> There have been large bodies of work from technologists critical of the creeping technological panopticon ... since at least the 1980s
As someone who was active in AI research in the 1980s, I have to say that I didn't notice these large bodies of work. In contrast one of the specific concerns that I do remember was that the Japanese 5th generation project would leave the western computing industry in the dust, not that it would create a surveillance nightmare. I also remember concerns that the (then) approaches to AI (e.g. rule-based expert systems) would lead to brittle decision making, or that it couldn't scale to real-world problems.
Can you name some of the authors who were publishing panopticon concerns then, or the media they were publishing in?
Shoshana Zuboff, In the Age of the Smart Machine: The Future of Work and Power (1988) Notably reviewed in the Whole Earth Catalog's Signal: Communication Tools for the Information Age (1988).
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy "Privacy and Information Technology" bibliography is largely 1990--present, but contains some earlier references.
As someone who was active in AI research in the 1980s, I have to say that I didn't notice these large bodies of work. In contrast one of the specific concerns that I do remember was that the Japanese 5th generation project would leave the western computing industry in the dust, not that it would create a surveillance nightmare. I also remember concerns that the (then) approaches to AI (e.g. rule-based expert systems) would lead to brittle decision making, or that it couldn't scale to real-world problems.
Can you name some of the authors who were publishing panopticon concerns then, or the media they were publishing in?