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Slashdot points to an interesting article from the UK: Machines will make criminal of every driver. It would appear that some bright people in Britain want to equip all cars on the road with a microchip transponder and instrument roads to be able to detect the transponders.
The result? A system that the Government says will make roads safer and cut crime. What they're not touting too loudly is that the system will be used to nab (and fine) drivers for at least 47 different offenses, from stopping on the yellow line in the road to speeding. <sarcasm>I'm sure the system will also shine when it comes to fighting non-automobile related crimes, such as terrorism.</sarcasm>
When I read something like the Sun article, I get to thinking that part of the outrage with having a government-mandated system like that in the car is that it only works to your detriment. Did you drive 40 mph in a 35 mph zone? Go through a yellow light just slightly too late? Make a left turn from the right lane (after having made sure it was safe to do so)? With such a system, you'd get dinged every time you (or whoever you let drive your car) do so, and it wouldn't matter if - between transgressions - your behavior on the road qualified you for sainthood.
But then again, allowing the government to reward certain kinds of behavior has its major downside, too. I still remember (and was a victim of) the policy of "channeling" that the Selective Service implemented in the Vietnam era. Channeling was what encouraged thousands of young men to seek careers in engineering and education, since those two majors were pretty much guaranteed you a student deferment from the draft. That misbegotten policy successfully glutted the education and engineering fields until the draft lottery system was put into place.
As a result of that glut, owing to a buyer's market, there were no engineering positions available for the typical education or engineering graduate in the early 70s, and those positions that were available didn't pay very much. Worse, thousands of men who had no business being in engineering or education ended up benefiting neither themselves nor their shotgun-wedded professions by working in them. (As for myself, I knew I was going to be some kind of scientist or engineer since junior high school. I became disillusioned with engineering when I realized, much to my chagrin, that if you're really good at it, you get promoted to a management position where you don't get to do any more technical work.)
On the other hand, getting back to the subject of the post, while it would appear easy to imagine the types of "incentives" that might be kept track of by a spy system such as the one described in the Sun article, it's actually harder than it appears, if you make it a condition that compliance can not be enforced using some other existing means.
For example, you could try to reward people for, say, attending a museum, but furnishing a museum recipt would do the job. You could reward (or penalize) people for the distances driven over a year, but an odometer check would do instead.
No, most of the non-traffic-offense "utility" of such a system would exclusively lie in efficiently keeping track of people's movements. Who attends the services of the Z fundamentalist group? What groups of people tend to associate with one another without making a public ripple (applicable to sewing circles, poker games, and terror cells)? The former is something that can be done without the chip, but requires large expenditures of police time; the latter is something that can not be done using current surveillance techniques (at least not easily) if the meetings of the group tend to change location each time.
In any event, if you combine this chip with the RFID chip that's going to be ubiquitous in all of our possessions in the near future, and we've got the makings of a Really Great Movie.
Cheers...
The result? A system that the Government says will make roads safer and cut crime. What they're not touting too loudly is that the system will be used to nab (and fine) drivers for at least 47 different offenses, from stopping on the yellow line in the road to speeding. <sarcasm>I'm sure the system will also shine when it comes to fighting non-automobile related crimes, such as terrorism.</sarcasm>
When I read something like the Sun article, I get to thinking that part of the outrage with having a government-mandated system like that in the car is that it only works to your detriment. Did you drive 40 mph in a 35 mph zone? Go through a yellow light just slightly too late? Make a left turn from the right lane (after having made sure it was safe to do so)? With such a system, you'd get dinged every time you (or whoever you let drive your car) do so, and it wouldn't matter if - between transgressions - your behavior on the road qualified you for sainthood.
But then again, allowing the government to reward certain kinds of behavior has its major downside, too. I still remember (and was a victim of) the policy of "channeling" that the Selective Service implemented in the Vietnam era. Channeling was what encouraged thousands of young men to seek careers in engineering and education, since those two majors were pretty much guaranteed you a student deferment from the draft. That misbegotten policy successfully glutted the education and engineering fields until the draft lottery system was put into place.
As a result of that glut, owing to a buyer's market, there were no engineering positions available for the typical education or engineering graduate in the early 70s, and those positions that were available didn't pay very much. Worse, thousands of men who had no business being in engineering or education ended up benefiting neither themselves nor their shotgun-wedded professions by working in them. (As for myself, I knew I was going to be some kind of scientist or engineer since junior high school. I became disillusioned with engineering when I realized, much to my chagrin, that if you're really good at it, you get promoted to a management position where you don't get to do any more technical work.)
On the other hand, getting back to the subject of the post, while it would appear easy to imagine the types of "incentives" that might be kept track of by a spy system such as the one described in the Sun article, it's actually harder than it appears, if you make it a condition that compliance can not be enforced using some other existing means.
For example, you could try to reward people for, say, attending a museum, but furnishing a museum recipt would do the job. You could reward (or penalize) people for the distances driven over a year, but an odometer check would do instead.
No, most of the non-traffic-offense "utility" of such a system would exclusively lie in efficiently keeping track of people's movements. Who attends the services of the Z fundamentalist group? What groups of people tend to associate with one another without making a public ripple (applicable to sewing circles, poker games, and terror cells)? The former is something that can be done without the chip, but requires large expenditures of police time; the latter is something that can not be done using current surveillance techniques (at least not easily) if the meetings of the group tend to change location each time.
In any event, if you combine this chip with the RFID chip that's going to be ubiquitous in all of our possessions in the near future, and we've got the makings of a Really Great Movie.
Cheers...
