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I wrote an essay in 2003, saying that all of this was 100% inevitable. No matter how many people thought it was creepy, didn't want it, raised privacy concerns,
by psyc 10y ago
I wrote an essay in 2003, saying that all of this was 100% inevitable. No matter how many people thought it was creepy, didn't want it, raised privacy concerns, it was imminent all the same. Digital sense organs would continue to multiply all over the planet, and the digital nervous system would become ever more sophisticated and scary-smart all the time.
I argued that the one thing we had some limited hope of shaping was cultural attitudes and public policy towards this information and how it is applied.
- paulbaumgart 10y agoIs there a link to your essay? I would be interested to read it.
- psyc 10y agoMy best guess is it's on a zip drive, in a box, in a storage unit. The idea that the future would feature drastically reduced privacy was taken as a given. The thesis was basically that humans tend to be both judgmental and hypocritical, so in a world of total information, we could either keep persecuting and jailing each other over non-violent cultural things, or we could become more tolerant. I must say that the current climate of everybody tearing each other apart on social media is so far not encouraging. The rest of it was about the more concrete benefits, like improved traffic, logistics, labor and resource allocation.