One idea I haven't seen much discussion on is "provably beneficial surveillance" [1], which builds off of Nick Bostrom's vulnerable world hypothesis. It seems like the best path forward.

>We can turn that conventional wisdom on its head, by reframing it as a question: is it possible to do surveillance and consequent policing in a way that is (a) compatible with or enhances liberal values, i.e., improving the welfare of all, except those undermining the common good; and also (b) sufficient to prevent catastrophic threats to society? I call this possibility Provably Beneficial Surveillance. It's a concept expanding on an old tradition of ideas, including search warrants, due process, habeas corpus, and Madisonian separation of powers, all of which help improve the balance of power between institutions and individuals. In particular, all those ideas help enable surveillance in service of safety, while also taking steps to prevent abuses of that power.

1. https://michaelnotebook.com/optimism/index.html

"Provably beneficial surveillance" is the wrong framing.

What you're trying to say is that the harms of surveillance are diminished when the underlying power is distributed enough that cops have to justify themselves in order to access the surveillance powers. That's why we have a 4th Amendment that demands cops get warrants before doing searches and seizures. Think of the difference between a store with a security camera that records to a local network DVR, and the same store but they bought some Ring cameras and send it to Amazon's servers. The former is the necessary amount of surveillance to prove a crime happened, the latter is just enabling abuse.

Nope. That's not how any of this is trending at all. Being optimistic is good for getting through tough times. Albeit sometimes. It might help people sleep at night but sleeping our way into technofacism won't make it any better for us or our children.

All the known history of humans is evidence against the possibility of existence of "beneficial surveillance".

This is a utopian idea of the same kind as the idea of theoretical communism.

The communist theory argued that because the owners of assets can use their power in nefarious ways against the others this can be easily solved by dispossessing them of their assets and transforming all such private assets into assets that belong to the common property owned by all people. Then all assets will be used for the welfare of the entire society.

The fallacy of this theory was that when something belongs to all people it is impossible for all people to manage it directly. So there must be a layer of relatively few middlemen who manage the assets directly.

In all the communist societies, instead of managing the assets for the common good, those middlemen have succeeded to become the de facto owners of the assets, despite not being de jure their owners. And then they managed the assets according to their personal interests, like any capitalist billionaire.

The only difference was that the communist elite was much less secure in their positions than rich capitalists, because not being the legal owners of a company or of other such valuable assets meant that they could lose their privileges at any time if their boss in the communist party hierarchy no longer liked them and sent them to an inferior position.

This hierarchical dependence ensured that the communist elite had to obey more or less whatever the supreme leader ordered. Except for this obedience, there was no real difference between a communist economy and the extreme stage of monopolistic capitalism, despite what the naive theory of communism hoped to achieve by nationalizing everything of value.

Similarly, I see no hope for a theory of "beneficial surveillance". Such beneficial surveillance could exist only if it were controlled by good-willing people. But this will never happen, like in practical communism, some of the worst people will be those who would succeed to control it.