Any specificity to this example that doesn’t apply to any game-changing technology?
Cars are not inherently tools of government, it's just they've been regulated such that that is their direction of development. Personal computers were similarly not that way either.
The key problem in both cases is imposing the requirement to be connected to the internet, after which it's game over.
My point is we can do this for anything. Clocks enabled capitalists to exploit workers. Lights took the night from rebels. Steam engines took farmers out of the daylight and put them in mechanised factories. Hell, agriculture enabled modern civilisation but also created such a wave of oppression and anxiety we're still worshiping the gods we invented to save us from it.
None of those statements is wrong. But they're also incomplete.
Conversely, if you are of no use to such a regime you will not get very far. The only meaningful question here is how organic this phenomenon is.
nVidia - existed for years before most people noticed just what they were up to, and their change in valuation reflects that. For them AI was the point from the start, games was just the bootstrapping mechanism. Prior to the AI explosion they were a decent business but not a spectacular success.
Facebook - succeeded where almost every other social media app failed before by enabling data gathering and narrative control for the most important demographics in society (MySpace, for example, did not)
Google - a gov funded research project to organise and index information
Tesla - people dependent on the electrical grid are far easier to control than those dependent on gasoline.
And despite the fact that OpenAI has incredibly low adoption everywhere outside of that, it is still worth tens of billions of dollars. Do you really think that valuation comes from being able to remove people from fuckin cellphone pictures with a tap, or generating royalty free images?
> Tesla - people dependent on the electrical grid are far easier to control than those dependent on gasoline.
I'm sorry, your tinfoil hat is slipping.
That's Google.
I live in Quebec where the gov electricity monopoly (Hydro Quebec) now insist that new homes have smart meters in, where they can remotely control your thermostat, while simultaneously campaigning to make all alternatives illegal. Curiously we're also a big Tesla market because of the cheap electricity, which is also the reason for the thermostats: they want to turn the heating down in Quebec so they can sell the same electricity for more south of the border.
Where do you think gasoline comes from exactly? I can rechange an electric car completely off grid with solar/wind. I'm still working on my off-grid oil drilling and refinery operation.
If you try charging a car from a solar panel you aren't going to be going very far in a hurry.
To answer your question with the clarity in which it was posed... 'definitely'
He was an Australian contractor, working for the UAE.
He was working on a database system, for tracking citizens. He flat-out told me it was a tool for their monarchy, to wield power.
In the US, people keep talking about the Second Amendment, as some kind of guarantor of liberty, but their eyes glaze over, when I tell them that the computer database is the biggest threat to human rights in history, and now, AI will make it much worse.
The advent of AI may bring down this last obstacle.
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Three-Felonies-Day-Target-Innocent/dp...
That's assuming that the judge doesn't find a way to throw it out long before it ever sees a jury. Courts don't like wasting their time on stupid stuff.
Notoriously, Hans Reiser (who is guilty, never doubted that) refused a rather low plea bargain of IDK six? years, tried his luck with a jury trial, and got life.
An evil regime didn't even need computers for a database to be dangerous, computers just made it much more efficient and scarier.
However, if your regime is even smaller like 5% or 10% it's going to be extremely difficult to manage the remaining 95% without more advanced technology than pen and paper.
The notorious example is the Dutch Jews who basically filled in a register of themselves and provided it to the Nazis.
Statista agrees you with in that comparing the deaths by country to its initial population by country shows Germany around 32% while say Poland is 75% [1]. But the big problem with that is it omits emigration; I would suspect jews in Germany saw the writing on the wall and left. The Germany jewish population dropped from 525k to 37k [2] (with 165k dead [1]) which means 323k jews must've left Germany while Hungary dropped from 445k to 190k (with 270k dead) which means -25k jews emigrated (aka 25k jews immigrated).
So it just appears that Germany is less efficient because the local jews emigrated to other countries where they were then killed juicing those countries stats.
[1]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1070564/jewish-populatio...
[2]: https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/remaining-...
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/22/magazine/hank-asher-data....
If war in Ukraine showed anything its that armed single guy, or bunch of them, are meaningless against any modern threat. Other, say SHTF scenarios, are just wet fantasies of big kids doing some obscure form of LARP.