In 1967, Herman Kahn already foresaw predictive surveillance systems and called them a nightmare.

Evidence

It was not long ago that Varian’s prosaic proclamations were regarded as the stuff of nightmares. In his 1967 book The Year 2000 the hyper-rational wunderkind futurist Herman Kahn anticipated many of the capabilities that Varian now assigns to the new extraction/execution architecture. Kahn was no shrinking violet. He was rumored to be director Stanley Kubrick’s model for the title character in Dr. Strangelove, and he was well-known for arguing that nuclear war is both “winnable” and “survivable.” Yet it was Kahn who foresaw innovations such as Varian’s vehicular monitoring system and characterized them as “a twenty-first century nightmare.” Among his many technology-oriented insights, Kahn foresaw automated computer systems that track all vehicular movements and also listen to and record conversations with all the capability available for high-speed scan and search. He imagined computer systems able to detect and respond to individual behavior—a raised voice, a threatening tone: “Such computers may also be able to apply a great deal of inferential logic on their own—they may become a sort of transistorized Sherlock Holmes making hypotheses and investigating leads in a more or less autonomous or self-motivated manner.…” Anyone who wields this kind of knowledge, he concluded, is, like Faust, “less immoral than amoral… indifferent to the fate of those who stand in his way rather than brutal.” — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 682

Categorization

• QUESTION: Kahn as the model for Dr. Strangelove is a striking biographical detail worth verifying and possibly pulling into writing about techno-optimist culture.
• SEED: The gap between what futurists flagged as nightmare in 1967 and what we now treat as banal progress could anchor an essay on the normalization of surveillance.