Changes In Society
November 2016 Editorial
www.ink2quill.com

 The computer revolution then the mobile phone or cell phone revolution continues to change our society in many ways. Some statistics state that there are more mobile phones than laptop computers being sold and that the modern cell phone has the power and nearly the memory of many laptops. So my question is, for better or for worse, what are the changes in society I believe are coming our way?

The first change is our complete and I do mean complete loss of privacy. Not just our complete loss of privacy but people´s acceptance of it. This one is huge and many people think that this has already come like a vampire in the night and is nearly done sucking the last vestiges of privacy from our lives. This has more bad consequences to the individual than good ones because an individual´s information will always ultimately be used against them. Whether it´s medical, financial or private records.

This leads to the second change that continues to infect our society like a virus. That is the presence and influence of predictive programming on the individual. We all know that the handling of our information has become increasingly automated and that those softwares predict certain outcomes for everybody. It is said that some insurance companies in America predict certain risks in a person´s life and offer policies accordingly. So things like certain health risks, divorce, bankruptcies etc are all calculated from an individual´s information like age, gender, ethnicity, education level, family medical history, income level, neighborhood and neighborhood raised in. This leads to subtle forms of discrimination where none can be held accountable because the authority is a computer and runs on mathematical principles and other such nonsense. What I´m trying to say is that the automated world will have more and more control over the individual. This should scare the pants, dresses, skirts and kilts off the thickest of people.

Another change coming our way, a change that I briefly touched on in my previous editorial, is the loss of value or demand for things hand-made. (Check out my editorial “An Element From Storytelling To Consider” ). It is a common stereotype in the modern world that a computer does everything faster, more precisely, cheaper and basically better than people. This is true in many cases but when we start to buy art, books and films that are made by a computer and have little if no human input then I feel we have crossed the line into stupidity and that is where we are headed. This brave new world of modernity will have computers replacing our artists and that is a great loss.

How stupid does that sound? Well imagine reading an autobiography generated by a computer that describes heart wrenching trials in vivid detail and then imagine a gripping story written by a real person. The computer generated story is a fake while the story written by a real person is real. Now imagine the computer generated story wins distribution privileges over the real story because in the future we are heading toward people will be conditioned to accept computer generated things over real things. I only hope future audiences will reject that kind of fakeness.

I think I´m gonna end my list here because I´ve got to run. I´m gonna end my editorial by saying that I love all the conveniences of the modern age but I do not want to build a world that has lost touch with what´s most important to all of us. There should always be a place for people´s achievements and self expression even in a future with sophisticated AI. I´m amazed how so many talented artists and sci-fi writers were able to forecast these aspects of our society.

These are all topics you see in sci-fi stories. So read some sci-fi folks.

(Commentary by   www.ink2quill.com )
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