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A24 TECHNOLOGY
Friday 28 december 2018
Did 2018 usher in a creeping tech dystopia?

By MATT O’BRIEN that collects personal infor-
AP Technology Writer mation or a propaganda
We may remember 2018 machine that could sway
as the year when technol- elections.
ogy’s dystopian potential “We were just trying to get
became clear, from Face- it to work,” recalled Cerf,
book’s role enabling the who is now Google’s chief
harvesting of our personal internet evangelist. “But
data for election interfer- now that it’s in the hands
ence to a seemingly un- of the general public, there
ending series of revelations are people who ... want it
about the dark side of Sili- to work in a way that ob-
con Valley’s connect-ev- viously does harm, or ben-
erything ethos. efits themselves, or disrupts
The list is long: High-tech the political system. So we
tools for immigration crack- are going to have to deal
downs. Fears of smart- with that.”
phone addiction. YouTube Contrary to futuristic fears
algorithms that steer youths of “super-intelligent” robots
into extremism. An experi- taking control, the real dan-
ment in gene-edited ba- gers of our tech era have
bies. crept in more prosaically
Doorbells and concert — often in the form of tech
venues that can pinpoint In this Aug. 8, 2018, file photo, a mobile phone displays a user’s travels using Google Maps in innovations we welcomed
individual faces and alert New York. for making life more conve-
police. Repurposing gene- Associated Press nient.
alogy websites to hunt for month on Twitter. “A dark, employees who are more Google attracted concern Part of experts’ concern
crime suspects based on goofy ‘90s retro-future.” active about ensuring their about its continuous sur- about the leap into con-
a relative’s DNA. Automat- More awaits us in 2019, as work is put to positive ends. veillance of users after The necting every home de-
ed systems that keep tabs surveillance and data-col- “Something that was heart- Associated Press reported vice to the internet and let-
of workers’ movements lection efforts ramp up and ening this year was that ac- that it was tracking peo- ting computers do our work
and habits. Electric cars in artificial intelligence sys- companying this parade ple’s movements whether is that the technology is still
Shanghai transmitting their tems start sounding more of scandals was a grow- they like it or not. buggy and influenced by
every movement to the human, reading facial ex- ing public awareness that It also faced internal dis- human errors and prejudic-
government. pressions and generating there’s an accountability sent over its collaboration es. Uber and Tesla were in-
It’s been enough to ex- fake video images so real- crisis in tech,” said Meredith with the U.S. military to vestigated for fatal self-driv-
haust even the most imagi- istic that it will be harder to Whittaker, a co-founder create drones with “com- ing car crashes in March,
native sci-fi visionaries. detect malicious distortions of New York University’s AI puter vision” to help find IBM came under scrutiny
“It doesn’t so much feel like of the truth. Now Institute for studying battlefield targets and a for working with New York
we’re living in the future But there are also counter- the social implications of secret proposal to launch a City police to build a fa-
now, as that we’re living measures afoot in Congress artificial intelligence. censored search engine in cial recognition system that
in a retro-future,” novelist and state government — The group has compiled China. And it unveiled a re- can detect ethnicity, and
William Gibson wrote this and even among tech-firm a long list of what made markably human-like voice Amazon took heat for sup-
2018 so ominous, though assistant that sounds so real plying its own flawed facial
many are examples of the that people on the other recognition service to law
Nationwide public simply becoming end of the phone didn’t enforcement agencies.
newly aware of problems know they were talking to In some cases, opposition
internet outage that have built up for years. a computer. to the tech industry’s rush
Among the most troubling Those and other concerns to apply its newest innova-
affects CenturyLink cases was the revelation bubbled up in Decem- tions to questionable com-
ber as lawmakers grilled mercial uses has come
in March that political da-
ta-mining firm Cambridge Google CEO Sundar Pichai from its own employees.
Analytica swept up per- at a congressional hearing Google workers helped
BOISE, Idaho (AP) — Some CenturyLink customers
across the country were without the internet as out- sonal information of millions — a sequel to similar pub- scuttle the company’s Pen-
ages stretched from New York to California. of Facebook users for the lic reckonings this year with tagon drone contract, and
The company said in a statement Thursday that its purpose of manipulating Facebook CEO Mark Zuck- workers at Amazon, Micro-
network was “still experiencing a disruption” and that national elections. erberg and other tech ex- soft and Salesforce sought
it was working to restore services. It provided no other “It really helped wake up ecutives. “It was necessary to cancel their companies’
details, including how many customers were affect- people to the fact that to convene this hearing be- contracts to supply tech
ed. these systems are actually cause of the widening gap services to immigration au-
Jessica Rosenworcel, a member of the Federal Com- touching the core of our of distrust between tech- thorities.
munications Commission, said via Twitter that this was lives and shaping our social nology companies and the “It became obvious to a lot
a “nationwide outage” and her agency needed to institutions,” Whittaker said. American people,” Repub- of people that the rhetoric
investigate. That was on top of other lican House Majority Lead- of doing good and benefit-
It appeared that most of the trouble was in the West. Facebook disasters, includ- er Kevin McCarthy said. ing society and ‘Don’t be
The Idaho Statesman reports that the internet prob- ing its role in fomenting vio- Internet pioneer Vint Cerf evil’ was not what these
lems led to the temporary shutdown of phone servic- lence in Myanmar, major said he and other engineers companies were actually
es at the Idaho Department of Correction and the data breaches and ongo- never imagined their vision living up to,” said Whittak-
state’s Department of Education. ing concerns about its host- of a worldwide network er, who is also a research
There were reports of ATM machines not working in ing of fake accounts for of connected computers scientist at Google who
Idaho and Montana.q Russian propaganda. would morph 45 years later founded its Open Research
It wasn’t just Facebook. into a surveillance system group.q