Fast forward to the near future. Drones patrol the sky and monitor every square inch of urban life. Streets bristle with sensors and cameras that record and filter every utterance and action. The all-seeing eye of government peers into every home and listens to every private conversation through phones and laptops. Government AI tirelessly polices this treasure trove of data, and when it perceives a legal violation it generates a record of guilt, sends a fine in the mail, or files criminal charges. Months have passed since an American last committed a crime, from bank robbery to jaywalking to speeding. Our technology has enabled us to achieve perfect enforcement of criminal law. Lest this seem like a far-fetched, Orwellian fantasy, consider that drones already police the sunny skies of Miami to pursue fleeing criminals; big tech and company listen to our every word; and China polices jaywalkers with face-screening technology tied to their regime’s social credit score system.
The Steel Man
The exponential improvement and adoption of government AI trained on large language models make that near future all-too possible if not desirable. Wishing that the American justice system should enforce all criminal laws to the letter has an appeal, particularly for the most depraved crimes. When legislatures pass laws, they do so with the intention that these laws will be enforced for the common good toward the end of human flourishing. At the lowest but most solid level, law enforcement secures our individual rights, and at the highest it cultivates virtue and self-discipline among citizens. Perfect enforcement of criminal law thus might be thought to represent the ideal toward which governments have always strived. Advanced technology helps execute this mission, while dramatically reducing costs and taxes.
Because America operates on the consent of the governed, it would achieve perfect enforcement through voluntary means. The most obvious route is through our elected officials passing legislation to embolden our perceptive and coercive technology. Law enforcement routinely procures more advanced tools to perform their duties. On a more personal level, society may encourage people to opt into self-governing technology that monitors and nudges behavior to remain within legal guardrails. Some insurance companies already offer discounted insurance for people that use autonomous driving technology. Similar incentives will push others to don AI glasses, which will soon whisper into your ear the lawful boundaries of the world around you.
A perfectly enforced legal code would also reveal that many if not most of our laws are overly broad, outdated, too numerous, and poorly calibrated to people’s needs and preferences. Envision, for a moment, speed cameras on every corner of a city that catch every car going 1 MPH over the speed limit. The inevitable groaning of the people should lead their representatives to adjust the speed limit upward. Otherwise, drivers routinely hover around 3-7 MPH over the speed limit and seethe in anger when they end up behind another driver obeying the legal limit. Beyond speeding, imagine government perfectly enforcing laws against jaywalking, pirating media online, sharing PDFs of paywalled articles with friends, and countless other crimes that often go unpunished. In such a world, the saying, “show me the man, and I’ll show you the crime,” may finally recede into the pages of history as a bygone relic of a crime-infested era.
A more refined legal code supported by perfect enforcement would, in theory, allow us to have more just laws. In a democratic society like ours, ground-level frustration with perfect enforcement of bad laws could push policymakers to adopt positive laws that better accord with natural law principles. Assuming the legal code becomes just in such a way, the government is entirely justified in perfectly enforcing it because no man has the right to commit a wrong. Moreover, the arbitrary human judgment that has always tempered the rigidity of positive law would no longer be necessary. Instead, government would enforce its just code with machine-level precision, without the bias that often plagues human decision making. At last, our government would treat every American exactly the same, regardless of background.
Threat to Virtue and Liberty
True freedom requires the capacity to choose virtue, and not just the avoidance of punishment. James Madison in 1788 asked: “Is there no virtue among us? If there be not, we are in a wretched situation. No theoretical checks—no form of government can render us secure.” If people obey the law out of fear of omnipresent enforcement, they will not cultivate the inner morality or civic virtue required as a precondition for self-governance. They will adapt their behavior, chilled into withholding thoughts and actions considered on the edge of what’s permissible. While we may not lose the capacity to reason, we will lose the habits that form the exercise of reasoning well: namely, good judgment and prudence. It’s on that edge of what’s permissible where our most organic and creative endeavors toward natural justice have often occurred, tempered by prudence, such as over the struggle over Civil Rights.
Our familial, religious, and cultural institutions equip us with the moral compass to choose between right and wrong, and we outsource that compass to government when it polices our every move. Such cognitive offloading deepens our dependence on the Leviathan to instruct us how to think, talk, and act in every scenario. We all become mindless ants whose sole purpose is to serve the sovereign.
Perfect enforcement furthermore creates incredible potential for abuse. When the aspiring tyrant achieves governmental control, oppressive regulations will ensue, and in a more authoritarian way than ever before. The augmentation of the government’s perceptive authority will enable it to regulate every nook and cranny of human existence in a way that would make the modern administrative state blush. This increased power to monitor will reflexively whet the appetite to use that power to regulate. Certain factions will salivate at the chance to coerce fellow citizens with their ideology. Imagine, for example, the government docking your bank account $5 every time it sees you commit a micro-aggression. This ability to scrutinize and regulate every aspect of our lives will allow tyrants—including technology itself—to rule us with an iron fist by trapping us in an inescapable vice.
If that comes to fruition, the judiciary could fight back with the Fourth Amendment. Two cases are key. First, Justice Antonin Scalia in Kyllo v. United States held that the use of a thermal imaging device to detect heat patterns inside a home constitutes a “search” under the Fourth Amendment and generally requires a warrant. Writing for the majority, he warned that when the government uses “sense-enhancing technology” not in common public use to obtain details of the home that would previously have been unknowable without physical intrusion, the Constitution draws a “firm line at the entrance of the house.” Nearly two decades later, the Court reaffirmed this instinct in Carpenter v. United States, holding that the government’s acquisition of historical cell-site location information was likewise a search. If thermal heat waves and cell-site location information trigger constitutional scrutiny, then the aggregation of every word, movement, and transaction into a centralized algorithmic ledger warrant even greater vigilance.
Even assuming government does not employ that power for ill, people will feel imprisoned. Perfect enforcement through AI will erect a high-tech Panopticon always peering over your shoulder—always watching. The constant monitoring of every word and action will engender feelings of resentment, a perceived lack of freedom, constant fear in the people it purports to protect, and the most severe privacy invasion in history. There’s a reason beyond mere cost that we do not ordinarily post police officers on every street corner—that is, unless the city has reached an exceptional level of depravity.
Despite the zealous insistence of our tech elite, we cannot turn God into an algorithm. Mankind will forever lack a Solomonic lawgiver, which confines our fate to the rule of law and imperfect legal codes. Laws, no matter how specific, are blunt instruments incapable of capturing every nuance of right and wrong in our complex world. That is why we depend heavily on human judgment to adjudicate suspected illegality: prosecutors decide whether to file criminal charges, judges evaluate whether to dismiss those charges, juries determine whether to acquit, and executives evaluate whether to pardon. These separate processes create a crescendo of human judgment that perfect enforcement cannot encapsulate on the front end. This concept thus necessitates stricter obedience to unjust laws.
A Time for Choosing
The American tradition has always aspired to obstruct the pathway to tyranny. That is precisely why we champion our separation of powers, checks and balances, and federalism, all of which disperse human judgment across an array of departments working together to secure natural justice. As shiny tech encroaches on these human endeavors, the idea of perfect enforcement emerges as the next logical step in our criminal justice system by concentrating our perceptive and coercive technology in a manner never envisioned before. While we still have the chance, we must strangle this concept in its infancy to ensure the common good in America.
This essay represents the personal views of the author and not the U.S. government, the Department of War, or its components.
