Arjun Khemani@arjunkhemani
.@dwarkesh_sp: By 2030, it will be less expensive to monitor every single nook and cranny in America than it is to remodel the White House.
“Mass surveillance is, at least in certain forms, already legal. It has just been impractical to enforce so far.
Under current law, you have no Fourth Amendment protection against any data you share with a third party. That includes your bank, your ISP, your phone carrier, and your email provider.
The government reserves the right to purchase and read this data in bulk without a warrant.
What’s been missing is the ability to actually do anything with all of this data — no agency has the manpower to monitor every single camera, read every single message, and cross-reference every single transaction. However, that bottleneck goes away with AI.
There are 100 million CCTV cameras in America. You can get pretty good open source multimodal models for 10 cents per million input tokens. So if you process a frame every ten seconds, and each frame is 1,000 tokens, then for 30 billion dollars, you can process every single camera in America.
And remember that a given level of AI ability gets 10x cheaper every single year - so a year from now it’ll cost 3 billion, and then a year after 300 million, and by 2030, it’ll be less expensive to monitor every single nook and cranny in this country than it is to remodel the White House.
Once the technical capacity for mass surveillance and political suppression exists, the only thing standing between us and an authoritarian state is the political expectation that this is not something we do here.”
