The present of Artificial Intelligence not only poses the end of pure Hollywood-style police chases, but brutally realizes many other autocratic dystopias.

The car driven by RoboCop, that cop from the future of the eighties, was a Ford Taurus. A car that four decades later is totally nondescript. It is neither futuristic nor has it aged enough to be vintage. But even older than that Ford is the very concept of a robot getting behind the wheel of a car, now that with autonomous driving we know that the car itself is itself a robot and police robots can be a simple drone. Nor did Total Defiance, that other futuristic fiction that has aged regularly in which technology allows you to go on vacation to the red planet, but the robots do not seem futuristic at all but automatons of the nineteenth century. Schwarzenegger rode in a cab driven by a rather orthopedic robot dressed as a hotel bellhop. That was what was still understood in the 1990s by a robotic car: an android driving.

And just as hyper-surveillance and biometrics are rendering obsolete much of the suspect identification scenes we were accustomed to in 20th century crime thrillers, so too may autonomous vehicles do away with that most characteristic subgenre of police chases. If cars are self-driving, it won't be easy to convince the machine to run a traffic light: its own system prohibits an infraction. In the future, will we all flawlessly and uniformly and parsimoniously comply with the safety distance in our self-driving vehicles? Does this compromise individual freedom or does it compensate for such control if it guarantees greater safety in return?

The doubt takes on another dimension if we imagine this technology, whether autonomous driving or facial recognition, in the hands of authoritarian regimes. It would no longer be science fiction to have a police officer who could simply geolocate the vehicle in which the suspect is fleeing and order him to stop, not to order the citizen to stop, but the vehicle itself. Why would they chase him if they can force him to turn around and give himself up at the police station? All that can be done with artificial intelligence.

Neither cinema nor science fiction

It is not science fiction to imagine a back door, not of the car but of the system, as cybercrime experts call it, with which authorities can take control of vehicles in case they detect a security threat. Authoritarian regimes will not even need to wait for a court order to intercept citizens in autonomous vehicles.

Then there is the data. Connected cars, moreover, keep a record of all the trips their occupants have made. It's not going to be easy to find an alibi or a place to hide. That's fine for finding the bad guys, but what happens when the bad guys are the ones in control of the technology?

It is not just an anecdote for those nostalgic for 80's cinema that police chases and improvised alibis may disappear, but another example of how technology for political and social control purposes is reaching a new dimension.

To get an idea of how artificial intelligence is going to change everything and the challenges it presents, there is nothing like imagining how autocracies can use it. Or rather, AI-tocracies, as researchers Martin Beraja, Andrew Kao, David Y. Yang and Noam Yuchtman of the Centre for Economic Performance at the London School of Economics have dubbed them.

His research posits that AI can be particularly effective in improving social and political control of autocratic regimes. The ability to predict and analyze large-scale data for patterns makes the collection of sensitive data much easier and scalable. ...

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