Xprize Founder Insists All the New Tech That's Surveilling Humans Makes Us 'Behave Better'

Peter Diamandis, the millionaire founder of the Xprize Foundation, published a new Substack post on Thursday about all the ways that humans are now being monitored, from satellites in the sky to the cameras on autonomous vehicles. He writes that by the year 2030, there will be 40 billion connected devices, all feeding information to AI about how everyone on the planet is acting. And rather than imagining this as a dystopian hellscape, he thinks this will have a positive effect on society. Because, as Diamandis puts it, humans behave better when they’re being watched. Diamandis starts in the sky, noting the 13,800 active satellites currently in low Earth orbit, with petabytes of data being collected on everything happening below. He makes his way lower to drones, then the autonomous vehicles of Waymo (each with 13 cameras), and lower to a world of the future in which humanoid robots capture all the data in their surroundings. After that, you’ve got the smartphones in our hands—7 billion of them globally—and all of the data being collected not just visually, but from their GPS, gyroscope, and so much more. Next, the 21 billion internet-connected devices around today are projected to