Post by praying4usall on Nov 18, 2007 21:43:19 GMT -5
What Price Freedom?
by Robert A. Freitas Jr.
Is a tyrannized humanity worth preserving, even at the expense of its freedom, in order to maintain the very existence of the human species, recognizing that global tyranny is a logical end-state of the unchecked spread of nanotechnology-enabled dictatorships that are capable of employing perfect mind control?
Originally published in Nanotechnology Perceptions: A Review of Ultraprecision Engineering and Nanotechnology, Volume 2, No. 2, May 8, 2006. Reprinted with permission on KurzweilAI.net, May 8, 2006.
Criminals vs. Terrorists
In an attempt to make David Brin’s1 privacy-free “transparent society” more palatable to civil libertarians, Robert Sawyer 2 has proposed an “Alibi Archive” in which everyone’s activities are meticulously recorded in a centralized, judicially controlled archive, with the archives legally accessible only under court order and only upon request of the person whose activities were recorded. In a criminal investigation, this person would be able to access (and make public from the archives) those records of his activities that would definitively establish an alibi for him, thus conclusively proving that he was elsewhere when the crime was being committed. Potential criminals would know that they would not be able to establish an alibi in this manner, and thus would be deterred from committing crimes.
Regardless of the merits of this idea (and there are many aspects that can be debated), it seems that it is workable only with respect to perpetrators who actually care if their illegal activities are discovered. In the unique case of suicidal terrorists who plan to kill themselves during the achievement of their objectives, the alibi archive simply won’t work as a deterrent. Suicidal perpetrators plan on being dead after the commission of their crimes. They won’t care what, or whether, anything can be proven after they’re gone. We need some additional ways of deterring them and disabling their ability to act. Perhaps some sort of highly intrusive and actively monitored nanotechnology-enabled omnipresent recording system could be employed to this end.
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