You are being watched ... maybe

This plan of Jeremy Bentham's panopticon prison was drawn by Willey Reveley in 1791.

Back in 2010, yours truly wrote a piece titled, you guessed it, :) Panopticon, talking about, in part, the brilliant "social engineering" plan by Jeremy Bentham whereby ... The panopticon is a design of institutional building with an inbuilt system of control, originated by the English philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham in the 18th century. The concept is to allow all prisoners of an institution to be observed by a single prison officer, without the inmates knowing whether or not they are being watched.

Although it is physically impossible for the single guard to observe all the inmates' cells at once, the fact that the inmates cannot know when they are being watched motivates them to act as though they are all being watched at all times. They are effectively compelled to self-regulation. 

Fast forward 13 years to see why Bentham's design is even more apropos in the age of AI.

Source Image: Freepik

Now, artificial intelligence is making this dynamic worse. As we enter the AI age, our data—who and what we are—has become more valuable, and more vulnerable, than ever. 

We’ve got OpenAI’s CEO dreaming of a day when “every conversation you’ve ever had in your life, every book you’ve ever read, every email you’ve ever read, everything you’ve ever looked at is in there, plus connected to all your data from other sources. And your life just keeps appending to the context.” 

And finally ...

Wormhole technology has advanced to the point where information can be passed instantaneously between points in the spacetime continuum. The wormhole technology is first used to send digital information via gamma rays, then developed further to transmit light waves. The media corporation that develops this advance can spy on anyone, anywhere it chooses. A logical development from the laws of space-time allows light waves to be detected from the past. This enhances the wormhole technology into a "time viewer" where anyone opening a wormhole can view people and events from any point throughout time and space.

When the technology is released to the general public, it effectively destroys all secrecy and privacy. 

An underground forms which attempts to escape this observation; corruption and crime are drastically reduced; states discover the true causes and outcomes of international conflicts; and religions worldwide are forced to re-evaluate their divine histories. As the underground movement grows, it utilises a direct neural interface coupled with the unlimited communication provided by the wormhole technology to develop a group mind.

Casimir forces on parallel plates

Interestingly, the book has legs as the start point for the creation of the wormholes is the Casimir Effect, a proven theory creating a vacuum within a vacuum with fascinating effects unable to be ignored.

To understand the Casimir Effect, one first has to understand something about a vacuum in space as it is viewed in quantum field theory. Far from being empty, modern physics assumes that a vacuum is full of fluctuating electromagnetic waves that can never be completely eliminated, like an ocean with waves that are always present and can never be stopped. These waves come in all possible wavelengths, and their presence implies that empty space contains a certain amount of energy--an energy that we can't tap, but that is always there.

Now, if mirrors are placed facing each other in a vacuum, some of the waves will fit between them, bouncing back and forth, while others will not. As the two mirrors move closer to each other, the longer waves will no longer fit--the result being that the total amount of energy in the vacuum between the plates will be a bit less than the amount elsewhere in the vacuum. Thus, the mirrors will attract each other, just as two objects held together by a stretched spring will move together as the energy stored in the spring decreases.

With SF being as it is, the Casimir Effect is amped to the nth degree to create the infamous Worm Cam.

Plan view of the panopticon prison, by Reveley, 1791[2]