I just read the abstract for an upcoming talk at work. One line spoke of the "vision of establishing and running a virtual business, a business in which most or all of its business functions are outsourced to online services". Wow! The complete commoditization and abstraction of human labor is at hand. Isn't that grand!
Others at my place of employment are working on everything from building nanoscale sensors that can be deployed anywhere and everywhere on the planet to the data extraction and analytics algorithms that will be necessary to process and act on - in realtime the terabyte streams of data those trillions of sensors will produce. I'm sure they'll put those to use in good, non-surveillance-type applications!
Maybe my "John Henry and the Steam Hammer" allusions are too much, and maybe "1984" had more impact on my thinking than it should have, but I can't help feel that I'm witnessing - and in my own small way, contributing to - the undoing of civilization, if not humanity.
How did I get so damn vested in such a system? How do I break free without becoming some dirt-eating hippie?
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