TED Talk: Troubling Technology Take-over
TED stands for Technology Entertainment and Design and is a world organization. In the TED Talk videos they talk about technology, they talk about different aspects of technology. I have recently watched a video of Malte Spitz talking about how phone companies are watching people. He explained how he asked his phone company what information they have collected from his cellular device and received it. He showed all of the data and the data was where he has been and when he called someone and for how long. Basically, they
tracked him and knew where he was every moment of every day. I find this extremely disturbing. I have a smartphone and when I think that I am being tracked, I want to fling it away and never pick it up, but I do anyways. We have become dependent on technology and it has started to take over the world we live in. The people who control this data have a lot of power in their hands. If they become corrupt (like most government officials have been known to be) the consequences can be horrendous. They may construct a totalitarianism society that may control everyone with the one object that almost everyone has. On the other hand, it may not be all that bad. Using this technology and taking information of entire populations, they may actually help people. If they know what is going on and a crime is being planned, they can take measures to prevent it kind of like the show Persons of Interest, where they stop the crimes before they happen. It would be much better if say they were able to prevent the terrorist attacks on 9/11. Millions of lives would be saved. The pros and cons have to be weighed and it is my opinion that the cons outweigh the pros. I think it would be nice for crimes to be stopped, but also feel that I would have less freedom when tracked. I think that the system should be optional so that people who feel that it would be better to be "in the loop" or so to speak can be while more cynically-minded people, like myself, would choose to decline.