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Comment by fredley | Hacker News Reader

Although I couldn't stand The Circle (book or film), it did raise questions about what happens to society when we can place extremely cheap cameras everywhere invisibly that require no battery, and hence can operate almost indefinitely.

In The Circle they are owned by a pseudo Goog-book company that publishes (and records) every video feed (and its history) publicly.

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Another book to check out is Vernor Vinge's "A Deepness on the Sky," which depicts our smart dust future in a way I still think about all the time, decades after reading the book. His "Qeng Ho Localizers"

- are invisibly small (1mm square and thin)

- can be released like a gas into the atmosphere

- are powered by low-power, low range microwave bursts

- mesh network with each other

- have omnidirectional video, other sensors

In the book, historians survey the wrecks of myriad advanced societies in our local galaxy area. The find that smart dust, as final-form state surveillance, is a kind of an end game of technological development. That is, it inevitably emerges, and inevitably destroys society.

On the brighter side, if you can power/harness the localizers around you, you can expand your sensorium to sense everything they do, which sounds cool.

You might enjoy "The light of other days" [1] then.

It envisions the world where wormhole cameras can view any event in the past, thus eliminating all secrecy and privacy overnight.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Light_of_Other_Days

I started to wonder about this, but then I realized that what we're really witnessing right now is the birth of the primordial Grey Goo. I mean, omnipresent super-observation states may be one angle of Our Future Dystopia, but I think energy-harvesting super computers that can reproduce is right around the corner on this one ..

Reproduction is one thing I'm really not concerned about actually. Is it even possible to build any kind of silicon-based electronics outside of a fab?

We've already entered into a period of symbiosis, where software controls human bodies. It seems unlikely that machines can ever do better than a human hand (but can do better almost everywhere else!)

That software is still created by humans, subject to human forces though. You can characterise many things as 'training' or 'evolving' humans to serve their purposes, e.g. gut bacteria, poppies, cows, dogs, toxoplasma gondii, hammers etc. The characterisation doesn't tell you much though.

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