bodily privacy

I apologize in advance to anyone who is paranoid about being watched.  If so, don't read the rest of this post.  I'm serious.  This is about a prediction I am making that might make some such people uncomfortable.

I had a shocking realization recently.  I certainly hope that I am wrong, but I think that at some point in the future there are going to be unclothed pictures of pretty much everyone stored somewhere publicly accessible.  This isn't because I think that everyone is going to be an exhibitionist in the future, but simply due to technological advancement.

As a minor, slightly unrelated example of how fast privacy is going away, a couple of weeks ago a picture of NJ showed up on my Facebook news feed, except it was not a picture of NJ.  It was a picture of one of my Facebook friends taken and posted by someone he knows and with whom I am not friends on Facebook.  He just happened to be in the same restaurant we were in earlier that day, and NJ was simply in the background of the picture.  Just think of all of the people in the background of the pictures you have taken.  You're probably in just as many picture backgrounds as well, so there is pretty strong documentation of most places that you have been in public if the faces in the pictures could be properly indexed and searched.  Usually, that is not a big deal, but in some situations it may be.

I have long suspected that privacy as we think of it will become infeasible to maintain at some point in the future.  It is also easy to see in social media that a lot of people are very comfortable exposing specific aspects of themselves that society has traditionally deemed private.  Most of my contemplation to this point has centered around the privacy of thought rather than bodily privacy, however it makes sense that if we lose one we will lose the other.  If there are cameras everywhere to catch conversations and facial expressions, there will be cameras everywhere to undo other sorts of privacy as well.  These cameras might catch things inadvertently or intentionally, but the result is still the same that privacy will be violated.

The one thing I can think of that might strike down my predictions is that I can also consider is that anti-filming or camera detection technology will advance at the same pace, and that businesses and governments that manage public restrooms and changing areas invest in those technologies.  This will means that individuals will have to be diligent, and the question is whether that level of diligence is realistic.

As an extra consequence of this prediction, I believe that any companies that currently hold patents on technology to detect and/or disable hidden cameras will probably make a killing in the not-so-horribly-distant future.  Well, at least that is my paranoid prediction.  Hopefully, I am wrong about all of this, or I am at least wrong about how far in the future this reality is.

the end of privacy

This is the post where I sound like a crazy conspiracy theorist. I generally deride the claims that the government is watching every move we make; and I am not either pro- or anti-government, but rather believe we are placed under the systems that God has ordained. I am hoping that these facts provide a little validity to some of my anti-government-sounding, paranoid views below.

I read 1984 one time and that time was about fifteen years ago. While a lot of people view the society described in that book as a likely danger I thought the ideas proposed were ridiculously paranoid when I read them, and I largely still do think that way. I do think that there is one thing about that book that is an eventual inevitability in every society because of advances in technology, though. We will be monitored and that monitoring will be functionally similar the thought police described in the book.

One of the main focuses of 1984 is that people are constantly monitored and that potentially subversive elements of society are detected and spied on by thought police. While I do not like the government conspiracy aspect of the idea, the fact is that technology is going to get to the point in the not-too-distant future where every government (and corporation, and many individuals) will be able to almost accidentally monitor almost everyone in the world effortlessly. It will just take a different form than the book described.

One example is through social media. There is a lot you can tell about people from what they write even when they are purposely trying to hide it. The types of reactions that people post to things they read online, what they say about their preferences or who they admire, when they are active online, what aspects of themselves they decide to share or not to share, et al. I know there is already enough information available on this blog to provide a rather comprehensive personality and psychological profile on me if you know what to look for. Some day automated profiles will be created for everyone who has ever done anything public online simply because the software will be available to collect, parse, and categorize the relevant, freely-available data. Eventually, it will be easy to know everyone who is a threat to commit a certain crime in the future, or who poses a likely threat to a government, or who is the most prone to overpay for the things they buy. Not only that, but the profiles will provide information on everyone's weaknesses and drives, and so will detail how to keep them from doing those things the government does not want them to do. There will not be people who are thought police, but the function will exist through the stuff that we willingly share because that will be the price we pay for a convenient life.

Another example is through old-fashioned monitoring, but in a far less centralized way than was foreseen in 1984. In the book the government did all of the monitoring and no one else really got to know anything meaningful about their neighbors, but in reality we will do the monitoring and our connection with those around use will be what also provides information about us to everyone else who wants to know. People already geo-tag images and video that they upload to cheap or free. Eventually, there will be little point to not be recording and uploading your own video constantly, and some service will exist to collect all of that live video to get monitoring of everything happening everywhere where someone happens to have their device-with-a-camera-in-it (cellphones now, but who knows in the future) running. This is only one source of video. A lot of household products will eventually use video as a source of input (sort of like how the XBox 360 Kinect works), so a lot of inadvertent household audio/video will be made more public than people realize. This sounds bad, but it gets even creepier.

While most people will have video on them most of the time they are in public, simple images are not going to be the only thing that will be collected. Again, since it will be so easy to do, most of that video will eventually be hooked up to software that measures microexpressions. These are small and involuntary expressions that exist on people's faces for short enough periods of time that betray how they are feeling, and they are generally too short for most people to notice. A microexpression would not give away what specifically the person was thinking, but rather that he or she was unintentionally expressing boredom, distraction, contempt, physical attraction, stress, or any number of other feelings. With constant video and software to detect our feelings, the necessary facades of civilized society will disappear. To some people this may sound like a positive thing, but it truly will be more a curse than it will be a blessing. There are a lot of things that we really should not know about each other, and much of it has to do with how we feel about each other in specific situations. On top of that, the video that is collected containing peoples' reactions to different situations will be used to build personality and psychological profiles for every person alive who ever ventures into public or interacts with anyone else.

So, my prediction here is simply this. I think the people who are paranoid about online privacy are right that almost no one appreciates what they are giving up by using social media services, such as this blog for example. I also think, however, that resistance is futile simply because it will be impossible to hide from all of the possible ways to collect data, and even if you found a way to successfully do so that would only make you look suspicious to those you are trying to hide from. Frankly, it will say something about you that you are trying to avoid detection in the first place. Our experiences, our emotions, and our very existences will be naked and on display for the world to see. So, rather than being scared about what is going to happen anyway, enjoy your privacy while you still have it. Fear and paranoia won't look good on a personality profile anyway.

future capitalism/socialism

As is typical for most science fiction fans, I like to try to figure out what the future holds. I am especially interested in those things that will probably impact me or my family so that keeps me to near-term predictions, which is great because they are easier to make anyway.

Since most political debate of late has focused on where on the Capitalist to Socialist continuum the country should reside, and since the economics of pay, social welfare, regulation, and taxation have been in the news a lot over the last year, my futurism thoughts have been largely employment-related. While the future trajectory of work could be different than I predict, I think my following predictions are the most likely scenario. My prediction is that American society is going to get more Capitalistic in the short term (for the next ten years, maybe), then it is going to get very Socialistic after that. I am biased to believing I am right, but it just feels inevitable to me.

I believe that the country is primed to become more capitalistic in the short term for a few reasons which I will list below.

1. A more capitalistic free market system is the way the political pendulum is swinging right now.
2. Probably most important, technology will enable people to freelance more and will allow companies to hire freelancers rather than maintaining a staff of people to do specific tasks. The internal functioning of most companies is actually more authoritarian than capitalistic, so a free market system that relies on freelancers is actually much more capitalistic
   
3. A lot of people in the United States long to be able to be their own boss without really thinking through the implications of that are.
4. It is possible that if any more tinkering is done with healthcare that someone might figure out how to decouple health insurance from people's place of employment. Believe it or not, this would lead to a more capitalistic employment system because there would be more incentive for people to try to freelance rather than hold down a steady job.

This period of increased Capitalism cannot last for long, though. At some point it will become dramatically more socialistic. A few of the reasons for this are below.

1. A lot of people will find that freelancing is great when the economy is great, but it is rough when no one is buying services. The first strong economic downturn will push former freelance capitalists toward the security of Socialism.
2. Capitalism relies on people acting in their own personal interests. No one cares when things are good, but it makes capitalist greed a popular scapegoat when things turn sour. This means that people tend to lean more socialist during bad economic times. This is a tendency that already exists, but it will be magnified by the other things I am mentioning.
   
3. Automated technology will eventually replace most jobs. If you have seen WALL-E, think about the automated world presented in that movie. In a world like that where every necessary function is performed by an automated system what possible service can a typical person provide to earn money to make a living? I do not know how long it will take, but eventually almost every job conceivable (even "creative" jobs, which are believed to be safer) will be performed by some computerized system. When a critical mass of job functions no longer exists for people to perform for payment, capitalistic society will either collapse or morph. Both of those options will eventually lead to Socialism, though the second would be far less painful.
   
4. Going with the WALL-E theme, if there is any type of society where Socialism works, it is in the society where no one can produce anything better than an existing automated system can produce it. Pure socialist societies today have serious incentive problems that a "WALL-E World" (my term) society simply would not have.
   
5. Most people are actually more socialistic than they think they are based on the services they believe government should provide. This means that they can palate some Socialism so long as it is not called "Socialism," and this will be how a socialist system can be established.
   

I should note that I do not think that there really is not any one system that is inherently more Godly than any other system. I think the most effective system does not go to either extreme, but effectiveness does not equate to Godliness, either. I do happen to believe that we will be cycling through a few different types in the coming years, so we will be finding out what the good and the bad implications of each system are firsthand.

cars in the future

I will warn everyone ahead of time that this post is basically my prediction for the future of transportation. I can see that interesting some people and severely boring others. If you are bored by speculation regarding the future of cars, then don't bother reading this post. Don't you wish everything I wrote came with this disclaimer?

Everyone knows that Toyota has been in the news lately for problems with breaking. For people who own a Toyota vehicle this must be a bit nerve-wracking. For some people adamantly against the idea of buying a car assembled in the United States by a non-unionized Japanese company, I think there is a bit of restrained glee (I decided not to use the word "schadenfreude" because the word seems pretentious). While a lot of people have gotten the idea that this proves the reputation of Toyota's manufacturing excellence a farce, I have to disagree.

Since the issues sound like they are due to very quirky behaviors with the software, this has very little to do with Toyota's ability to assemble a quality car. Software development is a whole different world from car development. Because of this, situations like this one with Toyota and future similar incidents are almost inevitable. As long as we rely on large amounts of software to automate functionality in our vehicles, and we will more and more in future years for economic reasons, inevitable defects will appear. Just due to random chance, some will impact important functions such as the car's ability to stop. This is just speculation, but it sounds like automotive software issues are more difficult to diagnose and fix as well because Toyota sounds to me like it is stalling until the software issue is identified and addressed.

As someone who has spent several years devoted to supporting software and interacting with the support staffs of other software companies I feel I have some qualification to compare expected standards for software compared to automotives. Software is typically held to a lower standard. For example, if a defect makes your browser crash and you have to reboot that is irritating, but it is not entirely unexpected. If your car steering fails to function one day while you are on the highway because of a defect that is much more unexpected and serious. While a Windows defect could cause Microsoft customers some pain a defect in a Prius could cost a customer his or her life.

As an example of what I am talking about, part of the reason that the things NASA builds are so expensive is that there is almost no tolerance for defects. It is very difficult to fix something that is millions of miles away, so it has to be nearly perfect. Even with these standards, NASA has had many serious failures over the years with both hardware and software, and I would argue that as stupid as many of the defects were, having them was quite nearly unavoidable. It is likewise unavoidable that some software glitch is going to cause some serious automotive issues that take lives.

I have considered this quite a bit. It only makes sense that the next big advance in automobiles will be self-driving vehicles. Technically, it is close to possible to build a car that can drive itself already. Prototypes have been made, but they are not anywhere near safe enough to use on the road. The technology simply is not mature enough, but most of the remaining research involves details rather than undeveloped technology.

I expect that the technology will start with semi trucks since the drivers can still take over the vehicle from auto-pilot if there are problems. Eventually, though, the technology will become advanced enough that no truck driver will be needed in the vehicle even as an emergency co-pilot. The day that the technology is mature enough to allow for self-driven cars unmonitored by a human will be a good day for consumers because of cheaper shipping, but it will be a very bad day for anyone who makes a living largely based on their having a CDL. On that day school buses will not have drivers, but rather just an adult who keeps order. Domestic airlines will lose a lot of business because it will be easier and cheaper to rent a car equipped with a bed overnight and sleep while the car does the driving than it will be to deal with the hassle of a flight. Hotels that are not destination hotels will be hurt as well for the same reason: That no one will need to stop for a rest midway through their trip. This should also reduce the need to expand roads and lessen our dependence on oil because an automated car uses less gas than a manually driven car does and can drive closer to other vehicles (reducing its road footprint). All of this is almost technically possible now (or at least within five years), but it will probably not happen for the next twenty because of the problems that Toyota is having now.

What I expect will happen is that small bits of automated functionality will be introduced into cars slowly, such as Lexus' automated parallel parking. Even though the current pace of adding automation to cars is relatively slow, it will get even slower because sooner or later another software issue like what Toyota is seeing will appear and another CEO will be called before Congress to get chewed out regarding his inability to fix some issue that no one entirely understands but that is causing random accidents. This will happen a handful of times and each time it does it will slow the deployment of new automated functionality to a standstill.

Eventually, though, the technology will mature and the next generation will tell their kids about the good old days when cars came with steering wheels, gas pedals, and bucket seats. Not only that, we also had to drive barefoot through the snow uphill both ways...