Random Thought Of The Day #434

Day 434

Our technology is going to kill us all.



Everything connects

 I love technology. I love how personal we've made our tech. But in some ways, I think we take our desire to be plugged into things, to expand our senses through technology way too far. And into the areas of violating the personal space of others.

We're constantly plugged in. We can have video conversations with someone on the other side of the country while standing on the subway. We get push notifications of every change in anyones status that we want to our iPhones or blackberries. You're never unplugged at this point. In 12 seconds, we can see something, take a photo, upload it to any social media network and flickr or make homemade HD-quality porn and have it online in as long as it takes for your data connection to upload it. We can see someone, think they're cute, introduce ourselves, have an hour long conversation and set up a first date without having to have ever been even in the same zip code as them.



These glasses can read micro-expressions such as
annoyance, interest, anger or dishonesty & then
communicate that information to the wearer.

It doesn't matter what we want to do... our technology has become personal enough that we can do it. There are actually working prototypes of the Cell Phone Tooth implant.
From glasses that can read micro-expressions and communicate their meanings to the wearer (so THAT'S why Fox cancelled Lie To Me?) to firms dedicated entirely to social networking investigations hired by businesses to investigate potential or existing employees. We're crossing the line. And once you cross that line by an inch, someone else IS going to cross it by a mile. And it doesn't matter what degree it's been crossed to. Crossing it is crossing it. By an inch or a mile. It's been crossed.

Yeah, claim that "slippery slope" is bad logic, but guess fucking what? It happens almost every time. Slippery slopes fucking happen. Period. So whether you like it or not, the fact that it happens makes it good logic.

We said "ok" when the government wanted to increase security at airports and now we have 2 hour secuirity lines, little kids and your 97 year old grandma getting "enhanced screening" pat-downs, backscatter x-ray scanners that can see under your clothes but not all the way thru your body and all number of other privacy violations because someone made the argument that they were "common sense" security precautions. As I said... slippery slope. And that's only one of a thousand possible examples that affect us all.

I know the arguments... we put too much of our social lives on the fucking internet. And that's a damn good point. We do. We make too much of our private lives public just by posting it online. But the thing is... many people also have an expectation of a degree of privacy in our social media. A mistaken expectation, but still... And our web presences are expanding, not decreasing. As I said just the other day... it's a viral world and we've all now been given the opportunity to create and spread our own virus across the planet through the intarwubz. Everyone is realizing this. And everyone is taking their opportunity to do so.

There's also a sexist element to this. It's going to have a disproportionately adverse impact on women.

Seriously. I'm not making a joke or taking a shot at the feminazis with this one. These services screen for sexually explicit photos of you online as well in your web presence. There's a disproportionately larger number women that are going to be impacted by this than men.

From jaded former lovers spiting their ex by posting that picture he convinced her to let him take of her sucking his dick to the sexting boob shot she sent to his cell phone to tease him before their date that night. Most of these don't show the man's face. And unless there's now penis recognition software out there that I'm not aware of, the cock-pic he has on FetLife or Craigslist isn't gonna be recognized. But facial regonition software that DOES exist can still tell you are you even when your mouth is full of dick.

But I can only hope that this ends in firms like this and companies that would hire firms like this realizing a law of diminishing returns. With the incresing web presence that many of us have these days, the normal, typical youthful experimentation that WILL get posted on Facebook or wherever and all of the other follies of youth and early adulthood, hopefully this is just end up as another experiment in going around the normal interviewing process for work that will exclude so many potential employees that companies eventually abandon it because they can't find enough "suitable" candidates.

Because at the end of the day, our social media is about just that. Our socializing. Our social lives. And have little or nothing to do with our ability to do a job. Or our character. Some people might play just as hard off the clock as they work while on it.

And if this becomes the new order of the day... well, all I can say is this is just another example of how fucked we are allowing ourselves to become.