final thoughts: 1984 irl?

There are a lot of things preventing 1984 from becoming a reality. Quite notably, the premise of oligarchical collectivism’s success is constant war. With ever-increasing advances in technology, our “wars” are probably conducted remotely through drones, cyberattacks, and whatever else you can conjure up. In this manner, the public might not even know about what’s going on for the most part, much less be driven to complacency. 

If we were living in a dystopian world, realistically, the “dystopian” aspect would revolve around living in a surveillance state. One telescreen, ha. My house alone has more than a dozen devices that could easily be used to spy on me (phones, laptops, TVs, smart clocks, and the list goes on). “Ideally,” he dystopian group in power would be able to track everyone’s behaviors, run them through sophisticated artificial intelligences, and be able to predict everyone’s next moves, or even their thoughts. However, I don’t think our thoughts would be suppressed, at least not as of right now. If anything, with social media, people express their opinions now more than ever. 

But maybe thoughts would be restricted, in that the information we receive lines up with a particular ideology, such as oligarchical collectivism. It depends on what the dystopian society’s agenda is: a misguided sense of equality, global domination, or simply power for its own sake? The list goes on. 

The world already had things like this happen, even in countries that are less authoritarian, like the U.S. For example, post-9/11, I recall hearing that there was a project that changed the internet itself for anyone with an Islamic or Islamic-passing name, literally attempting to restrict the scope of thought for a particular group of people. That alone is beyond scary. 

And the disturbing reality of the Social Credit System in China is probably where we’ll be headed soon. Think of something analogous to our “credit score” system on AI steroids, like that one book where everyone gets like a “citizenship score” and it determines their social status, privileges, etc. I definitely think that most cities will become surveillance states. 

Having done research with AI and machine learning with medical applications myself, I am well-aware of the disturbing realities of what a surveillance state could do. Biometric data alone can indicate someone’s overall health, whether they have type 2 diabetes (retina scans), and so much more. I feel like, ironically, improper use of AI in society could exacerbate all kinds of disparities, not just those related to health. I don’t even want to talk about what could happen with gene editing. 

If an ideology that centers around conformity ever came into play in the U.S., to some extent, I think it’s inevitable that we would live in a dystopia. I mean, a global pandemic is basically like a dystopia, or at least an event momentous enough to trigger one into occurring. So yeah, I’m not particularly optimistic about how technology and society will interact.

Comments

  1. L. MoffittMarch 11, 2021 at 9:51 AM

    I'm not an optimist either, not even a little, but I suppose what we need to work on is our sense of ethics first and foremost. Technology is going to happen and keep happening. Some good will come out of it, but also a lot of not-so-good, and maybe the only way to deal with the not-good is to be ever vigilant about it. Not much of an answer, but it's what I got.

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