Technocreep (2 page)

Perhaps you will seek refuge from all this invasive technology in some nostalgic low tech activity like attending a rock concert. We will still have those in the future, as people clamor for the “live experience” in a world with unlimited digital media access. But the fiftieth ­anniversary Woodstock concert will probably be a lot different from the original one in 1969.

At Woodstock 2019, you may be swatting away disposable flying robot cameras that people have launched to catch a better view of the performers. Folks all around you will be pushing the “find my friends” button, revealing their exact location at the concert venue. Unlike today's friend finder apps, the 2019 version may also tap into their brain waves and body chemistry to decide if they are interested in joining you for some food, or perhaps something else. Yes, babies will be conceived at Woodstock 2019 just as they were in 1969.

If you have broken some minor rule like forgetting to renew your vehicle's license, you will come back at the end of the show to see your “smart license plate” displaying “EXPIRED” where the number should be. Should you decide to buy a souvenir T-shirt, your every move will be tracked by cameras that make uncannily accurate estimates of your age and gender, and then predict your buying habits.
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They may even recognize you by your face or change the prices based on the color of your credit card, which it will be broadcasting to the world.

Should you seek medical help at Woodstock 2019, you will almost certainly receive tests and treatments tailored to your unique genetic makeup. Dr. Leroy Hood, the biologist who pioneered automated DNA sequencing, describes what you should expect at the Woodstock 2019 first aid tent. “We'll be able to prick your finger,” he says, “and take a droplet of blood and make ten thousand measurements that tell us about a gazillion different things that may speak to why you have apparent cardiac pain. There'll be very powerful imaging devices that can probably be done at Woodstock that could look at the brain or look at the heart.”
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Hood also believes that this type of personalized medicine will come down in cost very rapidly. “My own prediction,” he says, “is with third generation DNA sequencing … the genome will cost $100 and we'll be able to do it in fifteen minutes.” That price drop, from the current level of thousands of dollars, should put your mind at ease. After all, there will be no way to skip out on your bill at this medical facility. They will have your DNA sample.

Unlike in 1969, when misadventures with psychedelic chemicals accounted for many visits to the medical tents, the Woodstock 2019 medics may be treating the after-effects of electronic stimulation of the pleasure centers of the brain. And just as crowdfunding sites are starting to determine which products are manufactured by online consensus, Woodstock's organizers may be able to tap into the “hive mind” of concert-goers to keep the show moving at just the right pace.

If you cannot make it to the live event, there will be ultra-high-resolution videos to enjoy, streamed directly into your retina or perhaps even your brain. Organizers will probably use big data analytics and artificial intelligence to choose the lineup of musicians. That is how Hollywood already decides which television shows we are most likely to watch.
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This book is about the unseen ways in which technology is already changing our lives. We will visit the hotel suites at the DEF CON and Black Hat conferences, where hackers attack circuit boards and tweak software late into the night. We will go into the online nooks and crannies where digital exploits are secretly shared. We will even examine a kids' toy that frightened the National Security Agency so much that it was banned from their building. You will learn why you might want to avoid certain kinds of medical testing and why your online presence will definitely outlive you, unless the “transhumanists” are correct and the first immortals are already living among us.

Many people believe that these disturbing technologies are confined to the Internet and that if they are careful, or even avoid online activity altogether, they will be safe. But the technologies that will truly change our lives will be in our cars, our streetlights, our hospitals, and even inside our brains and bodies. Our favorite watering holes, even our pets and our children, are being infested with technocreepiness.

The general public learns about creepy technologies episodically. A whistle-blower unveils whole areas of government or corporate snooping. A probing journalist figures out how big data can be used to link together nuggets of your life to create a chillingly accurate portrait of you. A scientist works backwards from a DNA sample to infer the most likely surname of the person it came from.
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Perhaps you receive a particularly astute yet unsettling suggestion for a new contact on Facebook or LinkedIn, and wonder how they did that.

Every new technology eventually attracts calls to restrict or ­regulate it, and often to find a way to turn it into a revenue stream and make it taxable. But the flow is becoming too fast, too diverse, and too imaginative for lawmakers to keep up.

We will always have new innovations, and people will find ways to misuse some, and to combine them in unanticipated ways. Some ideas will pass into oblivion like the pernicious
RottenNeighbor.com
. For a while, this website let you anonymously badmouth folks whose dogs allegedly pooped on your lawn or falsely label the guy down the street as a sex offender. Companies were not exactly eager to advertise on RottenNeighbor.com, and it now sits, dormant, though still registered and presumably ready to rise again if a viable business model suddenly appears. The “uncensored people reviews” at
dirtyphonebook.com
continue to provide an outlet for this kind of personal attack.

Creepiness is an elusive concept that taps into our primal fears and assumptions about the way things are and should be. Sigmund Freud pondered it, suggesting that creepy things, with part of their true nature hidden, remind us of our own deepest secrets and guilt over repressed impulses. Edgar Allan Poe achieved heights of creepiness in his short stories by playing on our fears of being buried alive or catching the plague.

Filmmakers often seek the fine balance that will send the audience away wondering darkly about a character's true nature and motivation. Culture blogger Sarah Dobbs explains that movies can be scary with loud noises and sudden moves, but that truly unsettling cinema is a lot harder to achieve.

“To be one of the good horror movies,” she writes, “a film needs to establish a certain atmosphere; it needs to draw you in and make you care. It needs to give you something to think about when you're trying to drop off to sleep at night; to make you wonder whether that creaking noise down the hallway was just the house settling, or something lurking in the shadows. Creepy stays with you. It gives you goosebumps.”
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Clowns, dolls, ghost stories, and even the words from the mouths of our young children can fascinate us in unsettling ways. The closer something is to our hearts and our highest values, the most disturbing it can be.

A famous discussion on the social news site reddit asked, “What's the creepiest thing your young child has ever said to you?”

Here are two of the more disturbing examples:

I was tucking in my two-year-old. He said, “Goodbye, Dad.”

I said, “No, we say goodnight.”

He said, “I know. But this time it's goodbye.”

Had to check on him a few times to make sure he was still there.

/u/UnfortunateBirthMark

And

When I was about three we had a cat that had stillborn kittens.

I asked my father if we could make crosses for them, which he did.

As he was making them I asked: “Aren't those too small?”

Dad: “What do you mean?”

Me: “Aren't we going to nail them to them?”

Dad (after several moments' silence): “We're not going to do that.”

Me: “Oh.”

/u/Tom_Zarek
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Cute? Innocent? Perhaps. But the creepiness stayed with these people long enough for them to share it on reddit. The fact that this thread is now up to around 15,000 comments speaks to our fascination with the
unheimlich,
a German word that literally means “the opposite of what is familiar or home-like.” By thinking about what unsettles us the most, we are able to confront and understand our greatest fears, and try to make rational decisions as citizens, software designers, ­creators, parents, and consumers.

So, what is creepy? We know it when we see it. The hairs stand up on our neck or we ask, “How do they know that?” Creepy things make us question our assumptions, and lie awake, wondering “what if?”

My study of hundreds of technologies that are creepy in various degrees has revealed some common factors that make people uneasy. At the end of this book, we will explore these “dimensions of technocreepiness” in the hope that we can avoid them in the future. We will even do a bit of “creep-proofing” to, as much as is humanly possible, protect ourselves from the worst ravages of invasive technologies. But for now, let us let those hairs do their job. We will begin our journey into technocreepiness at a rather unlikely place—the New York Public Library.

There are twenty-nine steps from the corner of 41
^st
Street and Fifth Avenue to the front entrance of the New York Public Library. I know this because, in the mid-1970s, I lugged a radio station's tape recorder up every one of them. I might as well have been carrying a television set. Back then, “portable” meant that something had a handle. I was there to interview the keeper of an amazing new technology—the Kurzweil Reading Machine.

Billed as an aid to the blind, this bulky contraption was the world's first functional text-to-speech synthesizer. Walter Cronkite used the machine to sign off on his January 13, 1976 newscast. I typed up a piece of paper with “For CBC Radio, this is Tom Keenan in New York.” The machine rattled this off for me in the same mechanical monotone that we now associate with the hacktivist group Anonymous.

I then asked the librarian, “What kind of things do people bring in to read on it?”

“Mostly pornography,” he replied.

I thought I had heard him wrong. He explained that “if somebody wants to hear a textbook on American History or something, there are plenty of volunteers who will read that. We're seeing books like
Lady Chatterley's Lover, The Story of O
, that sort of thing.”

A lot has changed since my first encounter with the Kurzweil Reading Machine. Instead of lugging a bulky tape recorder, I can now push a button on my smartphone and safely store my interview in the cloud. If I want to know how many steps I will face at the New York Public Library, I can simply count them on Google Street View. Anyone with Internet access can find all the pornography they could possibly want, and have it read to them in whatever exotic voice they desire.

The abundance and variety of Internet pornography illustrates a concept that Cullen Jennings, one of my former students and now a Cisco Fellow, expressed very well. “No matter how liberal or broad-minded you are,” he once said, “I guarantee I can find something on the Internet that will instantly offend you.” It is a small leap from “something that will offend you” to “something that will creep you out.”

Even though I have seen a lot of bizarre things since the 1970s, the image of tumescent guys hooked up to the Kurzweil Reading Machine at the public library has stuck with me, along with the gadget's monotone voice.

A good friend and I used to split the generous “lead fees” which a certain national tabloid paid for ideas that turned into stories. Driven by empty wallets, and armed with a bottle of Jack Daniels, we could spin off quite a few plausible if sensational ideas in an evening. Of course, a tabloid tale is not a publishable story without a reputable expert to support it. This paper had a helpful list of “trained seals” who, for a fee, would happily confirm UFO sightings and authenticate photos of fictional monsters. Yet they had a big gap—they needed a bright young computer science professor, which was precisely my line of work.

Soon I came to be quoted on fantasy technology stories like “an amazing implanted chip will someday measure your caloric intake and release an appetite-suppressing hormone.” That feature attracted bags of mail from people desperately seeking to help me test this rather wacky idea. I sent the letters back suggesting that they look into some diet and exercise plans.

Perhaps I should have told them to wait. An article in the 2009 issue of
MIT Technology Review
describes a “small, stick-on monitor no bigger than a large Band-Aid” that can accurately monitor your caloric intake.
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Some smart scientist will undoubtedly invent the appetite suppression technique and make our fictitious dieter's dream patch a reality.

In that weekly tabloid, I also mused that “someday computers will speak to you in the voice of your choosing. It might be Marilyn Monroe's or Clark Gable's or the voice of your long-dead mother.” Since then, science has shown that the sound of your mother's voice indeed does have a profound physiological effect on you.

In studies of mother/daughter dyads, Leslie Seltzer found that hearing Mom's voice raised girls' oxytocin levels, calming them down.
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Email and SMS messaging did not have the same effect. Some have even speculated that an artificially intelligent program that sounded like your mother, used her favorite expressions, and had an intimate knowledge of your life story, could be a powerful way to calm, interrogate, or even control you.

Back in 1966, Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Joseph Weizenbaum unleashed ELIZA onto the world, hoping to illustrate the fundamental differences between human and computer brains. A fairly simple “chatterbot,” ELIZA could mimic the conversation style of a Rogerian psychotherapist, faking the answers when it did not understand what you just said.