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> Dissidents and revolutionaries would hardly be able to do much. Hence the scary question: Once the technology is available (now) and complete surveillance is

• mc32 8y ago
  This is a good question. I think the answer is "yes" with proviso that it would most likely come from the top. The CCP, is not exactly a monolith. It has factions, some get suppressed, some come to prominence. One that saw the negative aspects as being too negative would have to come to prominence to undo the overreach.
  • coldtea 8y ago
    Isn't it far more likely, given all we know, that western governments and elites will follow lead? They are already heavy surveillance, and have a long history of suppressing dissidents (from labor massacres to McCarthyism, and from the '68 Democratic Convention and Kent State, to black rights demonstrations, OWS, and such -- to name but a few). If they have such tools at their hands, they'll use them. It's not a love for freedom that doesn't let them, but that without full enforcement, they risk having such measure come against them. But once full enforcement is feasible...
  • 21 8y ago
    I think you are wrong. It will be hard to roll back any system which abolishes violent crime. The people will accept it as long as it not abused that much.
    • myopicgoat 8y ago
      This is a tricky line of thinking. Once surveillance is there you can always hide behind the “now we’re safer”, the issue is that you can always survey more and always claim that going back would be less safe and so on and so forth. A good example for this is airport security. As far as I’m aware it’s quite unclear how effective all the security apparatus is yet it piled up over the years since 9/11, full body scans are now the norm etc. The question left to ask is: when is it too much? How much intrusion are we ready to bear for how much marginal safety gains?
      • macintux 8y ago
        It ultimately doesn’t matter much what we’re willing to bear. Those in power do not easily surrender tools that can keep them there.
• beebmam 8y ago
  I don't think so. There's no going back to the world that existed before nuclear weapons. Similarly, AI and surveillance tool advances are too useful and efficient for maintaining order, and there won't be going back to the world before them. They fundamentally change the way that law enforcement interacts with citizens at a high level.
• hnzix 8y ago
  "If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever."
• ymse 8y ago
  A friend of mine speculated that total surveillance (and thus control) of society will eventually make the world consistent in logical terms. Which necessarily makes it incomplete following Gödel's incompleteness theorems. Here completeness refers to diversity: to maximize completeness is to encourage genetic (and memetic) variation. If society is consistent, such a proposition becomes absurd. It's an interesting thought experiment, and I don't think the consistent state is reversible. Luckily it requires that all of the world (intelligentsia) agree on the same set of rules, so there's still time. Taking this argument to the extreme: perhaps the reason we haven't met civilisations from other worlds is simply that they all made the same logical error once the tech was available.
  • rsync 8y ago
    "Taking this argument to the extreme: perhaps the reason we haven't met civilisations from other worlds is simply that they all made the same logical error once the tech was available." In the book _A Deepness in the Sky_, it is remarked that civilizations/governments that attempt to implement "ubiquitous law enforcement" are making a terrible mistake that always ends very poorly. It is, in the book, a marker of a society that is about to die. I recommend the book.