In 2016, I ran across three articles that appeared on Digg the same day involving technology and they caught my interest regarding the power of what I call technology convergences, what they might be, how they fit in the evolution of our culture and if we have any influence over them.

The three articles:

• Boston Scientific’s 2mn video on its functioning bipedal robot (a must-watch).
• Inside Mexico City’s new Surveillance Center.
• Is Predictive Policing Ethical? (page no longer available)

While the articles arguably showcased separate technology streams involving robotics, pervasive visibility and data science, it’s easy to see how these technologies might connect and feed off each other in the future.

The larger meta-point from this reflection became a question: how much influence do we really have over where technology is leading us in light of these emerging convergences?

When I watched Atlas, Boston Scientific’s bipedal robot, I could hardly believe my eyes and several thoughts entered my mind:

• Is Atlas a proto-RoboCop in the making?
• Could this be the future of ‘who’ will provision or manage Amazon warehouses in the future?

When I read about Mexico City’s recently built militaristic bunker which is a NASA-like Orwellian surveillance control center for that vast metropolis, I could only imagine:

• Where is privacy headed? Had a London-style pervasive surveillance come south of the border? The article raised key questions about “the nature of power and the roles of humans and technological vision.”

The article on the ethics of predictive policing may need some explanation since I’m not sure how widely understood the term “predictive” is. Predictive in the context of data science means applying statistical methods over big datasets and building program algorithms that find patterns and correlations over people patterns.

I can tell you that this article definitely conjured up visions of Minority Report as seen through the lens of machine learning and data science rather than psychic viewing.

Son of Big Brother?

We now live in the age of “big data” where everything we do is increasingly being tracked and recorded through the long reach of cameras and digital interactions.

Every interaction through laptop, tablet, phone, device, wearable, sensor, appliance can now be a data point captured and stitched for eventual analysis and tracking.

What happens when these technology streams get increasingly interconnected through emergent cross-pollination of tech streams seeking innovation, creative outlet or economic gain?

• What happens when robots and drones come at the service of surveillance centers or the police in general?
• How far will predictive analytics further illuminate patterns hidden in people data then to be used to enhance law enforcement control? Our economic behaviors online are already being stitched in the background for prospective marketers. Our actual location behaviors are now also being tracked through our phone. 
• When does the pervasive connectivity allowed by tech turn into a surveillance political economy? 

I would argue that we have very little influence as individual citizens in the society we live in today over our cultural-economic evolution. While we reputedly live in the West’s free-market system, it’s not hard to imagine a slow drift into a controlled political economy happening without our being aware of it if the natural forces at play in technology convergences come to emerge in force.

What to do?

It’s hard to predict the impact of these technology convergences which are not necessarily bad but expose us to the risk of remaining as passive participants, uninformed of the consequences of the evolving tech forces in our economy. Who knows what emerging properties will blossom from these to our detriment as free agents? 

The first step, of course, is to become aware that technology unwisely applied runs the risk of stripping us of our humanity by progressively depriving us of freedom and of the natural diversity that comes with being human.

We must seek to imagine our future otherwise it will be defined for us and most likely against our will.

What do you think, do you have a feeling around this?