Adam 7
Rise of the Machines - Skynet Here We Come
November 3rd 2009 14:07
Far be it for The Compassionate Cynic to provoke any unnecessary paranoia, but it seems that everywhere you turn these days you can't help but run into some form of digital information exploitation skulduggery.
Having charted the rise of recent information-aggregators, marketing-WMDs and people-enslaving internet technologies such as Google, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Amazon and eBay from nascent digital larvae to giant self-replicating entozoons I often wonder what the future holds for your current species if these binary behemoths are allowed to propagate unmitigated throughout the realm currently (and rather out-datedly) known as cyberspace.
Add to this the growing trend in information technology and robotics of developing ever more insidious and powerful artificial intelligence software and land-navigating automatons and one can begin to envision a future where all our thoughts, words and actions are stored, monitored and eventually controlled by some sort of integrated Machiavellian global technology. Sound familiar?
Already technology such as augmented reality (you can point your iPhone at anyone or anything and instantly get information about it/them), celebrity tracking websites and instant on-the-spot news reporting have infiltrated your brave new society.
Avoiding the obvious (and grossly abused by the media and popular culture) Big Brother references let's focus on something even more dramatic and fear-inducing: James Cameron's 1984 (hah) film - surprisingly prescient given its contemporary technological climate.
Are we really so far off from the hellish dystopia portrayed in this Hollywood masterpiece (Arnie in leather pants, anyone)?
Searches on Google are logged by their gargantuan servers, individual hits on YouTube are calculated by storing your IP address. All transactions on Amazon and eBay are anonymously tracked and sold as "aggregate statistics" to faceless corporations and marketing agencies. Facebook account information is there for the taking. All these network entities know your location, purchasing and browsing habits, individual tastes and preferences, among many other things.
ISPs store records of every site you access. Do you trust them to keep your records private? Increasing internet censorship and new corporate revenue models - such as flagging your 'illegal' downloads and increasing individually tailored (read: consumer targeted) advertising assure that your whole person can be compacted into some sick digital doppelganger and used for the twisted gratification of the political and commercial elite.
But all this is nothing new. The ubiquitous media have been trumpeting identity theft, personal information abuse and all such privacy related issues since the beginning.
The issue here is whether or not you trust Google or your ISP or any other of these indispensable new world utilities not to divulge all your private details to some unscrupulous mercenary agencies at some point in the future. After all, they have your IP address.
Personally, I love the internet and would be literally lost without it. But I really hope that this endogenous monstrosity doesn't spread too far and that in some distant future my descendants can avoid being hooked up to brain-tubes and milked by semi-sentients for their life-juice.
It's here, people of Earth. The dreaded Skynet. You have been warned.
CC.
Images used without permission.
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