Which could be good or bad, depending on whether you agree with the statement that ignorance is bliss. For instance, if you had asked me 5 years ago whether owning a self-driving car would be awesome, I would have answered with an enthusiastic yes. Now, as a novice-to-journeyman software engineer, if I had to own a car at all, I'd buy one made before computers became a fundamental component inside most vehicles (got my eye on a 1976 Chevy Silverado, but I digress).

Call me paranoid, but I can't help but feel it's only a matter of time before some hacker gains control of a highway full of cars and demands X # of bitcoin from their occupants or he'll drive them all off a bridge.(1) I can't un-see that image in my head, and it terrifies me. Security professionals need to be right every single time in order to be successful at their jobs. Hackers need to be right only once to be successful at theirs. It's a Sisyphean task trying to keep people physically safe in a digital age, let alone keep their privacy intact.

Which brings me to my other point- technology being used by those in power to maintain and expand that power by weakening our expectations of privacy:

-Social media platforms are being co-opted to derive insights about everyday people that even they don't know about themselves, and these insights are being used to manipulate their behavior at the voting booth, at the shopping mall, etc.(2)

-Governments are creating "social credit scores" based on how well a citizen tows the official party line, who they associate with, or the opinions they express. And these scores can affect everything from their job prospects to their ability to get a loan to their very geographic mobility.(3)

-Facial recognition technology is being deployed in traffic cameras and even in wearable technology to make it easier to pick "undesirables" out of a crowd.(4)

I don't mean to single out one single country. If this technology exists, there's a greater-than-zero chance in any country that sooner or later a leader will come along who will seek to use that technology for their own gain.

Sorry to get so dark, I don't mean to sound overly dramatic. I never thought of myself as a tinfoil-hat type of person, and I hate that I'm essentially slowly turning into one. Technology does a lot of good too, I'm just genuinely scared for the future.

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