Can billions of phone calls be surveilled at once?
Totalitarian governments have long wanted to track the opinions of dissenters and critics, and to identify those who are dissatisfied with the regime.
But tracking phone calls of hundreds of millions of citizens, and identifying the "sentiment" of the caller/callee (and not just simple keywords) was never feasible.
But as of today, technology exists that would allow both your phone manufacturer as well as your telecom provider, to PERFECTLY summarise the content of your call, find out if if you're being critical of the government or planning protests, and send this information to the regime.
Lists would be made. And people would randomly disappear.
To be fair, imperfect versions of this have existed for some time now, but with the latest AI models, it has become much much cheaper to deploy the technology at scale, with minimum cost.
End-to-end encryption won't be of much help here because "sentiment analysis" can occur right inside your phone before your data is encrypted. All it requires is the willingness of companies to offer this service to governments.
If a few companies refuse, you can incentivize local companies and place restrictions on foreign ones under the pretext of promoting indigenous interests ("Make in.."). It's a small cost for the ability to forever remain in power.
Even if this becomes public knowledge, the general public would be taught to parrot lines like "this would end terrorism forever" and "if you don't have anything to hide, why fear".
I know we'd be having romantic notions of "human spirit" and "human ingenuity" being able to resist and find a way around it, but it's absolutely delusional. Once a govt applies the full power of (even narrow) AI to monitor it's citizens, it'll be practically impossible to organize dissent.
The willingness was always there, but for the first time in history, the power to create the Orwellian nightmare is in our hands.