[lmm]

> The thing is a government never needed technology to be authoritarian. The government today already has all the tools to ruin your life. It had them in 1940. It had them in 1840 and it had them in the year 40 as well. And that tool is known as the monopoly on violence. It can be wielded in many ways good and bad.

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.

[asdff]

> An army of humans is obedient up to a point, but there is a limit to what orders you can give them.

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.

[pydry]

It's more that in the past widespread surveillance required a lot of people, many of whom will have a conscience which will end up disrupting your surveillance.

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.