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Comment by 45h34jh53k4j | Hacker News Reader

This will be rolled out further and further, first the rest of China, then other parts of Asia, eventually Europe and the Americas. Strongly resist the rollout of this technology, along with the social credit rating systems.

This is like the last chapter of humanity before we stagnate for hundreds of years.

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At this rate, China is 10 years away from being the premiere surveillance state in all history. I mean, think of all the laboratory requirements they meet that no one else does in this grand experiment:

- Single party state

- President-for-life

- Full-spectrum surveillance of their own citizens with little to no oversight

- Court system that criminalizes political dissent

- Large "re-education" and "work-based" prison system

- Widespread and automated censorship of media and online discussion in all forms, combined with a willing rewriting of history (e.g., Tiananmen in 1989 has been completely scrubbed, and discussion of it in any form is deleted within minutes)

- "Social score" system that integrates the surveillance system into the legal and bureaucratic systems

- Limited access to external information of any form outside of the Great Firewall

- The money, capability, and the political willingness to implement and expand all of the above as needed

I am hard-pressed right now to imagine any other country that is drifting more quickly to a dystopian surveillance state than China.

I'm confident in Europe's ability to resist this trend, their privacy legislation is looking positive.

You're thinking about their regulations about what private companies can do with data.

What the government can do is something very different. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/28/opinion/europe-is-spying-...

In the US at least, there are probably enough people with a significant number of firearms that it would take a war to make this work. I’m not usually fond of anti-government fanatics, but I have to admit that in extremes they can be useful.

This is not a situation that can (or should) be resolved through violent rebellion.

A violent response would only serve to justify the application of the system, to cut the head off of any leadership structure before it materializes (or just pick off the lone wackos before they cause problems).

If it came to violence then disaster would already have struck, but there is a deterrent effect when a statistically significant portion of your population would fight to prevent it. The cost moves from, “pass some laws, enforce as usual,” to “commit to atrocity, and massive civilian losses.”

A less militarized society could reach the same point. "Sending in the special cops with guns" === "sending in the tanks and bombers."

In both cases the government withholds superior strength for itself, regardless of the baseline. The question of "are people willing to risk their life" and "is the government willing to kill in large numbers" seem unchanged.

Sure, but that assumes a government willing to literally go to war with its populace, and why I explicitly said a war would be required. I have no illusions about how that war would end of course... tanks and B-52’s reliably best handguns and rifles. The difference between a country drowning in guns and one without them is that in the latter case it’s just that much easier, a “lower barrier to entry” if you will.

> I have no illusions about how that war would end of course... tanks and B-52’s reliably best handguns and rifles.

Plenty of US adversaries have met these odds and held their own. Aside from some targeted campaigns to eradicate individuals, we haven't truly "won" any notable military conflict since 1945.

IEDs tend to level the playing field, but see how far you get trying to build or acquire those today. You'd be among the first wave of dissidents swept up in the ML-aided dragnet looking for purchasers of batteries and fertilizer.

All good points, and I think it reinforces the incredible cost associated with attempting to institute something as tyrannical as “pre-crime” detention in the US. It could be done, but only over a mountain of corpses and human misery. A government willing to do that, and sacrifice economic and social stability for generations is happily not one which resembles our government. That could change, but it would be a massive change, not some inevitable slog.

In China they’ve already crushed anything like resistance, disarmed their populace, and gone the full “re-education camp” route for a while.

The people with the guns will be the ones supporting this. The US Govt won't be going after those types (to start) - this will first be used to justify going after terrorists, pedophiles, and the like.

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