Opinion

What Is Cyberpunk? A Neon City In The Rain? The scene opens on a rainy, smog-shrouded, hypercapitalist, neon, surveillance state and the viewer is dropped in without context. There’s an inciting incident to plunge you into the story, and you, the viewer, are gripped for the next two hours.  Any scene setting is left to the imagination, and questions of why the world is this way, and how it came to be, are left to fan fiction and speculation. This is the future. Deal with it. 

And when the inevitable finally comes to pass, what then? Do I get a puppy? Do I get another shelter dog? I want a dog as much like my current dog as possible, so it’s an option to get his genes sampled and find out exactly what blend of the 57 varieties he actually is. And then I can simply find another one.  What if I could have a dog who would never die? One who would never get old and frail and ill, and habitually balance on that knife edge of life and death as I will him not to go into the light?

1990 saw the return of Robocop in Robocop 2. The sequel doesn’t suffer from a lack of talent – Peter Weller and Nancy Allen return as their roles of Murphy and Lewis, with Tom Noonan as Cain, the main antagonist.

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.

Is your small app making money for someone else? There’s no way to defend yourself beyond denying permissions to all but the most basic core functions

It has been covered by every news network, complete with handy visuals, because a standard corporate unveil is now a news story – clumsy CEO wrecks own vehicle. It’s not relegated to the tech or motoring pages any more

Take one up-and-coming young professional, add a singular crusty old executive, multiply that by a brand new task management software, square root an innocent staff and divide the whole thing by lackluster email communication. The sum total equals conflict. The young buck and the old timer are blaming each other for getting behind. The project is dead and the money is burned.

That’s the net neutrality debate in a nutshell.

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.

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.

Love it or hate it, cryptocurrency is a trending topic for the digital age. Encrypted currency, like Bitcoin, is either lauded for working independently from bank regulation, or loathed for being used on the dark web for various nefarious reasons, like illegal drug or firearm trade.