The Dwarf Lords: tiny devices, tiny minds and the new enslavement

You visit a new doctor and he or she will soon be able to call up your entire medical, dental and optical records on line - no matter where you were treated, for what or by whom - using new health informatics systems.

Even your home, increasingly, will know when you are there and what your are doing from your power and water use, your security sensors and other devices that may prove to be a two-edged sword, spying on their owner.

But these contemporary intrusions are nothing compared to the power which quantum computing and nanobots will shortly unleash to monitor and record each individual in an advanced society, almost every minute of their lives.

Here I refer not merely to the lightning speed, ultra-potent analytical powers and ubiquity of these emergent devices but, above all, to their phenomenal data-storage capacity. Fragments of information will be stored as atoms or even subatomic particles in an atomic lattice - the entire National Library in a matchbox.

For the first time in history it will be possible to observe any individual, cradle to grave - and even, via genetics, beyond the grave and before the womb - and file the results.

Historically, from Elizabeth 1’s Walsingham and Fouche’s secret police to the Tsar’s Okhrana, the Soviet Union’s KGB, America’s CIA and our own ASIO, the task of surveillance has been carried out imperfectly by bungling and fallible human beings. This is about to change. The task is being handed to brains that do not sleep, weary, get drunk or need to take a leak. That have almost limitless storage and data fusion capacity. That remember everything and are capable of regurgitating it, chapter and verse, in the most microscopic detail. That are capable of construing patterns of suspicion from the most innocent of incidents or a mass of unrelated sources.

For the first time in history it will soon be possible to assemble virtually the entire life of an individual, all they do and say or is done or said to them, everywhere they go, all the records and all the vision they generate - and retrieve it at need using “intelligent” computer systems rather than bored police constables.

The slaves of old enjoyed transient hours of precious freedom when they were out of the scrutiny of their overseers - locked in the barracoons at night or when unsupervised about the house or farm, perhaps.

Not so the citizen of the modern democratic state. She or he will potentially be under surveillance, one way or another, 24/7, 7/52 and 52/100.

It will be a system beyond the most megalomaniac dreams of the KGB Registry.

And it will be here within a generation.

Every monetary transaction you make.