AI & Tech Authoritarianism — Day 2 of 5: The Technology Isn't the Enemy
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 argument easy to dismiss.
The danger is not any single technology. The danger is convergence.
Consider what happens when large databases are joined to facial recognition, location history, financial transactions, communications metadata, vehicle movement, online activity, and AI capable of reading all of it at once. Then add the conditions that decide how that power actually gets used, meaning weak legal restrictions, thin transparency, judicial oversight that has become a formality, and political power concentrated in very few hands.
Separately, these are tools. Connected, they become a portrait. Where a person travels, who they spend time with, what organizations they support, what they buy, and with enough inference, what they probably believe.
This is why the conversation should not sort people into those who are for technology and those who are against it. That framing wastes everyone’s time. The better question is what safeguards belong around these capabilities, who has to approve their use, who reviews that approval, and what happens when the rules get broken.
Technology can serve a free society extraordinarily well. The same technology hands extraordinary power to whoever governs that society next.
Good safeguards are not built on trusting the people in office today. They are built for the people we will not trust tomorrow.
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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