Did 2018 usher in a creeping tech dystopia?
December 25, 2018 by Matt O'brien
We may remember 2018 as the year when technology's dystopian potential became clear, from Facebook's role enabling the harvesting of our personal data for election interference to a seemingly unending series of revelations about the dark side of Silicon Valley's connect-everything ethos.
The list is long: High-tech tools for immigration crackdowns. Fears of smartphone addiction . YouTube algorithms that steer youths into extremism. An experiment in gene-edited babies .
Doorbells and concert venues that can pinpoint individual faces and alert police. Repurposing genealogy websites to hunt for crime suspects based on a relative's DNA. Automated systems that keep tabs of workers' movements and habits. Electric cars in Shanghai transmitting their every movement to the government.
It's been enough to exhaust even the most imaginative sci-fi visionaries.
https://phys.org/news/2018-12-usher-tech-dystopia.html
