We are all Winston Smith now.

You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows and you don’t have to be paranoid to recognize that new technologies have enabled citizens of the industrialized world to be watched, measured, rated, judged and analyzed daily to a degree that even Winston Smith, the hapless worker bee from George Orwell’s prescient 1949 novel 1984, might find intrusive.

The average American now appears on closed-circuit TV 75 times a day; the average Londoner more than 300. Our keystrokes and searches on computers and mobile devices are captured and analyzed — mainly for the purpose of knowing what we want to buy and allowing advertisers to put that item in front of us before we come to our senses. The internet forgets nothing. Google “How to kill someone with an undetectable poison” and you can be certain that it will come up at your trial.

Some wise guy broke into thousands of accounts belonging to users of two GPS tracker apps a few weeks ago which allowed him to monitor the locations of thousands of cars and even turn off the engines for some of them while they were moving. Police are using facial recognition software to identify dead bodies. Your refrigerator knows you ate the last piece of coconut pie.

As tech investor Susan Guo of Greylock Partners said at a recent conference:

It’s inevitable that we will soon have cameras watching our every move. There’s a saying, ‘You are who you are when no one’s watching.” We’re going to be watched all the time and it will certainly alter our behavior. It’s not my fault what the future holds, so if that’s scary I apologize.

George Orwell’s 1984 was published 70 years ago this month but its horrifying vision of a world in which every citizen is monitored at all times by an all-knowing, all-seeing authoritarian “Big Brother” government seems oddly closer and more threatening than ever. Driven by a combination of surveillance and data processing technologies — artificial Intelligence, deep learning, facial recognition software, Internet of Things, the world is quickly adopted the very technologies that make such a system possible.

Do we truly understand what’s going on and the risks involved? Are we ready to allow advanced technology to become a powerful instrument of state control?

What Orwell knew and when he knew it

In 1946, Orwell left behind his bombed-out flat in London and moved to a farmhouse called Barnhill on the north edge of the remote Scottish island of Jura to write what was to become his masterpiece and one of the most important and unsettling books of all time.

It had been a bad spell for Orwell. He and his wife Eileen had adopted a three-month son the year before but Eileen died nine months later while being given anesthetic for a hysterectomy. Her younger sister came to Jura with him to help take care of the child but they all nearly drowned when their boat was drawn into the deadly Corryvreckan whirlpool during a trip to a nearby village.

Over the next two years, Orwell, who was dying slowly of tuberculosis, hammered away at his Remington portable typewriter in an upstairs bedroom of the chilly and damp farmhouse. The novel was 1984, Orwell’s horrifying imagining of a dystopian freedom-less future in which an authoritarian government monitors every movement and every gesture of its citizens at all times.

In this bleak and unfeeling world–devoid of privacy and individualism–giant posters everywhere reminded citizens that Big Brother, the mysterious figure who represented the Party’s power and authority, was literally always watching. Orwell’s protagonist Winston Smith described it like this:

Always the eyes watching you and the voice enveloping you. Asleep or awake, working or eating, indoors or out of doors, in the bath of in bed — no escape. Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimeters inside your skull.

Like all totalitarian states before and since, Orwell’s fictional territory of Oceania sought to control every aspect of its citizens lives through a combination of fear, misinformation, hate, psychological warfare, and surveillance.

Citizens who were deemed insufficiently patriotic were labeled enemies of the state and vaporized by the Thought Police — their bodies, possessions and personal history erased as if they had never lived.

The technological underpinning of Orwell’s imagined society was the “telescreen,” a kind of two-way television set that watched you as you watched it. Every home and public space had a telescreen and they were never to be turned off. Even the slightest hint of insufficient enthusiasm spotted by the telescreen drew a warning. While protagonist Winston Smith performed his mandatory Physical Jerks exercises one morning, for example, a voice from the telescreen criticized his poor effort.

1984 was published in 1949–13 months before Orwell died at the age of 46.

So widely read and influential has 1984 become that nowadays we would describe it with the adjective “Orwellian.” That is surely a tribute to the author’s understanding of the worst impulses of human nature, the cynical and cyclical nature of political power structures, and his pessimism about the ability of those in power to relinquish it and those not in power to change their predicament.

Why 2024 is the new 1984

With the renewed infatuation with authoritarianism now sweeping the globe, it might be useful to remind ourselves that 1984 didn’t happen in 1984 and hasn’t happened since-not because the worst totalitarian impulses were not still there–but because the surveillance technology needed to make it a complete reality didn’t yet exist.

Now it does. Orwell missed the mark by only 40 years. Facial recognition technology, AI, and virtually unlimited computing power makes his nightmare vision of Big Brother not only possible but probably inevitable. That has thoughtful academics, policy and technology leaders concerned.

The AI Now Institute at New York University, an interdisciplinary research institute dedicated to understanding the social implications of AI technologies, issued its third annual report. Among its key recommendations:

Facial recognition and affect recognition need stringent regulation to protect the public interest.

Such regulation should include national laws that require strong oversight, clear limitations, and public transparency. Communities should have the right to reject the application of these technologies in both public and private contexts. Mere public notice of their use is not sufficient, and there should be a high threshold for any consent, given the dangers of oppressive and continual mass surveillance. Affect recognition deserves particular attention.

Affect recognition is a sub-class of facial recognition that claims to detect things such as personality, inner feelings, mental health, and “worker engagement” based on images or video of faces. (Remember Big Brother’s warning to Winston Smith for his lack of enthusiasm during Physical Jerks?) These claims are not backed by robust scientific evidence and are being applied in unethical and irresponsible ways that often recall the pseudosciences of phrenology and physiognomy.

Linking affect recognition to hiring, access to insurance, education, and policing creates deeply concerning risks, at both an individual and societal level.

AI Now is not alone. Microsoft President Brad Smith, who is the official spokesman for the company, has been advocating for government regulation of facial recognition software for months:

The use of facial recognition technology by a government can encroach on democratic freedoms and human rights. Democracy has always depended on the ability of people to assemble, to meet and talk with each other and even to discuss their views both in private and in public. This, in turn, relies on the ability of people to move freely and without constant government surveillance.

While noting that there are many governmental uses of facial recognition technology that will protect public safety and promote better services for the public without raising these types of concerns, Smith added:

When combined with ubiquitous cameras and massive computing power and storage in the cloud, a government could use facial recognition technology to enable continuous surveillance of specific individuals. It could follow anyone anywhere, or for that matter, everyone everywhere. It could do this at any time or even all the time. This use of facial recognition technology could unleash mass surveillance on an unprecedented scale.

Smith ends on a hopeful note:

As George Orwell described in his novel “1984,” one vision of the future would require that citizens must evade government surveillance by finding their way secretly to a blackened room to tap in code with hand signals on each other’s arms — because otherwise cameras and microphones will capture and record their faces, voices and every word. Orwell sketched that vision nearly 70 years ago. Today technology makes that type of future possible.

But, not inevitable.

For the sake of all our futures, let’s hope he is right. The technology gets smarter every day. By 2024, we’ll know for sure.