Makes me think of academic papers that overhype their contribution. Also makes me think about AI hype.
Not to the same extent. An army of humans is obedient up to a point, but there is a limit to what orders you can give them. When the officers are algorithms that limitation is a lot weaker.
Whatever that limit might be is genuinely terrifying, given how far obedient soldiers have gone and not hit such a limit many times over the past.
The movie Das Lieben der Anderen makes this point very cogently.
Nowadays you can run a huge surveillance program with far fewer people, all of whom can be conscience free.
Im not sure how the next stasi will crumble but it'll be a lot harder to wrest them from power with the tools they have at their fingertips.
There are a couple of problems with this:
1. As a matter of raw empirical fact, a government around the year 40 wasn't too likely to possess a monopoly on violence.
2. A monopoly on violence isn't necessary to ruin your life. A simple nonexclusive license, which governments of the period did have, is sufficient.
Yea, and they were way more successful at it in 1940 than 1840. Are you accounting for all the times they tried to enforce their authority but ultimately failed?
> And that tool is known as the monopoly on violence.
No one has a monopoly on violence. What they really have is called "qualified immunity."
In this particular instance, though, their violence is particularly enabled by cheap technology and computing power.
"Monopoly on violence" is a political philosophy concept. What make a state a state.
Put it this way, if Hitler had grok, would it really get any worse for the Jews? I don't think so. I think they would be screwed no matter what.
Not grok specifically, but yes.
The holocaust in the Netherlands was remarkably bad in large part because the Dutch administration was so well-organized and had kept a registry of Jews.
Bad guys are going to use this technology to evil ends if given the chance.
BTW, there's a chilling alternate history novel called NSA by German author Andreas Eschbach about precisely that kind of idea. The premise is that computer science progressed a lot more quickly. The book opens with German data scientists in the 1930s combining census and financial transaction data (i.e., food purchases using electronic cash) to identify households that are hiding Jews and other "undesirables" .
It failed because Nazi Germany was not militarily superior to combination of the nations that it got upset with it externally, not because of any internal failure of control. While its nice to think that Nazi Germany “failing” somehow disproves the viability of the same broad kind of one-party, massacre-the-opposition totalitarianism, it isn't really justified.
This shouldn't make as much of a difference as it does, but due to how our legal system works, it's much harder to get meaningful legal satisfaction when an algorithm (or other inhuman distributed system) commits a crime against a person than when a person does so.
Cars measure success by not hitting things.
Cops measure success by number of people they arrest. Note, not the number of people found guilty, that's the prosecutor.
Cops will gladly use a hallucinating computer system to beat the absolute fuck out of you with qualified immunity.
Simply not true. Police KPIs tend to focus on crime rates.
Regardless, they can mistreat you with or without AI backing.
If anything I would expect technology favors the victim of false arrest because it gives the cop a face-saving get out. Previously, a cop who false-arrested you would have been incentivized to take it all the way, because you getting justice for it is intrinsically tied to impugning their word and/or reputation.