By 2030, if we avert ecological collapse, the data society will be far more advanced than it is now. Your personal data, collected by so many devices and platforms over the decades, days, minutes and milliseconds, already gives an exceedingly fine-grained picture of you. In ten years, that picture will be richer than we can imagine.
Tech evangelists say we will live in smart cities and homes, surrounded by machines, miniature and large, that will drive and deliver and delight us. It’s a utopian vision that sits at the heart of industrial strategies across the world’s power centres.
In that future, personal data will continuously inform decisions made by computers as they speed around, serving us. Today’s tech giants beguile us with hyper-personalised playgrounds, endlessly tweaked to meet urges we never knew we had; in the coming age of the internet-of-things, data-driven desire satisfaction will ensconce us fully.
