Much has been written about the digital age and the menial day to day tasks that it purports to save us from; much too has been written about the enslavement of people through the digital age - an Orwellian world in which people are monitored and controlled around the clock.
Regular viewers and readers will be aware that that world is becoming more of a reality day by day, and, according to the mainstream media, organisations such as Microsoft and Google are bringing us ever closer to the precipice of no return.
Google's and Microsoft's latest claim is that their new programme, ‘Far Out’, is able to predict our future movements by monitoring our current movements via GPS. Such a claim is truly ‘far out’ since what we are discussing is the fine tuning of technologies which are able to monitor us on a daily basis.
What purpose or benefit does this sort of technology serve the common man? What benefit is there for us to know what we may or may not be doing in several years time? None. But there is a great many benefits that can be derived from such technology for governments and corporations.
For governments there is the ability to track the movements of people, even opening up future technologies in the field of thought crime or pre crime, where government agents are able to predict the movements or behaviors of people. Such technologies are perhaps not entirely accurate in their assumptions, but none the less correctional and penal services and revenue collections will be licking their lips in anticipation of such technology.
For corporations, not only would they be able to predict our movements, and therefore know when and where to place their products to entice us to buy, but they may even be able to use such technology to steer us in a direction they want. Couple this with the implementation of automated cars and a cashless society and we are running into a world where at the touch of the button a car could be incapacitated or a bank account could be terminated should the user disagree, or refuse to comply, with a select elite few; or perhaps for actions they had not yet taken, should such technology come to be used.
That is not to suggest that technology, even this sort, is a threat to us as individuals. Under the right circumstances technologies that can monitor or predict our movements, transport us or even manage transactions digitally are extremely beneficial, all of which are perfectly fine when presided over by trustworthy people; the problem is is that we do not live in a world governed by trustworthy people