“At least when there’s an evil dictator, that human is going to die. But for an AI, there would be no death. It would live forever. And then you’d have an immortal dictator from which we can never escape.”—Elon Musk (2018)
Get ready for Surveillance State 2.0.
To achieve this turbocharged surveillance state, the government is turning to its most powerful weapon yet: artificial intelligence. AI, with its ability to learn, adapt, and operate at speeds unimaginable to humans, is poised to become the engine of this new world order.
Over the course of 70 years, the technology has developed so rapidly that it has gone from early computers exhibiting a primitive form of artificial intelligence to machine learning (AI systems that learn from historic data) to deep learning (machine learning that mimics the human brain) to generative AI, which can create original content, i.e., it appears able to think for itself.
What we are approaching is the point of no return.
While the scientific community has a lot to say about the world-altering impact of artificial intelligence on every aspect of our lives, little has been said about its growing role in government and its oppressive effect on our freedoms, especially “the core democratic principles of privacy, autonomy, equality, the political process, and the rule of law.”
According to a report from Accenture, it is estimated that across both the public and private sectors, generative AI has the potential to automate a significant portion of jobs across various sectors.
Certainly, President Trump has made no secret of his plans to make AI a priority. Indeed, Trump recently issued an executive order giving the technology sector a green light to develop and deploy AI without any guardrails in place to limit the risks it might pose to U.S. national security, the economy, public health or safety.
Cue the rise of “digital authoritarianism” or “algocracy—rule by algorithm.”
In an algocracy, “Mark Zuckerberg and Sundar Pichai, CEOs of Facebook and Google, have more control over Americans’ lives and futures than do the representatives we elect.”
Digital authoritarianism, as the Center for Strategic and International Studies cautions, involves the use of information technology to surveil, repress, and manipulate the populace, endangering human rights and civil liberties, and co-opting and corrupting the foundational principles of democratic and open societies, “including freedom of movement, the right to speak freely and express political dissent, and the right to personal privacy, online and off.”
How do we protect our privacy against the growing menace of overreach and abuse by a technological sector working with the government?
The ability to do so may already be out of our hands.
In 2024, at least 37 federal government agencies ranging from the Departments of Homeland Security and Veterans Affairs to Health and Human Services reported more than 1700 uses of AI in carrying out their work, double from the year before.
A particularly disturbing example of how AI is being used by government agencies in rights- and safety-impacting scenarios comes from an investigative report by The Washington Post on how law enforcement agencies across the nation are using “artificial intelligence tools in a way they were never intended to be used: as a shortcut to finding and arresting suspects without other evidence,” resulting in a growing number of wrongful arrests.
“How do I beat a machine?” asked one man who was wrongly arrested by police for assaulting a bus driver based on an incorrect AI match.
It is becoming all but impossible to beat the AI machine.
When used by agents of the police state, it leaves “we the people” even more vulnerable.
So where do we go from here?
For the Trump Administration, it appears to be full steam ahead, starting with Stargate, a $500 billion AI infrastructure venture aimed at building massive data centers. Initial reports suggest that the AI data centers could be tied to digital health records and used to develop a cancer vaccine. Of course, massive health data centers for use by AI will mean that one’s health records are fair game for any and all sorts of identification, tracking and flagging.
But that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
The surveillance state, combined with AI, is creating a world in which there’s nowhere to run and nowhere to hide.
Thanks to the 24/7 surveillance being carried out by the government’s sprawling spy network of fusion centers, we are all just sitting ducks, waiting to be tagged, flagged, targeted, monitored, manipulated, investigated, interrogated, heckled and generally harassed by agents of the American police state.
It’s just a matter of time before you find yourself wrongly accused, investigated and confronted by police based on a data-driven algorithm or risk assessment culled together by a computer program run by artificial intelligence.
It’s a setup ripe for abuse.
Indeed, with every new AI surveillance technology that is adopted and deployed without any regard for privacy, Fourth Amendment rights and due process, the rights of the citizenry are being marginalized, undermined and eviscerated.
We teeter on the cusp of a cultural, technological and societal revolution the likes of which have never been seen before.
AI surveillance is already re-orienting our world into one in which freedom is almost unrecognizable by doing what the police state lacks the manpower and resources to do efficiently or effectively: be everywhere, watch everyone and everything, monitor, identify, catalogue, cross-check, cross-reference, and collude.
The ramifications of any government wielding such unregulated, unaccountable power are chilling, as AI surveillance provides the ultimate means of repression and control for tyrants and benevolent dictators alike.
This is not a battle against technology itself, but against its misuse. It’s a fight to retain our humanity, our dignity, and our freedom in the face of unprecedented technological power. It’s a struggle to ensure that AI serves us, not the other way around.
Faced with this looming threat, the time to act is now, before the lines between citizen and subject, between freedom and control, become irrevocably blurred.
The future of freedom depends on it.
So demand transparency. Demand accountability.
Demand an Electronic Bill of Rights that protects “we the people” from AI deployed without any safeguards in place to protect against overreach and abuse, what Elon Musk described as an “immortal dictator.”
Whatever you choose to call it, this “immortal dictator” will be the future face of the government unless we rein it in now.
As I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, next year could be too late.
Reprinted with permission from the Rutherford Institute.
