The basic premise of Rogue Dreams involved a civilization built around cameras and the government watching all the citizens a la Big Brother. Right now, we live in a Little Brother world of data mining and the like that won't exist in this future; the point of the system developed is to stop and prevent crimes. The trade-offs between security and freedom are always interesting to explore and in this case one of the definite themes to tease out is that the government is doing the right thing.
People should not be assholes. This is as true in the future as the past, and works as a general rule. In RD, status is Important and jockeying for it can involve slander and naked ambition, which an omnipresent camera system can help contain. It helps that this society has been entirely social-engineered at some point in the past in a desperate effort to not repeat the mistakes of its predecessors and there are going to be characters who rightly think the government-watchdog idea isn't viable; obviously such things cannot work in a long term, as a better method would involve educating the populace to be better people .... only sometimes being a bastard works.
That the government does not use AI means that citizens cannot be watched effectively, which creates an entirely different set of problems and issues .... to be considered in another post.
...another large logic problem to untangle, eh?
ReplyDeleteWell, there's an entire Drone class of people (social-standing wise) that pretty much includes all criminals and so forth, but it's likely highly abused. The computer system they have is advanced, but it can only flag possible problems and not actually determine if the situation IS a problem. Given a population of 10 billion (legal) people, it is does become an Issue.
ReplyDeleteEveryone knows they're being watched, and if they do a crime they'll be caught. Eventually. Perhaps. It allows people to play the odds on minor crimes and lets people believe they're free, which is the best lie a society can tell its citizens. The extent to which this particular bit of social engineering allows 'major' crimes to go unpunished is where things get nicely complicated.