[ajay-b]

They film us on the street. They film us at traffic signals, from law enforcement vehicles, and drones, parks and even through our doorbell cameras. I don't mean this glibly, or in its entirety, but the big screen watching your every move in 1984 seems not too far off..

[boothby]

And now with the advent of highly capable LLMs, we don't even need humans watching and listening. The data streams can be captured, analyzed, summarized, for any behavior, mention, suspicion, or hallucination of undesirable activity. In a population inured to masked agents snatching people off the street domestically and semi*-autonomous drone strikes abroad*, our future doesn't look rosy.

* for now

[martin-t]

This is the key realization which is missing from talks about AI dangers.

Total surveillance used to be impossible because the government needed people to spy on other people. They needed to find somebody willing and pay them.

Now it can be automated.

The war won't be humans vs an AI controlling robots. It'll be humans vs the government and rich people controlling AI controlling robots.

[anal_reactor]

There will be no war. As long as people are fed, they won't revolt.

[schrectacular]

Exactly. Roll it out first to see who is being "productive" at work.

[nicbou]

At least we don't have listening devices in our homes!

[zyx321]

Yeah, that would be so sad... Hey Alexa, play Despacito 2.

[Arch485]

Hey, Alexa?

[wslh]

Seems like we need more peaceful citizen defense tools.

[wahnfrieden]

ICE will go after you for organizing such tools (unrelated to immigration cases): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45475525

[dashundchen]

Larry Ellison, major asshole and big ally of the current authoritarian regime:

"Citizens will be on their best behavior because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that's going on," Ellison said, describing what he sees as the benefits from automated oversight from AI and automated alerts for when crime takes place.

Ellison, Vance, Musk, Thiel, Luckey, Zuckerberg and many of the tech oligarch assholes want us to live in their surveillance state.

They're currently making good progress. What will you do to help stop them?

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/09/omnip...

[fsflover]

> What will you do to help stop them?

- Support https://eff.org, https://fsf.org

- Use GNU/Linux phones (Librem 5 and Pinephone)

- Use https://qubes-os.org on desktop.

[martin-t]

And so plebians vs patricians turns into citizens vs entrepreneurs.

It's not just about who owns the means of production anymore, it's about who owns the means of surveillance (the so called AI).

Two thousand years and humans have learned nothing. Power and money still lead to more power and money which lead to abuse, which after decades gets so bad it leads to revolution. Except this time they want to make revolutions impossible. So they _have_ learned but common people have not.

[theossuary]

And this guy is going to own TikTok through a deal with Trump, he's literally going to be the thought police

[EliRivers]

Citizens will be on their best behavior because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that's going on

These people live in fantasyland bubbles, powered by their unshakeable belief in their own intelligence and "hyper rational" nonsense.

People already film themselves committing crimes. There are a great many people who, over and over again, make decisions in the present that will have strongly negative consequences in their own futures.

"If we watch people they won't do bad things." Sure, in some other universe maybe.

[lesuorac]

It's funny because they were constantly recorded at epstein's island and yet not on their best behavior...

Recording isn't enough you also need follow-up and if there's anything we've learned over the years is that the police are going to follow up on somebody throwing their soda can into Ellison's yard but not breaking your front door.

[rolandog]

With WiFi even being able to detect our heartbeats [0], we'll get to enjoy dynamic pricing on our insurance on a second-by-second basis!

Remember kids, if the invasive tracking is done by the government and a couple of companies, then it's the good kind of dystopia! /s

[0]: https://news.ucsc.edu/2025/09/pulse-fi-wifi-heart-rate/