According to a report released Thursday by the Pew Research
Center, 59% of Americans think tech developments
will make life in the next half-century better, while only 30% said they will
make life worse.
With Google’s wearable glass revolution, Amazon’s
package-delivering drones edging closer to reality, and Facebook’s "Nearby Friends," a tool that lets you track your friends in real-time by merging your digital footprint with your actual one, science fiction
is fast becoming reality.
"In the long run, Americans are optimistic
about the impact that scientific developments will have on their lives and the
lives of their children -- but they definitely expect to encounter some bumps
along the way," said Aaron Smith, a senior researcher at Pew and the
author of the report. "They are especially concerned about developments
that have the potential to upend long-standing social norms around things like
personal privacy, surveillance, and the nature of social relationships." (source)
Los Angeles-based author Adam Michael Luebke
(@adamluebke) writes satirical news at Dear Dirty America and posts
regularly on hot button technology trends. Prodding and provoking our attention
to wider issues in society, Adam inspires us to think critically about
subjects that impact our lives. I encourage you to read one of his more recent
articles (below) and think critically about your own position.
How do you view the consequences that are part of
technological change? What do our attitudes about technology say about us as a
culture? Are there ways to ensure that we use technology responsibly? Or will
our glowing rectangles inevitably cause us to flat-line?
{photo from MorgueFile - Millennials texting}
FREE SERVICES & SMART DEVICES IN
EXCHANGE FOR YOUR DATA
It’s not difficult to imagine that in the near
future even the remotest regions of our planet will be Internet-capable and
connected. What is disturbing is that the same ubiquitous online connectivity
will be happening in your home. Every last appliance and device will, in the
coming years, be instilled with ‘smart’ technology.
It’s like your toaster oven and refrigerator
and even your toothbrush would have been given souls. They will be alive,
active, and collecting all your data. Your refrigerator will remind you that if
you keep buying frozen pizzas and stacking them in the freezer, inevitably
you’re going to eat them and continue feeling like shit.
Your toothbrush, which will have Bluetooth
connection, will inform you that you’re brushing your teeth too hard, or too
lightly, or you forgot to brush them the night before. “Why didn’t you brush
last night?” it might ask. “You didn’t come home last night, did you.”
And your toilet might kindly remind you that
you’re awfully low on fiber. “I’m swallowing a lot of poorly processed dairy
and enriched white flour. This is not good for your health in the long run.
Your doctor will not be happy when she looks over the results in your file.” A
file that would be updated automatically, over and over again, every minute of
your connected, modern fucking life.
I’m not making this up. Financial Times takes
a speculative glance at what
happens when Silicon Valley gets through with updating our lives to all ‘smart’
devices, which seems ineluctable at this point, and they’ll tout the blessings
and benefits of this sort of data-collection lifestyle. How convenient and
happy our lives will be!
So it’s imagined:
A fridge that not only knows that you are running out of
milk but can do something about it sounds empowering. Yet in the longer term
there is a more consequential side: sensors and internet connectivity are also
turning “dumb” gadgets into powerful vehicles of prediction and speculation.
The data they capture can be integrated with data from other gadgets and
databases to create new information commodities whose value might eclipse the
value of the gadgets used to generate the underlying data. Soon, the devices
might even be given away for free.
Consider your toothbrush. Armed with a sensor that knows
when you are using it, it can detect behavior patterns – how often you use it
(or not use, as the case might be) – that help determine when you should see
the dentist. That prediction would be more accurate if some other
sensor-equipped gadget – say, a smart fork – knew how much sugar you consumed.
The more data-tracking devices are hooked to the network, the more accurate the
predictions (source)
We’ve been exchanging our data and online
activity for free apps and web browser service, but the great financiers and
entrepreneurs of our age will see the treasure trove of information that can be
snatched when every human in the industrialized world switches to all ‘smart’
devices in their homes.
Every daily activity will produce results for
savvy online marketplaces to pinpoint exactly what you need, what you are
desiring, and when you will order it.
If that sounds like a Utopian reality for many
Americans, it is a disaster for others. Imagine every appliance and device you
use at home connected to the same network. You really have to trust in your
government, the corporate sphere that dominates our buying and selling and
money flow, and that those with power over this supremely centralized system
will look after you and the best interests of the collective.
Who will be in charge of this network? What
happens when you challenge the system? What happens when a politician with
truly good intentions to change Draconian laws and mass surveillance or
unlawful killing of American citizens overseas gains strength in the polls? How
easy will it be to hang out his dirty laundry? How easy it will be to clamp
down on any true resistance or leaders of popular protests against the system.
Shut down their existence and their ability to
live in a world that is completely connected and under surveillance. The more
we rely on a lifestyle of interconnected ‘smart’ devices, the easier it is
going to be for our global elite to control every last facet of our lives, and
dictate how they should be lived.
Think of how Julian Assange, founder of
WikiLeaks, was shut out by the major global banks after he exposed brutal
American war crimes in Iraq. Amazon
kicked WikiLeaks off their servers,
and Senator Joe Lieberman praised the move. It is becoming possible to simply
flip a switch and erase any person from a modern society that is so tightly
controlled and organized there is no room to live outside it.
We’re heading toward a dazzling nightmare.
There’s good reason to be in awe at the shiny new devices that advanced science
and technology will bring us, and possibly even give to us for free in the
future. But what are we giving in return? We’d better have the conversation as
a people, a society, a nation, as a world, because it’s happening extremely
fast.
