Once upon a time, Greg Bear wrote a novel called Strength of Stones, where the inhabitants of a planet built artificially intelligent, self-maintaining cities w

Once upon a time, Greg Bear wrote a novel called Strength of Stones, where the inhabitants of a planet built artificially intelligent, self-maintaining cities with the ability to exile criminals to protect the rest of the inhabitants. Then, potential criminals. Eventually everyone. I don't remember the rest of the book; it wasn't very good.) Anyway, have you realized that cheaper prisons are a bad thing? (No one really cares about the safety of prisoners. Honestly, do you?) Cost is the primary limit on incarceration in the US; making incarceration cheaper simply means more people are kept in prisons. The US imprisons about 1% of the population (2020: 2,120,000 prisoners, 330,000,000 population); what proportion is about right, do you think? More or less? A comment: "Ethan, I’m glad you’ve mentioned Morozov’s writing in this post. His essay on “The Taming of Tech Criticism” http://thebaffler.com/salvos/taming-tech-criticism http://thebaffler.com/salvos/taming-tech-criticism strikes me as examining the key issues here, particularly his line: “Disconnected from actual political struggles and social criticism, technology criticism is just an elaborate but affirmative footnote to the status quo.”"