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Comment by speleding | Hacker News Reader

I'm going to argue the other side: in Chinese cities like Chongqing they've seen a drastic reduction in crime after blanketing the city with cameras and monitoring technology.

Whole categories of crime disappeared. Women and elderly feel safe to walk the streets at night. No one locks their bike anymore in Chongqing.

I care about privacy, but I think we should be smart enough to work out a way to get some of those benefits without going full 1984. For example by having surveillance that can only be queried by an AI with very strong guard rails.

Admittedly, I live in a country with very strong democratic institutions, and I trust we would take action the moment something gets abused or surveillance overreaches. I would probably feel differently living elsewhere.

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> I trust we would take action the moment something gets abused or surveillance overreaches.

The thing about turnkey authoritarian solutions is that once something happens it's likely too late to take action. However there are often alternative solutions that physically constrain the system such that substantial abuse is impossible without time consuming and expensive physical modifications. The traditional speed cameras in the UK for example.

Cameras, AI integrated at the edge, software that can't be updated remotely, the full stack publicly audited, that only output video data when a suspected violent crime is flagged. Something like that might work. I'm not optimistic such a solution would see much support though.

You'd also probably want a policy put in place in advance to quickly pull them down if certain criteria are met. But again, I'm not optimistic about the prospects.

Well I agree, and my hopes aren't very high of this actually happening. Our politicians tend to be clueless with anything tech related, their opinions calibrated by what they saw in Hollywood movies, where anything tech related always turns into "black mirror". (By contrast, allegedly over half the Chinese politburo has an engineering degree of some kind).

But we could start small, with just one neighborhood, a pilot project where the kinks get worked out and slowly scaled up. Getting permission for a small scale pilot shouldn't be impossible.

So you want to slippery slope your way into Nazi Germany?

Everybody made that exact same "slippery slope to Nazi Germany" argument when euthanasia was legalized here. That was decades ago. There have been several attempts to broaden or narrow the scope of those laws and the democratic institutions did just what they were designed to do, making changes judiciously.

If you are worried about the slippery slope, then you are really worried that democracy does not work as intended. (And depending on where you live that may be a very reasonable worry). By the way, Nazi Germany was not really a surveillance state, perhaps you are thinking of East Germany?

> If you are worried about the slippery slope, then you are really worried that democracy does not work as intended.

Not really. That's a well established failure mode. People's perceptions can gradually shift as they become accustomed to the new way of doing things.

Personally I'd be less concerned about a slippery slope and more concerned about abrupt changes in policy. All infrastructure should be designed with the worst case scenario in mind. It's naive to assume that things will never get worse suddenly or that we will have plenty of warning or even a meaningful opportunity to react.

Are you saying democracy is working as intended, but you don't like the outcome?

There's no way to deploy a system like the one you're describing without being abused for authoritarian overreach. It's simply a matter of time, and once it is deployed for authoritarian overreach, the only way back will be paid for in blood.

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