Robotic Nation Evidence

Thinking about the London subway bombings last week, it seems like one thing is certain. In just a few years, after one or two more incidents like this, we are very likely to see the end of anonymity in human society.

What happened on Thursday is that several people walked with complete anonymity into several subway stations. They planted their bombs invisibly and then either left the scene or remained to be detonated. We have no idea who they were, where they came from, who they associated with or where they went if they left the scene.

We consider anonymity like this to be completely normal today. And we see the effects of this anonymity constantly, simply by reading the paper or watching the news. Anonymity gives criminals a huge advantage. The O.J. Simpson case and its "trial of the century" brought this point home with a big splash 10 years ago. On June 12, 1994, two people died in a brutal murder and no one can conclusively prove who did it. We have no idea who was on the street near Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman at the time of the murder, or where O.J. Simpson was that night.

The O.J. case is one end of the spectrum – a gigantic murder mystery. At the other end are tiny crimes that happen anonymously everyday. For example, one of my neighbors found the envelope of a credit card bill torn open and lying on the grass near his mailbox last week. He has no idea who did it, and therefore had to cancel all of his credit cards that afternoon.

It would be relatively easy to eliminate anonymity today, and that is why its end is near. All that we need is a way to read biometric information (thumbprint, iris, whatever) whenever a person enters and leaves an area like a subway station. This might be done very simply with thumbprint-reading turnstiles. This type of identity gathering will occur at the entrance to every subway station, building, airport, mall, campus, park, stadium, etc. In addition, the identity of every car will be tracked as it moves around.

That will be the first level of the net. With these simple measures, we would know the identity of everyone who entered the subway stations on Thursday. That data would make it easy to discover the identity of the London terrorists in just a few days.

Then the net will tighten. Once it is known who is entering each facility, it will be possible to use cameras to track each person's motion and identify their exact location on a moment by moment basis. If Person X stops to talk to Person Y, that will be known. So will all of Person X's and Person Y's phone calls, email messages, package deliveries, purchases, etc. No longer will email messages and spam arrive with anonymity – we will know exactly who sent them, and so will "the authorities". That means that once the criminals are caught, all of their associates will be caught as well. Entire terrorist cells will be rooted out quite easily once anonymity disappears.

Is this good or bad? It doesn't really matter – it is inevitable. Anonymity is simply an artifact of our non-technological past. The only reason we have anonymity today is because, in the past, it would have been too expensive and too onerous to eliminate it. Today we can use technology to eliminate anonymity at low cost and with only small inconvenience. We will gladly deploy the technology to eliminate everything from petty theft to global terrorism. Given a choice between "anonymity" and "the potential to have a city blown up by terrorists", we will choose to lose our anonymity.

Once anonymity is gone, it is very likely that we will eliminate crime as we know it today. That will be a very good thing. According to this page, in the year 2000 in the United States there were:

• 1.4 million violent crimes
  
• 10.2 million property crimes
  
• 15,000 murders
  
• 90,000 forcible rapes
  
• 407,000 robberies
  
• 1.1 million vehicle thefts
  
• And so on...

In 20 years, people will look back at the level of crime and terrorism that we endure today with a certain horror, in the same way that we look back in horror at all of the deaths caused by things like smallpox.