Shabana Mahmood, Britain's Home Secretary, dreams the dream of the interior minister: total surveillance of everyone, everywhere, at every moment of their lives. Evoking the Panopticon—the circular prison devised by philosopher Jeremy Bentham to allow a single observer to see into every prisoner's cell—she said she hopes for an "AI version" so that "the eyes of the state can be on you at all times."
"When I was in justice, my ultimate vision for that part of the criminal justice system was to achieve, by means of AI and technology, what Jeremy Bentham tried to do with his Panopticon. That is that the eyes of the state can be on you at all times. Similarly, in the world of policing, in particular, we've already been rolling out live facial recognition technology, but I think there's big space here for being able to harness the power of AI and tech to get ahead of the criminals, frankly, which is what we're trying to do."
Mahmood's dystopian fantasy was offered in a conversation with former prime minister Tony Blair, himself a longtime advocate of surveillance technology. The "AI" angle is that "AI" would not only let them focus on the criminals, but people the "AI" is trained to predict will become criminals.
The Torment Nexus comes to mind, given that this scenario was warned of in Minority Report. And the totalitarian implications were duly noted. It is "a deeply authoritarian, 'Big Brother' state.. totally unacceptable, and we must resist this dystopian future," said Green MSP Maggie Chapman.
"Everyone is entitled to a level of privacy in their lives regardless of their history or wrongdoings. We know too that surveillance by the state in this way would not be restricted to potential or actual criminals," she said.
Note that even the minimal, walked-back position here is "criminals forfeit their right to privacy for life." The "AI" hype doesn't just lead to this totalitarian viewpoint, but justifies being enthusiastic about it. In this respect, AI is a kind of technocratic catnip. Computer magic beans making it possible makes it desirable. It's the same mentality that led to the disastrous Horizon computer system at the Post Office, and to the hysterical institutional inability to accept or remedy its failures even after hundreds of people were falsely imprisoned.
It's been 24 years since "Secure beneath the watchful eyes" (now a classic London Transport poster)—and 77 years since the publication of Nineteen Eighty-Four.
