A while back after reading about how many above ground atomic tests we did in the 1950s I found myself wondering: what are we doing right now where future gener

A while back after reading about how many above ground atomic tests we did in the 1950s I found myself wondering: what are we doing right now where future generations will look back and ask "what were they thinking?" Other than burning all the carbon, I think this insane totally unregulated, opaque, user-hostile, leaky, insecure surveillance panopticon is a good candidate for a large scale human self-own. Privacy loss is a little like climate change. The problem builds but nothing obviously bad happens right away, so people don't notice or don't really care. Nothing bad happens until it does but when it does it's too late. One of the things I've found is that Europeans seem much more concerned about privacy than Americans. I've chalked this up to their experience in the 20th century with Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, and the Soviet sphere of influence. Maybe Americans need their own experience with totalitarianism to show them why surrendering all privacy for convenience and free candy might not be a great idea. (Who knows... we might get it soon!) Another class of very bad things that can happen is foreign influence powered by all this surveillance. We've already seen some of this from Russia, but China is smarter and better funded and probably has 100X the data and access. If they decide to invade Taiwan expect a full information warfare assault against the US population powered by fine grained surveillance data and delivered via social media. Since they probably know when you go to the bathroom, they'll be able to use AI with all this information to micro-target every single individual.