Not only a most informative and well structured post, but one I view as a very important one, because it raises the question of what kind of future we want compared to the kind of future technology is going to create for us that you made very clear. Perhaps less clear was that the world will be dominated by the tehcnologic giants, of which Google is one.

Not only is it trying to amass all the worlds data, even down to undersea info, but it now has at least 8 AI companies that it acquired and two robotic ones. It is clearly trying hard and will doubtelss succeed to position itself as really dominant in the future.

There is also the question of Augmented reality. Why the hell do we want augmented reality when we cannot handle correctly the reality that we have? Driverless cars do nothing to diminish the pollution problems ruining not only the environment, but also our health. The EU rescently detemerned that at least 400,000 deaths a year occured in the EU because of air pollution caused by transport. If the vechicles become electric, then there will be more power stations needed that will pollute the air instead.

We are already overdependent upon machines and every sign is that we will become even more dependent upon them. The bottom line to that is that we will become slaves to the machines, even if they don’t take us over. Like the banks are too imortnat to fail, because of the consequences, then machines will become too important to allow to remain out of service for long, so we will become slaves to keeping them running.

Problem is machines will wear out and raw materials are needed to repair/replace them and our resources in raw materials are not only limited, but most are being depleted to the point where some metals will not be available in just 25 years time and that includes aluminium!

Back near the beginning of the Industrial revolution there arose a kind of counter revolution, called the luddites, who started destroying machines. Because we will become too beholden to them, that option is not readily useable. In fact it would seem there is only one solution available to us to change the direction we are headed, being as its a slippery slope we sliding down at increasing speed and thus has a lot of momentum, its going to be very diffcult to do someTthing.

The answer is that the public, en masse, needs to refuse to accept all this futuristic tehcnolog. Don’t buy/use anything that uses Augmented Reality, things which are connected, which are being pushed like mad, smart homes, alternative currencies, whatever, the list is long and will get longer, Companies will not produce things they cannot sell. The economic lever is the only one we have avaliable, but it will work, providing enough use it.

We HAVE to stop this headlong technological flight that is out of control down the slippery slope, because if it gets to the bottom, we will probably no longer be here!! Of course, of you would prefer to be controlled in everything by just a few lines of code somewhere, then do nothing.