But if it’s not wrong, then that is a useful answer. If the people who are committing crimes are a military force that is willing to use force to avoid being held accountable by law… questions that depend on the rule of law being in effect are missing the point. Laws need to be enforced by some kind of superior force to the people being subject to the law. Ideally that force is mutually agreed upon by society through some political process. Modern democracies are supposed to base that legitimacy on democratic will restrained by constitutional limitations. But clearly that doesn’t strictly need to be the case for a state to operate. The most base level of political legitimacy for the use of force to govern is the mere unwillingness of the population to use their own violence to counter it. If things ever got bad enough, the thing that keeps that in check is ultimately organized resistance and revolution.
Going back to liberal democracy though, even with all of our theoretical restrictions on power, ultimately all of that only works based on some combination of the government believing in and choosing to follow those principles and if all else fails… revolution. Just think about how historically significant the first ever peaceful transition of power was. The people with all the guns just decided not to use them to keep their power. Think about how crazy it is that some of the people in the government wanted George Washington to become king and he was just like “Nah. Pass. That’s not how we’re gonna do things anymore.”
If they decided otherwise… what was a judge going to do about that? Write a strongly worded opinion paper? Then what? In order for anything to happen either the gov needed agree or enough other people with guns would have to organize to do something about it. Even if you have some police force to represent the courts independent of the main government, that police force needs to be full of people who agree with the rule of law and they have to be strong enough to enforce that court decision.
So getting back to our situation… if the main government and the military and police under its direct control has decided that the rule of law isn’t important to it, then even if you can point to the laws they’re breaking and get the courts to rule against them… you need to answer the question of who is going to make those court decisions a reality. If it isn’t going to be ICE, the US Military, or any of the other organizations engaged in the illegal activity, then it needs to be someone else and at that point it’s a war and the laws don’t really matter anymore anyway.
So that’s the decision tree for this question. If you think the government isn’t entirely run by fascists, then we can discuss the legal question. If your answer is that the government is corrupt and fascist, then answering the legal question is producing answers that are inherently incorrect and misleading. If you do genuinely believe the opposite, then yes, just giving the fascist answer is incorrect and misleading. In either case, the path we go down, if incorrect, leads us away from the more productive conversation. But the question of which of these two answers is the correct starting point for the interesting and necessary discussion.
In a broad sense, I don’t agree with the premise that technology is always good and it’s about how society chooses to use it.
Technology enables people to do things that previously weren’t possible. It gives people powers that those who don’t/can’t use the technology don’t have. It fundamentally changes the power dynamics between people. You don’t get to choose how someone else uses the technology. You have to deal with its existence.
For example, guns. Guns are a weapon that enables people to inflict violence on others very effectively without much if any athletic prowess. Previously someone who was more athletic could have power over someone weaker than them. With guns, the weaker person could be on an even playing field.
Now, guns are pretty difficult to manufacture, so an authority might be able to effectively control the availability of guns. But now lets say someone discovers a method that enabled basically anyone to make a gun cheaply in their house. Now it’s harder to stop people from getting them. It becomes more accessible, and once again this changes the potential power dynamic in society. We could all come to an agreement on how we want to use guns, but that doesn’t really matter if some guy can secretly build a gun in his garage, put it in his pocket, and just go shoot someone. The very existence of this technology has changed the nature of social reality.
Now compare that to AI. Generative AI has enabled people to produce novel media that is becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish from authentically generated media very quickly. While this is technically something that was possible before, it was far more difficult and slow. There is media in the world today that could not have existed without AI. (If only in so far as the quantity being larger means that things that wouldn’t have been made in the same time period now can be.) AI isn’t even a physical device. A computer program is essentially an idea translated into a language a computer can understand. It might be difficult to learn how to program, but anyone with a computer can do it. Anyone can learn how to write a computer virus, so now we have to live in a world where we all have to be careful of viruses. Anti-virus software changes that dynamic again, but it hasn’t changed the fact that someone can learn to write a program that gets around them. Now, AI as it works now is a bit harder to make on your own with just knowledge because it requires large quantities of data to train the models. So technologies and policies that could restrict people’s access to data could limit the availability of AI technology. But future developments may discover ways to make AI models with little or no data, at which point it would become easy for anyone to have that technology. So even if right now we put in place laws to restrict how AI companies operate so people don’t have easy access to the AI models or perhaps the AI models come built with logic that helps to identify their outputs, those laws would be meaningless if it were trivial for anyone to make their own.
Now, it’s going to be different for every different kind of technology and it’s interesting to discuss, but the root of any human decisions around the technology is the fundamental nature of what the technology is, does, and enables.