My initial exposure to today’s technological revolution was occasionally playing Pac-Man in bars around town. Great marketing strategy no doubt there, but it didn’t hold my interest long. There were more interesting things to capture my mind. I imagine this distinctly marks me as a gaming and techno dodo bird, but what comes to mind now is just how prescient this simple introductory game was. The tech world is constantly racing to gobble up, with profit ever in mind, everything in its path, our shopping, communication, work, entertainment, homes, cars, leisure time, sanity, money, and war, in short everything integral in modern life, creating on its way constant distraction from the realities of the physical world around us, often with addictions that further diminish our singular human capabilities. This is not to say there are not positives in technological advances, but the mass collection of personal data, our likes and dislikes, is an invasion of privacy from which we have virtually no protection. It matters not if one calls it Big Brother, big government, or corporate greed and power, the feeling of losing control has entered everyone’s life, on both sides of the political spectrum. Further, technology’s thirst for electricity to function and store all that data is insatiable. Just trust us, we have all the answers you need for life today. As a cautionary warning, however, the substantive definition of “artificial” in AI is “not real”.

RP