A Scary World: The Cons

The Collective. Borg. The Fat People from Wall-e.

It has a lot of names, but what happens when technology takes over our lives?

The idea of advanced technology heavily integrated in our lives has many scary implications. We’ve all seen 2001: A Space Odyssey, and hence all have the same dreams and nightmares about a computer losing it and trying to eradicate our presence from its world.

What’s scary is most of us don’t know that Google’s goal is to be able to answer any question about our lives we may have, going so far as to be able to answer “what should I do tomorrow?”

Then of course there’s the ever classic Terminator idea, which especially hits home with my generation, growing up with the movies on TV. With the ridiculous amounts of weapons at almost any countries disposal, (just the ones we know about, too) what if a computer program was made smart enough to control all of them and decide whether or not they should be deployed? Non of these weapons have any physical overrides anymore, at least non that a intelligent computer program couldn’t circumvent.

But what about us? If, you know, we aren’t concerned about the world.

What happens when we can get all we need from our computer, netbook, phone, or even watch?
As the prominence of social networking sites increases, it is less and less necessary to actually have to meet a person to be friends with them. Personally I have many friendships all over the US that I have never met in person.

Same with the news, I get everything I need from Twitter, and I generally get it faster and more accurately that if I listened to the news on TV. God forbid I have to wait for the paper Sunday edition.

I’m even able to order anything I need, from clothing to electronics to groceries, on my phone. Scary, huh?

As a society the world is getting to the point where we don’t have to leave the comfort of our apartment to interact is a “personal” way with whole communities.

And if technology keeps advancing in the same way it does, soon we won’t even have to think. We’ll be able to ask a website what we should wear that day, what kind of date we should go on, and what kind of food we should eat that day. Then we’ll be able to order those clothes, have them sent to us, go on a virtual date, and have the food delivered to us, ready to heat up.

The fact that many companies are independently developing very intuitive devices to control applications and programs with our minds means we wont even have to use a mouse, keyboard, or touchpad. And what’s the next step after a wearable mind control device? That’s right, implanted ones.

In my next piece I plan on taking a look at what technology will help us avoid these problems, and what I feel the human race needs to do to walk as one into the new electronic world, in a healthy way.

If you’re not already, follow me on Twitter @stay_calm, and as always friends, please stay calm.