The future of…

Click here for contact details, other articles and personal details

The future of big brother

With good enough marketing, I believe we can be sold anything. Let's face it, heaven is supposed to be much better than hell, but most people follow the road to hell because the marketing is better.

Big brother is being packaged very successfully as reducing-crime, and improving safety and efficiency, and consequently people aren't just accepting it, they're demanding it. Many villages demand speed cameras that can already record the details of every passing car. State of the art technology can recognise the occupants too provided they are known to the database. Neighbourhood watch schemes are increasingly making use of surveillance cameras. New systems can be monitored by automatic systems, capable of recording not just the video footage, but zooming in on activities of interest, all without human intervention. We can monitor everyone that enters the neighbourhood and record their every move. People in large cities are videoed hundreds of times a day already. In a few years, the national network of such cameras will be able to keep track of all of our movements, who we were with and what we did. With data storage becoming ever cheaper and more abundant and cheap, there is little incentive ever to destroy this information.

On its own, this already can cover much of our lives. Other systems that we willingly accept exist in shops. We are paid a small discount on our shopping for details on all of our buying habits. A competent supermarket or credit card provider could build a good picture of our diet, clothing tastes, family makeup, our health, and age, when we take holidays, how often we have parties, and with what sorts of people, just to name a few items. They can sell this information to anyone for much more than they pay us!

Linking this together, we have a huge amount of data stored about us, detailing most of what we do. People say they don't mind because it is only people with something to hide that need fear. They are mistaken. Goalposts move frequently in modern society. 1984 considered surveillance, but also looked much closer to home, at what happens in our heads. This phase of 1984 is well under way too.

Political correctness is the enemy of open rational debate and greater knowledge, but is packaged as a basis for equality and fairness. It is a prohibitor of entire branches of research and thus knowledge acquisition. Increasing regulation and monitoring of business and social communications and systems is hard wiring this correctness into everything we do. Accelerating this social engineering with new technology will improve a very few areas of our lives but reduce overall freedom of thought and action, reduce individuality and ultimately quality of life for all. And yet, in spite of the fact that many of us liken political correctness to brain death, I am frequently dismayed by how much people go out of their way to show they are politically correct. If you doubt that people can be manipulated so easily, consider the evidence for morality inversion over the last three decades. When I was a child, people didn't dare to admit they were gay. Three decades later, anyone who casts any doubt on this being at least as good a way of life is cast out as a homophobe or a bigot. Back then, abortion was wrong, now anyone holding that view in the UK is oppressing women's' rights to choose. People used to accept responsibility for the consequences of their own actions, now many of us rush into court for compensation as soon as anything goes wrong. In fact, many traditional Christian values have gone from being normal to being regularly made fun of as antiquated and oppressive. So goalposts do move. You may think you are a person of upstanding character today, but the video evidence of this, when considered in three decades time, may be enough to prove you were anything but. Who knows which values will change and in which direction?

I live in the UK. In 2004, our 'government direct' initiative comes into flower and we will have a wonderfully efficient electronic link to government, making all our contacts with the state much easier and more efficient. A single point of call. But of course, this means that government need to streamline the access to our information. And they can easily access historical information. I'm not particularly worried by this in the short term. I often doubt the competence of the authorities but rarely worry about their possible desire to lock me up. But even though we have benign government today, does not mean it will forever be that way. Who knows whether there will be another war, and whether an invading force might want to access details on the people for less noble reasons. We now allegedly have a police force that keeps any DNA samples that they take when we appear in a police station for even small offences, even if we are innocent. The data collected by these various systems is not a complete picture of our lives, but it isn't very far short.

But technology isn't done yet either. People with severe disabilities now have hope of help via thought recognition. With a small brain implant, they can make the curtains close or the kettle switch on simply by thinking about it. This is where voice recognition was 30 years ago. In due course, thought recognition will be able to monitor what we are thinking. And where, and when, and with whom, or of whom. We could have ubiquitous and all-pervasive surveillance. But how could you refuse? Just think of all the thought crimes we could tackle. Surely you have nothing to hide?