Slippery Slope Report

Chicago's Parks Department is planning to use employee GPS monitoring to better manage and oversee their employees. The goal of monitoring workers? Good. The means? Dangerous. The increasing use of GPS and similar systems for "good" purposes will make it cheaper and more normalized for nefarious ones. How long until we put GPS monitors on paroled criminals? Or require them for automobiles?

Modern technology puts into sharper relief than ever the tradeoff between order and freedom. Both are goals for American society, and we must seek a balance between them. Order & centralized control, however, is getting a lot more benefits from modern technology than is freedom. A free society will have some "messiness" around its edges - and that's the price we pay for our own intellectual, religious, political, and economic freedom. The framers of the Constitution believed that order could be maintained by free people who valued their freedom: responsible citizens will follow a social contract willingly. By outsourcing basic "citizen" functions (like working responsibly) to satellites, we increasingly erode the citizen's sense of responsibility.

A society of rulers never lasts. If we outsource our moral and economic and social responsibilities to machines outside our control, we will ultimately find that we have lost those responsibilities and the accompanying privileges.