Maybe you never uploaded that one picture to social media. Maybe nobody recorded that conversation you had in a dark alley five years ago. Maybe you’ve faithfully kept that secret you promised you’d keep to your grave. But like the internet, you can’t remove events from your memory. Once it’s in a human brain, it stays there. And sooner or later, artificial intelligence is going to gain access to human brains.
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Until the 1990s, text was king. No surprise, given it took a full minute to download a picture and the average user was still using a monochrome display with a choice of either puke green or amber. Fast-forward to today, and find Youtube, Pornhub, Netflix, Twitch, not to mention constant unwanted ads on every random website…good or bad, video has become integral to the modern internet experience. At some point, virtual reality is going to consume the internet just like video already has.
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For those who’ve been living living under a rock lately, Elon Musk finally got around to giving us the Neuralink update he promised us on the Joe Rogan podcast last year. Now that we’ve all had time to digest it, what it has to say is a little terrifying.
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Maybe we shouldn’t complain. Life with Google and Microsoft will probably be cleaner and healthier than life under Renraku or Genom. But as time goes on and technology becomes increasingly powerful, it’s fairly likely that powerful corporations will ironically play a diminished role in our lives.
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While the promotional content mentions boring but practical applications like remote construction and oil rig inspections, we can only imagine what uses the hacker community is going to come up with for a dog-sized, semi-autonomous robot.
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It’s fairly central to the cyberpunk genre that there are a number of powerful mega-corporations governing the average citizen’s daily life, being resisted by only a very small number of people on the cutting edge of freedom and technology. We don’t have to look very hard to see that scenario developing in the world around us today.
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Ubiquitous Japanese influence in semi-dystopian future literature has largely been fueled by real world American fears of the “unstoppable” Japanese behemoth of industry, and has manifested itself in many ways even outside of the cyberpunk genre.
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You think consumers will be sufficiently concerned about their privacy that they’ll even take the time to check an “opt out” box, let alone fight it? Not a chance. Remember little Billy being trained to accept 24/7 surveillance? When the children of today grow up, they’re not going to care who has access to their personal data, because they’ll have had an entire lifetime of being taught that it’s normal for everyone to know everything about them.