Fun

Technology is awesome, but I’ve noticed that many technophiles tend to have a rather optimistic view of human nature. They’re the ones who assumed that radio was going to broadcast fine opera to the masses (rather than breakfast radio), that television was going to be an educational boon (rather than a mindless distraction) and that the internet was going to be dominated by the thrill of hot porn (rather than the inanity of Facebook).


This naivety continues today. As the rate of technological advancement accelerates, futurists like Ray Kurzweil make predictions like this:


"By the late 2020s, nanobots in our brain, that will get there noninvasively, through the capillaries, will create full-immersion virtual-reality environments from within the nervous system. So if you want to go into virtual reality the nanobots shut down the signals coming from your real senses and replace them with the signals that your brain would be receiving if you were actually in the virtual environment. So this will provide full-immersion virtual reality incorporating all of the senses."


Well yes, that might happen. But I immediately notice that Kurzweil’s sunny little technoworld assumes that no one in the future is a sociopathic jerk.


Let’s face it, if this prediction comes true and we all have VR nanobots in our brains, every SINGLE day thousands upon thousands of suckers (the same people who fall for email and phishing scams) will click on a bad link and have goodness only knows what downloaded directly into their brains.


Bear this is in mind, technophiles: if you think it's bad having to fix your mother's computer when she foolishly clicks on a file called cutekitties.exe, just wait until she's downloaded a nanobot virus that locks her brain into a virtual reality of torture porn.