Totalitarianism marches on: Today's news for March 9th

I could re-post yesterday's news, because it reads: "In today's news, yesterday is continuing to happen."

However, there is a theme in a few stories I saw today...

Fox News:

Comey warns there is no longer 'absolute privacy' in US

FBI Director James Comey said Wednesday that Americans should no longer have the expectations of complete privacy.

Comey, who was the keynote speaker at a cybersecurity conference at Boston College, said there is no longer “absolute privacy” in the U.S., Politico reported.

“Even our memories aren’t private," he said. "Any of us can be compelled to say what we saw. In appropriate circumstances, a judge can compel any of us to testify in court on those private communications. There is no place in America outside of judicial reach."

...“All of us have a reasonable expectation of privacy in our homes, in our cars, and in our devices. But it also means with good reason, in court, government through law enforcement can invade our private spaces,” Comey said.

At least Comey has security (his livelihood) as his excuse for totalitarianism. What is Stephen Hawking's excuse?

Independent:

Without a ‘world government’ technology will destroy us, says Stephen Hawking

Stephen Hawking has warned that technology needs to be controlled in order to prevent it from destroying the human race.

The world-renowned physicist, who has spoken out about the dangers of artificial intelligence in the past, believes we need to establish a way of identifying threats quickly, before they have a chance to escalate.

“Since civilisation began, aggression has been useful inasmuch as it has definite survival advantages,” he told The Times.

“It is hard-wired into our genes by Darwinian evolution. Now, however, technology has advanced at such a pace that this aggression may destroy us all by nuclear or biological war. We need to control this inherited instinct by our logic and reason.”

He suggests that "some form of world government” could be ideal for the job, but would itself create more problems.

“But that might become a tyranny," he added. “All this may sound a bit doom-laden but I am an optimist. I think the human race will rise to meet these challenges.”

Who would expect a brilliant guy like Stephen Hawking to be such a politically inside-the-box thinker? The only way to save ourselves from ourselves is to enslave ourselves to a few of us?

But this is the state of the world we live in: We have security dangers (which we created by killing innocent civilians in Muslim nations) pushing us to forfeit our human rights to protect ourselves, even as we have future dangers used as an excuse for totalitarianism disguised as a "world government".

What is most incredible about this is that Hawking doesn't see the inherent danger of concentrating power in the face of an anomalous artificial intelligence threat. If AI is truly smarter than humanity, wouldn't we just be setting ourselves up for an even easier destruction by concentrating our power in the hands of a few? If you put all the political power in the world in one city, all you have to do is destroy that city and you have effectively conquered the world.

For this, I award Hawking the shark: