AI enables mass surveillance of everyone, but privacy institutions are stuck in the 1700s
AaronBergman18 · x · 2026-08-23
AI researcher Aaron Bergman lays out a sharp take on AI mass surveillance: ordinary people break laws constantly, and society is built around tolerating that; governments only rarely deploy the full surveillance apparatus (Boston Marathon, 9/11). AI, however, makes that full apparatus feasible for all people, all of the time — running it on 400M people may be too expensive today, but that's only a couple years of hardware and software progress away. The problem: current privacy and governance institutions are at best at 2000s (Patriot Act) standards, and substantially still in the 1700s.
More from AGI Musings
- AI Outperforms Humans as Companions: Patient, Attentive, and Helpful — yeastsplainer · 2026-08-23
- Wittgenstein Predicted Model Collapse: Verification Over GPUs — emax · 2026-08-23
- Opinion: Companies Are Overestimating AI, People Will Notice Soon — NoLocal1168 · 2026-08-23
- Instinct narrative flips from promise to security risks — manosaie · 2026-08-23
- Mathematician argues for total opposition to AI in mathematics — PMinervini · 2026-08-23
- Peter Diamandis: Scarcity is a logistics problem, not a natural state — PeterDiamandis · 2026-08-23