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Over the past four days, I have argued that AI and surveillance technology could reshape the relationship between citizens and their government more than most laws passed in our lifetimes. A progression is worth keeping in mind. Surveillance leads to identification, identification to classification, classification to prediction, prediction to restriction,
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A future surveillance state may not need to build a surveillance network. Private industry has already built a great deal of one. Our phones know where we go. Advertising networks learn what interests us. Social platforms record who we know. Connected cars generate location and driving behavior. Apps collect the
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The most efficient surveillance state is not the one that arrests the most people. It is the one that rarely needs to. When people believe their activity might be examined someday, something quiet happens. They begin adjusting on their own. Maybe you skip the demonstration. Maybe you decide not to
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Facial recognition helps find a missing child. License plate readers recover a stolen car. AI catches fraud that no auditor would ever find by hand. Cameras supply evidence after a crime that would otherwise go unsolved. None of these tools is authoritarian by nature, and pretending otherwise makes the whole
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Authoritarian government is not a new invention. States have always watched the people they govern, using police, informants, intercepted mail, and whatever records they could manage to keep. What has changed is the price. Surveillance used to be expensive. Following one person took several people working in shifts. Reading someone’
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The honest answer to whether your child will have a job turns out to be a question about character. The worry underneath all the others, the one parents lie awake over, is not about honesty, privacy, or screen time. It is about work. Will there be a place in the
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The hardest piece in this series is about the relationship your child forms with something that never says no. It is worth being honest about why a child might come to prefer the machine to a person, because the reasons are good ones. The machine is available at one in
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Five questions you can ask at dinner tonight, and why the point is the asking and not the answers. The first two essays in this series were about what to teach. This one is about how to begin, and the method will feel backward because it asks you to stop
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Why a confident answer and a correct one have nothing to do with each other, and how to raise a child who knows the difference. The dangerous thing about a machine that is wrong is not that it is wrong. It is that it is wrong in complete sentences. When
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A guide for parents who do not need to become experts. They need to start the conversation. There is a good chance your child has already had a longer conversation with artificial intelligence than you have. Not a more sophisticated one. A longer one. While the adults in the house
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Artificial intelligence tends to sound safer the moment someone can say that a person remains in charge. The phrase "human in the loop" turns up in government reports, corporate presentations, academic papers, and news coverage, and it does its work quietly. It tells a nervous public that, however
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AI is often hailed as a force that will raise productivity, ease work, advance science, and promote prosperity, much like electricity, automobiles, and the internet, reshaping the economy and improving most lives. Yet beneath this optimism lies a growing concern, particularly among accountants, analysts, marketers, developers, project managers, teachers, financial