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Comment by spense | Hacker News Reader

There's an inflection point where technology accrues too much power to a ruling class, such that no amount of unrest or revolution is able reset the social order.

I believe China has already passed this point. Their culture and individual behavior is tightly controlled (e.g., you can't use public bathrooms if your social score is too low).

AI may be the catalyst for western countries.

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"(e.g., you can't use public bathrooms if your social score is too low)"

do you have a source on this? i have used dozens of public bathrooms in china and i've never seen any of them gated off for specific people for any reason or anyone checking anything before you go inside

The things people believe about the social credit score just shows they don't know how little we know about China. https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1716857951380721972.html

And then there's the Uighur minority who can't buy knives that don't have QR codes on them [0], that is if they haven't been imprisoned or forced into factory labour hundreds of miles from home.

[0] https://www.fastcompany.com/40510238/in-xinjiang-china-some-...

It was the Internet. Not because the powerful gained more power, because all possible revolutionaries became opiated.

> It was the Internet. Not because the powerful gained more power, because all possible revolutionaries became opiated

Is the claim that the frequency of revolutions scales inversely with internet penetration? Because this is trivially testable and obviously false. (Ukraine and Tunisia off the top of my head.)

even here some jobs you can't get if your credit score is too low.. a definite social ramification. it leaks a bit - but it will be a sieve eventually.

If anything I’m surprised to see the ruling class isn’t starting to lose this battle to the masses. Ukraine’s use of disposable drones plainly shows how easy it is to create smart weapons that could be piloted autonomously (or at least in the “terminal” phase).

The history of technology, including weaponry, has been to increase the power of the individual with respect to the state.

Does it? Mass surveillance technology clearly only benefits the state who can run it. A random person or activist group doesn't have NSA like powers. Likewise advancements in tanks or nuclear weapons does not empower the individual.

pray tell how does the individual counter the state's use JDAMs?

By targeting the logistical chains that are necessary to deliver said JDAM to the point of actual use.

On the other hand, for the state to use JDAM against the individual, they need to know that said individual is there and is worth targeting, for starters.

I don't think it's accurate to say that the balance of power has shifted on the whole, but regular individuals definitely have access to way more destructive power than they ever had in history. At the same time, modern military technology, while very destructive, is also very demanding in terms of logistics. Even a single blown up railroad, fuel depot, large transformer etc can have a profound effect.

The destructiveness isn't always a positive, either. Any modern military can easily reduce even a very large city to rubble, but to what purpose? A city is only valuable in the grand scheme of things because of its infrastructure and its population that can utilize that infrastructure for some useful economic purpose.

look at the upside, we may be able to eliminate school shootings when the AI-powered turrets are installed in every classroom.

Nah, they'll just hack those remotely instead. :( :( :(

On the surface, China is a country where power controls behavior, but the real situation is that the Western world is

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