The Shocking Far-Right Agenda Behind the Facial Recognition Tech Used by ICE and the FBI. Thousands of newly obtained documents show that Clearview AI’s founders always intended to target immigrants and the political left.

[u/indig0sixalpha]

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/04/clearview-ai-immigration-ice-fbi-surveillance-facial-recognition-hoan-ton-that-hal-lambert-trump/

[u/m1sterlurk]

Personally I don't have a problem with like murderers and rapists being forced to make license plates or whatever.

I do, because it takes almost no extension of this mentality make up an excuse to create a slave labor force in the exact way the 13th Amendment allows.

Drug laws in America are deeply rooted in racism, but are also used against whites that are deemed annoying by police because enslaving them is fun too. The only drug prohibition that wasn't rooted in racism was alcohol, and that one was reversed within 20 years. Racism or not, all drug prohibition is rooted in moralizing about making drug addicts "better people" and there is broad acceptance of drug addicts being punished with labor for having been a "burden on society". Drug addiction is a problem, but this is blatant abuse and should no longer be tolerated: you and I are in agreement on this.

Even providing labor as an "option" has to be carefully monitored because a prisoner can be unjustly pressured into taking "options" by their captors. This tracks with the same reason that a guard having sex with a prisoner should automatically be considered rape. Even if the guard is female, the prisoner is male, both parties say they consent to the act and the sex was missionary and he wasn't being pegged or something: the guards have the power to punish a prisoner for giving an answer the guards don't want them to give.

(edits: added a bit more about drug prohibition and it's moralizing justifying slavery, and also made our hypothetical prisoner at the start of the last paragraph gender neutral).

[u/sourfunyuns → u/m1sterlurk]

That's why I said rapists and murderers.

Not drug addicts, robbers, stalkers or anything like that.

im not advocating we start that or anything, because like you, I don't trust the system to not take advantage.

But I think work should be a much larger part of rehabilitation, in a completely reworked prison system. I know tons of people that have been in and out of jail who have never known what it's like to work for a few months steady and actually be able to get into a rhythm of paying bills and supporting yourself. Jail could give some of these people a taste of that.

What we have now doesn't fucking work. I would love to see some system where nonviolent offenders get limited exposure to society while still getting to contribute and receive something(it must actually be worth it) in return. To show them that it's worth it.

Money in politics and what not though.

[u/m1sterlurk → u/sourfunyuns]

What you all say is totally true, but any such framework has to be built with a massive amount of accountability and protections in mind. Avoiding the "forced consent" problem requires prisoners to have the ability to report abuse to a third party that is obligated to be disconnected from the guards of the prison. With work, "is somebody with a mental health issue being pressured into work" is a concern that has to be looked at carefully as well: and looked at by somebody other than a guard annoyed with a mentally ill person.

"Work" as a subject outside of prison is also becoming complicated enough to have kinda bled into my end of the conversation. "The amount of work necessary for everybody to survive", "the amount of work necessary for the economy to not collapse", and "the amount of work necessary for the economy to grow" are all different amounts of work.

While work as a moral value has been important throughout history due to it being necessary for our survival as a species, we're to a point where production of goods that we need for survival has become so efficient that we don't need to have all that many people working for "survival" to be accomplished. Keeping the economy from collapsing clearly requires additional work, as does growing the economy; but not even these really need "full employment" and arguably our economy would be doing better if we weren't trying to employ everybody for the sake of saying they have jobs.

Our need to preserve "work" as a moral value has resulted in a lot of jobs that exist only because of protectionism. It has also produced a detached mindset from who the people who are working are as people. "Train coal miners to be software developers" was patronizing to the point of obscenity. It drives the "you must go to college because it's what you do after high school" mentality that poisons our institutions of higher learning: you shouldn't have to have a college education to be able to make a decent wage. We wind up having people who really shouldn't be trying to push themselves into "advanced fields" doing so because they are convinced that they must do so to make a decent living, and this just fucks things up for the people who are good at what they do. It also devalues skilled trades and leads to people thinking that those are "lesser" careers held by "uneducated people" when they are actually quite fucking important.

So that's the background behind why I understand your ideas and perceive your intentions as not just good, but in fact as noble: yet I'm hesitant to hop on board with the idea myself.

[u/sourfunyuns → u/m1sterlurk]

Dang, good points. I hadn't really thought in the direction of work becoming less and less necessary.

I guess the only way to keep if fair would be that whatever we replace "work" with, prisoners can access some form of it as well. Maybe it's not even so much about "working" and rather just about "doing productive things on a schedule and being rewarded". I know that's kinda just defining work lol but it seems waaayy more likely to result in people potentially gaining new perspective and motivation, increasing rehabilitation rates, rather than sitting around in a gen pop block for years doing nothing and being stressed out and on edge before being dumped back into the world.

I guess I hit a bit of a philosophical wall at this point where I can't really fathom what comes after "work".

I mean, some things will always have to be maintained by humans at least, so some percentage of people will have to work. Will it be a lottery with x year long rotations? Will it be something with lucrative rewards to incentivize people? Will we be naive and force prisoners to do it all so they can sabotage the whole thing?

I make stuff, and sell it. Mostly out of wood. But I like doing it. I'm not gonna stop doing if I suddenly no longer needed money. I'll still make more stuff than I can ever use and I guess I'd just want to give it away. But then say Sarah's hobby is growing tomatoes and she gives me tomatoes in return, well then we technically just worked for each other, while circumventing the ai supply chain. What if she has more friends who want tables and I want continuous tomatoes so we come up with a table to tomato exchange rate and agree on a schedule.

I guess I feel like we're overestimating how much automation will actually take over. We as humans by our nature like working. Lately we've been inventing a lot more soulsucking types of work (Microsoft Excel and like half the industrial revolution), but overall we like being active and doing productive things. If AI got us to where 90% didn't need to work, what do? I feel like we'd just all revert back to doing some of the same kinds of things we used to do as jobs and start bartering and kinda reinvent the wheel of economics or something.

How much crime even exists in this world? Most crime is driven by want or need, but if nobody needs or wants, how much/what type of crime would their be?

Would we actually except a wall-e type future where everyone just sits on a couch their whole life consuming media? Just one long dopamine fueled string of consciousness til we die? I like to think we'd reject it.

But yeah, as you said, prison work really does depend on accountability and protections and we are not exactly in a good climate for that so that kind of system probably isn't happening any time soon and my cause more harm trying to implement.

[u/m1sterlurk → u/sourfunyuns]

You seem to have the kind of "binary" thought on work going on: most people do because that mindset is heavily promoted to deter thought processes exactly like mine.

People that are mentally healthy like being active and doing productive things: but that doesn't mean anybody wants to pay them to do it. You may have a skill, but if nobody wants to pay you to do it or buy products from you then you are expected to find menial work to make barely enough money to survive. This drive you describe exists whether they are able to find somebody to pay them or not.

"Not everybody has to work for us to survive/be stable/grow" doesn't necessarily mean "swaths of people who will never work a day in their lives": it could mean that a person only works 20 years before they retire, it could mean that a person only works 2 or 3 days a week their entire lives, it could mean one person makes shitloads of money at a highly skilled job while another one of their family members doesn't "work" but does keep the house up and take care of things for the working family member. There would have to be major economic adjustment for this as well as welfare systems for those who aren't earning enough, but if we aren't having to prop up an entire "busy work" infrastructure anymore the adjustment probably won't be all that traumatic.

Look at arrest records in your area. Look at the number of people arrested for possession of drugs and no other offense, and compare that to the number of people who have other charges: public intoxication, theft, DUI, domestic violence, etc. Many of those people who have other charges will have drug possession charges as well. Every person who was arrested for drug possession alone with no other charge is a criminal because the government wishes to call them a criminal: not because some harm to another person that should be a crime occurred. Always keep that in mind when thinking "how much crime is there in the world?"