What is a panopticon? According to the late French philosopher, Michel Foucault, a panopticon is a prison design which allows for constant surveillance of housed inmates; It is also a metaphor for the way society is organized. The concept of the panopticon actually originates in Jeremy Bentham’s work, Panopticon (1791).
The panopticon is a physical prison in which inmates’ cells are faced towards a center column which houses the prison guards. At any given moment, the inmates are always in the view of the center column, even if the guards are not present. The inmates cannot tell if the guards are present in the column at any given time. The omnipresence of surveillance allows for complete and total power over the inmates’ actions.
Michel Foucault used the physical concept of the panopticon as a metaphor for the organization of society in a time where corporal punishment waned in favor for corrective and reformative punishment. The panopticon, as a method of social organization, was effective in creating docile subjects by way of surveillance:
“Hence the major effect of the Panopticon: To induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power,” (Discipline and Punish: pg. 201).
Foucault argued that panopticism would slowly creep into other aspects of societal organization, allowing for a “design of subtle coercion for a society to come,” (pg. 209). The police would be instrumental in enforcing the crimes found through the surveillance made possible through panoptic society. Foucault goes on to say:
“And, in order to be exercised, this power had to be given the instrument of permanent, exhaustive, omnipresent surveillance, capable of making all visible, as long as it could itself remain invisible. It had to be like a faceless gaze that transformed the whole social body into a field of perception: thousands of eyes posted everywhere, mobile attentions ever on the alert,” (pg. 214).
Although Foucault published these words over 40 years ago, they are still relevant to this day. Think of your smartphone that you carry everywhere, is it not a device of constant surveillance and data collection? With the rise of generative Artificial Intelligence (AI), one cannot help but to think of the ways in which AI will enhance the panoptic organization of the society in which we live.
We can see that this is already happening. AI is being leveraged in facial recognition technologies across the country to track and catalog people. AI is also used to predict crimes and dispatch police officers accordingly.
The United States is a surveillance state, and it seems as though emerging technology and AI have opened a new gateway for complete control over people’s autonomy and free-will.
These emerging technologies are designed to appear accurate and objective, while in reality they are faulty expressions of human design. Take this recent case of mistaken facial recognition for example. Nonetheless, AI has increased the surveillance capacity of Western society for better or worse.
-M