AI & Tech Authoritarianism — Day 1 of 5: When Surveillance Becomes Cheap
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’s correspondence took a room full of clerks. Investigating a few thousand citizens meant thousands of hours that could not be spent investigating anyone else. That expense was never designed to protect anybody, but it worked that way anyway. It set a ceiling on how much any government could actually know.
Digital technology is lifting the ceiling. Phones record where we go. Cameras can recognize faces. License plate readers log the movement of cars. Platforms map who we know and what interests us. Connected vehicles and household devices produce a steady record of ordinary life. AI can now read all of it together, which is the part that matters most, because for a long time the real limit was never collection. It was finding enough people to look.
That changes the economics of the whole enterprise. A government no longer needs an enormous bureaucracy to watch an enormous population. Watching becomes cheaper, quieter, easier to scale, and far less visible than it has ever been.
None of that creates an authoritarian state by itself. It does create something earlier authoritarian governments could only wish for, which is the technical ability to observe very large numbers of people at the same time and pay almost nothing for the privilege.
So the useful question is not whether government should ever use surveillance technology. Of course it should, under the right circumstances and with real oversight. The question is what limits we put in place while there is still time, before watching everyone becomes so cheap and so effortless that nobody has to decide to do it.
Marty Crean
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Books by the Author:
Short Essays on Artificial Intelligence - Vol 1
Short Essays on Artificial Intelligence - Vol 2
Your Child is Already Using AI
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