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In another hundred years are people going to look back at this time as a barbaric age of surveillance or are they going to be even more surveilled and controlle

In another hundred years are people going to look back at this time as a barbaric age of surveillance or are they going to be even more surveilled and controlled than ever before? So far the trend is towards the latter...

walterbell 4y ago
Coming in 2024: Device-Free Wireless Sensing (DFWS), aka Wi-Fi 7 Sensing that can "see through" home/business walls.
- judge2020 4y ago
  I think you mistyped 2015 https://youtu.be/fGZzNZnYIHo https://youtu.be/fGZzNZnYIHo
  - walterbell 4y ago
    DFWS has indeed existed for some time, but 802.11bf in 2024 would standardize mass deployment in new consumer and business routers.
bragr 4y ago
I think it will be a mix. There's always been the use of technology to both enhance and break privacy. On one hand you have surveillance, on the other you have encryption. It is a give and take and the march of progress will always render previous methods inadequate. Hundreds of years ago, letter locking was the thing for secure, private communication, but now we can read those letters without even opening them. http://letterlocking.org/imaging-locked-letter-collections http://letterlocking.org/imaging-locked-letter-collections
closedloop129 4y ago
You don't need to control people if you can control machines. Once AI is there, society will fundamentally change. I would assume that in hundred years, people will spend most of their time in virtual worlds. Would it be important what people do and think if all they do is moving some bits around?
jillesvangurp 4y ago
It's a nice thought experiment. I call it ubiquitous surveillance. Anything you say, do, etc. is picked up by cameras, microphones, sensors, etc. and analyzed and archived for the duration of your life. We're a few decades away from that becoming practical to do for the entire population of earth. A few exa bytes of data per person sounds like a lot right now but there are already companies operating at that scale today. A few decades would allow scaling that by few billion times. That's scary if you think in terms of a scary state surveilling its citizens. But as soon as you have multiple parties doing ubiquitous surveillance on each other it gets interesting: counter surveillance becomes a thing. Counter surveillance could be a crucial tool to enforce rules related to e.g. privacy. For example, the act of violating somebody's privacy would be observed by potentially many third parties, some of which might not be friendly. Doing so covertly would get a lot harder and now would have a risk of legal escalation. In fact doing anything covertly would become extremely hard. People will get to watch each other, but not covertly and probably under some very strict and extremely hard to dodge rules.
- pmoriarty 4y ago
  This vision reminds me of David Brin's "Transprent Society"[1], which I believe doesn't take in to account that the wealthy and powerful will be able to afford much more privacy and surveillance than poor people. The former will also be able to bend laws, technology, and the rest of society to their benefit and to the detriment of less powerful, poorer, and less well-connected people. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Transparent_Society https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Transparent_Society
  - jillesvangurp 4y ago
    The key thing is that there will need to be an arms race in people's ability to defend themselves against unwanted attention. And of course there are no guarantees. So assuming privacy when you actually have no way to guarantee you have it becomes dangerous if you start breaking rules and laws. And of course you having little side chats with other people about helping you out in exchange for something would count exactly as a situation where that conversation might not actually be private anymore.

walterbell 4y ago

Coming in 2024: Device-Free Wireless Sensing (DFWS), aka Wi-Fi 7 Sensing that can "see through" home/business walls.

judge2020 4y ago
I think you mistyped 2015 https://youtu.be/fGZzNZnYIHo https://youtu.be/fGZzNZnYIHo
- walterbell 4y ago
  DFWS has indeed existed for some time, but 802.11bf in 2024 would standardize mass deployment in new consumer and business routers.

bragr 4y ago

I think it will be a mix. There's always been the use of technology to both enhance and break privacy. On one hand you have surveillance, on the other you have encryption. It is a give and take and the march of progress will always render previous methods inadequate. Hundreds of years ago, letter locking was the thing for secure, private communication, but now we can read those letters without even opening them. http://letterlocking.org/imaging-locked-letter-collections http://letterlocking.org/imaging-locked-letter-collections

closedloop129 4y ago

You don't need to control people if you can control machines. Once AI is there, society will fundamentally change. I would assume that in hundred years, people will spend most of their time in virtual worlds. Would it be important what people do and think if all they do is moving some bits around?

jillesvangurp 4y ago

It's a nice thought experiment. I call it ubiquitous surveillance. Anything you say, do, etc. is picked up by cameras, microphones, sensors, etc. and analyzed and archived for the duration of your life. We're a few decades away from that becoming practical to do for the entire population of earth. A few exa bytes of data per person sounds like a lot right now but there are already companies operating at that scale today. A few decades would allow scaling that by few billion times. That's scary if you think in terms of a scary state surveilling its citizens. But as soon as you have multiple parties doing ubiquitous surveillance on each other it gets interesting: counter surveillance becomes a thing. Counter surveillance could be a crucial tool to enforce rules related to e.g. privacy. For example, the act of violating somebody's privacy would be observed by potentially many third parties, some of which might not be friendly. Doing so covertly would get a lot harder and now would have a risk of legal escalation. In fact doing anything covertly would become extremely hard. People will get to watch each other, but not covertly and probably under some very strict and extremely hard to dodge rules.

pmoriarty 4y ago
This vision reminds me of David Brin's "Transprent Society"[1], which I believe doesn't take in to account that the wealthy and powerful will be able to afford much more privacy and surveillance than poor people. The former will also be able to bend laws, technology, and the rest of society to their benefit and to the detriment of less powerful, poorer, and less well-connected people. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Transparent_Society https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Transparent_Society
- jillesvangurp 4y ago
  The key thing is that there will need to be an arms race in people's ability to defend themselves against unwanted attention. And of course there are no guarantees. So assuming privacy when you actually have no way to guarantee you have it becomes dangerous if you start breaking rules and laws. And of course you having little side chats with other people about helping you out in exchange for something would count exactly as a situation where that conversation might not actually be private anymore.