I did a little calculation: at what point can governments spy 24/7 on their citizens and store all the data? I used the World Bank World Development Indicators and IMF predictors for future GDP growth and the United nations median population forecasts, the fit 10.^(-.2502*(t-1980)+6.304) for the cost (in dollars)per gigabyte (found on various pages about Kryder's law) and the assumption that 24/7 video surveillance would require 10 TB per person per year. Now, if we assume the total budget is 0.1% of the GDP and the storage is just 10% of that (the rest is overhead, power, cooling, facilities etc), then the conclusion is that doing this becomes feasible around 2020. Bermuda, Luxenbourg and Norway can do it in 2018, by 2019 most of Western Europe plus the US and Japan can do it. China gets there in 2022. The last countries to reach this level are Eritrea and Liberia in 2028, and finally Zimbabwe in 2031. By 2025 the US and China will be able to monitor all of humanity if they want to/are allowed. So at least data storage is not going to be any problem. It would be very interesting to get some estimates of the change in cost of surveillance cameras and micro-drones, since presumably they are the ones that are actually going to be the major hardware costs. Offset a bit because we are helpfully adding surveillance capabilities to all our must-have smartphones and smart cars. I suspect the hardware part will delay introduction a bit in countries that want it, but that just mean there will be hardware overhang once they get their smart dust, locators or gnatbots. Note that this kind of video archive is useful even if you don't have a myriad analysts, perfect speech recognition or AI (in fact, it would be a great incentive and training corpus for developing them). When you figure out that somebody is doing or have just done something nasty, you can easily backtrack and check on everybody they had been in touch with. It would be quite easy to catch most members of any rebel network this way as soon as it was recognized as a rebel network - and one could easily create incentives for not associating with potential subversives and/or reporting them, adding crowdsourced reporting. The only kind of uprisnings with any kind of chance would be spontaneous eruptions. The more interesting (sinister) uses of this kind of intelligence corpus is of course to do trials and experiments to see what predicts social norm compliance and obedience. How well does various forms of nudging work? What about the longitudinal loyalty effects of natural or deliberate experiments? How well can you predict people from their saccade patterns? We might actually be living in a short window of opportunity right now. The problem is not the surveillance per se, but the danger from non-accountable uses of them once they are in place. Totalitarian governments with this kind of transparency might prove extremely hard to dislodge, and could become stable attractor states. This suggests that we should work very hard on figuring out how to maintain government accountability even when it has total surveillance powers, and how to prevent open societies from sliding into the totalitarian trap. Given that the tail statistics of big disasters is dominated by pandemics, wars and democides we have very good reasons to view this as among the top questions for human survival. Appendix: 2018 Bermuda 2018 Luxembourg 2018 Norway 2019 Australia 2019 Austria 2019 Belgium 2019 Canada 2019 Denmark 2019 Finland 2019 France 2019 Germany 2019 Iceland 2019 Ireland 2019 Japan 2019 Kuwait 2019 Netherlands 2019 Singapore 2019 Sweden 2019 Switzerland 2019 United Kingdom 2019 United States 2020 Cyprus 2020 French Polynesia 2020 Greece 2020 Israel 2020 Italy 2020 New Caledonia 2020 New Zealand 2020 Oman 2020 Puerto Rico 2020 Seychelles 2020 Slovakia 2020 Slovenia 2020 Spain 2020 United Arab Emirates 2021 Antigua and Barbuda 2021 Bahamas 2021 Bahrain 2021 Barbados 2021 Chile 2021 Croatia 2021 Czech Republic 2021 Equatorial Guinea 2021 Estonia 2021 Hungary 2021 Lithuania 2021 Poland 2021 Portugal 2021 Saudi Arabia 2021 Trinidad and Tobago 2021 Turkey 2022 Argentina 2022 Belarus 2022 Botswana 2022 Brazil 2022 Bulgaria 2022 China 2022 Costa Rica 2022 Cuba 2022 Dominica 2022 Dominican Republic 2022 Gabon 2022 Grenada 2022 Kazakhstan 2022 Latvia 2022 Lebanon 2022 Malaysia 2022 Mauritius 2022 Mexico 2022 Palau 2022 Panama 2022 Peru 2022 Romania 2022 South America 2022 Suriname 2022 Uruguay 2023 Albania 2023 Algeria 2023 Angola 2023 Azerbaijan 2023 Belize 2023 Bhutan 2023 Colombia 2023 Ecuador 2023 El Salvador 2023 Fiji 2023 Iraq 2023 Mongolia 2023 Morocco 2023 Namibia 2023 Serbia 2023 Thailand 2023 Tonga 2023 Tunisia 2023 Turkmenistan 2023 Ukraine 2024 Armenia 2024 Georgia 2024 Guatemala 2024 Guyana 2024 Honduras 2024 India 2024 Indonesia 2024 Marshall Islands 2024 Paraguay 2024 Philippines 2024 Samoa 2024 Sri Lanka 2024 Swaziland 2025 Bangladesh 2025 Cameroon 2025 Djibouti 2025 Egypt 2025 Ghana 2025 Lesotho 2025 Nicaragua 2025 Nigeria 2025 Pakistan 2025 Papua New Guinea 2025 Sao Tome and Principe 2025 Senegal 2025 Solomon Islands 2025 Sub-Saharan Africa 2025 Sudan 2025 Uzbekistan 2025 Zambia 2026 Afghanistan 2026 Benin 2026 Haiti 2026 Kenya 2026 Kyrgyzstan 2026 Mauritania 2026 Mozambique 2026 Tajikistan 2026 Uganda 2027 Central African Republic 2027 Chad 2027 Ethiopia 2027 Gambia 2027 Guinea 2027 Madagascar 2027 Malawi 2027 Mali 2027 Nepal 2027 Niger 2027 Rwanda 2027 Sierra Leone 2027 Togo 2028 Burundi 2028 Eritrea 2028 Liberia 2031 Zimbabwe -- Anders Sandberg, Future of Humanity Institute Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University _______________________________________________ extropy-chat mailing list extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE