Artificial Intelligence and the Surveillance State

At sensor-mesh scale, AI is not an efficiency gain for the analyst — it is the precondition for the data being usable at all.

Where a sensor mesh covers a city or an area of operations, collection produces volumes no analyst can work through unaided. The paper argues from direct experience in the South China Sea, where intelligence arrived raw and in quantities that made warning indicators and priority intelligence requirements genuinely difficult to service without machine assistance.