Peter Diamandis, the millionaire founder of the Xprize Foundation, published a new Substack post on Thursday about all the ways that humans are now being monitored, from satellites in the sky to the cameras on autonomous vehicles. He writes that by the year 2030, there will be 40 billion connected devices, all feeding information to AI about how everyone on the planet is acting. And rather than imagining this as a dystopian hellscape, he thinks this will have a positive effect on society. Because, as Diamandis puts it, humans behave better when they’re being watched.
Diamandis starts in the sky, noting the 13,800 active satellites currently in low Earth orbit, with petabytes of data being collected on everything happening below. He makes his way lower to drones, then the autonomous vehicles of Waymo (each with 13 cameras), and lower to a world of the future in which humanoid robots capture all the data in their surroundings.
After that, you’ve got the smartphones in our hands—7 billion of them globally—and all of the data being collected not just visually, but from their GPS, gyroscope, and so much more. Next, the 21 billion internet-connected devices around today are projected to soon grow to 40 billion by 2030, according to Diamandis.
This is all used to build up to his main point. We are building a “planet-scale sensing organism,” as Diamandis says, and yet the average person has “no idea how big it’s already gotten.” In a few years, he believes we will soon enter a “trillion sensor world.”
What happens when everything is being monitored all the time in every conceivable way? “When people know they’re being watched, they behave different, they behave better. And we now have hard data proving it,” Diamandis writes.
The millionaire venture capitalist points to studies on police body cameras, which he says prove his thesis. He believes that “transparency and disclosure measurably reduce corruption,” in his rather optimistic view of life in the future. Diamandis also refers to a recent podcast he did with the CEO of Planet Labs, Will Marshall, who goes a step further by arguing that not only does “transparency” [read: surveillance] drive accountability, it “reduces the probability of war.”
Diamandis hedges by the end of his post by acknowledging that “tools don’t have ethics” and a surveillance state can have downsides unless it’s a total surveillance state.
“The world I worry about isn’t the one where everyone is visible. It’s the one where the powerful can see everyone, while no one can see them. Transparency only builds trust when it points both ways,” he writes.
And he’s correct. But there is nothing about the technological world Diamandis envisions that turns the cameras on in the smoke-filled back rooms of the powerful. That’s a political problem that must be legislated, not one that solves itself with technology.
As TechCrunch notes, Diamandis isn’t the first wealthy person to go on about how great society can be when everything is being monitored. Billionaire Larry Ellison may have been the most shocking example in recent years when he said in 2024 that there would be mass “supervision” in the future.
“The police will be on their best behavior, because we’re constantly watching and recording everything that’s going on. Citizens will be on their best behavior because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that’s going on,” Ellison said.
The Oracle co-founder should know. His company was founded in 1977 as a CIA project. And he’s one of the many tech oligarchs currently jockeying for power in the U.S. government, along with guys like Elon Musk and Sam Altman.
All of these people know we’re not stupid. We understand that all of the cameras and sensors being deployed around the world are being used against us. But the goal is to position these as positive developments that will keep everyone well-behaved. And they make sure to throw in some comments about keeping an eye on police, whether it’s Diamandis talking about bodycams or Ellison insisting that AI will “report” on cops who act inappropriately.
Ring CEO Jamie Siminoff didn’t even bother talking about monitoring cops when he spoke to The Verge last year about how his product, coupled with AI, would eliminate crime within a year.
“I think that in most normal, average neighborhoods, with the right amount of technology — not too crazy — and with AI, that we can get very close to zero out crime. Get much closer to the mission than I ever thought,” Siminoff said at the time. “By the way, I don’t think it’s 10 years away. That’s in 12 to 24 months … maybe even within a year.”
Siminoff made that prediction in Oct. 2025. Hard to believe we’re just four months away from crime being eliminated. At least in “normal” neighborhoods.