Perhaps The Most Inflamatory Post About Technology Ever Written

It's truly amazing to think about how far technology has evolved in my relatively short lifetime. Computers have gone from the desktops and the extremely unwieldy, heavy laptops to smart phones, tablets, and featherweight laptops. Electronic storage has also advanced at an impressive rate. The floppy disk was on its last legs when I was really young, and it gave way to the CD, which then gave way to the flash drive, whose monumental capacity and flexible file control (no longer needing to burn files onto a disk and being able to then remove those files) were revolutionary, which then gave way to "the cloud." Now there is theoretically no need for physical storage of any kind. It's hard to imagine our future getting any more advanced than this, but it will, and I will take a shot at what a few of them will be over the course of the next ten years (and a little bit beyond that).


Prediction 1: Much of, if not all of your life will be in some way connected to your technology

This isn't as much of a prediction as it is an observation. Most everything you do now is or can be in some way associated with technology. The time you wake up is facilitated by an alarm clock, or an alarm clock application on your phone. A smart phone application can tell you how much nutrients you need to consume during breakfast and the best way to get those nutrients. Your car can give you directions how to get from place to place. Your phone can be your calendar, organizing and reminding you of things you have to do or attend. You check up on your favorite sports team on your computer, and while your at it you drop by the news site to be presented what's the day's important top stories. Now, as a student, you can take not just classes, but entire courses online. So, as I said, it's only a matter of time before everything you do can be in someway organized, influenced by, or perhaps even executed by your technology.

Prediction 2: Your entire life (past and present) will be collected in some kind of electronic database

That's scary. Your entire life. All available by some technological end. But let me clarify something: I do not think that this database will be accessible to just any entity. It will naturally be unavailable to you, but also to unavailable other citizens. It will be available to the government and certain advertizing agencies, although eventually later than ten years from now the government will lose their access.
How close are we to this now? Most of your important information is already cataloged in federal databases (social security, banking information, criminal record, etc.) and many corporations have already begun making databases about the unimportant stuff (what you buy online, what you like to eat, what you "like" on Facebook) to assess patterns of purchasing. While this doesn't encompass all of your life, I predict it's only a matter of time, perhaps not in the next ten years, but certainly in the next twenty-five, before corporations have the rest of your life cataloged to analyze what you do/like/enjoy and how they can profit from what you do/like/enjoy, and because, as I previously predicted/observed, your technology will be a part of everything you do, it will make it that much easier for corporations to gather this information. This brings me to my next prediction (those of you with weaker constitutions might want to stop reading at this point).

Prediction 3: Corporations will eventually become the governing bodies of Earth

Many of you after reading that heading are like:

So, now that the Drake and Josh reference is out of the way, let's talk about this preposterous prediction. This seems like a pretty radical stretch no matter how you slice it, but it seems especially out there when this is a blog post about technology. How did we get talking about "the governing bodies of earth"? Well, just as my second prediction is a reflection on my first, so also is this a reflection of the other two. Because our wide-spread use of technology will enable corporations to develop detailed pictures of our lives, it will give corporations significant influence over our decisions, primarily our buying decisions.
So how will corporate control over our buying decisions have anything to do with a corporate control of the world? Well, almost every government in the world at this point (if not every, many or most) is some form of democracy or republic. These forms of government rely on the support of the people in order to function, and the people control the fate of these governments. If companies control the decisions of everyone, then they control the government.
"But wait a minute: buying decisions do not constitute every decision every human has ever made ever." That's true. "And I don't vote every time I buy something." Well, think about that last one; What are you really doing when you choose between shopping at Walmart and shopping at Costco? Aren't you casting a vote on which one you prefer? "But that has nothing to do with my political affiliation or what I believe in or how I vote in elections." That may be true. Not everyone who shops at Costco votes liberally and not everyone who shops at Walmart votes conservatively. But by shopping there you support that store and by extension what that particular store believes in, both socially and politically. If a corporation chooses what you buy and where you buy it, then it chooses what ideals you indirectly support.
So I guess I should amend my prediction. I predict that corporations will eventually control the governing bodies of Earth, not necessarily become them.