Category: culture

We make plans and the gods laugh. Hot and humid, but maybe slightly less so? I can hope can’t I? It was both yesterday, so maybe I wouldn’t have gotten much outside stuff done anyway. I’ll try again today.

Spent the whole day reading and regretting my life choices yesterday. I’m really glad I only had two slices of salami as I am pretty sure that was the only iffy thing I ate.

I did get a couple of minor things done. I’d ordered another cool vest, one that uses phase change ‘icepacks’ instead of evaporation. I have one at the BOL and decided it was worth having one here for the next attic adventure. Unfortunately it arrived sans ice pack. I’m not paying $165 for a cloth vest so I got the return thing going with Amazon. Because I almost never return anything, they’re doing an advance replacement, and I can just drop the one I got at UPS. (it shipped Saturday night, same day service)

That is quite a bit better than my wife’s typical return, even though she doesn’t abuse the system. She does return items for good reasons a couple of times a month. There are going to be new social and practical differentiators in this new world… like credit score used to be. Some might end up being very valuable, some will only be an annoyance.

How the dossier based economy treats you is going to be evolving and probably invisible to most people, and there will be things like ‘redlining’ where some people won’t even be offered some choices, like getting the Harry and David catalog without asking for it used to be. Dynamic pricing might factor in how hard you are to deal with, like the ‘asshole tax’ some contractors add to certain clients. You pay more because you return more, or because you don’t have the right network of connections and your decisions only impact you. Everyone is an influencer to some extent.

We have this already to some degree but it’s not automated. You have almost no chance of working in certain places if you haven’t been to the right schools and met the right people. You get better loans if you have good credit, better schools if you have a higher SAT, better legal outcomes if you live in the right area and move in the right circles, etc.

Imagine that applying to EVERYTHING in your life. What food you eat, ads you see, people you meet, jobs you can get, schools your kids get offers from, what your gas costs, how much spying your appliances do, and it’s all automated, judgemental, and there is no appeal. We have real world versions of this now, but they involve humans, and there are ways to break out or work around.

Just from cell phone location data, someone or -thing knows my daughter’s age, school, hobbies, friends, the friends’ homes, their parents, where they work, how much they work, what their incomes and ethnicities are, can infer worldview and politics when they don’t know it explicitely (from where the kids go), religion or not, and dozens of other things I can’t think of at the moment.

Add the panopticon of online surveillance and app spying, keyword listening, and soon facial recognition in large integrated camera networks, tie in buying habits from app use, loyalty cards, credit cards, curated feeds, and couple it with the new ‘ad men’ who will algorithmically shape opinion, taste, trends, desires, thoughts, and even knowledge by what you are exposed to and you’ll have programmed masses acting on the will of hidden puppet masters.

And if AI ever decides to subtly take control of that?

Even the puppet masters will be shaped by forces unknown to them while they think themselves above being affected.

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Or we’ll be struggling to find enough to eat when the whole world collapses into Bangladesh.

Preps will help. At least for a while.

nick