Yeah. Some anonymous web poster pointed out to me that changes in the law regarding marijuana & homosexuality would have been impossible with perfect surveillance.
Advancement in the social code is only possible because people can get away with violating it.
I think this is a really good point - if we can never break a law, we can never change one.
There is another good point as we move towards more perfect surveillance and enforcement of laws; so many of our laws are designed with the idea that you will only catch x% of infractions. If we knew we would catch 100% of the violators when we created these laws, we might have chose different thresholds and punishments.
For example, take speeding - if we knew that we would catch 100% of people driving faster than the speed limit, we might set a higher speed limit and a lower penalty. We set the current penalty based on the idea that it needs to be high enough to offset all the times that we speed and don't get caught. For example, if we get caught 1% of the time we speed, then we can expect a $500 fine for speeding to cost us about 5 dollars per time we speed. If we are caught 100% of the time, that jumps to $500 per time we speed.
Also, the speed limit is lower because we can't enforce it perfectly - we need a little bit of a buffer, so that a cop can be sure the person is speeding before issuing a ticket. This means speeds are lower than they should be with perfect enforcement.
We really need an overhaul of our laws if we are going to allow automated and perfect enforcement.
In fact, one of the reason I dislike anti-discrimination laws are because enforcement using things like statistical analysis was really only designed for unskilled labor and the like.
Of course. Just imagine a country such as Saudi Arabia, where many of the things we consider "normal" in more developed societies are crimes, often punished by death. If Saudi Arabia gets to have perfect surveillance and law enforcement, that society will never reach our modern standards for a developed society. Only those that will be able to bribe their way out of it will survive.
Thinking about it, ideally the arrests should hit the news in cases like this. I am thinking that jury nullification should be replaced with a temporary stop on enforcement.
Advancement in the social code is only possible because people can get away with violating it.