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Idea for a dystopian tech novel: A guy who is about to surprise his girlfriend with a wedding proposal gets arrested because the police, with its newfound data
by peterwwillis 11y ago
Idea for a dystopian tech novel:
A guy who is about to surprise his girlfriend with a wedding proposal gets arrested because the police, with its newfound data-sink into Apple's tech stack and wearables, made legal by enhanced fear over domestic terrorism combined with a lack of public interest in privacy rights, had an illegal-behavior-trigger set to a similar heart rate spike and circumstantial behavior pattern. Since he kept his wedding plans to himself, he has no way to prove his story, and he's imprisoned along with actual potential terrorists who the feds have entrapped into collecting bomb materials or spying on high value targets. The girlfriend gets hit in an actual mass shooting soon after (since they've incrementally risen in frequency to once every few weeks), and the boyfriend is implicated and later convicted with a death sentence. Twenty years later, on the eve of his execution, a new law is passed that exonerates anyone who was convicted based on circumstantial statistical correlations - but a last minute push to the prison's e-mail and news alert apps introduces a bug that delays updates for 24 hours.
Now if only I were a writer...
- hga 11y agoGordon Dickson is the first as far as I know to write this, in 1965: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computers_Don%27t_Argue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computers_Don%27t_Argue