Algorithm and Blues: The Tyranny of the Coming Smart-Tech Utopia
&gt; Most people do not subscribe fully or exclusively to the ideals embedded in the smart-tech utopian vision, yet they’ll have no choice but to live by those ideals.<p>All too true. The kinds of comment like &quot;but they can just not use X&quot; always appear in the context of Facebook&#x2F;Google (often when they appear on HN). But that&#x27;s like saying you should just &quot;not use CCTV&quot;. I&#x27;m not a user of FB&#x2F;Google&#x2F;Smart Tech, it uses me, and when it is deployed pervasively, it becomes by definition, impossible to avoid. I can&#x27;t stop my friends getting an Alexa &#x2F; Siri &#x2F; Google Home thing, so I can&#x27;t help coming into contact with them.<p>We can&#x27;t have it both ways. Making tech &#x2F; apps &#x2F; etc addictive or indispensable or &quot;impossible to live without&quot; (once you&#x27;ve had it a few weeks and so do your friends), and then asserting people can &quot;just not use it&quot; is contradiction 101. As a corpus of people, I think we engineers need to look much harder at the world we are building and the constraints &#x2F; motivators that are causing us to do it.