Eric Fish: Prediction sells. It's hard to get media outlets to give you op-ed space or air time if you just say "things are complicated and we don't really know what's going to happen."
Frank Chimero: More technology only amplifies the problems created by an abundance of it. This leads to the most pressing question: How far out will technology grow? And when does it cross the line of comfort?
Julian Baggini: A terrifying vision of the future may come to pass exactly as foreseen, but because people gradually get used to it, those who live there feel no terror at all. As long as we are worried by the prospect of a way of life which reduces human flourishing to a spreadsheet we will have the motivation to resist it. Once we come to love it, we are already lost.
James Gleick: This is how the future really happens, so ordinary that we scarcely notice.
James Hamblin: The machines are not too expensive as appliances go ... But once you have one, it has you, too.
Rene Ritchie: The Apple Watch isn't an iPhone any more than the iPhone is a Mac. Computing has moved from the server room to the desktop to the laptop to the pocket and now onto the wrist. Every time that's happened, every time it's moved to a new, more personal place, those of us who were used to it in its old place have become slightly anxious, we've become subject to our own expectational debt. Yet every time, over time, we've come to not only accept them, we've come to depend on them.
Frank Chimero: In pursuit of convenience, we have opened the door to unscrupulous influence.
Cmdr. Sean Malinowski, who helped develop the predictive policing model the LAPD now uses: The future of this thing is going to be how creative cops can be in using predictive or other data-driven strategies. That gets people pumped up to do something different. It kind of injects life into the crime fighting.
Nick Sweeney: We have been given GPS receivers and three-axis accelerometers and proximity sensors for our pockets and purses, and the things we build for them urge us to keep moving. They are optimised to tell us that we're not where we want to be: miles from our destination, steps from our daily goal, seconds from our personal best, an immeasurable distance from our rose-gold aspirations.
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