Destiny Of Violence

As a species, we've made a living from being the nastiest and most persistent predator on the planet. Ok, a lion might be bigger and nastier one on one but a lion can't throw a rock or a stick, much less build a machine to throw a rock attached to a stick. Violence therefore has been our salvation and is a huge part of our existence. Nowadays of course, we like like to distance ourselves from it personally and leave the real violence to our police forces and our armies but occasionally some people only understand a good punch in the gob so we go back to being well-dressed apes for a little while.

Acts of violence in the polite parts of our society are greatly frowned upon. Family violence, violence against the old and the very young, violence while committing some other crime and "senseless" shootings by crazy or just plain unhappy teenagers with daddy's automatic weapons collection are despised by all yet no one has the will or the power to stop it. Imagine removing every gun from every person not a policeman in the entire world. Some people sleep with their AK-47s more than they sleep with their wives!

So how about zero tolerance enforcement then? Well, technically this is possible with today's technology. First of all, everyone must be observed at all times. Given enough cameras and enough computer power and enough network bandwidth, we can do this today. People wouldn't like it for sure but just imagine that there was no choice. For cases of attack, rape, fights and such we would simply have to prevent people from having proximity to their victims. Most people don't act in angry or suspicious ways so a force of a couple of thousand autonomous unmanned drones could be assigned to anyone who acted oddly so that they could render the attacker immobile with nets or with knock-out darts. Anyone who picked up a gun could be rendered insensible too and anyone throwing a projectile would find that the object, however big or small, was knocked out of the air by a well-aimed shot.

Even more radical would be the complete abolition of prisons. Even the most dangerous criminal would be able to live next door and, if needed, could be made to live in total isolation even while being allowed to walk freely abroad. We even have technology that would prevent violent vocal exchanges by using precise audio dampening techniques similar to those used in noise cancelling headphones. The only thing we lack is an infallible system for managing all of that on a global scale. 

It seems difficult to imagine but these sorts of technology could be among the first implemented by an intelligent system that might exist after the Singularity event. The way that human beings interact would be changed in such a fundamental way that the race would not understand what to do with itself for a while. However, no one would be murdered, no one raped, no child molested or killed and no drunken argument or mass shooting would happen ever again.