Suppose you had a way to know all this stuff about people; what could you do with it that would actually be good?
China has a social credit score system and apparently they justify it on the grounds of preventing bad behaviour of various types (fraud, crime, etc). It would be interesting to think more about this and how we might be able to maximize the benefits and minimise the downsides.
It isn't just useful for mass surveillance.
Bruce Schneier disagreed with him in 2008 [3] (and probably still does).
[1] https://www.wired.com/1996/12/fftransparent/
Police rarely find murder / assault weapons this would allow them to track the assailant and find where this key evidence was hidden. Better evidence could mean a better justice system.
That said, our current justice system usually gets a conviction even when there is no murder / assault weapon. Clearly evidence just isn't that important to the justice system.
More Surveillance will probably lead to more accurate enforcement of laws, all else equal.
We already have old, broken down, and innocent guys walking out of prison 31 years after someone at the innocence project collected the exculpatory evidence that the state was supposed to have handed over to the defense 31 years earlier. Why would the state be more likely to fulfill their obligations to justice in this regard when that evidence is digital? I guess I just don't see that behavior all of a sudden changing because cameras are involved. In fact, cameras have been involved in the past, and the videos have still not made it to the defense in discovery.
Long story short, all else is definitely not equal. When it is, I'm sure a lot more people will exhibit less discomfort at the idea of the authorities retaining film in perpetuity on everything they do 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
What else are you dreaming of?
As it is, and always has been, all this stuff is to the disadvantage of the individual, not lessenig the burden of proof. Anything else is PROPAGANDA!
The problem isn't the techniques, it's that law enforcement in America seems to now be built more around profit than law abidence... And I doubt increased surveillance put in for the best of intentions wouldn't ultimately become coopted somehow by these interests too.
As if we can control them? Those in power (deep state etc) and the big corporations control them. We have no say into the matter, we'll just get what they decide.
(I'm not saying we can't do anything about it - I'm saying to do anything about it we should address the larger issue of popular will and politics).
Would the immune system want better ways to identify threats to the state?
Humans are treated as cells. The values of Classical Liberalism and Liberal Democracy don’t apply in this model. The body politic is the main focus, as it was under Fascism and other such ideologies. Corporations together with the State.
Nowhere do we see this more than in China today. The social credit system for example. In the early stages, it seems rather benign, since people will be behaving better and crime will go down. But this apparatus can go far beyond simply preventing crime. Once it is in place and the screws will be tightened, you will see an AI-powered State, with fewer and fewer people at the top in control, or maybe no one really in control, not even the leaders, perpetuating itself against all competing organized thought, whether violent or not.
Already we see it with Falun Gong, Uyghurs, Tibetan nationalism, and now with Christian churches. For example:
https://amp.businessinsider.com/china-harvesting-organs-of-u...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jan/13/china-christia...
Falun Gong practitioners, for instance, may believe kooky things but don’t behave violently. And yet, they have been arrested and incarcerated without due process and held extrajudicially to re-educate them:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_Falun_Gong
Some of the re-education camps can do positive things too, like teaching farmers en masse new techniques how to grow food to feed billions. China has to quickly innovate its way out of an environmental catastrophe and feed billions:
https://amp.theguardian.com/global-development-professionals...
The One Child Policy had mitigated potentially a worse disaster.
So it’s hard to say, really, that everything that an oppressive state apparatus is bad. For now. It has to take extreme measures to deal with population growth, for instance.
By almost eradicating child mortality 100 years ago we are bumping up against other limits — of sustainability and ability of ecosystems to not get totally polluted and exploited.
But in every other area, except population growth, this AI-powered state will eventually look NOTHING LIKE the individual-rights-based societies we have come to value so much in the West. And it will happen in the West, just more gradually.
They say the only way evil can triumph is for good men to do nothing. Well, when a large and powerful state with many people undertakes this kind of program, it is tempting to just let it happen. Like when Nazi Germany started treating its Jews in worse and worse ways, the world simply stood by, traded with German companies etc.
Sanctions don’t work. Private trade is good, it provides a counterbalance to the strength of the State apparatus. Sanctions just help radicalize a population into more nationalism and support for eg State developing atomic bombs to “defend itself”. States should not become Autarkies. So what is the only alternatives?
I think international inspectors should not just be for Iran. They should be the norm, including in the USA etc. They should be composed of a randomly selected (nationality wise) groups of people, have access anywhere with warrants, and should make sure that human rights abuses aren’t happening en masse. Think of it as a program funded by the international community to check that no individual “body politic” abandons human rights in favor of Fascism.
Culture is the other. We need a free internet, free spread of ideas. Free-ish movement of people. Without censorship of any ideas (however, with mandating that biased ideas that possibly those that radicalize populations to violence can be hard to share alone, but easy to share accompanied with opposing viewpoints... think Wikipedia rather than Twitter).
With no sanctions anywhere, free trade and culture, we may save human rights from the AI-powered states, at least for a few decades. China is already exporting the AI system to Venezuela and other places.
But I am afraid that, as with Climate Change, we won’t be able to coordinate ourselves to take effective action.
Yeah, this is a serious risk. I don't quite think you have the right solutions but you've certainly identified the problem.
I think the solution to this kind of thing might be found in zero-knowledge technology. A good system doesn't just harvest all the data and basically hand it out to any hacker or alphabet agency. A good system should only hand out aspects of the data that are actually needed. You should not be able to run arbitrary queries, but rather queries like "were any of these 5 suspects within 1km of the crime scene". If the answer is "No", then you don't need to know where those people actually were.