Monday, March 30, 2015

robot march

It may be an age thing, but I am getting increasingly skeptical of the general direction that technology is evolving towards. I was very happy with the tech we had until 2006 or so, and then came the unstoppable rise of facebook, smartphones that broadcast your every move, search engines trying to read your mind, drones, self-driving cars, and e-readers that tell their corporate motherships what pages you've read and which passages you've highlighted. I'm beginning to think that a dystopia of the Brave New World kind has already sucked us in.

After reading The Filter Bubble and filter-feeding on all the robotic news that comes in on a daily basis now, I've written another feature about all this, which is out today. Health warning: the content may frighten you.

The unstoppable march of the machines
Current Biology Volume 25, Issue 7, pR255–R258, 30 March 2015
Open access

(own photo, taken at an innovation event at Said Business School last year)

1 comment:

Paul Halpern said...

I couldn't agree with you more, Michael, that technology has taken a turn for the scary. I'll look forward to reading your article.