Any evidence to back up that claim?

> Given that centralization is so useful, and people want it so much, it should not be resisted. We would be better off if the effort being put into decentralization was instead put into better centralized services that respect user privacy.

OK. So, given that centralization is so useful, and people want it so much, let's put a dictator in power. We would be better off if the effort being put into elections and parliaments was instead put into better dictatorship that respects human rights.

Humanity is doomed to repeat history.

In theory, sure, in practice, strongly disagree, but this would be too long a philosophical and political discussion to be had as a forum comment.

A civilized government doesn't need to be cooperative and nice with people, with their monopoly on force, overwhelming power over the individual, not to say it doesn't really care about you, in a country of tens or hundreds of millions of other people. You literally are just a statistic. Its only problem is if a huge majority of people rebel against it, but there is a very efficient way to avoid that: control of mass media and... psyops. Why would you rebel against the system when you're brainwashed it is efficient, friendly, and you have the power to change it? How would you organise against it, when all our lives are based on the Internet and technology that is easy to monitor?

Sorry, I promised I wouldn't get political.

Huh. I hadn't connected the dots between minoritarian rule and surveillance (capitalism) until now. Thanks.

They really are codependent, aren't they?

So advocating majoritarian rule -- more democracy, consent of the governed, etc -- will weaken the pressure for surveillance.

I was arguing about your statement that seemed like a blanket one. I have no problem with the use of search in this particular case.

> But we live in a world where this authority is centralized

Yes, but that does not mean there is no alternative. Large scale societies are still very recent in Human History - and authoritarian systems have largely led to wars up until now, so assuming this is the only working system is just survivor bias at work.

I dont think thats realistic anymore. Once they are able to hit first and hit hard when opposition forms, they are pretty much untouchable.

The whole argument, of autocratic regimes having a higher chance of collapsing the longer the reign looks like a naive outdated approach to me. It bets on a critical mass of opposition forming. With total surveillance this wont happen.

A successful mass protest has to start somewhere. If you arrest those first people willing to risk everything you quell the entire thing. Its the basic concept of 1984. The only thing holding back this dystopia was the lack of a big brother state with sufficient insight.

Agreed, surveillance, oppression are all terrible, but I highly doubt you can really choose any system you may want now, (see Confessions of an Economic Hit Man).

> It's not possible, governments need checks and balances, things get bad really fast when they have absolute power.

If it's not possible then I think we're destined for a very nasty future.

I don't think a technologically sophisticated government can afford to be non-totalitarian (in the narrow sense I'm using here: making "total" use of available information technology. Cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_Information_Awareness ). I think if it tried it would be undermined by other governments.

In re: this point, I find it discouraging that the Communists won in their imperialistic effort to subdue the people of HK. I was hoping that technology would give the masses the edge over the central government but it doesn't seem to have played out that way.

> > Yes, your privacy is a social fiction, but in return, we can stop almost all crime.

> No we can't,

What would prevent it?

> and (longer conversation) it wouldn't be desirable to in any case. There is a strong school of thought that we don't want perfect enforcement of all laws, at least not ones based around nonviolent crimes.

I don't agree. I feel strongly that laws should be legitimate or repealed. We can't have perfect enforcement, but technological advancement is exponentially reducing the cost of enforcement, eh?

Is the answer selective enforcement? That doesn't sound right does it? If there are laws that we believe should be imperfectly enforced then that should be written into the law.

For example, if you smoke pot, is it better for that to be legal, or illegal but most of the time cops won't bust you for smoking a joint?

> To me, it is hypothetical, because we still had a Capital riot even with increased surveillance. After the riot, it didn't take ubiquitous surveillance to catch those people, they bragged about it in livestreams on social media. We can do better with the capabilities we have.

Well, I'll say this: the Capital riot is unprecedented in USA history and I think it will be a while before we can draw reliable conclusions from it. It does seem to me that the problems with the response to it that day did not stem from insufficient information.

> It seems intuitively correct to say that the NSA surveillance is improving security, but (surprisingly) I don't see strong evidence that the programs are actually helping to catch terrorists. We're giving additional capabilities to people who aren't leveraging or making good use of the capabilities that they already have.

That's kind of my point: rather than trying to sequester the technology (which I believe is impossible) we have to use it well, or we'll fall into some sort of dystopian system.

> > I'm not a particularly good person (I do my best) and I like my privacy, but I think I would have to take that bargain.

> I wouldn't. To me, it sounds like a nonsensical comparison, it's like asking whether or not I'd switch to eating only bugs to stop a kidnapping. I don't believe that it would help, I don't believe the bargain you're proposing makes sense on an individual level. And as a widescale solution to crime on the macro level, the consequences of constant surveillance for everyone are worse than a kidnapping. It's not a good trade.

I wasn't clear. It's not a trade. You're going to be livestreaming anyway, whether you like it or not, so do we also stop the kidnapping? That's the question.

I can't find the news article now, but I was reading a few months ago about this exact scenario: A young child in China was kidnapped and the authorities used the system there to locate and rescue the kid within a few hours.

We in the West could do that too but if we don't because we value our personal privacy over the occasional kidnapped kid, well, I'm no fan of the CCP but that doesn't seem like a defensible moral position to me.

> I do agree with you in one way, which is that regulation of this tech is not a perfect long-term solution. We need to figure out how to enforce regulations, and outside of the regulatory world we need adversarial research into the technology itself as well. Banning facial recognition will not be enough, on its own, to solve the problem -- solving the problem will require a combination of multiple solutions. But it is a problem we should try to solve. Whether that's by normalizing mask wearing, researching how to combat systems like gait detection, making it easier to detect cameras -- we should be thinking about how to give people tools to hide from omnipresent facial recognition.

To me that just sounds like closing the barn door after the horse already bolted. The technology is already deployed and more and more gets deployed every day. We should be talking about a universal highest-common-denominator of laws for the planet so that the decreasing cost of asymptotically-prefect enforcement becomes a solution rather than a problem!

That makes more sense to me than fighting it because the laws are crap and unevenly enforced.

Tell that to the people of every tyrannical regime in the history of mankind. Perhaps they were just doing it wrong?

> Also, I don't think "someone else [having] the right to rule [us]" is a correct characterization of functioning democratic governance (even in a representative democracy).

How would you characterize it then?

> You have shown neither that the above is sound reasoning, nor that other frameworks are not.

What reasoning and "other frameworks" might you be referring to?

> And if 100 people decide I don't have a right to a spleen in a context without government, how does that go any better?

How is that relevant to what I said?

> But my point was deeper. One of the consequences of prohibition (of alcohol or drugs) was to remove government as a means of settling disputes for a group of people handling relatively large sums of money.

Why not say something like that then? :p Disregarding whether you've described a real problem, you seem to be suggesting that a government's decision caused a big problem, and therefore, government is.. good?

> Yes, precisely. And much like any technology it can be misused, poorly designed, poorly configured; and this can lead to frustration or harm.

This is just way out there.. :p But tell me, how exactly is government a "technology", how should it be "used", and why didn't we do so? :P

> Once again, that's not true. In a functioning democracy, governments are responsible to the people lest the groups with power lose it.

Well, "luckily" the real power is not with rank-and-file politicians that indeed do come and go: http://charleshughsmith.blogspot.fi/2014/02/the-dollar-and-d...

> In any system, the possibility of revolution serves as a partial check.

Again, I'd point to every single tyrannical regime ever. That "partial check" doesn't seem to be working too well.

Look, ultimately it's about how much abuse the general populace is willing to take.. before it's too late to do anything (see: North-Korea, USSR, etc).

Once there's a small group of "people" wielding power over everyone else, the people are guaranteed to end up suffering sooner or later. The ruling class keeps expanding and looting everyone else harder and harder, until you're.. say, in the US in 2014.

The US provides a prime example of what follows from a minimal, "Constitutional" government.

> Governments are also responsible to other governments, in some extreme situations.

Sooo.. War, or something? Well, maybe ordinary Canadians will rescue ordinary Americans from their government? :p "We must give America the blessing of Democracy! Now go forth and kill or be killed!" --> "Sir! Yes! Sir!"

> I'm not sure where you derive this ranking in which government is highest, or why only lower powers can be kept in check.

"Every Communist must grasp the truth: Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun." - Mao.

I'm sure you know how it works.

> Not always; when it's not, things suck even more; see, for instance, many parts of Somalia.

Again, it's all about the attitude of the general populace. If people accept that there's a ruling class bossing them around - even if it's a small one - it will grow and gain more and more power. The only limit to a government's growth is the attitude of its subjects.

The government fosters dependence on itself, through various social programs, health care, pensions and so on. Through the education system, the government conditions people into thinking it's absolutely necessary and beneficial, and through controlling the money supply, the government loosens the limits on how much money it can spend.

And here we are. Look at what the US has become. Note how the whole Western world's economies are going down the toilet too, and note how mass surveillance is spreading everywhere.

> Revolution is horrible, yes.

Yeah, and the thing is, without governments, there would be no revolutions! It's like, countless deaths could be avoided!

> I don't think "group of sociopaths in power hurting everyone" is a legitimate description of all government.

Would you settle for "looting everyone" then? That much is accurate at least.

This sounds lovely, except it's just absolute nonsense. For many thousands of years states have maintained the power to restrict citizens communications and almost since the invention of the telegraph they have been able to be monitored in some form. Despite this we are freer than ever.

Healthy and free societies are not built upon a base of unlimited freedom, that is all but anarchy.

I've been thinking this for quite a few years now.

>the Twitter mob is deciding who to banish. It's a form of democracy, I guess - but one without any checks or balances or regulations.

Or swarms of bots shaping public opinion run by just a few people? As long as Govt's allow encryption, over the telecoms networks in their countries, the sooner govts become irrelevant.

No, that is how you prevent a police state.

I mean, obviously you don't actually live as if you already lived in a police state, but you take some of the same precautions, which all boil down to keeping power distributed.

That's the whole point of democracy, really: We make our political system deliberately inefficient by making sure that the amount of power that's concentrated in any single person's hands is limited, and the only reason we do that is to limit the damage when the wrong person gets into a position of power. If there is one thing we absolutely should have learned from history by now, it is that concentrations of power are extremely dangerous.

Also, much of this is not about individuals, and it's not black and white. Authoritarian regimes don't care about most individuals. This is about power structures in a society as a whole. A dictator wants to know the top 100000 or so individuals that could be dangerous to their power in order to be able to concentrate their efforts on keeping them under control. Even if your political disinterest is no risk at all to the dictator's power position, the fact that they can tell you apart from the dissident next door helps them staying in power. And all of that is gradual, it's all an economic question in the end: How much effort does it take to prevent everyone from successfully challenging the dictator's authority? Every additional person you need in your secret police in order to maintain your power makes things harder, everything that a computer can just tell you makes it easier.

So, you have to think not from the standpoint of an individual and what someone could do to target you specifically (which usually is impractical to protect against, and is unnecessary in a stable social structure), but from the standpoint of someone trying to gain power over a large social structure (such as a dictator in a country--but really, it's not in any way tied even to political positions, it might just as well be the head of a company trying to establish themselves as a de-facto monopoly, say), and what makes it easier for them to gain and to maintain power, and what hinders them, on the scale of the society as a whole. And you have to realize that a lot of this is path-dependent: It's a lot harder to remove a dictator once they are in place than to prevent them. So, reactionary solutions don't really work. In simple terms: You can vote a dictator in, but you can not vote a dictator out.

That seems like it simplifies a few things like national security, civic safety of any kind, health care, migration, education. I can see a lot of arrows pointing towards centralization of power and for good reasons.

Not saying I'm happy about it, but I really, really struggle to imagine a solution for it that is as stable.

Any government that currently exists maybe, but not necessarily any government that is possible.

The governmental forms we have now are ancient, designed in a period that pales in comparison to the complexity and power currently available to mankind.

The runtime we are in physically supports improvements, but it appears to not support improvements psychologically - you can test this theory by asking questions of agents within the runtime, and you will discover that there is extreme and almost unanimous opposition to improvements, which to me seems highly counter-intuitive but that is what data suggests.

Maybe try reaching for something else (such as technological solutions). We are currently on the brink of armageddon due to an autocratic regime. Centralization IRL necessarily leads to corruption over time. It's efficient but not robust.

That’s an extreme and reductionist position - and I feel it’s an incorrect position.

The state does not have a monopoly on violence - certainly not in practice, and in most democracies today the state is expressly forbidden from using any kind of physical force (domestically, at least) excepting emergencies (e.g. police shootouts). Corporations /can/ be just as bad: look at brutal Fortune 500-sponsored union-suppression in South America happening today, for example.

I think you're ascribing something to a particular ideology that's actually much more aligned with the fundamentals of the human condition.

We've tried various political and economic systems and managed to corrupt all of them. Living under the communist governments behind the iron curtain was no picnic, and we didn't need AI to build deeply sinister and oppressive systems that weren't aligned with human interest (e.g., the Stasi). Profit, in the capitalist sense, didn't come into it.

The only way to avoid such problems completely is to not be human, or to be better than human.

I'm not saying its the perfect form of government (and I'm not even American), but the separation of power into executive, legislative, and judicial in the US was motivated by a recognition that humans are human and that concentration of too much power in one place is dangerous.

I do think, therefore, that we perhaps need to find ways to limit the power wielded by (particularly) large corporations. What I unfortunately don't have is any great suggestions about how to do that. In theory laws that prevent monopolies and anticompetitive behaviour should help here but they're evidently not working well enough.

Absolutely don't agree. People definitely don't typically have that power. In authoritarian nations not even motivated majorities might not be able to overthrow their government.

It's a quite rude thing to claim, implying that any time there's a cheating, lying, corrupt bastard leader around, it's because their people choose them.

I'd argue that in the last decades revolution has actually become increasingly difficult because law enforcement authorities benefit a lot from the improvements to surveillance and communication technology.

I think that's a false dichotomy - but for the record, I was thinking USSR and Nazi Germany as powerful centralized governments, and thinking of Rome, Height of Britain, America before Spanish-American War/World War I/World War II as decentralized governments.

The last powerful centralized African government was Shaka Zulu's bloodbath. By contrast, the two most successful African Empires I'm aware of were much more decentralized - Cartage and Mali.

> Longer term there may be a solution to some of this as we find (finally) a successor to democracy that improves on what we've got, but a democratic world government would be an improvement over the silly nation states that we have today (which, even in their most advanced forms are a holdover from a time when there were more kinds of people).

This I agree with entirely, yes.

> Corporate domination of politics is one of the hardest things that we need to take care of, this planet is not here for corporations, it is here for all of us, including other species.

Here's an interesting thought experiment for you - try replacing "corporations" with "organizations" in any corporate-bashing you read for the next week: You'll find all the statements pretty much hold true. Voting blocs, political parties, religious organizations, even nonprofits often do as much to corruptly impose their agenda on other people as for-profit corporations do.

I agree with you that organizations, coalitions, and other blocs of people shouldn't be able to trample individual's rights - but I think power should be primarily start at the level of individual people, and be reserved to them first and gradually upwards. So authority on decisionmaking goes first to individuals, then to communities, then to towns and city districts, then to large cities, then to states, then and only then to countries - from small to large. Large shouldn't be able to impose on small, whether it be Whole Foods Corporation, or the New York Yankees, or PETA, or the Conservative Party in England, or the Democrats in the USA, or labor unions, or General Motors, or anything. Individuals are the way.

> His taxation scheme would be a very large step in the right direction.

I like some of the ecological merits of it and I agree that taxing productive work is a stupidly bad idea. I bet there'd be some really nasty unanticipated secondary effects with that idea, though. Still would be an improvement over taxing people for doing productive work, which is just crazy on almost all levels.

Sounds like the issues we currently have with democracy.