Fish bowls, their impending shrinking in size and our ability to influence this new world

As the world gets smaller, privacy ceases to exist and we all live in fish bowls.

I’m scared, the world of the book 1984 might just come true in the near future. Watched, every move tracked, everything you have ever written or said is recorded for storage. The word “privacy” shall be erased from our dictionaries in the future for no such concept will exist then. We can just be like Truman in The Truman Show, only that we can see it coming before it actually happens. Google seems primed to be that director for each of our TV shows. In this article, it is so said that Google has kept tracked of every bit of data it has come across and puts them away in some gigantic storage facility for safekeeping. I mean, isn’t that just a huge repository of all our lives? Sounds a little to me like a mini-God climbing his/her way to becoming an omnipotent God and I don’t know if that is a good or bad thing.

And what’s even worse, pod slurping: enabling sneaky peeps to plug an iPod into any computer machine and in a manner of minutes be able to transport the whole business structure on which the company thrives on away. So your new middle-aged cleaning lady could be a spy from a competitor and the next day, you find yourself out of business. How potentially threatening can this get? To me, this proves the huge ability of technology to disrupt our lives and cause humanity to take leaps forward (or backward, depending on one’s viewpoint) and this is also why, as technopreneurs, we have a great responsibility and thus power in our hands.

I do not believe in creating something that harms the human race or the world in which we reside in. That’s not long-term vision, that’s just being selfish and hopelessly myopic. Like say, something as simple as heroin, it is used to alleviate pain in patients yet it is abused by others. Then we move on to the argument that technology can both benefit as well as corrupt. True. And while some may say that a true mercenary business person might not care about benefiting mankind and would pounce upon a money-spinning idea any time, and that we cannot do much about them, but I am sure that the phrase – every small step counts – rings a bell. I truly believe in it. It will be almost inevitable that your technology might be utilized in a way that is not beneficial to most of mankind but instead insidiously corrupts him, but it is our choice to choose the right path and champion it such that at the end of it all, we win. Instead of conniving individuals who only care about when the next moolah comes in.

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