> > The primary result is that we should all work to make a humane
tyranny (if such a thing is even possible; it sure sounds like an
oxymoron, doesn't it?)

> It's not possible, governments need checks and balances, things get bad
really fast when they have absolute power.

If it's not possible then I think we're destined for a very nasty future.

I don't think a technologically sophisticated government can afford to be non-totalitarian (in the narrow sense I'm
using here: making "total" use of available information technology. Cf.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_Information_Awareness ). I think if
it tried it would be undermined by other governments.

In re: this point, I find it discouraging that the Communists won in
their imperialistic effort to subdue the people of HK. I was hoping that
technology would give the masses the edge over the central government but
it doesn't seem to have played out that way.

> > Yes, your privacy is a social fiction, but in return, we can stop almost all crime.

> No we can't,

What would prevent it?

> and (longer conversation) it wouldn't be desirable to in
any case. There is a strong school of thought that we don't want perfect
enforcement of all laws, at least not ones based around nonviolent
crimes.

I don't agree. I feel strongly that laws should be legitimate or
repealed. We can't have perfect enforcement, but technological advancement is exponentially reducing the cost of enforcement, eh?

Is the answer selective enforcement? That doesn't sound right does it?
If there are laws that we believe should be imperfectly enforced then
that should be written into the law.

For example, if you smoke pot, is it better for that to be legal, or
illegal but most of the time cops won't bust you for smoking a joint?

> To me, it is hypothetical, because we still had a Capital riot even
with increased surveillance. After the riot, it didn't take ubiquitous
surveillance to catch those people, they bragged about it in livestreams
on social media. We can do better with the capabilities we have.

Well, I'll say this: the Capital riot is unprecedented in USA history and
I think it will be a while before we can draw reliable conclusions from
it. It does seem to me that the problems with the response to it that
day did not stem from insufficient information.

> It seems intuitively correct to say that the NSA surveillance is
improving security, but (surprisingly) I don't see strong evidence that
the programs are actually helping to catch terrorists. We're giving
additional capabilities to people who aren't leveraging or making good
use of the capabilities that they already have.

That's kind of my point: rather than trying to sequester the technology
(which I believe is impossible) we have to use it well, or we'll fall
into some sort of dystopian system.

> > I'm not a particularly good person (I do my best) and I like my privacy, but I think I would have to take that bargain.

> I wouldn't. To me, it sounds like a nonsensical comparison, it's like
asking whether or not I'd switch to eating only bugs to stop a
kidnapping. I don't believe that it would help, I don't believe the
bargain you're proposing makes sense on an individual level. And as a
widescale solution to crime on the macro level, the consequences of
constant surveillance for everyone are worse than a kidnapping. It's not
a good trade.

I wasn't clear. It's not a trade. You're going to be livestreaming
anyway, whether you like it or not, so do we also stop the kidnapping?
That's the question.

I can't find the news article now, but I was reading a few months ago
about this exact scenario: A young child in China was kidnapped and the
authorities used the system there to locate and rescue the kid within a
few hours.

We in the West could do that too but if we don't because we value
our personal privacy over the occasional kidnapped kid, well, I'm no fan
of the CCP but that doesn't seem like a defensible moral position to me.

> I do agree with you in one way, which is that regulation of this tech
is not a perfect long-term solution. We need to figure out how to enforce
regulations, and outside of the regulatory world we need adversarial
research into the technology itself as well. Banning facial recognition
will not be enough, on its own, to solve the problem -- solving the
problem will require a combination of multiple solutions. But it is a
problem we should try to solve. Whether that's by normalizing mask
wearing, researching how to combat systems like gait detection, making it
easier to detect cameras -- we should be thinking about how to give
people tools to hide from omnipresent facial recognition.

To me that just sounds like closing the barn door after the horse already
bolted. The technology is already deployed and more and more gets
deployed every day. We should be talking about a universal
highest-common-denominator of laws for the planet so that the decreasing
cost of asymptotically-prefect enforcement becomes a solution rather than
a problem!

That makes more sense to me than fighting it because the laws are crap
and unevenly enforced.