The end of freedom

Jan 28, 2025
Walking business people are tracked with CCTV AI facial recognition technology, Big Data Analysis, scanning crowd, personal security, privacy protection concept

Freedom, the dream that has inspired countless individuals, cultures, beliefs and civilisations over millennia, will soon be gone. Forever.

In just a few years every person on the planet will be under constant surveillance, each minute of each day of their lives, from birth unto death.

Their every word, facial expression, keystroke, expenditure and act will be automatically stored in vast quantum repositories, searchable by whomever has the power to do it, government, oligarch, corporation or villain.

Nothing you do or say will go unnoticed by the vast banks of artificial intelligence that will be primed to seek out dissidence and keep you in line – or make you a compliant victim of consumer culture. You will have little choice over who governs you, what you buy or do. You will be a tiny cog in a vast global consumption and obedience machine, unconsciously following the electronic bidding of your overlords. What you regard as free choices will, in fact, be carefully embedded in your consciousness by super-analytical AI that re-interprets your preferences and inclinations more persuasively than you can.

The key instruments of oppression will be quantum computers and artificial intelligence – devices so powerful, fast, intelligent, capacious and searchable they can store and retrieve all the data, collected on any individual, in milliseconds.

The scientists who work on quantum computers and AI sing their praises – all the wonderful benefits this astonishing technology can deliver to us. But so too did the first nuclear scientists in the 1920s and 30s, before they built a device that could end human existence. QC+AI has exactly the same flaw: misused, it can abolish freedom and human society as we know it. They both have many dangerous vulnerabilities. (See, for example, the Forbes Technology Council.)

Take closed-circuit TV and facial recognition (FR) as a simple example. More than 100 nations, worldwide, are now known to be using facial recognition technology combined with CCTV in some form – for policing, border entry, banking, use of personal devices, schools, workplaces, airports, buses and railways, street cams, shopping malls, sports venues, bars, fast food outlets, dwellings and private security. In many cases its use is involuntary and often, extremely invasive.

The world’s top official users of facial recognition, in order of invasiveness, are: China, Russia, UAE, Britain, Brazil, Chile, India, Japan, the USA, Australia, North Korea, Mexico, Argentina and South Korea. Yet this tells you nothing about how widely the corporate world and its billionaire oligarchs are using it to profile you and track your spending habits in order to brainwash you and plunder your pockets more effectively.

Combine that with your electronic trail – everywhere you go with your smart phone, satnav vehicle or tablet. Every email, text, social media entry, computer document you read or key stroke you make can be documented, and its content retrieved. Your smart TV, phone or home security system can already eavesdrop on your private conversations and actions.

Your devices are already stealing the addresses, contacts, faces and personal details of friends, family and people you correspond with or speak to – often for grubby commercial purposes so they can be bombarded with unwanted advertising and political messaging. Likewise, your data, too, is being purloined from their devices – often by corporations, but equally, by international crime networks.

Your bank, supermarket, stores, online marketers, credit ratings agency, travel agent, medical records, parking meter, sporting club, fly-buys, the tax office and a swarm of others, now document almost every purchase and financial transaction you make. At work your computer will monitor you for signs of laziness, discontent, lubricity or inattention. It will study your foibles and weaknesses with infinite care.

To be sure, all these things are already happening – but the data is currently far too voluminous and fragmented to store and analyse for every individual. The advent of the quantum computer, with its virtually limitless data storage capacity and AI searchability, will change all that. At the flick of a qubit, an individual’s lifetime data can be laid bare, open to any kind of exploitation the user desires.

Even those who live in log cabins, grow their own food and shun all forms of communication or record keeping cannot escape the sleepless eyes and ears of satellites (or drones) prowling in endless succession above. Spying, ever spying.

In less than a generation, our freedom has been stolen from us, with our trusting, naïve consent.

Governments have long understood that, to remain in power, they need to control political opinion and thought in the mass of people. QC+AI allows them to do just that. This costs money – hence politics’ unholy alliance with the emergent global oligarchy. The observed rise of increasingly fascist regimes in western democracies is part of the process of abolishing collective free will in favour of programmed propaganda. The explosion of disinformation on news and social media is a crystal illustration of the abolition of truth from politics. After all, if the people don’t know the truth, they can’t vote for it, can they?

In his epochal novel 1984, George Orwell portrayed an unsleeping ‘Big Brother’ overseeing society, much as the grim ‘security services’ of Stalin and Hitler had lately practised. Yet those regimes depended for their data on human betrayal, either willing or induced with rubber hoses and electric cables. The new Big Brother informs itself through your own willing compliance and desire for modern conveniences that spy on you.

If humanity has any freedoms left at the end of the 21st Century, it may partly be down to one person, Edward Snowden, who witnessed the secretive age of universal espionage in the act of its birth – and blew the whistle. In a recent comment he warned that today’s national institutions, the putative guardians of our freedoms, risk being ‘replaced with algorithms’. “If you thought human judgment was bad, just wait until you see what replaces it,” he warned.

A decade earlier, fleeing America’s spying agency, Snowden had cautioned “They are collecting information about everyone, in every place, regardless of whether they have done anything wrong.”

The ability to observe everyone, 24/7, is rising rapidly, like a toxic tsunami.

These are nothing less than the enabling technologies for a global police state. It is the dawn of the ‘nanocracy’ (or rule of the empowered using the subatomic particles used in quputers to track you).

Among the most polished wielders of this dreadful technology are the petrofascists, the $7 trillion fossil fuels and petrochemicals sector – the world’s third largest economy. Already it is spending billions on buying up governments, corrupting media, social media, public and political discourse.

Most people will fear the loss of personal freedoms which the nanocracy will bring. However, the far greater danger lies in the loss by society of the ability to freely and collectively determine its own future. To have it decreed by ignorant autocrats.

Historically, humanity has depended for its progress, moral, social and physical, on reformers, critics and dissidents such as Socrates, Jesus, Galileo, Mahatma Ghandi, Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela. Under a nanocracy such folk won’t stand a chance. They will be quietly identified by their electronic footprint, swept up and hushed before they can cause trouble. The gaoling of climate and eco-protesters by anti-climate regimes worldwide is an ominous first step on the road to the new universal fascism and suppression of liberties.

A race deprived of its radicals, visionaries, thinkers, explorers, philosophers and innovators risks becoming a stunted, lobotomised species, more like a termite mound than a society. One devoid of the ability to self-criticise and so escape the disastrous consequences of its own mistakes – such as climate change, global poisoning, ecological collapse or nuclear conflict.

A species condemned to extinction because no-one dare question those in power.

While some have expressed concern about the potential for misuse of AI and other advanced technologies, few so far have protested by far its most awful consequence, the universal loss of liberty and self-government.

Share and Enjoy !