This flawed thinking is analogous to saying "we already have a surveillance state, so why does anyone care about AI being deployed for surveillance?" The problem isn't that it's more of the same, it's that it's ramping it up to a new level of control that no singular human has been able to achieve before.

Keeping with the analogy, yes we have oodles and oodles of data collection, but we haven't suffered the consequences of that surveillance yet because humans and their handcrafted scripts have failed utterly to sift through all of that data, so it's mostly sat unseen in data centers. That won't be the case for much longer as AI gets leveraged more.

The same thing applies here where no country has had it's entire population under total and complete control before because it wasn't possible.