Dennis Fischer <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> I don't like William Gibson's Op-Ed piece on Google in today's New York Times
> merely because, barely a week after I went all Jeremy Bentham Panopticonic on
> the cat bin lady, he writes that "Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon prison design is a
> perennial metaphor in discussions of digital surveillance and data mining, but
> it doesn't really suit an entity like Google." [...]
There are two developments, advancing in parallel right now.
One is the smart phone. Didn't Linda Nagata call the personal assistant
robot that follows her main character around in her 2003 novel Memory
a phone? I kind of figure phones will eventually become as smart and
smarter than the devices described by David Marusek in "We were out
of our Minds with Joy" (1995).
The other is Google and all the other corporations who have realized that
there's gold in them there data mines. What a personal organizer can
do for the individual an organization with access to petabytes of data that
updates in real time with appropriately scaled computing power can do
for corporate or national strategy.
It'll be interesting to see what grows out of that synergy.
I liked Vinge's "Rainbow's End" (2006, Hugo 2007), which describes one
kind of future. Vinge writes a good yarn, but he also points out that the
level of government intrusion that is necessary to maintain civilization in
the face of generally available technology that lets a single person wreak
world wide havoc is going to make Orwell's 1984 look like weak tea.
However scary that sounds, I for one am not prepared to crawl back into
a cave. It's a Brave New World for me.
--
Helge Moulding
mailto:[log in to unmask] Just another guy
http://hmoulding.cjb.net/ with a weird name
|