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Subscribe to RSS feedWe all read the wired article about the beautiful future. The future in which everything we wrote, sung or said can be stored on anyone’s iPod. Every movie, every song, every book ever produced. That future is imminent and very very (very!) near. (and unstoppable since storage growth is unstoppable. We are already entering the petabyte home storage age)(meaning you can store the internet archive at your home harddisk c:\internet…)
We will see not only this use but also the rise of devices which will store everything you ever saw and heard on that same iPod. It will record your life so that part of your blog functionality is not needed anymore. You will be able to recover any conversation you ever had and every memory you have can be played back, possibly from multiple angles. It’s more near than the many other devices you can think of. By coincidence my wife and me thought this idea up this afternoon and when I did a Google this evening I saw several initiatives.
That is all fine. That is great. That is superb. That will improve life. I would want to buy one too, it would save me a lot of time and it would save me a lot of energy discussing past events.
However, in the real world, in this time, many governments consist of not so nice people e.g. dictators or worse. People who like to torture, people who like to arrest citizens when they speak the wrong words on a blog or in the press.
Now… what will happen in the next few years, when we will have all access to these cheap cool life recording gadgets and citizens in a country nearby will be required to wear the device or even have it integrated in their clothing or body, required to always have it turned on?
That will mean dictatorship with a controlling power which has not been seen ever in the history of mankind. A citizen will not be able to speak, hear or even look at things that are forbidden. It will make any opposition a thing of the past. It will be the ultimate dream tool for governments. People will not even be able anymore to escape or flee since any “look” at the wrong map or even listening to a possible escape could lead to arrests let alone speaking about it with your friends or family since those ultimate devices will be directly connected to a server platform scanning for patterns.
A human will not be able any more to deny since everything is recorded in the device. It will make the life of judges a lot more easier, since “the truth” is in the recording server: anything this person ever saw, heard or spoke.
The only thing possible will then remain thinking, for yourself, on possible ways of escape, until cognitive science produces some kind of mini MRI devices to scan your brain for information too.
I’m not writing science fiction here and I’m worried about this. These kind of devices will get as cheap as $100 a piece within the next years. With an investment of $ 100.000.000 you will directly have power over 1.000.000 of your citizens. Maybe invest in connectivity, server, maintenance and some specific software but that will not be the big part in the investment.
This future is now so very near that I assume that there some people out there thinking about this and working on possible solutions to prevent this from happening.
If, at any stage in time, the complete world gets conquered by an extremist madman then we will all be totally controlled in a way that has never happened in the past, with totally no possibility to escape or even talk about opposition ever. We will be doomed for ever.
I’ve heard than tin foil hats work very well against brain scanning!
nice scenario! made me think of things.
but don’t worry ed.
1. dictators do not have time to read all these data. 99% chance that you, and all te info you generate, will be in the safe zone which means nobody that is of any danger to you has any interest in ‘your’ data in the first place.
(if they do, then they probably already have a lot of info on you right now, and already had so 20 years ago. For example, my father has a BVD (now AIVD) record of all the meetings he went to (and I mean all of them) from 1968 to 1983 and in this record he has the literal transcriptions of everything he has said on those meetings. this is not 2020, this was 1970s).
2. dictators (nor judges) will not know what info to look for or how to judge it: what info is going to be of relevance? what does the information mean? this is the frame problem. AI has never solved this problem, and this is fundamental. it will not go away. so most of the data that can/will be stored is not information really, because it is too much too handle for the people involved and they have no means of selecting (under some realistic time pressure, say, the time before the sun explodes) the right information at the right time under the right circumstances.
3. the mini-MRI machine will lead to adaptations in our brain responses. it will not only scan/read our brain, but our brain will react to this new environmental circumstance as well. cf. if you know a meeting is being taped, you will talk differently as compared to when you know the meeting is ‘off the record’. same goes for your internal thoughts. they will adapt. moreover (referring back to points 1 and 2) i do not doubt that everybody that is brain-scanned immediately wil think the most evil of thoughts about sex, illegal acts, offending remarks, and so on; which might seem like a problem if the scanner would read this immediately. however, such ‘secret thoughts’ will quickly loose the value that such utterings now have when people display them openly in public, once it is shown that everybody has them, all the time. that is: while you will see ‘sex’ written on the brain of every man that is brain-scanned; this will also mean that no man in particular will be discredited by it: it will just be shown that this is a property of male homo sapiens, and so it will be ‘normal’.
4. every doom scenario for the future on the basis of technological advances that has been made in the past has turned out wrong, or at least even if it was sort-of right, it turned out that we didn’t really experience it as “doom” once we were in the middle of it. so this is one reason not to worry. still, doom scenario’s make good movieplots, let’s make this movie ed, it will be the matrix 2.0!