In a previous post, I posted about some fun ways to be paranoid. I’m not going to link directly to it, because then you’ll have to find it yourself, which means you’ll see more of my blog. Anyway, with this latest healthcare bill being passed and the latest census being taken, you might ask…. Do you have the right to be invisible?
A long time ago, if you wanted to be invisible, you just had to get a cabin in the woods and live in it. Then you had to not get sick and not die. It was easy. You could have kids, and nobody would know you had kids! Except your wife. But you could kill her and get away with it. You were free!
And that’s pretty much how human rights worked. If you wanted to explain human rights, you could just measure the amount of freedom you had. Actually, that’s a little immature. You get freedom and privacy. Privacy counts, too.
Of course, now we’re even more free. We have automobiles and can travel the world! But you’re more observable. With computers nowadays, the government can track you. They can track where you drive with license-plate recognizing cameras. They can track where you live. They can track everything about you. You won’t be truly free until you join a seasteading community — but then if you want enough reputation to be permitted to attach to any of the cool communities, you’ll need to emit a public persona. You can’t be completely private. And of course they couldn’t track you by satellite because your personal seasteading pod would be submersible.
Ideally, you want to have maximum freedom and maximum invisibility. Like God. Except that maybe you’ll actually choose to be observable from time to time. If that’s your thing.
To be unobservable in this modern society, your only hope is to basically put a backdoor in all government systems. You need a Ken Thomspon-style backdoor in all the assemblers, compilers, and what-have-you that is intelligent enough to insert itself into anything. You need your own army of artificially intelligent agents to wipe out any trace of you from all security systems. You need an army of intelligent autonomous robots to physically break into computer systems that haven’t been backdoored or aren’t connected to any networks so that you can remove your physical traces from them.
Someday, somebody’s going to become the first person to build their own personal army of autonomous agents, connected to their brains via neuroelectrical interlink, and then he’ll go invisible, and then he’ll secretly rule the world. The singularity will not be televised.