Opinion piece on surveillance, political correctness, and AI threats

All the more so when dictators rediscover the time-honored technique of weaponizing the people against each other by punishing those who don’t denounce or punish others. In contrast, technologically advanced societies have long had the means to install Internet-connected, government-monitored surveillance cameras in every bar and bedroom. Yet that has not happened, because democratic governments (even the current American administration, with its flagrantly antidemocratic impulses) lack the will and the means to enforce such surveillance on an obstreperous people accustomed to saying what they want. Occasionally, warnings of nuclear, biological, or cyberterrorism goad government security agencies into measures such as hoovering up mobile phone metadata, but these ineffectual measures, more theater than oppression, have had no significant effect on either security or freedom. Ironically, tech prophecy plays a role in encouraging these measures. By sowing panic about supposed existential threats such as suitcase nuclear bombs and bioweapons assembled in teenagers’ bedrooms, they put pressure on governments to prove they’re doing something, anything, to protect the American people. It’s not that political freedom takes care of itself. It’s that the biggest threats lie in the networks of ideas, norms, and institutions that allow information to feed back (or not) on collective decisions and understanding. As opposed to the chimerical technological threats, one real threat today is oppressive political correctness, which has choked the range of publicly expressible hypotheses, terrified many intelligent people against entering the intellectual arena, and triggered a reactionary backlash. Another real threat is the combination of prosecutorial discretion with an expansive lawbook filled with vague statutes. The result is that every American unwittingly commits “three felonies a day” (as the title of a book by civil libertarian Harvey Silverglate puts it) and is in jeopardy of imprisonment whenever it suits the government’s needs. It’s this prosecutorial weaponry that makes Big Brother all-powerful, not telescreens. The activism and polemicizing directed against government surveillance programs would be better directed at its overweening legal powers. The other focus of much tech prophecy today is artificial intelligence, whether in the original sci-fi dystopia of computers running amok and enslaving us in an unstoppable quest for domination, or the newer version in which they subjugate us by accident, single-mindedly seeking some goal we give them regardless of its side effects on human welfare (the value-alignment problem adumbrated by Wiener). Here again both threats strike me as chimerical, growing from a narrow technological determinism that neglects the networks of information and control in an intelligent system like a computer or brain and in a society as a whole. The subjugation fear is based on a muzzy conception of intelligence that owes more to the Great Chain of Being and a Nietzschean will to power than to a Wienerian analysis of intelligence and purpose in terms of information, computation, and control. In these horror scenarios, intelligence is portrayed as an all-powerful, wish-granting potion that agents possess in different amounts. Humans have more of it than animals, and an artificially intelligent computer or robot will have more of it than humans. Since we humans have used our moderate endowment to domesticate or exterminate less well- endowed animals (and since technologically advanced societies have enslaved or annihilated technologically primitive ones), it follows that a supersmart AI would do the same to us. Since an AI will think millions of times faster than we do, and use its 80 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_016883