I think this is a good criticism, and despite most of my post arguing that surveillance would probably be bad, I agree that in some cases it could still be worth it. I think my crux is whether the decrease of risk from malicious actors due to surveillance is greater than the increase in totalitarianism and misuse risk (plus general harms to free speech and so on).
It seems like surveillance must be global and very effective to greatly decrease the risk from malicious actors, and furthermore that it’s really hard to reduce misuse risk of global and effective surveillance. I’m sceptical that we could make the risks associated with surveillance sufficiently small to make surveillance an overall less risky option, even supposing the risks surveillance helps decrease are worse than the ones it increases. (I don’t think I share this intuition, but it definitely seems right from a utilitarian perspective). I agree though that in principle, despite increasing other risks, it might be sometimes better to surveil.
Hey, thanks for commenting!
I think this is a good criticism, and despite most of my post arguing that surveillance would probably be bad, I agree that in some cases it could still be worth it. I think my crux is whether the decrease of risk from malicious actors due to surveillance is greater than the increase in totalitarianism and misuse risk (plus general harms to free speech and so on).
It seems like surveillance must be global and very effective to greatly decrease the risk from malicious actors, and furthermore that it’s really hard to reduce misuse risk of global and effective surveillance. I’m sceptical that we could make the risks associated with surveillance sufficiently small to make surveillance an overall less risky option, even supposing the risks surveillance helps decrease are worse than the ones it increases. (I don’t think I share this intuition, but it definitely seems right from a utilitarian perspective). I agree though that in principle, despite increasing other risks, it might be sometimes better to surveil.