The Matrix will start in 2025
and there is no need for you to plug into it. You already are.
A couple of weeks ago, Google announced its prediction that Internet of Things (IoT) devices will overtake Non-IoT ones by 2025. Twitter user Pierre Metivier correctly pointed out how misleading that title is: non IOT-devices are nothing else but STANDARD computers.
Another fundamental point of that article is that “the growth in IoT is driving Google’s Coral initiative for embedding Machine Learning capabilities, with all its limits, directly in IoT hardware”.
“IoT” hardware? What is “IoT hardware”?
The Internet of Things has a potentially crucial role in many serious problems of our time, from fighting pollution to industry automation. But if we are to believe the current hype and industry expectations, a lot of IoT hardware should be everyday consumer products physically attached to us, or in our immediate vicinity: watches, shoes, fridges, cars and so on. So, if we combine it with the machine learning part, what that prediction means is that we are only six years from:
computers controlled by other computers, not humans, all around us, controlling humans.
Computers feeding humans with inputs, grabbing their outputs. Which, in case you hadn’t noticed, is exactly the situation in which Neo found himself:
Of course, as it always happens, a major part of the real problem here is which humans control the computers controlling all the other computers.
Who writes this, why, and how to help
I am Marco Fioretti, tech writer and aspiring polymath doing human-digital research and popularization.
I do it because YOUR civil rights and the quality of YOUR life depend every year more on how software is used AROUND you.
To this end, I have already shared more than a million words on this blog, without any paywall or user tracking, and am sharing the next million through a newsletter, also without any paywall.
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