Xprize founder says ‘humans behave better when they’re being watched’

Much of Diamandis’ Substack post is framed around giving advice to entrepreneurs or executives on how to live in a world with no privacy. This advice mostly boils down to: “be a good person.” And even he doesn’t have an answer for the question of whether people would do this because it’s the right thing to do, or because they might be under surveillance. (He writes that it’s the question he’s “been chewing on” since concluding the interview with Marshall.)

What Diamandis doesn’t wrestle with is the same set of questions that tech executives often elide in conversations about surveillance and privacy. The definitions of “good” or “honest” are, unfortunately, often in the eye of the beholder — in this case, powerful tech companies that control the surveillance infrastructure.

Diamandis briefly argues that these companies are offering transparency, and that “transparency is a tool, and tools don’t have ethics.” He doesn’t reckon with the fact that tools often inherit the biases of their creators. Who decides what behavior captured by a security camera is “good” or “honest”? This question isn’t explored, let alone answered.

All he’s willing to say is that transparency “only builds trust when it points both ways.” That balance seems tricky, at best, in a world where the technology to create such “transparency” is controlled by so few.