We’re Asleep to Technology’s March & That’s Dangerous

Photo by Jakob Owens on Unsplash

Data is the commodity of the 21st century. Privacy is in short supply. Your psychology is being hacked like never before. You’re exchanging your neurology for Internet services in the modern age. This is the new normal.

There’s no shortage of apocalyptic prognostications out there on the future of our technology-saturated culture. We needn’t dismiss them as mere doomsday fantasies because the truth is, the technological landscape is advancing at such an exponential rate that linear, modest assumptions will probably fall flat.

There’s plenty of grand future speculation but arguably less discussion of the concerning technological themes being witnessed currently. But it is this question that I’m very interested in.

Eliminating Choice

In watching the moves of the big tech companies, one of the most prominent, across the board, is the sheer rigor with which they are all developing their artificial intelligence arms. There is a collective awareness of the prize that is at stake for grasping at AI ahead of the others.

Google, for example, is increasingly preoccupied with artificial intelligence and less interested in preserving the ‘free market’ aspect of the Internet. That a Google search is associated with infinite pages is a source of…