Augmented Reality Gets Too Real

Once upon a time, gods and angels came unto the people in the night and had their way with them.  Later, demonic succubi and incubi were the culprits.  More recently, sinister alien Reptilians and butt-probing Greys did the deed.  Today, these strange hauntings have adapted to the shifting zeitgeist, and a woman in Moscow claims to have been raped by a Pokemon.

The Robot Butler Did It!

The good news is that the near future is going to see some rapid, revolutionary changes that could dramatically enhance our lives. The bad news is that the technologies pitched to “become successful and transformative” in the next decade or so are extremely vulnerable to all sorts of back-door, front-door, and side-door compromises.

Augmented Reality Breeds Dysfunction

Players of the first big "augmented reality" game, Pokémon Go, have crashed a car, fallen off a cliff, and hopped a fence in the middle of the night to catch a digital nothing beside a tiger enclosure.  In the process, they have been forced to accidentally get exercise (much to their chagrin), while also blissfully signing away their data to government, law enforcement, and private parties.

23andMe Selling Customer's Genetic Data

It's just possible that 23andMe has not been collecting the DNA of 800,000 customers for altruistic genealogical purposes.

Lessons From Sacramento

The leadership and ideologues of contemporary industrialized leftist (including anarchist and communist) movements are Jews with a Machiavellian racial motive, as well as rootless cosmopolitan fad-chasing white bourgeoisie, and they feel those whites who do not share their affinity for kale and “Polyamory” are hopelessly inferior, or even a potential threat to their status and privilege.

Chatbot Overturns 160,000 Parking Tickets

A robot lawyer has successfully appealed 64% of 250,000 parking tickets, resulting in millions of lost revenue for London and New York City.  Next injustice to be fought by artificial intelligence: refugees navigating foreign legal systems.

Zuckerberg Covers His Webcam

Even experts who don’t cover their cameras think they should. Why doesn’t Matthew Green, an encryption expert at Johns Hopkins University? “Because I’m an idiot,” he told Yadron.

“I have no excuse for not taking this seriously … but at the end of the day, I figure that seeing me naked would be punishment enough.”

China Surpasses America in Computing

A Chinese supercomputer has been named the world's fastest computer for the seventh year in a row – but unlike previous winners, this year's champion uses only Chinese-designed processors, representing a decline of US dominance in the field.

Virtual Reality and the Holocaust

A "virtual Holocaust survivor" who lived through an extermination camp and a death march will now be educating children by "upsetting the viewer’s sense of comfort." 

The interactive hologram and associated artificial intelligence answers questions with selections from 25 hours of footage of Pinchas Gutter, creating a vivid and convincing testimony intended to "jolt another world into your own." 

Historical investigation of the event remains verboten.

More Spying Makes US More Safe

Despite the fact that the FBI's awareness of Omar Mateen made no substantive difference to his plans, Hillary Clinton has promised to pressure tech companies to comply with intelligence agencies in an intensified program of domestic surveillance.

Your Landlord Needs To See Your Sandwich

Make no mistake: The data will mislead. Among the behaviors that count against your Tenant Assured “credit” percentage — i.e., how confident the company is that you’ll pay rent — are “online retail social logins and frequency of social logins used for leisure activities.” In other words, Tenant Assured draws conclusions about your credit-worthiness based on things such as whether you post about shopping or going out on the weekends.

Belgian Police Warn Against Liking Things

Facebook's helpful new feature allowing users to react with greater nuance has the coincidental effect of providing deeper data on user mental states, allowing algorithms to tailor the selection and placement of advertisements to take advantage of their moods.

Disappearing Migrants Necessitate Better Surveillance

Germany has lost track of 130,000 migrants, so the European Commission must spend £24million on computers to track everyone's faces.  The technology will be ready in four years' time--at which point it will help to bring migration under control, and definitely not be used for any other purpose.

The Bending of Trending

"Imposing human editorial values" is the job of a team of "news curators" who decide what stories Facebook will display as currently important to users.

Earthling Exceptionalism Improbable

The application of new exoplanet data to the Drake equation has added several exclamation marks to the Fermi paradox, the suggestion that we observe a problematic dearth of aliens around.  Either there are other intelligent civilisations already visiting, or we can expect our own civilisation to inevitably collapse very soon.  Possibly both.

Military-Industrial Complex Shares With Guitarist

Tom DeLonge, formerly of pop-punk band Blink-182, has written a novel with the help of a professor of Shakespeare, as well as "sources within the aerospace industry and the Department of Defense and NASA" (a statement apparently specifically approved by those sources). 

The premise of Sekret Machines Book 1: Chasing Shadows is that the government has built alien reproduction vehicles from acquired alien technology.  Curiously, this closely matches the story given in the recent revival of The X-Files.

Space-Awe For Health

The replicability of the overview effect, whereby seeing the Earth from space induces a life-changing sense of wonder, could lead to virtual reality awe machines.  Alternatively, this may just tell us that those who go to the heavens come back lighter.

Wellness Monitoring Takes Off

The corporation you work for would like you to wear a tracking device to collect data about your movements, for your health.

They're Listening

In Bentham's Panopticon, a design for a prison, the guard in the tower can see right through the surrounding ring of cells.  The inmates in their cells can't see into the guard tower, so they don't know when they're being watched.  They begin to police themselves, just in case.  They internalise the judging observer, and don't break any rules.

A recent paper suggests that online commenters aware of NSA surveillance, and convinced of its import for national security, will censor themselves from expressing views they believe go against the norm.  The perception of being observed increases conformity, and discourages dissenting opinions.  The need for hectoring collectivism is never even reached.

The Deadliest Animal On Earth

As corporate and governmental collusion and corruption, media propaganda, and unprecedented demographic shifts threaten the delicate balance of civilisation, and flora and fauna the world over lose the environments they need to thrive, and the gods and angels battle for the souls of all creation, a dolphin in Argentina and a pair of peacocks in China have been killed by jabbering naked apes with smart phones taking selfies.