Peter Diamandis Says Global Surveillance Makes Humans Behave Better When Watched

Xprize Foundation founder Peter Diamandis argued in a Substack post that “humans behave better when they’re being watched,” and he framed global monitoring as a positive social force rather than a dystopian threat.

“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”

Gizmodo

Diamandis said the monitoring stack runs from “13,800 active satellites currently in low Earth orbit” to drones, to Waymo autonomous vehicles with “13 cameras,” and onward to smartphones, where he said there are “7 billion of them globally.”

Gizmodo

He projected that “the 21 billion internet-connected devices around today are projected to soon grow to 40 billion by 2030,” and he described the result as a “planet-scale sensing organism.”

Diamandis also said the surveillance future is already producing measurable effects, writing that “When people know they’re being watched, they behave different, they behave better.”

TechCrunch linked Diamandis’s view to Oracle founder Larry Ellison, who predicted during an Oracle event in 2024 that “Citizens will be on their best behavior, because we’re constantly recording and reporting everything that is going on.”

In the same reporting, TechCrunch said Diamandis was spurred by a podcast interview with Will Marshall, the CEO of Planet, where Marshall told him, “No one can hide anymore.”

mezha.net

TechCrunch quoted Diamandis’s Substack language about “Radical transparency is coming,” and it added that he described a “Sensor Ecosystem” stretching from “the cameras in your home” to “a constellation of satellites imaging every square meter on the Earth every single day.”

The Gizmodo account also included Diamandis’s caution that “tools don’t have ethics,” while he worried about a world where “the powerful can see everyone, while no one can see them.”

TechCrunch reported that Diamandis told parents, “Your kids will grow up in a world with no ‘off the record’,” and it said he urged them to “Teach them that the best privacy strategy is integrity.”

“Xprize Foundation founder Peter Diamandis has joined a growing list of tech executives who think that global surveillance is a good idea, saying, “[h]umans behave better when they’re being watched”

TechCrunch

TechCrunch also described public pushback that complicated the “inevitability” framing, including that “Some cities have covered their Flock cameras with trash bags after reports that the company’s data was being accessed by ICE, the FBI, and other law enforcement.”

In the same account, TechCrunch said Ring’s “Search Party” feature contributed to the company canceling its own partnership with Flock, and it noted Meta faced complaints about camera-enabled glasses made in partnership with Ray-Ban.

Gizmodo, meanwhile, quoted Diamandis’s argument that “transparency only builds trust when it points both ways,” and it said he acknowledged that a surveillance state can have downsides unless it is “a total surveillance state.”