On The Future

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