The Panopticon Singularity
If you like the recommendations I’ve made on privacy articles, this one is a must read, even though it may stretch your brain cells a bit… exerpt below:
The 18th century utopian philosopher Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon was a prison; a circle of cells with windows facing inwards, towards a tower, wherein jailers could look out and inspect the prisoners at any time, unseen by their subjects.
Though originally proposed as a humane experiment in penal reform in 1785, Bentham’s idea has eerie resonances today. One of the risks of the technologies that may give rise to a singularity is that they may also permit the construction of a Panopticon society — a police state characterised by omniscient surveillance and mechanical law enforcement.
Note that I am not using the term “panopticon singularity” in the same sense as Vinge’s Singularity (which describes the emergence of strongly superhuman intelligence through either artificial intelligence breakthroughs or progress in augmenting human intelligence), but in a new sense: the emergence of a situation in which human behaviour is deterministically governed by processes outside human control. (To give an example: currently it is illegal to smoke cannabis, but many people do so. After a panopticon singularity, it will not only be illegal but impossible.) The development of a panopticon singularity does not preclude the development of a Vingean singularity; indeed, one may potentiate (or suppress) the other. I would also like to note that the idea has been discussed in fictional form by Vinge. [A Deepness in the Sky - a Zones of Thought book]
read the full article which goes into quite a bit of detail on various surveillance technology including dust sized RFID “chips” among many others. This article will perhaps be of particular interest to Zeitgeist fans.
Tags: datamining, must read, privacy, RFID, singularity, surveillance, technology, Zeitgeist
March 5, 2008 at 6:24 am
[...] pattern or anomaly indicative of terrorist or criminal activity….” [ed.- recall the Panopticon Singularity article re: criminal [...]
March 21, 2008 at 12:56 pm
[...] which I mentioned awhile back indicates a trend towards that type of thing) or perhaps a little celldar (Jabberwocky, anyone?), toss in the 336 billion bits of internet information (per month) which the [...]
May 5, 2008 at 5:55 am
[...] The Panopticon Singularity - a link/exerpt of an important article on how surveillance technology has developed and is developing towards a total surveillance society in the developed world with estimated dates for the technologies described to be fully operational. You can visit the article itself directly via this link. [...]