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If our national security rests on US tech, we have no national security

AI and technology can be transformative to the whole of the law and order space.

When I was in justice, my ultimate vision for that part of the criminal justice system was to achieve, by means of AI and technology, what Jeremy Bentham tried to do with his Panopticon. That is that the eyes of the state can be on you at all times.

Similarly, in the world of policing, in particular, we've already been rolling out live facial recognition technology, but I think there's big space here for being able to harness the power of AI and tech to get ahead of the criminals, frankly, which is what we're trying to do.

...the system of Siberian prisons were actually built by the Russian imperial regime of the 1700s. Both the czars and then the Soviets used the gulag to oppress their political opponents. These were not normal prisons designed to contain the violent, but institutions designed to exert complete control over and break the individual. And one of the individuals responsible for inventing those systems was Jeremy Bentham.

There's a strong case for Jeremy Bentham being one of the worst people ever. Bentham is famous today as a philosopher, social reformer and father of utilitarianism -- the moral philosophy that gave us effective altruism, the preferred philosophy of Sam Bankman Fried and many other Silicon Valley hucksters. But Bentham is famous for his panopticon, a special prison designed to allow just one guard to control an entire population of prisoners. The panopticon's famous circular design is actually secondary to its purpose. Central to the panopticon design is a psychological principle: that to be kept under control, people don't need to be constantly observed, they only need to believe observation is possible at any time. Think of the panopticon as the evil eye of Sauron or of Big Brother constantly watching you, two of the greatest symbols of pure evil ever imagined, and it's possible both Tolkien and Orwell had Bentham in mind when considering evil.

Bentham's panopticon was inspired by two years spent with his brother, a factory owner in Russia. Factories in this early stage of the Industrial Revolution had a problem: They had to employ almost as many supervisors to watch the workers as they employed workers. And persuading people to work in the factories at all was a struggle. For capitalism to profit, it needed a way to get people working. Bentham's ideas of a surveillance state were to be tested on prisoners. But the panopticon's true purpose was to discipline workers in factories and beyond.

Bentham remained largely unknown in his lifetime and was bitter until his death that his panopticon ideas were never inflicted on real people. Well, thank you, Jeremy Bentham. But while his prison was never built, Bentham's ideas lived on. "They make a sound as they die, a sort of choral agonized, pleading." At the heart of the terror that Narkina 5 creates is a question: Are you free? Are you a member of a free society and free to pursue life, liberty and the capitalist dream? Or are you controlled by unseen systems of discipline?