On the verge of a new slavery: in the ideal "digital" state, surveillance is not needed

Speaking on the BBC's Panorama program recently, Microsoft president Brad Smith warned that life depicted in George Orwell's 1984 "could become a reality in 2024" if lawmakers do not protect society from artificial intelligence.

It is no secret that China is today one of the main players in the field of artificial intelligence and big data processing, and that this country's experience in creating a "digital concentration camp" in the form of a social rating system, together with face recognition systems, etc., - represent a serious challenge to western democracy and way of life.

This is exactly what Brad Smith had in mind when he said that rapidly advancing technologies will be "difficult to catch up" - referring to the increasing use of artificial intelligence in China to monitor its citizens.

“I am constantly reminded of the lessons of George Orwell in his 1984 book. In fact, this story... was about a government that could always see and hear everything that everyone is doing and saying, ”Smith said. "It didn't happen in 1984, but if we're not careful, it could happen in 2024".

China is aiming to become a global leader in artificial intelligence by 2030, and many believe that its capabilities go far beyond those of the EU and even the United States.

And this is not surprising, given that China has enormous opportunities for accumulating and researching "bigdata" based on the data of its almost one and a half billion population. Moreover, the developers of AI systems in this country are not bound by any restrictions and laws protecting the privacy of data, as in Europe or other Western countries.

It is also interesting that China has long been no longer a "thing in itself", as it was customary to imagine it for a long time - in the 21st century, China is actively expanding its influence in Asia and especially in Africa, where Chinese companies are buying up land and are increasingly trying to occupy all the free space - under the full protection and support of their government.

Of course, part of this expansion in the future will be the spread of these very technologies of control of society in the form of a "digital concentration camp", the experience of creating which China will gladly share with other authoritarian regimes, including Russia.

Surely, politicians in the West will not miss the opportunity to strengthen control over citizens with the help of modern technologies, introducing social rating systems in one form or another, and explaining this by the benefits for the development of modern society…

However, the professional historian and priest Yakov Krotov is sure that the point is not at all in general digitalization, but much deeper:

“I have converged several texts about what used to be called problems, but now the" challenges "of the future. That the future is behaving defiantly, no doubt, but strange: none of the challenges listed in these texts seem to me to be a problem. I'll start with the simplest. Alexander Auzan:

"Why was totalitarianism in the 20th century unstable, overthrown by external and internal opponents? Because it had an insoluble problem - it is extremely expensive to keep an eye on its subjects. Arseniy Roginsky and I reflected on this in the Stasi archive in Germany, hoping that one observation is necessary it was to spend 17 labor. And now it's cheap. Totalitarianism is now possible, and I believe that digital totalitarianism of the 21st century has arisen. It is based on the cheapness of surveillance of people and has an economic resource in the form of concentration of personal data. What is against it? America thinks their conventional institutions will solve the problem. By acknowledging a person's ownership of personal data, they say, "You have a good court and there is competition. Change partners or seek redress in court. I don't think that's enough".

How is it - "totalitarianism in the 20th century was unstable"? What totalitarianism of the twentieth century was overthrown from within? It took a world war to overthrow Hitler, and as a result, the totalitarianism of the Kremlin increased enormously. The totalitarianism of Lenin and Mao has not gone anywhere.

The stability of totalitarianism is explained by many reasons, but not by the high cost of surveillance.

By the way, Auzan's calculations are perplexing: the Stasi incident is that surveillance was conducted on almost two-thirds of the population. Not 17 people followed one, but a third of a million followed 10 million.

The main thing is different: in itself, the accumulation of information about a person is not a danger. In countries where the majority of the population is directly or indirectly government officials, surveillance is dangerous there. The government can easily turn a person into an outcast, a prisoner, or a corpse. The danger lies not in digitalization, but in technical progress in the service of totalitarianism, and above all, in atomic weapons. It is this that makes even puny North Korea invulnerable.

The main problem is completely different, and Auzan does not mention it with a single word: the lack of feedback in society. This is the whole essence of unfreedom, and the degree of unfreedom is measured by the degree of disintegration of feedbacks in the country. Totalitarianism cancels feedback totally. People turn into puppets and help the system reproduce itself.

Moreover, Auzan's idea is just a mild form of conspiracy, luddism: supposedly, technical progress is fundamentally hostile to the individual. In acute form, it is in people who see the seal of the Antichrist in electronic chips and codes.

Totalitarianism is not a phenomenon within the sphere of words, logos, progress, it is a reactionary phenomenon that does not need words, returning a person to a monkey house.

The good news: no surveillance by itself destroys that inner core of the personality, which is its atomic boiler, which ensures self-development and creativity. The bad news: blunt physical violence, restriction of civil liberties and rights, this core, if not destroys, then plunges into a coma, turns off.

In real life, people living under totalitarianism often do not feel the originality of their position for the same reason that a blind person does not understand that he is in a dark cave. A person can live his whole life under Stalin in the naive conviction that everything around is normal. Because this man, for example, was called upon to write a great novel, but he worked as a security guard all his life, and all "literary work" was entirely subordinated to total censorship and propaganda. Mandelstam was killed, and in the next generation after Mandelstam, there was no need to kill: people were born and died in the wool of impossibility. They were not even aware of the missed opportunities. Ultimate infantilization is not a specific experience, but a lack of experience. Life in a straitjacket. The man did not even write denunciations against anyone, there was no need for this. In an ideal totalitarian state, there is no need even for surveillance - why? In the morgue, the pulse is not checked.

In modern Russia, many people are not really aware of the clan nature of society, because they do not need to enter any clan. The clan is a means of survival for the most active, and the majority of the population is excommunicated from activity, it looks like cotton wool in which Christmas tree decorations rest..."