> They do not have the ability to compel people to surrender to unlimited search on penalty of death. This is only reserved and pursued by holders of political authority.
If I run the company that controls peoples' goddamn brain implants, I can conduct unlimited searches or perform arbitrary death sentences at the click of a button.
Oh, there are a lot of options to make people install them. The easiest being, make it desirable to have one.
If smartphones are any indication, people would either straight-up not know about the issues with control/surveillance or have them as one factor of many to trade-off against.
And there are likely lots of benefits that brain implants could offer. If we go full sci-fi, some things they could enable:
- Perfect memory (thanks to digital storage, built-in or in the cloud).
- A perfect sense of location (thanks to built-in GPS and a direct uplink to a Maps-like service).
- Automation of tedious mental tasks (thanks to a bult-in scripting engine).
- Perfect control over your emotions.
- The ability to record and replay any experience.
- Telepathic communication.
- Taking part in fully immersive virtual worlds.
- Seamless interaction with electronic devices, to a point where they bahave and feel like a literal part of your body.
- etc etc.
So if you're a rational consumer, your choice is to have all of that and more - or to throw it all away, based on the seemingly remote possibility that the company could monitor or manipulate your thoughts or make you jump out of the nearest window. And the company is giving their strongest pinkie-promise that they would never do such things.
Even if you stay strong, if enough people take up the offer, network effects will kick in and make "not installing" an increasingly difficult choice:
- Employers will take the enhanced abilities for granted, so you'll have trouble getting a job.
- Operating devices could become difficult to impossible because manual controls will be seen as an unnecessary expense by manufacturers.
- You will be socially isolated, because taking part in telepathic communication will be difficult and you plainly can't visit virtual locations.
- etc etc.
If all that's to much of a hassle to you and you just want to force people to get the implants, you can just hire a "private security contractor" (or build your own army) and force people at gunpoint. If there is no state, who is gonna stop you?
The only reason anybody would install one is if it was desirable to have one, and it's definitely true you can't save people from themselves. With political authority as it stands though, you jump right to the absolute worst case scenario at the end there, they're simply coercively installed by force and there's no possibility of an opt out, they will then be used to do whatever the holder of political authority wants them to do to you, because just as you say, who is going to stop them?
Look at the world we actually live in, this is the way it works, the only thing which actually restrains wielders of political authority is the things they can't do. Not the things they're "restricted by law" from doing.
If they're still around when this is possible, the worst case outcome is inevitable. That doesn't mean that if they're not things can still get bad, by the way. Merely that the combination of the two things taken together is a surefire recipe for dystopia.
> and it's definitely true you can't save people from themselves.
That's too easy to dismiss if we - already today - have major industries that only exist because people act against their own interests - and we have armies of marketers and advertisers that work 40 hours a week to undermine peoples' capabilities of rational descision making.
Even if they didn't, market failures are real, the "invisible hand" a lot less so. We know that if everyone acts only in their own interest, the end result can end up bad for everyone. (Or good only for a small elite)
The market needs guiding principles and I'd very much prefer those principles being enacted by a democratic, law-bound government than some oligarch who is responsible to no one but himself.
> Look at the world we actually live in, this is the way it works, the only thing which actually restrains wielders of political authority is the things they can't do. Not the things they're "restricted by law" from doing.
And yet if leaders of private companies had the same powers, they'd magically restrict themselves. Why?
By the way, that isn't even true: Take Trump: You have a political leader with openly authoritarian views at the most popular position on earth, a party ready to follow wherever he wants to go and democratic institutions weakened by regulatory capture - and he still has to frequently backpedal because people defend the laws and don't just bend to his will.
In a private company, where the only law is "the boss is right", who should do that?
If I run the company that controls peoples' goddamn brain implants, I can conduct unlimited searches or perform arbitrary death sentences at the click of a button.