Letting the police install video cameras and microphones inside your home would also have many benefits. They could catch burglars, or call an ambulance if you have a heart attack. What could go wrong?
While there is an abundance of creeping excesses with tech and policing, the slippery slope argument got completely lost here.
CCTVs in cities are a big political topic. For corridors that people walk through often, this is much more effective for facial recognition and you don't have to power propellers or deal with crashes. The camera will operate for a decade without incident.
For overhead algorithmic surveillance, just use satellite photos. I fully expect that sat swarms in LEO surveillance will become a thing in my lifetime. Sure there are clouds, but the whole thing is imperfect, the goal isn't to track you 100% of the time and they don't need to anyway.
For persistent surveillance, drones are good for what exactly? Periodically peeking in windows? How many windows would a drone need to look in on a patrol? Can you fly them low enough to actually do this? On a regular route at that, my god.
I'm very worried about tracking with facial recognition and systematic location collecting based on cell signals and satellite car tracking. But this article was about a drone catching people smoking weed after a busybody called 911. The tech is a very marginal sideshow in that story.
In large American cities, this has been the case for decades. Except with helicopters instead of drones.
In the 90's, Houston had two helicopters on patrol 24/7 (one HPD, one HCSO).
The idea being to allow independent observers to check that the police are following the rules.
Based on recent history it would be deeply naive to think that they won't do that and worse with the technology once it's in their hands.
I'm not necessarily opposed to the use of drones, but I think their use needs appropriate restrictions and oversight. Given how little effective oversight cops have in general, and especially in the use of powerful tech, I am very skeptical that we'll see that with the use of drones.
And yes, everything can go wrong.
Possibly police will be less likely to use lethal force if they avoid taking what they may perceive to be a lethal risk by using drones.
I'd like a world with as much freedom and as few restrictions as possible; yet I also know that it's increasingly easy for someone working alone to cause enormous damage and loss of life.
I want a legal system simple enough that at least half the population know all their rights and responsibilities without any danger of unwittingly violating the law, because "ignorance of the law must not be a legitimate excuse" but it clearly is an excuse in a world where lawyers laugh in your face if you ask them if anyone knows all the laws.
I want punishments that have no vengeance, punishments which only serve to be deterrence for the sane, and where the insane are humanely kept out of harm's way; for these to be effective, I suspect (but don't know for sure) that the best way is to have near 100% accurate fines almost immediately upon detection, which in turn have to be small — framing example: you drop litter, 30 seconds later a notification of a fine for $1.00 appears on your phone, which you can also make go away by picking up what you dropped.
I don't know how to prevent that from becoming a totalitarian nightmare thanks to the apparent popularity of ever-escalating punishments for all offences.
I don't know how to watch the watchers. "State secrets" may be an excuse for the powerful to hide behind, but it's also, not only.
I don't know how to square that with the embarrassment that people have over so many aspects of themselves, that makes the right to privacy an absolute necessity.
And this kind of privacy issue is "easy mode" compared to what happens if we get mind uploads.
Instead of educating and healing people psych so that they are intrinsically motivated to not do shitty things, you watch them all the time and punish disobedience. Definitely not like any totalitarian state.
(Also there are many people for whom $1 is not worth a second's thought, and many people who have zero or negative amount of $ and will never pay it. If you really make it about that $1 instead of values, streets will drown in garbage.)
Oh it might be totalitarian, but to the extent that it is, it's anarcho-totalitarian, despite that sounding like a tautological impossibly at first glance.
Going from the opening paragraph on Wikipedia:
> Totalitarianism is a form of government and a political system that prohibits all opposition parties, outlaws individual and group opposition to the state and its claims, and exercises an extremely high if not complete degree of control and regulation over public and private life. It is regarded as the most extreme and complete form of authoritarianism.
It's absolutely the "complete degree of control and regulation over public and private life" — at least, for whatever matters, which I want be the smallest possible set of things (see point about law simple enough most actually know what it is); I don't know if that can be done without devolving into also the "prohibits all opposition parties, outlaws individual and group opposition to the state", but preventing that is also my position.
That's why I listed conjugate pairs of contrasting positions.
> Also there are many people for whom $1 is not worth a second's thought, and many people who have zero or negative amount of $ and will never pay it
Indeed, that's why I prefaced it with "framing example": I'm not going to go into the weeds with an entire novel social system for the sake of a comment.
We can in fact choose which technological rollouts are beneficial and which are harmful. I'm not sure what point you're making by trying to link the two.