Comment by Wowfunhappy
7 hours ago
> There is no form of surveillance that does more good than harm in the long run.
...how far do you take this maxim? Should we have any police on the street to enforce speed limits, since they're surveilling the speed of drivers?
Often, there are many solutions to a problem, with different externalities and implementation requirements. Speed limit enforcement for sure has some benefits, but also some downsides. Any absolute has edge cases that don't work, but I don't in fact think creating the large networks of people empowered to surveil citizens to enforce speed limits is the only viable means of reducing traffic deaths, a goal which is often better served by creating more viable transportation alternatives to cars. I don't think carceral approaches to problems are always wrong, but they are often an attempt to individuate a problem that's better addressed on the level of infrastructure
Yup, trees, narrower streets, round abouts, speed bumps, (no one would agree to it) one way road spikes... All sorts of proven tricks.
We don't imprison people for speeding per se in the UK.
GP probably meant mass surveillance. I don't think anyone's arguing that a cop with a radar gun watching one piece of road is harmful. It's harmful when it scales to hundreds of data points across different areas, is automated, and has almost no oversight or accountability baked into the system.
I thought the "automated" part was a clear implication of the statement personally.
What "automated" part, I see no "automated" in the OP, but perhaps it was meant. So far we have:
1. "opposed to the fundamental notion that human beings are capable of cooperation and altruism at scale" - a complicated statement, I think it means that keeping people under control stops them from being naturally good.
2. The scale, or as another comment said, "It's harmful when it scales to hundreds of data points across different areas", but why?
3. That comment continues "is automated, and has almost no oversight or accountability baked into the system." It's not clear why anything would be better when inefficient, but here we have an appeal to common sense and some sort of appeals process.
This is rather messy. I get the impression of an argument for case-by-case human decisions.
It reminds me of the data gathering done by businesses, which doesn't even technically harm me or lead to decisions about me personally, but still pisses me off. I'm happy for a store manager to contemplatively watch me shopping while incubating business decisions, but I don't want to be distilled into statistics, it's just offensive - I suppose because it's impersonal. "How do these humans behave mechanically?" is the question implied by the data-gathering.