How to Steal 50M Bees
I think this all changes in the nearish future.<p>In my line of work, we sell an extraordinary amount of hard drives to surveillance companies.  As an old timer, I&#x27;ve seen this &quot;edge of the wedge&quot; happen twice before, and it feels that it is happening again.  I feel that surveillance seems to be equivalent to the PC in 1985 or Smartphones in 2003.  In other words, in the same way that society and business was changed forever by the PC or Smartphones, crime will be changed forever by real world tracking.  If you lived through PCs or Smartphones, we all said it would change the world, but I think very few (Alan Kay as a prime exception) really internalized the obvious future.<p>The roadmap and growth of the commercial and consumer surveillance companies are absolutely extraordinary.  And resolution x cameras x facial recognition = a future society where large things, such as packages in front of your door, bees in a field, or traffic accidents, will all be caught.<p>Within a decade, in the same situation where somebody steals a hive of bees, the people that picked up the hives will almost guaranteed to have evidence from a camera on a face or license plate or vehicle type creating probable cause, so you can get the phone records and coordinates of not only the people that picked up the hives but where they dropped them off.  I just think it is going to be much easier to catch bad behavior and ensure punishment.<p>The real question to me is do we have a backlash against this similar to a GDPR?  We see that laws are emerging to keep people from tracking us on the web.  But will these types of laws be created so that we cannot track people in real life?<p>If society determines that crime is so bad that we allow real world tracking, what happens to crime?  Once you know that any physical act in the open will get you caught, does the crime rate drop dramatically except for those that wish to be caught?  Do we have a new breed of off the grid criminal?  Or a breed of super hacker criminal that evolves to beat the system.<p>I think the most likely is that physical crime drops dramatically because everybody knows they will be caught.<p>As an anime fan, there was program called Psycho-pass.  The tenant of the show was a technology that was developed so that any crime would quickly be caught.  In many ways a robust surveillance system is this fiction brought to life.  One of the most interested arcs (spoilers) is when the system is broken, and the current society is completely unable to deal with the criminals because they have become so naive because the crime rate is so low.  I can actually see something like that happening in the future just with a robust surveillance system if society allowed it to happen.<p>Fun time to be alive, and I think we&#x27;ll all see this story unfold in our life times.