Enslaved

You know, Genesis did get it right.

That fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil? It really is too much power to behold without the moral righteousness to wield the power appropriately.

And God was rightfully angry about it when Adam and Eve partook of that fruit.

Now I am not saying that it is wrong to learn more about things. I am saying that the act of learning more about things must be backed with an equivalent increase in understanding of the associated moral and ethical ramifications.

This is largely summarised in the trite observation that ``they did it to see if they could, but they never stopped to think if they should''.

While reading The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power by Shoshana Zuboff, I am getting increasingly depressed at the future that we are facing (this is after reading Parts 1 and most of Part 2). Much good can come from applying automation to assist in our understanding of the world, and yet what transpired from all that automation was just new ways of exploiting people in the name of capitalism, with seemingly futile push back from those who stand in defense for whatever is left of our collective conscience on what is ethnically and morally acceptable. The new ways of exploitation are ethnically questionable for the simple reason that they rely on deceitful practices and interfere strongly in ways that impinge upon one's ability to make one's choices to live one's life.

It's appalling and saddening.

It would seem like instead of merely being born into fleshly slavery that came about from the industrial revolution, we are now being born into mental slavery as well that comes from this second revolution of capitalism that Zuboff calls ``surveillance capitalism''. The cages now have bars that are invisible even to the mind's eye, because these generations now grow up in a world where a true sense of self was never experienced before. Combine that with the pervasive influences of commercial interests with these thought ``hijacking'', the generations after mine can no longer tell if a thought that they have was borne of their own experience, or if it is from a carefully guided one through the non-stop intrusion of surveillance capitalism.

It is depressing, to say the least, and in many ways, strengthens my resolve to not bring in any humans into this new-age serfdom.

But the money is always so good... its spillover effects seemingly benefitting society, creating that hard-to-answer rebuttal question: ``oh you so smart, you see this thing that everyone likes as a problem... then what is your solution, smarty pants!''.

If I knew, I would have been a hegemon of the world, and not an armchair prophet metaphorically shouting about how we are ending the world with our own hands.

We're supposed to tame our creations with the knowledge of computation, not enslave ourselves who aren't created by us. Why did it all go so wrong then?