In a 2018 TED Talk, Yuval Harari argued that democracy prevailed over fascism and communism in the 20th century not because of any inherent advantage, but because the technology of that age favored open and democratic societies. It was simply too difficult and too costly to centralize power using pre-digital technology.
But, Yuval warned, with the rise of AI, the calculus might flip: it might actually become far more efficient to run highly centralized authoritarian governments.
Eight years later, we're starting to see what Yuval was warning about. Right now, police across all levels of government, from small-town sheriffs to massive federal agencies, are adopting AI at a staggering rate and using it to build the kind of efficient, centralized surveillance-state apparatus that Yuval warned about.
Take, for example, the recent deployment of hundreds of thousands of automated license plate readers (ALPRs) across the country by companies like Flock and Axon. These cameras have made headlines in recent weeks, but as you’ll hear in this episode, they are just the most visible frontier of an AI-powered digital dragnet that gives police the ability to analyze extraordinary amounts of data about private citizens.
Today on the show, Tristan speaks with two experts on how police are using AI technology today, what we can expect in the near future, and what protections we need to create now before it's too late.
Andrew Guthrie Ferguson is a law professor at George Washington University who studies how policing technology collides with constitutional law. He's the author of Your Data Will Be Used Against You: Policing in the Age of Self-Surveillance.
Garance Burke is an investigative journalist at The Associated Press, where she leads high-impact projects on the intersection of technology and society. Her investigations into the global surveillance industry were part of a package that won the 2026 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting.
RECOMMENDED MEDIA
Your Data Will Be Used Against You by Andrew Guthrie Ferguson
Yuval Noah Harari’s 2018 TED talk: “Why fascism is so tempting -- and how your data could power it”
The full series of AP stories produced by Grance Burke and her Pulitzer Prize-winning colleagues
Further reading on Estonia’s data tracker tool
RECOMMENDED YUA EPISODES
Why Are Migrants Becoming AI Test Subjects? With Petra Molnar
America and China Are Racing to Different AI Futures
Laughing at Power: A Troublemaker’s Guide to Changing Tech
Corrections
Andrew said that real-time crime centers are in 300 cities across the US, which matches the findings of the National Real Time Crime Center Association; however, this figure is disputed, with the Electronic Frontier Foundation putting it at 150.
Andrew incorrectly described the resolution of the case of a man misidentified by AI in New Orleans. He said the man was acquitted, but in fact the charges were dropped.
Clarifications
As noted in the episode, Andrew’s discussion of agentic AI was a theoretical account of a tool that police may use in the future, not something actively used on the ground today.
Garance referred to the protests in Ferguson as the impetus for police-worn body cameras. Body cameras were being piloted in the US and UK prior to Ferguson, but federal grants in the wake of the protests made them much more common.
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1 hr and 1 min