[tomp]

I would prefer to live in a society that was 100% supervised, if the laws of the society were sensible.

Unfortunately, our society, where people can be denied tourist visas or arrested because of twitter jokes, where pregnant women can be charged with attempted murder (of the unborn baby) for falling down the stairs, where police can enter homes to remove "illegal" advertisement on your window or to arrest your 12 year old daughter who was downloading movies, is not sensible.

[drzaiusapelord]

Or when you look at felony charges for cannabis use. Every time I hear about the wonders of surveillance I think about how many lives the drug war has destroyed, even for drug use that is non-addictive, peaceful, and done in the dignity of one's own home by productive adults.

Also, as someone who lives in Chicago, I can tell you that a lot of crime is caught on tape, but only crime that is politically convenient for the police to go after. There's no shortage of stories of homeowners or landlords with videos of vandals and robbers only to be told to piss off. The police don't want to mess with the gangs unless they have to or it looks bad if there are too many minority arrests that month.

It seems the surveillance state is more often used against us than for us for a variety of reasons, mostly due to corruption, which we still don't have a fix for. In some weird way it has empowered the criminals, because it's a long way with lots of roadblocks from a face on tape to an actual arrest. We put up cameras instead of tall gates and guard dogs or gun ownership and think we're safe. We're not.

Not to mention, the criminals aren't stupid. They pull a hoodie down over their face as much as they can, and in the dark, can't be identified on tape. All the success stories I've heard seem to focused on crazies and idiots who more or less would have been caught with old fashioned police work. Holding up footage as the be and end all of police work really just empowers the worst kinds of people in law enforcement and fools the electorate into handing over powers that law enforcement has historically been shown to be irresponsible with. I just read that the PATRIOT ACT is now used on drug offenders. The slippery slope in unfortunately real in this case.

[honeybooboo123]

> It seems the surveillance state is more often used against us than for us for a variety of reasons, mostly due to corruption, which we still don't have a fix for

There is no fix for "corruption".

Imagine there's a ruler with only one subject. Would someone inevitably ask him for a favour? "Could you have your peon mow my lawn? -I'll buy you a beer some time!"

Would the ruler want more subjects? -Of course! It just means more benefits for him, more opportunities for making money at his subjects' expense! The possibilities are limitless!

Now take a bunch of rulers with 320 million subjects. Would Comcast ask them to make it difficult to compete with them? Competition is bothersome you know. It forces you to provide better quality at lower prices, even though you'd much rather just fleece a captive audience!

"Corruption" is a bit of a misnomer. It sounds like something is wrong, but actually it's just an element of a system with rulers and subjects working as intended.

> There's no shortage of stories of homeowners or landlords with videos of vandals and robbers only to be told to piss off. The police don't want to mess with the gangs unless they have to or it looks bad if there are too many minority arrests that month.

You're seeing another aspect of the system working as intended.

If you're a ruler, do you really care about your subjects' well-being? -Of course not. You'll pretend you do because you need them to refrain from overthrowing you, but your subjects are just tools to you.

Your "Royal Guard" (=the police) are meant to protect your power and to enforce your edicts, not to help your subjects. They behave accordingly.

[dropit_sphere]

This is half a truth, in that incentives do influence people's behavior:

> There is no fix for "corruption".

But not the whole truth, as the West is far less corrupt than, say, Bangladesh. We're under the impression that it's all because of our political systems and so are eager to teach the rest of the world Political Science 101 at gunpoint, convinced that if they only understood then they'd all be liberal democracies. But it's not their understanding of game theory that's flawed, it's ours.

As we've found out, it's not just a systems problem. Western Civilization? We didn't build that. There is, at least, a lot of residual faith in institutions built up over the last 800 years ago. And also some unabashed patriotism---the quiet kind that has you pay your taxes fully when you could perhaps pay a bit less and get away with it.

[honeybooboo123]

> But not the whole truth, as the West is far less corrupt than, say, Bangladesh.

The current degree and overtness of corruption in a particular area is completely irrelevant. The point is the very nature of political power: Its only use case is to gain at other people's expense.

That's it. Political power implies intervention in what people would otherwise do in their mutually beneficial, voluntary exchanges and arrangements.

Want to charge a fee for driving people from A to B? -You have to get a $X-hundred-thousand license to do that. If you don't, you will be punished, by force if "necessary". Who benefits? -The state-supported taxi cartel of course: now their drivers are debt slaves and profit margins remain higher than otherwise.

Note all those foreign governments protecting their taxi-cartel buddies from Uber.

Rulers want subjects because they benefit from them. Subjects are resources, like human livestock to be milked. And oh boy, milk us they do.

Sorry but I'm not sure how to address the rest of your post. Feel free to ask something or make some specific claims.

[dropit_sphere]

>Rulers want subjects because they benefit from them. Subjects are resources, like human livestock to be milked. And oh boy, milk us they do.

If only they understood that! That would not be the worst case( http://unqualifiedreservations.wordpress.com/2007/05/20/the-...)

>That's it. Political power implies intervention in what people would otherwise do in their mutually beneficial, voluntary exchanges and arrangements.

Remember, though, that not all voluntary exchanges and agreements are mutually beneficial (paycheck advances); or if they are, there may be an unknowing third party suffering some nasty externalities (I will sell you an extra-polluting car for only $1000!). Is this not a non-exploitive use case?

[honeybooboo123]

> If only they understood that! That would not be the worst case( http://unqualifiedreservations.wordpress.com/2007/05/20/the-...)

Please make a specific claim. I don't know how to address the nonsense you linked to.

> Remember, though, that not all voluntary exchanges and agreements are mutually beneficial

They are, to both parties involved in them. Otherwise they wouldn't go through with the exchanges, assuming no coercion of course.

> there may be an unknowing third party suffering some nasty externalities (I will sell you an extra-polluting car for only $1000!). Is this not a non-exploitive use case?

If you sell me an extra-polluting car, you're not exploiting anyone. I value the car higher than the money I'm parting with, because otherwise I wouldn't buy it.

[hackuser]

> There is no fix for "corruption".

There is no fix for anything by that reasoning; we'll always have illness, accidents, crime, and browser crashes. We can improve those things significantly though, and we have and we can improve corruption.

[honeybooboo123]

> There is no fix for anything by that reasoning; we'll always have illness, accidents, crime

Well, the fix for corruption is for no one to have political power. Would you say the fix for illness is to be dead?

[Avitas]

Be careful what you wish for. I don't think you intended to push the boundaries, but I'll do that for you.

Again, I consider this quite a stretch of your vision. But, imagine having supervision include things such as:

- ...Vehicle sensors. Exceeding the speed limit, making an illegal turn, failure to maintain safe distance, littering or any other violation automatically relays infraction details to relevant government agency and ticket is automatically issued

- Direct supervision of every trade (whether monetary or barter) for taxation and violation purposes

- Supervision of normally private / personal (i.e., at home) things for medical, safety and potential criminal behavior

I am not sure where the line should be drawn, but I would not feel comfortable with pervasive, unlimited supervision.

[WildUtah]

"Vehicle sensors. Exceeding the speed limit, making an illegal turn, failure to maintain safe distance, littering or any other violation automatically relays infraction details to relevant government agency and ticket is automatically issued"

35,000 people die every year on our streets because of careless driving. There's no right to privacy in what you do in public that endangers the lives everyone around you.

Killing a cityfull of innocent people every year is not some kind of civil right.

People who can't drive safely and within the law don't have to drive at all. Those who do have a responsibility to comply with public safety measures, including traffic laws and enforcement tracking. It makes little difference if that means cops or electronic tracking, except that electronic tracking can do a better job keeping us safe.

-- "supervision of every trade (whether monetary or barter) for taxation"

I don't know why you're shilling for tax evasion, either. And I'm a libertarian: I don't like the taxes, but that's no excuse to cheat while they're still the law.

[cgriswald]

Who is more dangerous? The traffic moving at 70 mph (which is 5 mph over the legal limit) or the car that merges into that traffic at 40 mph? In my view one is doing something technically illegal while the other is doing something technically legal but batshit insane. An automated system would ticket all the safe drivers in this scenario.

"People who can't drive safely" and people who can't drive "within the law" are two separate groups with limited overlap. And I 100% reject to your idea that they "don't have to drive at all." Driving is a necessity. (And if it isn't, let's get those idiot drivers off the road...)

Complying with "public safety measures" is not the same as driving safely. Everyone has a responsibility to do the latter and should not be penalized for it for not doing the former. I keep away from other cars and stay with the flow of traffic. That makes me a safer driver (even if traffic is doing 5-10 mph over the limit) than the guys who drive right next to each other doing the speed limit or less.

Electronic tracking doesn't keep us safer. Case in point: The shortening of yellow light timings beyond legal limits in order to increase revenues from red light cameras.

And even those red light cameras we have now have humans making all the decisions. I've triggered those cameras many, many times while making perfectly legal right turns on red.

[robomartin]

> Who is more dangerous? The traffic moving at 70 mph (which is 5 mph over the legal limit) or the car that merges into that traffic at 40 mph?

All, one-up that one. How about someone merging into a 60 to 70 mph highway flow at 40 mph with three cars behind him that also need to merge and are now stuck behind someone creating an incredibly dangerous situation because they are (conjecture) afraid of the accelerator. I have see potentially horrific situations just like the one I described on the California 5 freeway. This is a major trucking route which is full of 18 wheelers. They, of course, keep to the right-most lanes. I saw a woman (sorry ladies, it was a woman) merge onto the freeway at what had to be 35 mph and get right in front of a semi doing at least 60. Right behind her two cars who were just stuck there desperately trying to figure out how not to get killed by this semi that had to lock all its breaks.

Nah, give me someone with years of experience (not a teenager) driving fast any time. They are generally much safer drivers than the fools who are afraid of going over the posted speed limit. I've never had a problem getting on the freeway behind someone who's got the pedal to the metal and knows how to match traffic speed and merge safely.

[penguat]

What I do, stuck behind such a driver, is spot it quickly and hang well back. Then I can accelerate to match the traffic behind such a dangerously slow driver. Plus, if they have their accident early, I have lots of space and time to deal with it.

Drivers behind me often misunderstand this.

[simplemath]

Every time I am stuck behind someone merging at 40 into a 55 I whisper a silent plea for mass adoption of SDCs

[runamok]

Laws can't satisfy every single edge case. I have to sometimes run red protected left turn lights (very carefully) on my motorcycle because they don't sense it. Sometimes you have to swerve out of your lane due to an emergency, etc.

We have judgement for a reason. I also feel like the current fines associated with various law breaking have the expectation that not all of the behavior will be captured and thus it's rather high. If I got an automatic $5 fine every time I went 10 mph over the limit I might be more amendable to it than if it was $300 each time (as it is now). Again, if I am speeding 15 over in the middle of a deserted highway it's different than doing so in a residential area.

Also per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_motor_vehicle_deaths_i... I would not say ALL of those deaths are caused by "careless driving". In fact the majority is probably due to alcohol, falling asleep, etc. although I suppose you could consider being drunk while driving "careless".

[prawn]

Driving while tired (including driving for too long without a break) is careless. If you are tired enough, I believe the impact on your reactions can approach that of you being tipsy.

I have driven after working 30ish hours straight and think it's something best avoided.

[taejo]

Driving while tired can well surpass tipsy. http://www.discovery.com/tv-shows/mythbusters/about-this-sho...

[psc]

Just because our laws are poorly suited for new technology doesn't mean we have to be stuck with the tech we have. With more automated traffic enforcement, our laws would have to better model our expectations, as you point out. If we had speed cameras on 100% of roads, I doubt people would be okay with $300 fines for speeding, so it's bound to change.

[BrandonMarc]

That's a cute notion. It's exceedingly rare for a law to disappear once it's on the books, while mission creep for current laws is all too pervasive.

The idea that people balking at fines will cause the fine amounts to drop is equally silly. Consider the times the (local / state / federal) government introduces a temporary tax ... or builds a road that will only at first be a toll road. All too often, these temporary things become permanent fixtures.

[coldtea]

>35,000 people die every year on our streets because of careless driving. There's no right to privacy in what you do in public that endangers the lives everyone around you. Killing a cityfull of innocent people every year is not some kind of civil right.

And who said that amount is big?

Perhaps it goes with the territory -- driving machines that weight a ton for hundrends of miles with 70 mph, and it's not just the driver going 5 miles over the limit, but other factors that could be statistically inevitable despite any surveillance.

>I don't know why you're shilling for tax evasion, either. And I'm a libertarian: I don't like the taxes, but that's no excuse to cheat while they're still the law.

So do you do immoral things to if they are "still the law"? Slavery was the law too at a not too distant past, as was segreggation (and some of us lived at that time too).

[baddox]

> There's no right to privacy in what you do in public that endangers the lives everyone around you.

It's pretty terrifying to see that argument in favor of the government tracking everyone's detailed vehicle statistics.

[tracker1]

"John Spartan, you are fined five credits for repeated violations of the verbal morality statute."

I have to agree here, I'd have less problem if all camera feeds that the gov't has access to are available for all citizens, including police cars, etc.. at all times.

Also, the fact that discretion is rarely something one thinks of when it comes to the police or prosecutors lately with nearly 1% of the U.S. population in prison.

[MisterWalter]

>I have to agree here, I'd have less problem if all camera feeds that the gov't has access to are available for all citizens, including police cars, etc.. at all times.

Remember that stalkers exist. Madison, WI did this momentarily a year or three back, and a lot of abusers and such used it to stalk and harass other people much more consistently than they could have otherwise.

[gambiting]

>>- ...Vehicle sensors. Exceeding the speed limit, making an illegal turn, failure to maintain safe distance, littering or any other violation automatically relays infraction details to relevant government agency and ticket is automatically issued

I am afraid that this is already happening with trackers fitted by insurance companies. Going over the speed limit, or flooring it from the traffic lights is not going to get you a ticket, but your insurance premium will go up(and that can hurt more than a ticket). I hope that there always will be a choice of policies without trackers.

[Avitas]

Regarding vehicular tracking...

I realize that there are voluntary tracking programs in-place for insurance purposes. That is the reason I specifically mentioned the somewhat fantastical thought of an automatic ticketing system for every type of vehicle-related infraction one can imagine (e.g., littering, endangering for lack of maintenance).

From what I've seen on the roads, something like this would mean crushing financial burden for many people for the first few days, weeks and months of operation. On the flip side, I think we would see a welcome change on the roads.

Wouldn't that be something? On second thought, maybe that is not such a bad idea.

[UrMomReadsHN]

We seem to have a cultural attitude that most dangerous and illegal behaviors are socially acceptable just as long as one is operating a motor vehicle. That thinking really does baffle my mind.

We have a very real privacy issue with potentially tracking vehicle movements by authorities and/or private companies. I think somehow there can somewhere be a middle ground that makes the roads safer while preserving some privacy. Perhaps?? I personality think there isn't nearly enough to deter dangerous driving at the moment.

Hopefully we just will all have self driving cars in a few years instead.

[nitrogen]

There should be a distinction made ib every discussion about this subject between "dangerous" driving and merely "illegal" driving. Sometimes they are the same, like speeding through a school zone (never do this!). But sometimes they are not, like when four lanes of traffic on a limited access freeway all decide to drive at 80mph in a 65mph zone. In that case, driving 65 would be the much more dangerous choice, as it forces other traffic to back up and make more lane changes (more opportunities for accidents).

[UrMomReadsHN]

Speeders love to argue that speeding is not dangerous. Or that THEY are such good drivers that they know how to speed safely. I am not 100 percent convinced of that. The reason being is humans are very, very bad at analyzing risks as well as being very bad at analyzing their own skill. Famously 93% of drivers think they are above average in driving skill.[1] As far as cold hard facts, i don't know if they exist but government organizations claim speeding kills. The reliability of such claims of course can be challenged. Physics also tells us that if number of accidents remain constant than higher speeds during an accident would lead to more damage/death/injury.

In theory we would have safety experts analyze each road and come up with an effective speed that would be safe in optimal conditions. We don't have that unfortunately. Speed limits can tend to be somewhat arbitrary. This is unfortunate.

The other issue is, yes, it is safest when drivers are mostly operating at the same speed. How do cars all communicate with each other to set the speed? That would be issuing a speed limit. Speed limits are unfortunately set at a maximum which means driving below the speed limit is legal and potentially make the roads unsafe when everyone else is driving at or near the maximum.

It is a difficult problem that probably won't be solved until we have self driving cars. But for now i think we are not taking the human element of road safety as serious as i believe we should be. Road accidents are a MAJOR cause of death in people under 25. On the engineering side we have made huge strides in engineering safer cars and roads.

[1] http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/00016918819...

[gambiting]

On one hand, yes, I agree. But on the other - insurance companies will want to decrease their risks as much as possible. Which means that they will penalize everyone for accelerating faster than at a snails pace, for going into corners so you start leaning to the side a little bit, and of course for driving late at night. At which point, there will be absolutely no point in buying anything other than a 1.0L self-propelled shopping carts.

I know HN is extremely anti-car sometimes, but there are people(like myself) who enjoy driving. And by "enjoy" I don't mean going 100mph on country roads and overtaking like a maniac. I just like the physical act of driving, and I feel like having every one of my reactions judged by an insurance company to penalize me would kill any enjoyment I might have had left.

[zanny]

It would be nice if several US states could do this, and people could move there, and we could stand on the sidelines and see how it works out.

People could pick and choose where to move depending on what they like. One state could be mass surveillance and one could be anarchy. Or you could stay in a moderate state that is centrist and acts a lot like what modern states do.

It would be a lot better than the broad supernational control states and companies can have over policy and society. There is no political experimentation anymore and that really sucks.

[dragonwriter]

> People could pick and choose where to move depending on what they like.

People may be legally free to move between states, but certainly very many are not economically free to move between states.

> There is no political experimentation anymore

There certainly is significant political variation between the states, with some of those single-state variants becoming popular and spreading.

There may not be changes in the direction you want or on the issues you care about -- but that's different than an absence of political experimentation.

[cgriswald]

What you say is technically true, but kind of misses the point. Historically variation between the states was so great that today's variation is practically indecernable. Political experimentation still exists, but is difficult, because of strong centralized government. A strong centralized government makes some experimentation impossible and other experimentation gets pushed to the federal level even if not appropriate to the nation at large.

[kisielk]

Ideally by the time we get to that point of surveillance we'll have sufficiently advanced self-driving vehicles such that driving infractions will no longer be a thing.

Most financial transactions that hit the banking system at some point can already be tracked and audited. Arguably many people who elude that are basically ripping off the rest of society. As far as banks cheating people, maybe that kind of surveillance could help curb that?

Definitely would need to be careful about how far it pervades in to private life. Maybe it's impossible to limit, in which case it's probably a bad idea.

[JoeAltmaier]

We'll just have to get used to it, then. Tinier and tinier cameras get built every year. Imagine a limit - dust motes that record and relay, blown by the wind and carried by your clothes, hair, pet into your home. Anyone can tune in to anyone, anywhere.

The only hope I see is new social rules. Can't stop people from peeking into everything; but CAN have taboos against mentioning it. So the illusion of privacy maintained, which is all people need to keep sane. Already cultures have rules like this, especially where folks lived in close confinement.

[RAB1138]

This feels like such a cop-out philosophy: just get used to it and don't bring it up in polite company. This reeks of cognitive dissonance.

[JoeAltmaier]

No, its bowing to the inevitable. There is actually no way to avoid loss of privacy due to technology. It would be like asking everyone to quit breathing your air. Its not a cop-out to concede that, and work from there.

[gaius]

That all would be OK if we also had drones that followed politicians and senior civil servants 24/7 and streamed video and audio to any citizen who wanted to check up on them.

[baddox]

> I would prefer to live in a society that was 100% supervised, if the laws of the society were sensible.

Don't forget the enforcement of laws. In my estimation, the entire legal system of a 100% supervised society would have to be significantly better than any legal system that has ever existed for the advantages of surveillance to outweigh the disadvantages.

[coldtea]

Yeah, and then a despotic (or perhaps just idiotic) government takes over. And they have the 100% surveillance machinery in place to use as they please.

[LLWM]

And it's those nonsensical laws that are the problem, not surveillance. Limiting surveillance doesn't help solve any of that, it just makes enforcement more arbitrary.

[infinity0]

The article contained a story which directly disagrees with your last point.

http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2849#comic

Surveillance may result in more evidence that could potentially allow for better enforcement. However, people run these systems. Centralised surveillance gives a minority of people more power. As seen in the article, this power is abused, because there is nothing else to balance this power.

All these arguments talk about the benefits of surveillance without looking at the social relationships of how real-world surveillance is implemented. Like privacy tools, surveillance is just a tool. Without looking at the social relationships, one can make any argument in favour of, or against, these tools.

Centralised surveillance run by security forces, by nature will overestimate what crimes are being done, and allow the people in charge the ability and incentive to overinterpret innocent acts inappropriately.

CCTV rescuing you from drunken arguments is only one very small part of what CCTV can and will become.

[gambiting]

And then you can never foresee what that data is going to be used for in the future. Nazis used "completely innocent" records held by countries to find out where Jewish families lived so they could find them and put them in camps. The less the government knows about you the better.

[LLWM]

And if the records had been complete video of those peoples' everyday lives, those Nazis might have felt some empathy for the people they were exterminating, and reconsidered their positions. Anyone can make up whatever arguments they want about history, since it's not a repeatable experiment.

[msvalkon]

And if such behaviour was ever found, the gas chamber ate another person. The Nazi government did not take well to dissenters, especially among the armed forces.

[LLWM]

Yes, the Nazis were bad. How insightful.

[LLWM]

You're looking at it the wrong way. It's not a matter of abusing power or not. That power is destroyed when people realize that privacy doesn't exist. You are worried that someone will record you picking your nose? Instead of banning such recordings, how about changing society to one that accepts that everyone picks their noses?

[silentOpen]

That is not a realistic scenario. Not everyone kisses people of the same gender. Not everyone wears religious head garb. Not everyone vomits in the street.

A free society is one where people are free to question social norms, express themselves, and act in ways that don't violate others' rights. A society with ubiquitous surveillance is no longer a free society because people cannot freely and openly question social norms through action, express themselves, or act in ways that may be annoying or unbecoming but which do not violate others' rights. In a surveillance society, even one where "everyone knows", these behaviors are implicitly and globally discouraged by the act of recording all behavior and saving it in perpetuity.

I recommend reading about chilling effects < http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chilling_effect >.

[LLWM]

Sure they can. They might choose not to out of paranoia or cowardice, but that already happens today. Chilling effects are the result of vague laws and inconsistent enforcement. Universal surveillance solves that problem, it doesn't exacerbate it. There's much less need to speculate about whether you will be convicted of assault for punching this person when you can review every single alleged assault of the last 20 years and whether each defendant was found guilty.

[silentOpen]

Or people might not choose to exhibit borderline behavior out of rationality. That is, in the recent past, there were consequences for borderline behavior but the leverage of any single actor was no where near the leverage you are proposing.

If you read the wikipedia article, you will find that chilling effects are not only the result of vague laws and inconsistent enforcement but also the result of any legalistic behavior that might cause others to self-police or self-censor.

As for your assertions about universal surveillance, I find your position has a number of serious conditions:

1. It requires total surveillance of everyone.

2. It requires totally unambiguous laws and norms.

3. It requires total stasis of society.

4. It requires total faith in system by the governed population.

There are two major issues with this position:

1. Society must transition to this system somehow and survive.

2. People and systems in the material world are imperfect and we have no existence proof of any social system which achieves anywhere near the requisite levels of assurance.

I can only see this kind of system working in a society with 0 or 1 people in it. That is to say, I believe what you propose is impossible to enact by its very fundaments.

However, you continue to argue that attempting to create such a system is desirable. Due to this, I can only fathom that either:

1. You are a naive totalitarian.

2. You are a long-playing troll.

Because of this line of reasoning, I must conclude that the attempt to bring your proposed social system into being will not succeed and that the intermediate state will be much worse than the present state as totality will never be reached but concentration of power will corrupt.

If you insist that your proposed system is possible, how will you deal with dissenters such as myself who will refuse to live inside such a system? Doesn't the existence of dissent mean that you cannot reach totality? Or perhaps you believe that such a system can be made to accommodate dissent? What if the resistance is violent? Should the surveillance state kill anyone trying to resist its total surveillance, total laws, total stasis, and total faith? That would surely solve the dissent problem but perhaps the result would be neither stable nor pleasant...

[infinity0]

You're talking about a theoretical world where absolutely no-one has any privacy, even presidents, security guards, etc.

In the real world, there is lots of asymmetry. This asymmetry is absolutely critical when making ethical considerations.

[LLWM]

Yes, I'm talking about the world that we should work towards realizing. Wasn't that the entire point of this discussion?

Obviously it will take some time. Even if we recorded everything everyone ever did starting 50 years from now, which is still quite a stretch, it would likely take another 150 before we could be certain that every living person had been under surveillance for their entire lives.

[infinity0]

No, that wasn't the entire point of this discussion. You give no consideration on how to achieve your supposed scenario, whereas everyone else has considered how the ways of doing this proposed by the state, would lead to horrific crimes.

[coldtea]

Arbitrary (in the sense of limited) envorcement of the laws is what makes society tolerable.

[tomp]

I strongly disagree. I think that laws should be enforced 100%. If we (the society) wouldn't like that, it means that our laws suck, and need to be changed.

[coldtea]

The problem is some laws will always suck, and those in power are either bad or idiots.

So one is a harder nut to crack.

Until we solve the "laws are now all good" problem, is better to have some breathing space ("at least we can bypass some").

To put it in another way, they estimate that each of us commits three felonies per day (from obscure BS laws, edge cases etc).

Not sure if accurate, but even if it's one per year, would you want to go to prison now for that shit in the hope that there would be some backlash and those laws will change?

[tomp]

> Not sure if accurate, but even if it's one per year, would you want to go to prison now for that shit in the hope that there would be some backlash and those laws will change?

Well, yeah, obviously. In a year, everybody would be in jail, so I assume that, "yes", the laws would change. That's the point: if even absurd laws are 100% enforced, we'll soon realize how absurd they are, and repeal them!

[coldtea]

Well, it's not that easy.

For one, 100% enforcibility due to technology, can also just mean 100% enforcibility to THOSE persons those in power don't like. If, for example, you can know immediately when someone violates law X (because of advanced technology), you can still select to apply that to those you want to target only. (One can imagine the McCarthyism government using that knowledge to target "commie sympathizers, or the apartheid govervnemt against blacks, dissidents etc).

(a) some violations being 100% detectable (which is what technology can offer) and (b) fines/jail being enforced to 100% of the violators (which is a policy issue) is a totally orthogonal thing. And since we can't trust policy decisions, I wouldn't like having (a) either.

Second, even if we have (a) and (b), how about when it's not for all laws? (which realistically, it wouldn't be).

If any drug use is immediately detected with some future technology and its use punished, for example, tons of heroin users, who otherwise have done nothing wrong besides possession, would go to jail. And it's not necessary that this will have a big enough backslash to repeal the relevant law (after all, all the marijuana laws that affected millions weren't repealed for decades). To continue with this example, I'd still like most drug addicts to be free, even if the occasional unlucky one is caught.

I don't like perfect 100% systems -- I prefer things to have cracks, is what I'm saying. It's more human.

[mindcrime]

I would prefer to live in a society that was 100% supervised, if the laws of the society were sensible.

Wow, just wow. It boggles my mind how anyone could say that. So you'd really rather live in a world where you're under constant surveillance, your every move, word, action, behavior constantly tracked and recorded for all perpetuity? If so, I just have to say, I can't even begin to imagine the thinking behind that.

Personally, I would consider that world to be completely evil and dystopian, and would work to undermine, destroy, damage and subvert the "supervision" in any way I could.

[tomp]

Yes, but not in the 1984 sense - in the sense that everything is public, and secrets don't matter, because nobody cares.

Basically, I reach this conclusion from my desire to have robots that would assist us. Obviously, to have omnipresent AI that can help you with your life, you need to have it "perceive" the world - i.e. 100% surveillance. Furthermore, you wouldn't want this AI to just "forget" stuff, so you want it to remember things forever. As I said, this doesn't work with our current repressive political system that prohibits many victimless activities, but it could work in a different world (e.g. the fictional Australia in the story Manna [1]).

[1] http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

[teddyh]

What is “sensible” or not is extremely subjective. If you propose that your standards should apply, you are effectively proposing to become a dictator.

Also: If technology improves over time, and cool technology increases willingness to give up personal privacy, we have a bit of a situation brewing:

http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?id=3370#comic

[honeybooboo123]

The real problem is political power. Laws are irrelevant once political power reaches outright tyranny, as it's done countless times over the course of history.

The US and England are leading the charge to show the Western world that having rulers is still a bad idea, just like it was when Stalin was in power. Will we ever learn?