It is foreseeable today that facial recognition and ubiquitous cameras would allow tracking every individual in an urban area.

Satelites can detect things the size of trucks in rural areas already.

Together, it seems like this combination would allow a government/megacorporation/AI overlord to perfectly track and rapidly crush all dissent.

The idea of a surveillance state isn't new, of course, but historically corruption hampered such systems. Enforcers abuse their power, people pay enforcers to look the other way, the military of the surveillance state degrades over time, and the limitations of human capabilities mean dissidents operate freely in confusing slums, vast countryside, and cliques of competing elites who use their influence to cover for each other.

AI changes that. An AI doesn't need to be Roko's basilisk to recognize a person on a video feed, track their movements, track everyone they talk to, and put it in a database in case 10 years from now they are identified as a dissident. An AI doesn't need to be Skynet to put up a flag when a soldier takes a gun out of the state's inventory without the RFID code saying they are authorized to do so. Quite dumb AI can remove the corruption and human imperfection that makes authoritarian reigimes often fail.

You can ban this kind of technology, but then you run the risk of losing militarily or economically to those who don't. If your competitor tracks their delivery drivers to ensure they don't slack off on company time, they'll make more money than you and they'll win, unless "surveillance-free" becomes a prestige buy like "organic". And that won't save you from an opposing army which leverages these tools for military advantage.

The result seems like a difficult to defeat totalitarian state that is much more efficient than any historical one.

This could even be a Fermi paradox solution, if the Interdiction argument Isaac Arthur makes applies: the speed of light places a hard limit on surveillance. I don't know if it passes non-exclusivity though: at the very least sending out dumb harvesters to go turn the universe into statues of yourself seems like something an alien dictator would do. But I'm not sure I'd prefer a world where this isn't a sound Fermi Paradox solution to one where it is.

Thoughts?