In the year of tech, 2018 has revealed a lot. We have seen Facebook enable harvesting of our personal data for election purposes, we have seen the dark side of Silicon Valley’s connect-everything ethos.
We have also seen high tech tools for immigration crackdowns. Fears of smartphone addiction have also been identified. Youtube has made it possible youths to be drawn into extremism. Also, we have seen experiment in gene-edited babies.
Furthermore, in 2024, doorbells and concert venues have been able to pinpoint individual faces and alert police of the potential danger those with the faces could bring on others. We have also seen the re-purposing of genealogy websites to hunt for crime suspects based on a relative’s DNA. We have also been able to witness automated systems that keep tabs on workers’ movements and habits.
We have seen electric cars in Shanghai transmitting their every movement to government.
However, thinking about all these, we haven’t been able to say confidently that we are living in the future but we will rather say, according to a novelist by the name of William Gibson; we are living in a retro future. A dark, goofy 90’s retro-future.
We await to see how 2019 will shape or re-shape tech and our future. Already, we can see surveillance and data-collection efforts ramp up and artificial systems start sounding more human, reading facial expressions and also generating fake video images so realistic that one will fail to detect malicious distortions of truth.
However, there will be strong measures from governments and tech workers to counter these misdeeds that could get new lease of life in 2024. There are still many tech workers out there who are more active about ensuring their work turns out entirely positive.
Apart from the misdeeds of Facebook, Google has also attracted concerns about its way of surveillance on users’ data after Associated Press reported that it was tracking people’s movements whether they like it or not.
In the face of all these, some are warning that too much regulations on tech may not be what mankind needs.
