Liberty Might Be Better Served by Doing Away with Privacy
I found Zoltan Istvan’s Motherboard opinion piece about the future crossroads between liberty and privacy unsettling. Zoltan Istvan is a futurist, transhumanist, author of The Transhumanist Wager, and a Libertarian candidate for California Governor.
Zoltan Istvan, writing for Motherboard July, 14 2017
The constant onslaught of new technology is making our lives more public and trackable than ever, which understandably scares a lot of people. Part of the dilemma is how we interpret the right to privacy using centuries-old ideals handed down to us by our forbearers. I think the 21st century idea of privacy — like so many other taken-for-granted concepts — may need a revamp.
When James Madison wrote the Fourth Amendment — which helped legally establish US privacy ideals and protection from unreasonable search and seizure — he surely wasn’t imagining Elon Musk’s neural lace, artificial intelligence, the internet, or virtual reality. Madison wanted to make sure government couldn’t antagonize its citizens and overstep its governmental authority, as monarchies and the Church had done for centuries in Europe.
For many decades, the Fourth Amendment has mostly done its job. But privacy concerns in the 21st century go way beyond search and seizure issues: Giant private companies like Google, Apple, and Facebook are changing our sense of privacy in ways the government never could. And many of us have plans to continue to use more new tech; one day, many of us will use neural prosthetics and brain implants. These brain-to-machine interfaces will likely eventually lead to the hive mind, where everyone can know each other’s precise whereabouts and thoughts at all times, because we will all be connected to each other through the cloud. Privacy, broadly thought of as essential to a democratic society, might disappear.
The key is to make sure government is engulfed by ubiquitous transparency too.
Read the full article here.
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