I saw myself in the mirror on my way to grab a muffin and was reminded that people sometimes refer to the face as “KC Cole” (mine); it makes them laugh for some reason. I wonder what genre it fits into. I even want to know?
Now come It’s actually kind of creepy. When I first started writing about “the future of reality, ” I suddenly realized that the worlds described in The Matrix all was too real. I don’t dare say it, because I think people will consider me your typical tech-challenged old man.
But it turns out I have a lot of esteemed (and younger) companies. Hardly Luddite, the people who push us to take the red pills these days are mostly visionaries like Lanier. A decade ago, he wrote the classic book You are not a gadget; More and more, he argued, you are right. In particular, you (we) are becoming “a computer peripheral attached to the great cloud computing”.
Microsoft’s Kate Crawford, in Map of AI. AI forces to “systematize the unsystematized”, reduces depth, removes notes of grace, flattens the experience and us with it.
Lanier and Co believe that the world would be a better place if people shared information freely; instead, he describes it as a place where we are always watching, transferring data whether we like it or not. (I wonder if the Amazon driver outside is being tracked by some instance of Smith – better keep him in line. We all know the answer to that.)
Huge troves of data have been scraped off the internet — your faces, habits, health, finances, kids, lovers, favorite actors, vacations, conversations with your Roomba — visit megacomputer to tweak what you see to keep you hooked, sell you stuff. It’s a one-way street. We are transparent to the megaserver, but they are not clear to us. Distant corporations use data to change our lives “in confusing ways,” Lanier writes. “You never really know what might happen if someone else’s cloud algorithm comes to a different conclusion about your potential as a lender, dater, or employee.”
The cinematic version matrix gets its fuel from human batteries. The huge network of machines we ironically call “the cloud” also feeds people: people extracting rare minerals, assembling equipment, driving trucks, loading packages, translating texts, stickers label and rate objects and faces (often inaccurately; especially if you’re female, dark-skinned, or otherwise).
Thousands of people have to maintain the illusion of lightweight, weightless automation. For these tasks, humans are cheaper than robots.
Attempting to reach this underground reality is as jarring as Neo’s first look at a series of baby-powered fuel cells. No one wants to hear about the costs: the massive carbon footprint of computing, the draining of water and the community’s electricity supply, the reliance on taxpayer-funded infrastructure, the sewer system. grooves, gas lines, optical fibers. There’s a reason why these supersonic planes are hidden away in remote areas.
