Cover via Amazon
Science fiction horror scenarios spring from the basic premise that too much technology will eventually enslave us as opposed to liberate or make us better people. The Dune universe was a direct result of a world where computers took over and subjected human beings. George Lucas‘s THX1138 envisioned a world of people in the thrall of television and consumerism that drove people to numb themselves with antidepressants.
And then there was Logan’s Run, where babies were chipped at birth and their every movement monitored until they reached the useless age of 30 and were dispatched for the amusement of others.
Today people willingly tag themselves with GPS enabled phones that they delude themselves into believing are helpful tools. They are aided and abetted in their fantasy by apps.
There’s an app for everything, and they make the loss of freedom and downtime feel okay.
But they are really just the first toehold on a slide that leads to that proverbial glided cage.
And the scariest thing is the excitement. This guy thinks this nightmare of a world is an awesome leap forward for mankind. Personally, I think life as an uber-trained gerbil might push me into active anarchy.
But here’s what truly should frighten thinking people.
“… imagine what skilled game designers could do with this …”
Imagine that. If you have the stomach for it and don’t mind giving yourself nightmares from all the paranoid conspiracy theories that naturally flow from entertaining such notions.
And then imagine them selling this to your government – not the most ethical bunch of people on the planet – and worse, imagine what the business world will … is already in come instances … do with this.
Being a gerbil is fine, if you are born a gerbil, but human beings who aren’t allowed to think for themselves, and are expected to live on the equivalent of a Sisyphean treadmill, will be a scary bat-shit crazy bunch.
It looks though as if we’ve set the path for our children and theirs and the best we can do is hope that the Mayans were right. Or perhaps wish upon a solar flare to cause an emp to reset the clock and buy us time.
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anniegirl1138 
where it all breaks down is processing power/information management. we simply do not have the computational tools for this to become a means to surveil every human being on the planet all the time. targeted search? sure.
i’m more concerned at the business/marketing exploitation. and the fact that there’s a substantial portion of the population that plays mindless “click and earn points” games. no skill/thought/strategy required (ie: Farmville, MafiaWars, etc).
I’m not sure I interpreted his attitude as seeing the omnipresent technology as an awesome leap for mankind. I think it was more along the lines of his last words, “It’s gotta come. What’s gonna stop it?” And (he is saying) since it IS coming, let’s do it right. Let’s see if we can’t do it so that some good comes of it, on the individual level not just to benefit governments and corporations.
Unnerving. As I sit here, enjoying my new Kindle, thinking about the fact that a record will be kept somewhere about every book and article I ever read it — which had occurred to me before I watched the video, btw!
Perhaps it was just the ease with which he connected all those scary dots.
Can completely wiring us for “the record” ever be done right? There’s a right way to lose our freedom? Slippery slope thing.
I think he did it with such ease because he’s thought about it a lot.
Can it be “done right”? Probably not. Are we losing our freedom? Probably. Can it be avoided? Only, I suspect, by those who are willing to unplug themselves from the internet — and even that would be only minimally useful given how officially wired so much of our lives already are.
And slippery slope my a$$! It’s a full-blown avalanche.