Humans are boundedly strategic (self-interested), and boundedly ethical and altruistic (interested in the survival and advancement of the group over their own private interest.) Deontological materialistic long-run group-strategic outcomes-based ethics IMO trump other ethical foundations at least to the extent that poor outcomes evolutionarily disfavor other forms of ethics.

When game theory and incentives favor being strategic, individual incentives generally win.

As an example, in olden days MTA bus drivers were responsible for collecting fares and even made change. Now they are in a booth and the brain-damaged OMNY system doesn’t provide visible persistent proof of whether someone paid the fare. The person for whom $3 impacts their life sees a lot of people beating the fare and honesty carrying a price, and before long most people don’t pay.

Obviously, you need to change the game so honesty pays: the system beeps and flags the people who don’t pay to everyone, visibly takes their picture, the payment systems retains a ‘punched ticket’ you can show as proof, when people don’t pay an enforcement agent is summoned automatically, with sufficient probability to deter farebeaters.

AI surveillance like Flock is a given, you can’t really have driverless Ubers without a camera watching people.

Economics is the painful elaboration of the obvious. In this and many cases, you can just give agents incentives and see what happens under what incentives, see which economics 101 models hold up, and turn economics into more of a lab science.

The new world order is, tech companies tell governments what to do …  Ukraine has to ask Elon Musk for permission to use Starlink to defend itself. Certainly in the case of Musk, there is a tendency to seed mistrust in any government solutions and concentrate power in himself.

Government is messy and doesn’t always cover itself with glory (see MTA). The AI alignment problem is worse: 5 billionaires own it and are not aligned with the rest of society.

You can use the tech to improve governance and alignment and communication with involved citizens, instead of tearing it down. There may be some hope in what Mamdani is doing, with daily videos of him filling in potholes based on somebody tagging him on social media, and whatnot.

For sure you need a bill of rights on what Uber and Flock can record, how long they can retain it, etc.

Not really sure if e.g. Jason Arday deserved his Cambridge appointment or deserved to get hounded out, but I think most academics would lose their jobs if their worst enemies got all their digital histories and AI to datamine it. And you will see same attacks on Mamdani, Lina Khan, Ayushi Roy, certainly anyone who isn’t fully aligned with Big Tech. And if they have a foreign-sounding name they are the enemy within, and if they don’t, they are limousine liberal class traitors etc.