Accountability Becomes Inevitable

In the years between 2030 and 2040, accountability will cease to be a matter of discovery and become a condition of life itself. It likely won't happen suddenly, with proclamations and new laws, it will emerge gradually from the arrangements we have already accepted.

For most of history, people lived in a world where the past was uncertain. What remained of any action depended upon memory, which is usually treacherous and self-serving, or upon written accounts that could be lost, destroyed, or rewritten by those in power. That uncertain past was sufficient because no alternative existed.

A different reality is forming in front of us. Its outline can already be seen in the scattered systems that surround us. Our devices record every moment. Our currencies exist only as entries in digital ledgers. Our identities are tied to permanent accounts. Even our WiFi signals map the spaces through which people move, noting their presence and their paths. Each of these systems, taken alone, is incomplete. But they are starting to converge. And out of convenience, we will adopt the final post-convergence product. Because convenience becomes habit, habit becomes dependence, and dependence becomes the structure of daily existence.

When a single intelligence is finally able to draw all these threads together, storing every data point from them all accurately, forever, of everyone’s transactions, messages, movements, and associations as one continuous sequence from the past and present, the change will be very profound. Minority Report kind of encapsulated it in a Hollywood kind of way. Once this intelligence has this access, all actions will be recorded accurately, and all current actions will be mapped and cross-referenced in real time. A person will exist as an unbroken record of what they have done, independent of memory and presentation. The profile that it forms of you will be assembled by your actions, past and present, cross-referenced without mercy or favour. Based on a lifetime of accurate recordings, the profile will show what you are through what you have done.

This record it builds will not require you to actively watch it, it will simply exist. There will be no need to consult it constantly, for the knowledge that it is there will be enough. However, before a message is sent, before a transaction is made, before an association is formed, there will be a hesitation. People will learn to govern themselves in the small moments knowing everything is interconnected. Over time, this self-discipline will become unconscious. It will feel less like surveillance than like the natural order of things.

Explanations and justifications for actions will still be offered by people, to one another, as they always have been. People will continue to reinterpret their actions for others and for themselves. Those explanations will stand beside an unchanging record and lose their power to replace it. This record does not argue. It does not forget. It simply exists as a counterweight to every claim.

Past actions that once lay in shadow are illuminated by their place in the sequence. A transaction from ten years earlier may suddenly stand beside a recent questionable association. A movement once thought unrecorded appears linked to a message sent in haste. In today’s world, there is no intelligence cross-referencing all these events, but shortly, artificial intelligence can and will.

The convergence of these different streams of data into the system itself remains neutral. Artificial intelligence will make judgments possible on a scale never before imagined. The boundary between what a person was and what they are begins to dissolve.

Punishment, in the old dramatic sense, may not be the central feature. The consequences will likely be quieter and more pervasive. Opportunity, trust, and access will flow, or fail to flow, according to what the record contains. Institutions will come to rely upon its certainty. People will participate because participation is the path of least resistance. Resistance will come to seem difficult and eventually pointless.

New generations will know nothing else. They will be born into the record as into the air itself. The idea that a person might have a history that belongs only to themselves will seem quaint, almost incomprehensible.

In this process, what will be lost is something strange to name but essential to human life, and I think that is the mercy of forgetting, the freedom to reinterpret one’s own story, the space between what one has been and what one claims to be. When the record is complete and permanent, and adjustable, that space narrows and finally disappears. A person becomes their cemented history, and beyond appeal.

The infrastructure for this world already exists in fragments. The intelligence that will unite them is coming, if not already here. The direction it will take is clear and likely inevitable. What remains uncertain is just the when.