Microsoft president: Orwell’s 1984 could happen in 2024
My personal version of 1984 is someone smashing random quotes from 1984 into my face, forever. Has nobody seriously read another book in the last few decades?<p>And Microsoft's president even gives us a stereotypically shoddy reading of the book<p>><i>"You know the fundamental story…was about a government who could see everything that everyone did and hear everything that everyone said all the time.</i>"<p>The actually interesting takeaway isn't "government does bad stuff with tech", it's that an atmosphere of reality inversion creates fertile ground for people to accept fiction over truth, even when the lie is obvious. State surveillance doesn't require AI, the Stasi already had the capacity for that 40 years ago.