Privacy Is The Enemy Of Progress

I’m not sure how much of the following I believe… but I know I believe more of it than I do the wisdom of conventional society, so that’s a start.

Side note: you can listen to a recording of this article here.

For those of you wondering how this post will relate to my blog’s theme of autonomous vehicles, grab some popcorn and be patient. What makes autonomous transportation such a revolution is not the vehicles themselves, but the omniscience they share as parts of a whole, and parts of the greater whole that will be artificial intelligence. That’s why privacy matters: because it’s a bad habit, and as the parents of AI, we ought not to pass down bad habits… for our own sake, if for nothing else.

There are a few words in the English language — Western society, more appropriately — that have made their way into our culture and forged a solid ass groove on the couches of our minds without us ever bothering to ask, “who the hell are you?” Freedom is one such word. Privacy is another. We treat these words as if they were summits to scale, when in fact they are merely fulcrums. Balances of power. More freedom for me means more power, which means less power for the opposing force. It’s zero-sum, which is why running around clamoring for your freedom is really just clamoring for the oppression of something else.