The Coming Internet Of Things

Do you love your cell phone and other electronic gadgets? Well,  according to a new report released  by the Pew Research Center Internet Project and Elon University's Imagining the Internet Center by 2025 our bodies (but not mine, I assure you), homes and workplaces will be sensor filled and what little shred of privacy still remains will be traded away for those "connections". Hmmm I wonder how reliable all that mess will be as well. They still can't make a computer that operates as easily as the old TV sets or radios of the distant past.

The 1,600 tech experts who worked on the Pew Study say the next digital revolution is the often invisible spread of the "Internet of Things". Those things will make keeping nearly every aspect of your life private a near impossibility. But alas! I say to all addicted cell phoners out there, the good aspect to this tech boom is that you will see improvements in health, transportation, shopping, industrial production and the environment. So are you willing to trade your right to privacy for that? I wouldn't.

Just think, for instance. You tell your health insurer that you have given up smoking, but take a puff  and that is recorded and relayed to the insurer, who immediately raises your premium because you smoke. Or you go to the grocery store to buy coffee, and reach for your favorite brand...only to be notified on your idiotic phone that it's not an approved one.

Ultimately, this over connected  future filled with Internet connected things looks like is a place where every question will have a ready answer. I wonder where thinking for oneself fits into that equation. Observe any electronic addict particularly a cell phone user who texts while driving his automobile at high speed on a busy highway and you can see they already have forfeited some of their thinking and reasoning processes.

I am glad that I am minimally connected and will continue to be. The conveniences of much of the high tech connections today just don't seem to be worth a surrender of my privacy or of  the pleasure that I have in thinking for myself . I'd rather be occasionally wrong or slower in awareness of something than be an "Internet of Zombie" thing.