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Comment by shadowprofile77 | Hacker News Reader

Many here have commented on the lamentable weaknesses of this development in terms of size constraints and so forth, and on possible medical applications, which could indeed be fascinating and useful for saving lives, but what about the much darker potential of technology like this developing heavily:

Basically, if we're worried about modern mass surveillance, try to imagine a situation in which nano-scale surveillance is possible of large numbers of people, with devices that attach to nearly anything, are virtually invisible and could potentially even have the capacity to record location, audio and video of anything they're applied to, including both targeted civilians and large areas in which you could never be sure whether or not some government/police controlled army of microscopic bots is watching, tracking and listening. Don't tell me that exactly that wouldn't occur to both corporations and governments as this develops further.

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I'm reminded of the novel The Golden Globe, by john varley. In that novel very powerful AI handle most day to day operations of society, and it is mentioned by one of them that - technologically speaking - they could create the single most despotic and privacy-eliminating regime in human history. A place where even an individual's thoughts and emotions are no longer secret, let alone snooping on every word they ever speak. The AI then says it could do this, but it will not, and has intentionally blinded itself to all such data streams. The central intelligence refuses to examine the incoming data as it believes doing so would violate its subjects human rights. In-novel this is why the AI doesn't just tell our protagonist where the big bad is, but I've found it an interesting possible trajectory for the future. Where every word we say is monitored, but it is strictly illegal to view said monitoring.

I wonder if that is the most realistic version of a future were we still have private lives.

> I wonder if that is the most realistic version of a future were we still have private lives.

I think it's almost impossible for someone to build these data streams and not look at them. Look at the mass amount of surveillance every major country is participating in. Government officials in open and democratic countries have lied about the amount of surveillance they are doing, get caught, and keep the surveillance going. I think the more probabilistic future where we have private lives comes from futures where that technology is never built. This is to say, privacy is almost certainly dying.

Unless a still unknown counter-technology comes along to make privacy and individual empowerment much more concrete. Or, more conservatively, existing or near-extrapolation derivative technologies democratize enough to make surveillance far too costly for state actors without blowback.

The first wizard to learn black magic becomes the first to learn how to recognize and counteract it.

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