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Friday 23 January 2015

Technology is making our lives Betterworse

When I was a kid... maybe seven or eight... I was in the back of my parents' car and saw a huge billboard for some boring thing. I think it may have been ladies' underwear (so, yes, seven or eight, rather then thirteen / fourteen...).

I remember thinking to myself, "What a boring advert. Wouldn't it be great if there was some special database that knew all the stuff everyone was interested in. Then we could all have these special contact lenses which would read the blank advert board and fill it with adverts for actual stuff each person looking at it wanted to see. So someone else would see the ladies' underwear thing and I could see adverts for Star Wars figures".

Despite the temporary demise of Google Glass, it would seem that exactly the type of cool technology I dreamed of as a young 'un is now all around us.

And isn't it greaterrible!

All your purchases are recorded so that relevant, targeted ads for further purchases are piped to you every time you visit any random web page. All the routes you put into your GPS are saved to the cloud for your convenience. Aren't all these companies being ever so helpfulcynicallyopportunistic?

I've always loved technology. And every time my phone gives me an unbidden nudge that "it's time to leave work and this is the best route to take due to current traffic" based purely on the fact it's kept track of my daily movements since I first switched it on...it gives me a chill of excitementfear.

Because people have a greatterrible track record of using technology wisely, don't we? I mean, look at the microchipatomicbomb!

Last year, I read a fantastic book by Kim Curran called Glaze. It seems to share my excitementfear about how betterworse all this technology is making our lives.

"You're better together"

In it, a young girl named Petri is eagerly awaiting her sixteenth birthday so she can get a chip put into her head like everyone else and get onto Glaze - a kind of hyper-facebook-google reality overlay. (BTW, the title and the cover image of the book are a perfect indicator of the feel of the story). It's a great YA thriller and I read the entire story thinking "I would lovehate to be on Glaze! It's so helpfuldangerous." Even by the end, after the revelation of the Big Baddie's Plan, I was still thinking that I'd kind of like a (perhaps less invasive) version of Glaze. Yes, even after the Big Baddie Plan.

Sometimes, I do wonder where it will all lead. But then I see a promo for something like Microsoft HoloLens and I stop wondering because there's just too much cool stuff to play with!

#shutupandtakemymoney

Cheers

W

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