I’ve started contributing to Geek Magazine recently, and my first piece is about future tech.
It’s exciting to think about a pocket app that learns about what you like and finds it for you, and, on a larger scale, about omnipresent technology learning from our choices, and predicting our needs. Still, there’s plenty of fodder for a dark sci-fi future in which privacy is over and Big Data tricks mindless consumers into buying more and more mass-produced junk. As everyone who’s used the musical taste-discovery Pandora knows, the program learns from upvoting and downvoting songs, but it also has an uncanny ability to whip out one’s guilty pleasure songs at inopportune moment. It’s probably not self-aware and doing it on purpose, bent on phase one of destroying all humans, is it?
Via Niantic Lab’s ‘Field Trip’ and the Future of Ambient Intelligence
I’m not worried about mass-produced junk so much as a data system that tells me where to find chocolate.
“Bridget, why were you late for work again today?”
[Wipes croissant and chocolate crumbs off face.] “Er, the app on my phone said that there were dark chocolate hazelnut pastries only six blocks away?”
Right now it shows you Google Offers, but once it gets personal preferences more dialed in, that would be really dangerous. Ping! Sale on books by your favorite author just 2 blocks away! Ping! That cafe you like has the good muffins today!
Yeah, dangerous.