IOTs have Ears

So, soon the walls will really have ears. The latest article on our machines listening to us would be funny if such as scenario didn’t feel like an impending dystopian future. This incident was purely accidental, but in the hands of an authoritarian regime (Putin? Xi Jinping? Viktor Orban? Trump?), such listening devices would be very scary. Already China has a social credit score system which seems to be dictating who gets to buy certain things or gets certain jobs.

Will we avoid living in new building in the hopes that older buildings will not have such listening devices? What about your refrigerators, your computers, your TV’s, any devices that could hold an IOT type of device within it? The world is going to be just proliferating with such devices and we will feel like we are in a surveillance society. Russia and other parts of the world may be used to this but in America, we are not. We are used to having our freedoms and we take it for granted.

Earlier this week I read an article about Amazon supplying police departments a facial recognition system. (Amazon again!) How about drones? Especially if we combine nano technology and drones. Somebody could fly a nanodrone down

your chimney and record you, audio-wise or visually or both, and you would never know it. Talk about utter compliance in thought and action. We all think differently, we all have different opinions, and freedom of speech is a relief valve allowing us to expound on our thoughts and opinions without exploding. Those NFL players kneeling to express how they felt about societal violence toward blacks is a non-violent way to tell society that something is wrong with such violence against blacks. You don’t want them to express their feelings and thoughts in a violent way and this method was the only way they felt would make society take notice – yes, it was offensive to “disrespect the anthem” but it got our attention. Actually, that disrespect probably has its historical precedence in our revolution when we disrespected the monarchy. I’m sure the English thought our ancestors were disrespectful.

So we have Alexa, we have facial recognition system, we have drones, we have social credit scores, we have all kinds of IOT devices being embedded everywhere, and we have an expanding artificial intelligence about to take our jobs. Oh, what a great time to be alive!