People make the mistake of assuming that a more assertive authoritarian state means a more confident authoritarian state, when the inverse is more often the case.<p>China's growth is slowing and its leadership will always have the specter of Soviet collapse haunting them. The actual potential for Chinese growth and innovation will always be out of reach because creative destruction is unacceptable to entrenched interests.<p>The CCP aren't the future, they're dinosaurs clinging to relevance by using technologies usually invented overseas as crudely wrought instruments of power.
> we have the capacities to centralize this data<p>but we also have the technical capacities to descentralize it (federate it?)<p>interestingly enough, it <i>is</i> getting more centralized. Is this due to economic incentives?
If regimes like Iran manage to stay alive despite all the sanctions and international isolation, while having the power to meddle in other countries despite having such a dire situation at home, I think the odds of real revolutions in modern age are really really low. If Iran stays alive like this, I doubt China will have any problem staying alive ad-infinity, with all their surveillance tools.<p>Just because democracy might be a little bit better, getting there includes civil war, violence, and other costs people aren't willing to pay if their lives aren't incredibly bad.
One of the things that's keeping liberal democracy safe is the inefficiencies of governments and businesses, with "not invented here" being one of the biggest ones. What makes Palantir scary is not necessarily that they work with ICE but that they're probably delivering something that adds value.
As we get better at machine learning and data engineering, these solutions will not only get much more powerful but also plug and play. That's what I'm really afraid of, at that point they can be rolled out over night.
Two biggest weaknesses of centralized political systems are 1) incompetent leadership 2) the principal-agent problem.<p>Better data collection and monitoring alleviate both weaknesses and prolong such system's longevity.
i was born in a communist country and lived thru the downfall of the USSR.
the level of censorship and control that we have now is nothing compared to what the soviets were doing.
that's why my impression of the paper is very negative. we're the generation that has the most access to information in history, we can travel like no other human generation travelled in history. and we have so much money and access that obesity is a thing.
and yet people still prefer to believe in myths and propaganda.
i wonder how will this pan out once we colonise other planets. i imagine the disconnect between planets will be much much greater than the disconnect we now have between countries/cities/etc
That sounds a lot like claiming planned economies will obsolete capitalism once they solve the valuation problem. Only this time they have that precedent and fail to address it.<p>Propaganda has always had large societal influence and I am not denying that better data could in theory be used to make it worse. But just as in practice targetted advertising works about as well as trying to seduce someone with information gathered by digging through their garbage practice seems highly dubious.<p>Dictatorships are kind of dysfunctional shitholes because the concern is holding onto power for the few over advancement for many as loyalty trumps competence. The succession lines are intentionally horrible just toand vagur just to reduce odds of assassination. Overcoming that with "data" isn't even a plan - especially since the dystopian vague data tools can be jacked or dismantled by the successors.<p>Not to mention the arguement ad inevitability. Disclaimer - not having read beyond the initial pitch page: To be frank this seems like an attempt to tap into the zeitgeist to sell alarmist books on topics they know little about that will have less shelf life than Y2K books in 1999. Not exactly the best impression.