Sat 15 February 2025

I was an 80s kid. I grew up in a booming and optimistic time. The future held so much promise: all kinds of cures for disease, technology and automation would free humanity from the drudgery of labor (heh), and the Information Age would bring an acceleration to learning and innovation. The year 2000 would be a wondrous time, and things would only get better from there.

Yeah. How's that going?

Something funny happened the other day when I was visiting a family member at the hospital: I was walking back to the foyer from their room, and a robot wheeled right by me. It wasn't dangerously close to me or anything, it was just wheeling away from me on a perpendicular path. I freaked out a little, and the nurses saw it right away. I said, "I'm good! I'm good!" and walked on, but I was both a little freaked out by the robot, and freaked out by the fact that I was freaked out.

I am not the guy to be freaked out by technology! I practically came out of the oven with a keyboard in-hand, especially for someone of my generation. I've been drawn towards and fascinated by technology for as long as I can remember. When other kids were reading comic books during their lunch periods, I was perusing an industrial automation and scientific robotics catalog. I was all over that shiz! Loved every bit of it. I had a PDA before it was popular (ok, really, PDAs were never all that popular, but you get the idea), even had an acoustic coupler modem for my PDA, as well as a folding keyboard, all the way back in 2000. Computing was going to change the world for the better, and I was going to be a part of it, somehow.

What the heck happened?

You know.

Facebook/Meta.
Google/Alphabet.
Microsoft. (Ok, they've always been evil in my eyes, but now they're really evil)
OpenAI.
Amazon.
Elon Musk's techno-corporo-Eldritch-horror-du-jour. (and now add "-governmental-", for goodness' sakes)

We grew up being told by Science Fiction that the robots would kill us all (something I was never convinced of as being particularly likely), but in reality, the robots are rather going to monitor and control every little detail of our lives, and they won't even do the dishes for us: they will sit in our pockets and on our desks and kitchen counters, monitoring every minute detail, spoken thought, and activity, and not for the sake of some giant robot brain with inscrutable goals, but for the sake of an economic über-elite with the dumbest goals, outlook, and perspectives imaginable.

So, the kid who adored robots grew up to fear them.

This timeline sucks, y'all.

100 Days to Offload 2025 - Day 14

Category: Ethics Tagged: 100DaysToOffload Computing Ethics Life Non-religious post Non-technical post Philosophy Polemic Science Fiction