He predicted the dark side of the Internet 30 years ago. Why did no one listen?
msn.com
msn.com
Back in the early 1980s, I bought my first hard drive and it could hold 10 megabytes of data. A hear or to later, 20 MB. a year or two after that, 40 MB, then 120bMB, 256 MB, 500 MB, etc. How difficult is it to understand by the simplest extrapolation that soon storage would be pretty much unlimited? And the same thing with processor power. This is NOT rocket science. Very simple to understand. And then, all those drives would need to be filled with SOMEthing. I happened to work for a company back in the mid- to late-1980s, and they did something similar to the internet. I remember telling people that I worked with that in the pretty near future, all books, journals, everything would be published, and all old books and newspapers, and journals would be scanned onto hard drives. I was working with crude versions of the internet since 1983 or 1984 (ARPAnet).
The same exact thing with Facebook - I could 100% foresee that posting stuff on there, especially if you were a sarcastic and satirical person like I am, would come back and bite you in the ass in 5 or 10 or 20 years. So I never signed up for Facebook.
I did not have a mobile phone, for obvious reasons, but in the last few months I had to get one because financial institutions will absolutely not work with you, at all, unless you have one. So I did get one, for that express purpose. But, when not using it for that, it stays in a Faraday cage/bag, and I never remove it.
I would tell people this, and still do, and people laugh at me for being paranoid. Haha, last laugh is on them.
It's also easy to predict other things, too. 15 years ago, I could see where the world was heading with climate change. And the same with the next step in computers. For computers, it is now called "The Singularity" when computers and people merge. Others have finally caught on. Anyways, somehow, maybe the contents of our brains will be translated onto a computer chip. Maybe with some kind of robotics. I did see this happening by 2030 to 2040. Again, just simple extrapolation of data points, no big deal. For sure I'm not a math prodigy like that guy. And that is the same with global warming. I think by 2030-2040, there might be 5 or 6 million humans still alive. Because the warming is the very least of it - meaning the heat part. The real problem is when crops start failing, and famine starts to stalk the world. Which I personally see as a race between putting humans into robots, because that's the only way we can survive, if you call it that. On a harsh and heat-blasted bare rock planet by 2200.
I wrote a paper in about 1999 for a class, where everyone would have some kind of GPS chip implanted in their body. First it would start with ex convicts, because fuck them, right? And then start putting them in kids, because save the children!!!! So at the very least, all children grow into adults and they will all have GPS on them. But soon, it would be a law that everyone must have one, and a felony if they didn't. And the chip would be a transceiver so that the government could listen to every word you say, and could also talk to you, if the transceiver was implanted on your skull. I remember saying to the class, "Just think, if we all had GPS chips implanted on us, we would know if OJ Simpson killed his wife. This was right when that happened, so everyone laughed at that. But, everyone thought I was talking sh-t and it would not happen. But, voila, it HAS happened, just not in the way I expected. Instead of by the government, private companies do this, and can track every single move you make in your life. Every step. And 20 years ago, people were offended and say it would never happen and called me paranoid about tracking people. But, now they do it, and do it voluntarily, and pay big money to do it. And it isn't costing the government a dime, and they can get all that info anyways, just a subpoena away.
I guess I should have written an academic paper about it.