless the causal chain between any two events is very tightly linked our understanding of causality is not sufficient to understand it. That is to say we have a very tight link between a domino falling, hitting another domino and toppling it, but we do not have a very tight link between a country going communist and then another one later. Hence, every causal claim requires a separate argument.
The slippery slopes being discussed here are not about events and the causes that link them, but about the applications of technology and to a certain extent about laws being used beyond their original mandate. This kind of slippery slope is a logical one.
Thus the technology being used for this mean that it can be used for other things - what kinds of things can it be used for? Are there things that people would like to make illegal or that are illegal now that this technology can be used catch people infringing on these hypothetical laws. Thus - if we allow this technology in our devices now are we opening ourselves up for other potential uses for the technology in the future that will hurt us.
If this argument seems the same to you as the domino theory and that we must take every hypothetical problem when it actually occurs I wonder how you are ever able to plan for any eventuality?
I understand your argument, that a court (in a democratic country with a rule of law) would expect that the investigators extract the original image from the accused's phone with the appropriate chain of custody of the evidence.
However, that does not mean that while this investigation is under way, the accused is now go about their business.
For CP, or other crimes of violence, that makes sense.
But if laws are passed against peaceful protest, then that means someone could be held in detention while those photos are investigated. An anonymous photo now is trackable.
Let’s conveniently ignore all the facts that speak against the planned dystopia, and focus on the positives of having all facets of your life constrained and controlled by authorities.
There are plenty of examples where it is fallacious though, often absurdly so. The important distinction is: does A abstractly "lead to" B, or does A directly enable B, but for some will to use it that way.
For one example, it was always absurd to suggest that gay marriage would lead to legalized pedophilia, bestiality, or marriage to objects.
Meanwhile, trolls and staunch intellectuals demanding "enough" evidence think they can gatekeep what's acceptable to notice is already slipping and gaslight others for noticing and worrying, only to find that years later, the Overton window shifted and newer generations were none the wiser, bringing the things that were previously unacceptable into the mainstream with reckless abandon.
(edited for brevity, expanding more on this in a reply...)
The corporation that is the U.S government acts just like one: roadmaps and planning ahead for radical policy changes to occur within longer spans of time to signify progress (or something), and then absolutely losing their shit if an opposing candidate wins & gets in the way of their progress, as we observed these past 5 years.
Acceptance of pedophilia has been set in motion for several years now. One only need look at some of California's SB-145, the ever-expanding reach of public schools teaching sex-ed to kindergartners, and the N number of drag queens sexualizing themselves in front of young children in public libraries and schools with grand applause and media gushing as these facilities move a few steps away from becoming brothels.
(See what I did there? Surely our libraries won't become brothels, that would be absurd! I mean, the chances of that happening are 2nd to none; and if 10 years from now, libraries still aren't brothels, then I'd have been wrong after all, and my playful exaggeration will have expired. A gatekeeper would have done their noble internet duty to inform me just how idiotic my suggestion was from the start, to be sure. The joke's on them for losing 15 minutes crafting the perfect response to my alarmism that will definitely change my mind.)
We had none of this just 3 years ago, but I'm pretty confident I'll be gaslit in response to my highly misinformed and "hateful" comments, as it goes. ;) That's no matter though. I take responsibility for that by standing by what I say, not bending to the winds of outrage.
The only example you mentioned that is attributable to government is sex-ed.
Sex education isn't about teaching you how to have sex, it's "here's all the reasons you need to be very careful with sex".
In my classes I learned about many different STI's and the dangers of unprotected sex. Not once was I taught a Kamasutra position or what to do with my fingers.
For younger kids I assume the curriculum would be more about what kinds of behaviors they need to be careful of and immediately warn other adults about.
I suppose the name is very unfortunate because a lot of people seem to think sex-ed is about getting young people to start having sex, when in fact it has the opposite result and we can see it in statistics.
You're implying a slippery slope fallaciously. Legal protections for transgender people does not directly follow from legalized gay marriage.
Also, that father violated a gag order, and acted against the decisions of the both custodial parent and his child's medical professionals. You're being disingenuous to misrepresent that as "for calling his daughter[sic] she".
It is only a fallacy when it’s not backed up by solid reasoning. There are obviously slippery slopes. And sometimes they aren’t there, even though people claim they are. It’s a shame that some have been conditioned to immediately make the connection between the two.
I'm surprised to hear this falsehood being repeated here. There is nothing inherently fallacious about slippery slope arguments. Like almost all rhetorical tactics they can be used fallaciously. The fact that slippery slope is not inherently fallacious is very well documented in the academic literature on rhetoric.
It is a logical fallacy in that the consequences do not logically follow from the proposition. However that doesn’t say anything about whether they are likely to follow in practice, only that there is no logical proof that they follow.
In this case, the arguments against this mechanism are generatly slippery slope arguments - logic doesn’t guarantee the bad outcomes. However it’s quite reasonable to be concerned that the bad outcomes will happen because of the actors involved.
>isn't even really a logical fallacy. In fact, I can think of a number of circumstances where it turned out to be true.
This represents a very common misunderstanding of fallacies, IIRC it's called the Fallacy Fallacy: fallacies don't give you any information about the truth of the conclusion, they only indicate that the logic that ties that conclusion to the premises is unsound. So "slippery slope fallacy" means "worse things don't logical follow in increments from better things" but that doesn't mean that in any real situation "worse things follow in increments from better things" is not true.
The most common example of this misunderstanding is probably Occam's Razor, it says nothing about whether things are or aren't more complex in any real situation, only that it's easy to reason about things if you don't add additional aspects that aren't needed.
Pictures is just a pretense. Step #2 will be URLs of pictures that users send each other using the phone's keyboard. Step #3 will quietly expand the definition of a URL to any keyboard input. At that point, Apple will have a god's eye view into all communications of their users, be it over WhatsApp, Signal, SMS or an online forum. Imagine having a dashboard that shows in realtime with gps coordinates how many text messages contain the word "enough"! The same scanner module can detect certain words in phone calls. What dictator wouldn't want that?
If there ever is a showcase of the slippery slope fallacy this comment would be on it.
Step back for a second and think about why perhaps falling for the ‘but the children’ trap tells you Apple wants to go in the absurd direction you are pointing. Think about if it makes any sense at all they would want to go that way, think about why they would even let you know and think about how plausible it is for these steps to lead to each other.
It's not fallacy. There's huge demand for such monitoring and few countries are as competent as China to do it themselves. Apple already works closely with CCP, so it won't face any moral dilemmas. The only obstacle is damage to reputation in the US and Apple is assessing the scope of this damage right now.
I started writing an explanation of how you're mistaken, and then I realised just how quickly you went from Apple using a very common method for identifying CSAM (which Facebook already uses, yet I've not really heard much in the way of complaints about that) to Apple wanting to listen for keywords in phone calls, and just how unlikely it is you'd reasonably think through my response.
Perhaps you're the one who's wrong though? Your response makes no sense other than to grandstand how hasty and unreasonable the OP is being. You could have just omitted it and we'd be no worse off.
You can't trust a feature whose only impediment from being abused in the future is such pinky promise.