Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

What's being built is a mechanical god. It sees and remembers everything. Until recently it has mostly ignored the affairs of the average person, or at least operated in ways that have made observation of its activities difficult. But, with closer integration to the other parts of government, it has and will become more like a god who micromanages the affairs of its subjects by punishing their indiscretions. There is nothing to stop it from imposing its morality upon everyone.


Ah, what a brilliant future we have to explore as we introduce Bayes' Rule to the Analytics of crimes. Who needs a gelatinous liquid pool of psychics floating around when we can train a polygonal mesh of data points and extrapolate new data points after applying a laplacian smoothing function to it.

It will be just as wonderful as the voice-recognition software (like Siri) that runs on a similar principle, but this time it's for governing. And who wouldn't like Siri as mechanical a god?


And idols aren't of much use unless people are being sacrificed to it in some form or another.


Preferably visibly, with lots of blood, to keep the others in line.


Or a massive Sims like computer game based on real world data. Sooner or later someone is going to add controls that let the players subtlety modify peoples lives. Because winning the game is more important than the lives of the tiny little people.


Getting flashbacks to FFX-2, although I'm sure there are better references to be made.


What do you mean, "until recently"?




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: