#369

There are apps now that can study a photo of a dog and tell you what breed it is. (Remember when 'app' meant appetizer?) IoT and A.I. systems, sensors, and algorithms will manage our home security, climate, lights, lawncare, laundry, groceries, music, and moods (via ambient lighting, sounds, and smells). They'll drive our cars, monitor our health, take care of our pets (and maybe our children). Siri, Alexa, and Google anticipate our actions, make recommendations, remember our preferences, learn our tendencies, know if we're in a restaurant and ask us to rate it. It's beginning slowly; it's creeping and creepy; impersonal, flat, unnecessary, even if helpful and novel. I wonder when I'll receive my first Amazon package delivered by drone. Every year technology feels a little more invasive and oppressive. The human touch is irreplaceable. Right? We'll see. There are benefits to having a Jarvis, a handy voice and 'mind' that knows everything ever historically, factually (although what is 'fact' these days except mathematical absolutes or scientific certainties, i.e. the world is not flat... after all). The world is big and diverse though, so rollout and saturation of these futuristic techno-crazes will vary by region, I assume, and M 'n' m can always escape to Alaska and leave it all behind for a few days. If they want to. I hope they want to. But satellites will find and harass them with commercial badgering in some form. West World was an interesting show. And The Martian an interesting movie. As was Arrival. I don't see those things happening in their lifetimes, but I might be surprised. I won't be surprised if I'm surprised.

"We're already cyborgs. Your phone and your computer are extensions of you, but the interface is through finger movements or speech, which are very slow." (With a neural lace inside your skull you would flash data from your brain, wirelessly, to your digital devices or to virtually unlimited computing power in the cloud.) "For a meaningful partial-brain interface, I think we're roughly four or five years away."
     — Elon Musk, Vanity Fair magazine, April 2017