8
1 Introduction: The Digital Society
us with the right kind of personalized information. As I will show in this book, such
systems are actually on their way, or they exist already.
1.9 Do We Need to Sacrifice Our Personal Freedom?
Establishing a cybernetic society has a number of important implications. For
example, we would need a lot of personal data. In order to be able to control an
entire society, it seems important to understand how we think, what we feel, and
what we plan to do. Large amounts of personal data are essential to allow artificially
intelligent machines to learn what determines our actions and how to influence them.
In fact, while mass surveillance is surprisingly ineffective in fighting terrorism
12 and
child abuse,
13 it seems to be very useful to establish a cybernetic society.
But as with every technology, there are serious drawbacks. We would probably
lose some of the most important rights and values that have formed the bedrock
of democracies and their judicial systems since the Age of Enlightenment. Secrecy
and privacy would be eroded by information technologies, and with this, we would
lose our security and human values such as mercy and forgiveness. With the advent
of predictive policing and other proactive enforcement measures, we could see a
deviation from the “presumption of innocence” principle towards the implementation
of an ominous “public interest” policy at the cost of individual rights. Do we therefore
need to worry about the fact that the leading Big Data nation has more people per
thousand inhabitants in prison than any other country, including Russia and China?
14
With the help of mass surveillance, it is now possible to punish even the smallest
mistakes that everyone makes in an overregulated society.
15 The displayed speeding
ticket for going 1 km/h too fast with my car (see Fig. 1.1) should be a wake-up call
regarding what will soon possible on a much larger scale. In addition to sanctions by
public authorities, will insurance companies punish us in future for eating unhealthy
food? Will banks offer us punitive interest rates on loans simply because we live in
the “wrong neighborhood”? Will we get restricted offers of products or services if
we don’t fulfill certain expectations, or will we have to pay higher prices? While
12 The Washington Post (January 12, 2014): NSA phone record collection does little to prevent
record-collection-does-little-to-prevent-terrorist-attacks-group-says/2014/01/12/8aa860aa-77dd11e3-8963-b4b654bcc9b2_story.html; http://securitydata.newamerica.net/nsa/analysis; Gill [8];
see also BBC News (August 24, 2009): 1000 cameras ‘solve one crime’.
13 The biggest sexual child abuse scandals revealed in the past years have actually not been discovered
by digital surveillance techniques.
14 In fact, in recent years there were about 45 million arrests in the USA (see the National Geographic
of January 22, 2013: The war on drugs is a “miserable failure”, https://blog.nationalgeographic.
org/2013/01/22/the-war-on-drugs-is-a-miserable-failure/). About 2% of the overall population is
in prison. This is about 10 times more than in many European countries (see the list of countries
by incarceration rate, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarceration_rate#Incarc
eration_rates. Despite this, it didn’t really make the USA a safer place than Europe.
15 In this connection I recommend to read J. Schmieder [9].
1 Introduction: The Digital Society
us with the right kind of personalized information. As I will show in this book, such
systems are actually on their way, or they exist already.
1.9 Do We Need to Sacrifice Our Personal Freedom?
Establishing a cybernetic society has a number of important implications. For
example, we would need a lot of personal data. In order to be able to control an
entire society, it seems important to understand how we think, what we feel, and
what we plan to do. Large amounts of personal data are essential to allow artificially
intelligent machines to learn what determines our actions and how to influence them.
In fact, while mass surveillance is surprisingly ineffective in fighting terrorism
12 and
child abuse,
13 it seems to be very useful to establish a cybernetic society.
But as with every technology, there are serious drawbacks. We would probably
lose some of the most important rights and values that have formed the bedrock
of democracies and their judicial systems since the Age of Enlightenment. Secrecy
and privacy would be eroded by information technologies, and with this, we would
lose our security and human values such as mercy and forgiveness. With the advent
of predictive policing and other proactive enforcement measures, we could see a
deviation from the “presumption of innocence” principle towards the implementation
of an ominous “public interest” policy at the cost of individual rights. Do we therefore
need to worry about the fact that the leading Big Data nation has more people per
thousand inhabitants in prison than any other country, including Russia and China?
14
With the help of mass surveillance, it is now possible to punish even the smallest
mistakes that everyone makes in an overregulated society.
15 The displayed speeding
ticket for going 1 km/h too fast with my car (see Fig. 1.1) should be a wake-up call
regarding what will soon possible on a much larger scale. In addition to sanctions by
public authorities, will insurance companies punish us in future for eating unhealthy
food? Will banks offer us punitive interest rates on loans simply because we live in
the “wrong neighborhood”? Will we get restricted offers of products or services if
we don’t fulfill certain expectations, or will we have to pay higher prices? While
12 The Washington Post (January 12, 2014): NSA phone record collection does little to prevent
record-collection-does-little-to-prevent-terrorist-attacks-group-says/2014/01/12/8aa860aa-77dd11e3-8963-b4b654bcc9b2_story.html; http://securitydata.newamerica.net/nsa/analysis; Gill [8];
see also BBC News (August 24, 2009): 1000 cameras ‘solve one crime’.
13 The biggest sexual child abuse scandals revealed in the past years have actually not been discovered
by digital surveillance techniques.
14 In fact, in recent years there were about 45 million arrests in the USA (see the National Geographic
of January 22, 2013: The war on drugs is a “miserable failure”, https://blog.nationalgeographic.
org/2013/01/22/the-war-on-drugs-is-a-miserable-failure/). About 2% of the overall population is
in prison. This is about 10 times more than in many European countries (see the list of countries
by incarceration rate, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarceration_rate#Incarc
eration_rates. Despite this, it didn’t really make the USA a safer place than Europe.
15 In this connection I recommend to read J. Schmieder [9].