Yes. What'll happen is that since there is a practical limit on the number of people the government can put in prison, they'll just "defer" huge amounts of crime for people as long as they stay on good behavior.
Then, when the government chooses, they'll let the entire bomb drop on the guy. Of course there's also the blackmail and coercion potential (Looking at these traffic and land-use violations, you really don't want to criticize the governor in that way, do you?) It used to be that whichever party won the White House, the next year all the NGOs that supported the other party would be due for a tax audit. This increases that kind of thing by several orders of magnitude.
We voted for politicians who made promises and changes based on an existing manual system. All of those hundreds of years of voting and changing were inside of a system that doesn't exist any more. The feedback loop of the democracy was based on real humans going out there and enforcing the laws against real other humans, not the idea that whatever was said would automatically magically happen. Tom Smith in 1880 could get elected mayor on a platform of prohibiting spitting on the sidewalk because we all knew Tom, and we all knew that the entire purpose of the law was Joe, proliferate sidewalk spitter. Nobody cared about that law because once Tom got elected, he made Joe stop spitting and that was that. And who cared if it stayed on the books for the next 130 years?
But the world where laws were made by people, for people, to be enforced against people doesn't exist any more. Now we have technology that can take pictures all day long of people spitting, do facial recognition, and add it to a little file somewhere.
It's almost like we need to completely start over. We've built a machine that never could work, so it has all these patches and over-engineered pieces. Now that we're actually getting it to work, it'll eat us alive.
Comments
Yes. What'll happen is that since there is a practical limit on the number of people the government can put in prison, they'll just "defer" huge amounts of crime for people as long as they stay on good behavior.
Then, when the government chooses, they'll let the entire bomb drop on the guy. Of course there's also the blackmail and coercion potential (Looking at these traffic and land-use violations, you really don't want to criticize the governor in that way, do you?) It used to be that whichever party won the White House, the next year all the NGOs that supported the other party would be due for a tax audit. This increases that kind of thing by several orders of magnitude.
We voted for politicians who made promises and changes based on an existing manual system. All of those hundreds of years of voting and changing were inside of a system that doesn't exist any more. The feedback loop of the democracy was based on real humans going out there and enforcing the laws against real other humans, not the idea that whatever was said would automatically magically happen. Tom Smith in 1880 could get elected mayor on a platform of prohibiting spitting on the sidewalk because we all knew Tom, and we all knew that the entire purpose of the law was Joe, proliferate sidewalk spitter. Nobody cared about that law because once Tom got elected, he made Joe stop spitting and that was that. And who cared if it stayed on the books for the next 130 years?
But the world where laws were made by people, for people, to be enforced against people doesn't exist any more. Now we have technology that can take pictures all day long of people spitting, do facial recognition, and add it to a little file somewhere.
It's almost like we need to completely start over. We've built a machine that never could work, so it has all these patches and over-engineered pieces. Now that we're actually getting it to work, it'll eat us alive.