Doubt it. Didn’t happen with rubber. Didn’t happen with chocolate. Didn’t happen with Californian tomatoes. Technology will press the exploitation out when you don’t need people.
I don't think so, because people will figure out the weak spots and share this information. It will become a sport and people will think "last time I grabbed the milk like this, and they didn't charge me for it, what if I do it again tomorrow?" Hackers will start wearing special clothes with dazzle patterns or with grocery items to fool the system, etc.
"People are using the contingent stupidity of our current government to replace lots of human interaction with mechanisms that cannot be coordinated even in principle. I totally understand why all these things are good right now when most of what our government does is stupid and unnecessary. But there is going to come a time when – after one too many bioweapon or nanotech or nuclear incidents – we, as a civilization, are going to wish we hadn’t established untraceable and unstoppable ways of selling products."
As technology improves, it's hard to imagine regulations keeping pace with preventing this sort of thing ... And even if they did, then it would only be used by criminals and governments (while I may call it criminal, they would likely exclude themselves from any such regulation), and I'm not sure that situation (criminals and governments being the only users of the technology) is a better situation than the technology being available to all.
Currently people are still free to write and publish without paying rent to a patent holder. I don't think ycombinator, for example, is yet paying anyone other than their host/ISP to run this site. But you know someone is going to patent blogs, and web pages in general, they're gold nuggets just waiting to be picked up off the ground.
We here are more aware of it because it's affecting us first. That the general public hasn't been directly affected and probably isn't really aware of what's happening also shows that it's only the beginning.
Food is still free, as in libre. Anyone is free to raise their own chickens, vegetables and goats, notwithstanding zoning laws, and to trade seeds and stud services. Monsanto and their ilk are working hard to push self-reproducing seeds out of the food chain, and blanket the earth with Roundup so that only Roundup ready plants will live. I'm assuming animals, via cloning and mules, are in our near future.
Hackers will suddenly become some of the most valuable people in society. Those tractors will be jailbroken inside of a month.
The average human wants to survive. If that survival is predicating on knowing about sustainable potato agriculture, you better believe that folks will learn.
I’d wager yes firmly, a privacy invasive technology does not just fall from the sky. Salespeople are pimping it hard, and the world incrementally becomes more like a dystopian hellscape
I don't think it would, because they leaked admin credentials (unless it was encrypted with a customer key and inaccessible to admin/support)
Anyway, I think we're at the point with software/digital systems where food manufacturing was in 1900: there's been a gold-rush due to new technology, and we're reaching peak negligence in the pursuit of profit, and I think we'll soon get to a threshold where regulators will finally step in and lock down the wild-west and impose some real standards. Between SolarWinds, Exchange, and now this, it's to a point where it's dragging down our whole society. Something has to give.
No, not at the moment, but 60 something years from now it probably will be; that's a lot of time to spend making bits flip so some man or woman I'll likely never meet can be advertised to in some new innovative disruptive way (or whatever mundane/evil task your industry is involved in).
One possible outcome of this is humans stop producing freely accessible digital artifacts like text, code lest they get replaced by machines who can mimic them and which controlled by tech moguls.
If it remains a "free" (perhaps monopolized but mostly unregulated) market, we can expect that behavior to continue.
Not everyone in society seems to be equally vulnerable to those algorithms. We might reasonably expect a Darwinian loss of populations who are. More hopefulñy, at least some people are able to outgrow such addictions.
Of course there will always be entities who try to break the system - either through technical, political, or social means. Fortunately the existing agencies who had enough power to do this have lost their credibility, so I doubt they will be steering people back anytime soon.
I am not sure if what I said above is even possible, but I hope it is. Trying to remove the side effects of humanity from something created by humans is not an easy task.
reply