EU Police Chiefs want an end to end-to-end encryption

That said, I do agree that there's a necessary selection effect to make the books interesting, as the fundamental problem of writing about a good day in a utopia is that the writer's idea of what that even means is unlikely to sell any copies — so I think of these books in a similar vein to how others say that Asimov's robot books are a demonstration of all the ways that the premise (in the latter's case, the Three Laws) don't really work as well as one might hope.

As I say, what I hope for is the promise of The Culture, but I don't know how to get there… or even if one can.

Monitoring with all these things can be done at low-quality in real-time using the compute attached to those sensors, anything that might be interesting can be automatically passed on to a higher level system.

Smart dust was discussed quite widely until very recently, and as all the parts of that are now basically ready, I think the stuff has actually been made and is currently being actively (but quietly, under NDA) investigated by intelligence agencies both for potential uses and potential countermeasures.

A few years ago, I did a Fermi calculation and my conclusion was that a laser microphone pointing at every window in Greater London would cost about the same as the annual budget of the Met Police.

At 128 kbit/s (e.g. for decent compressed audio), recording all 8 billion humans on Earth for a year (24 hours a day so even while asleep) would require about 4 ZB of storage; current storage prices were around $14/TB in 2022, which would thus cost $56 billion compared to $73.4 billion the US Director of National Intelligence requested for the Fiscal Year 2025 National Intelligence Program.

We don't talk about the information explosion "problem" because there isn't actually a problem: all the data on the internet has to be processed anyway just for people to be able to see it in the first place, and for quite some time now all the data we care about is on the internet anyway.

My go-to example of this is heroin in the UK: the substance is the most severe level of classification, nobody speaks in its favour even when they regard the war on drugs to be an abject failure ("war on drugs over, drugs declare victory" that kind of thing), yet the number of users of just that one substance exceeds the total UK prison population by a factor of 3.

If you broaden this to all UK users drugs of the same classification, it's around 10 times the total UK prison population. All illegal drugs, 32 times the total UK prison population.

And then there's all the non-drug crimes…