Not to the same extent. An army of humans is obedient up to a point, but there is a limit to what orders you can give them. When the officers are algorithms that limitation is a lot weaker.
Whatever that limit might be is genuinely terrifying, given how far obedient soldiers have gone and not hit such a limit many times over the past.
The movie Das Lieben der Anderen makes this point very cogently.
Nowadays you can run a huge surveillance program with far fewer people, all of whom can be conscience free.
Im not sure how the next stasi will crumble but it'll be a lot harder to wrest them from power with the tools they have at their fingertips.
Yea, and they were way more successful at it in 1940 than 1840. Are you accounting for all the times they tried to enforce their authority but ultimately failed?
> And that tool is known as the monopoly on violence.
No one has a monopoly on violence. What they really have is called "qualified immunity."
In this particular instance, though, their violence is particularly enabled by cheap technology and computing power.
"Monopoly on violence" is a political philosophy concept. What make a state a state.
There are a couple of problems with this:
1. As a matter of raw empirical fact, a government around the year 40 wasn't too likely to possess a monopoly on violence.
2. A monopoly on violence isn't necessary to ruin your life. A simple nonexclusive license, which governments of the period did have, is sufficient.
