If you think someone is watching or listening to you, odds are pretty
high you’re partially correct. For sure you are not paranoid because
it is almost a certainty that in this digital age you are being
recorded.
The proliferation of sensors and digital cameras has been simply
breathtaking. The amount of data being accumulated about individuals,
their buying habits, recreation preferences, medical condition is
stunning. Google yourself. You’ll be bowled over by high much is
known about you.
Many folks have a false sense of security that their personal
information, income status, health history and credit record are safe.
Balderdash. If there is one lesson folks should indelibly imprint on
their brain it is that there is nothing a professional hacker cannot
hack into. A basic rule one should keep in mind is this: The more
connected one is the more vulnerable he is.
I garnered an inkling of what was coming during the presidential
election of 2004. We kept getting a call from the county Republican
campaign headquarters asking our presidential preference. Whether my
wife answered or I answered each time we politely told them there was
no way we would vote to re-elect President George W. Bush. Still,
they kept calling.
Explaining all this to a good Republican friend drew a laugh. He
gleefully explained the GOP (as well as the Democrats) had a
sophisticated voter analysis program that developed profiles of solid
Republican voters. I fit the profile yet was blowing their model.
Their data showed I had voted for Bush in 2000 (Could not stand
Al Gore), was the co-owner of a successful small business, had
purchased a flaming red Cadillac, had purchased a new shot gun for
trap shooting, had a concealed weapons permit, had for a time belonged
to the NRA, attended Mass at least once a week, sent my children to a
private Catholic high school – in short, I appeared to be an almost
perfect Bush voter, but I wasn’t.
One had the feeling they thought their entire model would collapse.
Fast forward now to 2017, and the amazing proliferation of even more
technological developments, from iphones and ipads to kindles to gps
chips in everything that moves and sensors that record reams of data
instantly. All this and much more is explained in the one book
everyone should read this year – Thank You for Being Late by the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman.
His thesis is that there are three major forces inexorably shaping our
future. Furthermore they are accelerating at an exponential pace that
is outpacing human ability to understand and keep up let alone shape
and control.
This ought to scare the hell out of a normal person because the day is
not far off when society will have robots with artificial intelligence
performing many mundane tasks. Think though about the implications
of AI advancing beyond its inventor.
Perhaps you may recall that great scene in the Stanley Kubrick movie
2001. Hal, the on board computer, decides Dave, the space vehicle’s
pilot, and his co-pilot are threats to the all-consuming mission to
Jupiter.
While the co-pilot is outside the ship Hal cuts the tether and there
goes the co-pilot spinning off into space. Hal then refuses to open
the airlock that will permit Dave back onto the ship. Dave
nonetheless figures out a way and the next scene is Dave, still in his
space suit walking into the guts of the super computer to dismantle
it.
The dialogue between Hal and Dave is one of the show’s highlights.
The only thing Kubrick gets wrong is the size of the computer.
Friedman explains how “Moore’s Law” has driven technology in the last
50 years to ever smaller, ever more powerful computer chips at ever
more cheap to produce costs. The super computer in 2001 would fit
into today’s lap top.
Friedman contends that what is so discomforting to so many is the
simultaneous explosive acceleration in technology coupled with forces
driving globalization and compounded by global warming and habitat
loss.
He outlines how this incredible pace is impacting politics,
geopolitics, ethics, the workplace and communities. The implications
of computer chips coupled with sensors, digital cameras, storage
capacity and search engines to make a billion calculations in one
second makes for an easy leap to recognizing that somewheere,
someplace there are recordings of our coming and goings, of ourr phone
conversations and who they are with. The search engine just needs a
key word to find it.
What makes this book a cause for hope rather than despair is a quote
Friedman cites at the beginning from the famous French scientist,
Madame Maria Curie: “Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to
be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may
fear less.” Amen.
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