Thursday, October 4, 2007
A Scary Future?
The introduction of this book definitely goes right at the issue. It almost provides a sense of paranoia when thinking about technology in the future and how it could negatively impact our lives. As I read I couldn’t help but be reminded of numerous futuristic movies in which the down side of technology is realized. In Demolition Man a machine automatically prints out a ticket each time Sylvester Stallone swears, or in Gatika genetic technology creates a new form of class separation where girls check out your genetic information before deciding whether or not to date you, and numerous other movies touch on issues of future technology and what happens when computers take over. I never really thought about it too much until now, but a lot of our freedoms and privacies have disappeared in recent years. Computers can track almost everything that we do making it impossible to get away with anything. I liked the quote “It’s a world where computers are assumed to be correct, and people are wrong”. This is a scary thought, the more that computers and technology are integrated into our daily lives the more control the computers will have over us, and the more devastating any small clerical, or computing errors will become on our lives. If a mistake does happen who will people believe, you or the computer? Hopefully this is far into the future, but there are issues that we are realizing right now. I know that I hate marketing with a passion. I feel that marketing combined with technology is ruining our society, it’s everywhere! If you own a land line you know that the majority of calls you receive are from telemarketers, then there’s billboards, commercials, packaging, junk mail, junk email, the list goes on. Technology is making it easier and easier for marketers to find and use your personal information to forcibly communicate junk to you and it’s only getting worse. With the lack of security on the internet, and the amount of personal data that is floating around on it it’s becoming increasingly easy to steal someone’s identity. Technology is a new concept that has expanded so quickly that the laws and regulations have not had time to catch up with many of the privacy issues that are being created. The major question that is posed in this chapter is can technology and privacy coexist? I’m sure that it will be a constant battle between the two and only time will tell which wins, but right now technology appears to have a head start.
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3 comments:
I liked the analogy you used with the movies. It is so true and a little scary how close we are to living in a world just like that. I don’t think we are that far away from many of those strange things that seemed unlikely. Also, people do usually trust a computer before a person. If there is a mistake it is assumed that the person is wrong before a machine. It is a strange world today that is likely to see more dramatic changes in the near future. Also, the marketing component has played a large role in this trend.
We will see a lot of advances in technology and some of the things you mentioned about the movies may not be that far off. While technology and computers have made huge strides and have certainly taken away some of our privacies, it is people who tell them what to do and how to do it.
The scariest thing is that these technologies are not that far off in the future. One thing that always freaks me out is when I watch Minority Report and I see the part where Tom Cruise walks into the store and the retinal scanners know who he is and advertises to him based on previous purchases.... That scares the crap out of me because I like going places and people have no idea who in the world I am. According to Mr. Garfinkle, that future is not too far off.
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