This quick thought is now so old as to no longer count as topical, but look at these two headlines from a couple of weeks ago:
In one case, a social media company assembled detailed personality profiles on hundreds of millions of people through phones in those people’s pockets. It then treated that database with all the gracefulness of college student taking a beer into the shower, abetting the election of Donald Trump (whatever dramatically negative characterizations about him you choose to make, I probably agree with all of them). In another, heroic sheriffs and FBI agents ended a bombing spree by using electronic records made possible by the phone in the perpetrator’s pocket. This is a sharp illustration of the tradeoffs we have to negotiate in the era of data collection.
The decades-long trend is to bring data collection and processing deeper into our lives. With the gains in productivity made likely by the Industrial Internet of Things, with the convenience offered by the recent spray of Google Assistant ads I’ve seen on billboards and heard on podcasts, with the huge financial and research investments in AI systems that require tons of training data to get smart, the main project of humanity for the next while will be to record as much information about ourselves and the world as possible, and send it off to a database somewhere so we can save time or get a little more comfortable.
By the looks of these two headlines, at the end of that process it will be near-impossible for even off-grid terrorists to evade capture. But all that information will be owned by a loose handful of entities, with strange and unsettling consequences for politics and who knows what else.
Is there a happy middle ground? Or is there another possible direction, either through policy or technological developments, that I'm not seeing?