Let’s start with a story, set in a clinic several years in the future. In many ways this clinic resembles the clinics as we know them today. People come when suffering from ailments or for a regular checkup. But there is a difference. When a doctor decides a patient is in need of an X-Ray, a blood test or another test, a computer combines the results of these tests with data from the government. The fact that the government possesses a lot of information about its citizens, including medical data, is taken for granted. The government has a say in the healthcare of its citizens, managing all their data securely, carefully and forever. But how did we get there, you ask? Let’s elaborate.
The transition to one all-encompassing government system was made possible by technological developments in the late 20th and early 21st century. Back then, the world was a fractured place, both on a political and economic level. There were endless opinions and ideas, resulting in tedious discussions and indecisiveness. But after the arrival of the Internet and the subsequent birth of global social media platforms, this started to change. Smart algorithms, the capability of social media platforms to gather and process enormous amounts of data, and the ever-increasing use of artificial intelligence transformed society. Social media platforms devised cunning ways to captivate their users. A like button was introduced, giving users instant gratification when they shared their content. Emojis where added, so people could express their feelings with hearts or teary-eyed smileys. Lastly, by creating user profiles, social media platforms learned how to feed users information that appealed to them, information about ideas, events and products they previously showed interest in. This technique inadvertently created groups of users with similar ideas and world views, so-called echo chambers. And it turned out that if managed efficiently, exactly as is been done with medical diagnoses, you could simply ‘treat’ users with the same profile as you treat patients with the same diagnosis.
You might think, what do social media platforms have to do with politics and government? The information people found interesting, not coincidentally the same information social media platforms fed them through their smartphones and tablets, was usually biased. Positive news about their own group was emphasized along with negative reports about other groups. Echo chambers became political movements. At the same time, social platforms kept refining their algorithms in order to captivate their users’ attention for longer periods of time. As a result, advertisement revenues of social media companies increased exponentially. And so did their power. It was up to the government to regulate the influence that social media companies held over their users and society as a whole. This caused an interdependency between social media companies and the authorities, while at the same time all parties were competing with each other. A clash was inevitable, and when the dust settled, one social media platform was still standing. The surviving platform was completely interconnected with the government, providing the means to bring about a new world order. This is a world order wherein all forms of social turmoil can be identified at an early stage and dealt with appropriately. For example, using behavioral pattern recognition – another gift of artificial intelligence – a sophisticated social credit system was developed. It enabled the government to manipulate people into behaving in an increasingly modified way. Understanding the far-reaching implications of behavioral modification, a strict set of rules and regulations is set into place. And to permanently remove human bias, the social credit score system isn’t run by humans but by computer algorithms.
Let’s return to our futuristic clinic. Compared to our day and age, the work of the medical practitioners is rather easy. Thanks to the technological advancements of the previous decades, there are protocols in place to correct every deviation of the norm, be it mentally or physically. This is possible because data is being collected about every citizen, and algorithms are capable of recognizing and adjusting deficiencies without human interference. Powered by sophisticated supercomputers, an omnipresent system works day and night to improve citizens’ health to a general standard, making people resemble each other more and more. Everybody becomes standardized and the equalization of citizens reaches the point where nobody has to be modified anymore. In the year 2050 the world comes to a standstill…….
Fortunately, there is another way.