The National Security Agency is
tasked with global monitoring, analysis of information, data for foreign
intelligence and counterintelligence purpose. Recently, it has been revealed
that this organization has breached the privacy rights of the American public.
Of course the public has shown anger towards the issue, they feel violated to
know that all their personal activity has been viewed and recorded online for
the sake of their protection. What if we’re thinking this in the wrong light?
What if it’s a great structure to be continuously monitored?
“Psycho-Pass” is an anime that
describes a close to Utopian society that is continually monitored and judged
by a computer system, known as the Sibyl System. The Sibyl System is setup to continuously
monitor each individual’s brain waves and monitor their state of being. From
your physical to mental health, the Sibyl System takes appropriate measures to
assure that your well-being is top priority. The systems guides each individual
in life as well, through a series of tests that everyone goes through, the
Sibyl System measures your intelligence and potential and determines which
career field you’re best suited for. Alongside the Sibyl System, society has
made so many technological advances that benefit mankind such as creating
personal artificial intelligence assistant that serve as assistants in their
daily lives from getting ready in the morning to scheduling out your day.
The system is able to judge whether
you’re being stressed out or if you’re about to experience a breakdown and
become unstable. The Sibyl System will warn you if it measures that your brain
is experiencing too much stress by assigning your state of mind a color hue
that serves a measurement of your mental health. The clearer your assigned
color hue is the more stable your mind, but the darker your color hue is means
that you’re at risk of experiencing a mental breakdown. If the system determines
you are at risk of having your stress levels become too severe it will
recommend you to take immediate therapeutic sessions. With the installation of
Sibyl, society is at peace and the crime level has gone drastically down to the
point where no real police force is needed in the world.
An important feature of this system
is since it is able to scan a person’s mental state and personality; it is able
to measure the probability that the person will commit a crime, also known as a
“crime coefficient”. I mentioned that there was no real police force in this
universe, but there exists a criminal investigation division that takes action
to apprehend and pursue any individual with a high crime coefficient. The Sibyl
System constantly monitors the population to make sure that everyone’s mental
health stays fine and that their crime coefficient remains low, but if it can’t
prevent it from rising it will send forces from the investigation division to
track you down before you commit a crime and upset the peace in society.
In exchange for no sense of privacy
and to have all your personal activity monitored by a computer system that has
cameras on every street corner and access to any camera located in a building,
so you have no way of avoiding its watchful eyes, it guarantees you a peace of
mind and results in a high functioning society. This system works to serve the public;
it has the population’s best interests in mind and only seeks to maintain the
peace in society so that they can continue to advance in their personal endeavors.
It is because of everything that the Sibyl System does to help society that I
refer to it as a Computer God. This Computer God accurately measures your state
of mind using data, numbers and absolutely no bias opinion; every individual is
treated equally to the Sibyl System. The concept of living in a society judged
and monitored by a computer sounds appealing to me, not everyone may agree
with this idea, but honestly computers plays such a huge role in our lives to
begin with that being monitored by them might prevent society from making
mistakes that all stem from human error and emotion.
While it is one unique idea to crime prevention, this would never be successful in real life. First you have people who do not know how to use or do not own the technology that would be required to implement this. Then you have people that live far from high populated areas such as farmers. The cost for cameras to be installed to monitor them would be enormous. Next this solution would need to be implemented across all countries so that everyone is tagged as tourists would probably skew the system in some way. Lastly, there would be people that would complain that their right to privacy was being disregarded.
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