[john-state-moz]

Perfect surveillance will be a hurdle society must cross, but we can come out of it to a more honest place.

Many injustices exist because groups of people can hide behind hypocrisy; pretending to be different from those they target, while engaging in the same behavior themselves. When there is nowhere to hide, there is nowhere to shut out the reality that we're all just advanced animals doing the best we can.

Unfortunately, as u/devoply mentioned, there will be significant pain (and yes, bloodshed) in this process as the legal system's many flaws will be writ large.

In the best scenario we'll eventually use systems like this to form more realistic and flexible societies, rather than as tools to enforce rigid ideas.

The hard part will be that as these surveillance networks develop, they won't be perfect. Their creators, elites, etc. will be able to use surveillance for thee and not for me. That, IMO is the thing to watch out for. If average citizens are going to be watched, everyone must be watched.

Edit to clarify my use of "elites": I use it here to mean anyone with enough money, power or influence to shield themselves from surveillance.

[pessimizer]

Surveillance will be owned by the people who own the surveillance, not socialized under any circumstances that I could imagine. Maybe a total transparency religious cult arises and takes over the world within a decade?

So "we" won't be doing anything. Right now is the perfect time for a your market in individual surveillance, the tech and software to run it is cheap and available, but just as capital under a free market accrues to a very few at the top, the majority of personal surveillance equipment involves sending everything to google and amazon. I could more easily see a future where individual surveillance is deemed dangerous and potential child pornography, and all cameras are required to have their input sent to government-certified organizations like google, and amazon. (aside: in that future, firefox will also be certified, have one percent of the market, be entirely contained on one floor of one building on a google campus, and subcontract analysis to a 3rd party company started by google alums with ex-CIA on the board of directors.)

There is no possible future in which you will have access to any unfiltered surveillance, unless you are currently an oligarch or associate with oligarchs.

[Barrin92]

>Perfect surveillance will be a hurdle society must cross, but we can come out of it to a more honest place.

Surveillance doesn't lead to more honesty, it leads to theatrics and reduction of behaviour to the lowest common denominator. One only needs to pay a few minutes of attention to influencers on social media to see what happens when someone is made completely transparent to their environment. Any notion of authencitity goes out of the window and you get a black mirror like popularity contest.

[mLuby]

I pray we don't make it that far, but one thing's for sure—–the place we'd emerge into wouldn't be an "honest" one.

Even assuming your best case where every citizen can watch their watchers and elites and that such surveillance can't be deleted, doctored, or circumvented by digital or old-fashioned duplicity, what are the people to do if they see abuse? For such an unrealistic scenario to have a chance of working, you also need a perfectly accountable "complaint system" where citizens can file concerns over mistakes or abuse. And of course the citizens need to find the time and energy to actually watch all this footage and the understanding to know when something bad is happening. Do citizens have access to the same NSA-level filter/search programs and the hardware to run them across so much data? What a terrible waste of everyone's time and energy.