I think I generally agree with most of your worries. Maybe somewhere along the lines of the free thought effect and the weirdness effect, there is something about anxiety. I think everyone (rightfully) feeling watched all the time could plausibly result in mass anxiety, which would have debilitating effects on productivity and also would just generally decrease life quality. I think it’s unlikely that we could adapt to this relatively easily.
I think it could be helpful to specifically consider the possibility that really bad things haven’t happened because bad actors were caught early on by existing surveillance methods. This probably falls under your “current efforts to prevent global catastrophes”. If we accept that catastrophe-causing technology is getting more accessible, in this scenario, the parallel drawn between tech development and surveillance development by Bostrom would be more plausible.
Also, I think some of the proposed alternative interventions (banning some kinds of scientific research, banning materials, digital surveillance etc.) would require at least some sort of controversial surveillance. If we implemented all of these different kinds of surveillance methods, it seems to me we might not be too far from ubiquitous real-time worldwide surveillance.
The anxiety point sounds plausible to me, but it depends on how the surveillance is implemented and who implements it (as do all my concerns, to be fair). I expect if surveillance was gradually introduced and generally implemented by trusted actors, then people would be much less likely to feel anxious about being watched. (Maybe a relevant analogy is CCTV—people now seem basically fine with being on camera in public, at least in Britain, but I expect we’d be much less happy about it if we’d gone from 0 CCTV cameras to current levels.)
I agree that if surveillance is stopping most bad acts currently, the case for expanding it is stronger! I probably should have been clearer about this in my post. I think my main worry is that harm doesn’t increase linearly with the scale of surveillance—I think some harms, like totalitarianism risk and effects on free speech and weirdness, only occur when surveillance is very widespread (if not universal). So even if limited forms of surveillance are doing a good job at stopping bad stuff, we should think carefully about massively expanding it.
I agree with your last point too, and I don’t think my suggestions were particularly good. Ideally we could find an effective response which, if it is surveillance, is limited in scope—i.e. surveilling people in certain roles or contexts. I think this would be significantly less harmful than ubiquitous surveillance, for the reasons I’ve described in the previous paragraph. And I also don’t think we should implement all of these methods, for the same reasons :)
Thanks for writing this up!
I think I generally agree with most of your worries. Maybe somewhere along the lines of the free thought effect and the weirdness effect, there is something about anxiety. I think everyone (rightfully) feeling watched all the time could plausibly result in mass anxiety, which would have debilitating effects on productivity and also would just generally decrease life quality. I think it’s unlikely that we could adapt to this relatively easily.
I think it could be helpful to specifically consider the possibility that really bad things haven’t happened because bad actors were caught early on by existing surveillance methods. This probably falls under your “current efforts to prevent global catastrophes”. If we accept that catastrophe-causing technology is getting more accessible, in this scenario, the parallel drawn between tech development and surveillance development by Bostrom would be more plausible.
Also, I think some of the proposed alternative interventions (banning some kinds of scientific research, banning materials, digital surveillance etc.) would require at least some sort of controversial surveillance. If we implemented all of these different kinds of surveillance methods, it seems to me we might not be too far from ubiquitous real-time worldwide surveillance.
The anxiety point sounds plausible to me, but it depends on how the surveillance is implemented and who implements it (as do all my concerns, to be fair). I expect if surveillance was gradually introduced and generally implemented by trusted actors, then people would be much less likely to feel anxious about being watched. (Maybe a relevant analogy is CCTV—people now seem basically fine with being on camera in public, at least in Britain, but I expect we’d be much less happy about it if we’d gone from 0 CCTV cameras to current levels.)
I agree that if surveillance is stopping most bad acts currently, the case for expanding it is stronger! I probably should have been clearer about this in my post. I think my main worry is that harm doesn’t increase linearly with the scale of surveillance—I think some harms, like totalitarianism risk and effects on free speech and weirdness, only occur when surveillance is very widespread (if not universal). So even if limited forms of surveillance are doing a good job at stopping bad stuff, we should think carefully about massively expanding it.
I agree with your last point too, and I don’t think my suggestions were particularly good. Ideally we could find an effective response which, if it is surveillance, is limited in scope—i.e. surveilling people in certain roles or contexts. I think this would be significantly less harmful than ubiquitous surveillance, for the reasons I’ve described in the previous paragraph. And I also don’t think we should implement all of these methods, for the same reasons :)