mukund shyam

But — you're sitting here, and you think the world is always going to be like this. Everyone does. I do.

Tom Scott, from the talk 2030: Privacy's Dead. What happens next?

Change never comes all at once. The next big thing, as Tom Scott said, is right around the corner. Who knows what the next big thing is? Teleportation, telepathy, autonomous vehicles, mixed reality, augmented reality... whatever it is, it's not something that changes the world overnight. Nothing is.

But how will it affect privacy?

Tom Scott’s talk:

In his talk 2030: Privacy's Dead. What happens next?, Tom Scott refers to something called "engines", which I interpreted to be something like telepathy.

According to him, in 2030, these engines record everything you say through throat mics, and in some sense trains the engine. The more you use the engine, the more the engine will learn what thoughts to send to other people and what thoughts to receive.

If you think about it, if the future is indeed like this, it would be absolutely incredible. Similar to Google, it would bring about another Information Revolution, and the amount of information that would be accessible would be crazy.

But it would come at a cost.

We can already see that the Privacy ship is sailing. The more information you give to Facebook or Google or whichever other company that exists, the better tailored experiences you'd get from them.

In the case of the hypothetical engines, that would also be the case. The more information that you provide to these engines, the more accurate these engines would be.

This would probably mark the end of privacy as we know it today.

The generation that was born post-Google probably doesn't even think that privacy is necessary, and pretty soon, it could just be a theory.

This is where the ethics of technology comes into play.

Google is one of the biggest ad agencies in the world.

They use the data that they collect to serve you more personalized ads.

First of all, is the amount of information Google collects ethical? Is the fact that they try to eke out as much information as possible JUST to make money ethical?

I don't know, and I think every company is almost treading the line of what is unethical and what is not.

With the advent of AI, I think we need to think about how ethical it is to just let an algorithm try and make assumptions about you. Google's AI tries to decode who you are as a person, and the more we use technology, the more accurate predictions the AI will be able to make about you.

But what if the database (or wherever else that information is stored) is hacked? Something not very nice, to say the least.

The more we use technology, the more we have to think about how important privacy is. Is it worth losing out on privacy for convenience?

Everyone will have different thoughts about this. And I don’t know which one is right. Will the future be utopian or dystopian? Probably something in between.

Thanks for reading. This was inspired by Tom Scott’s talk: