Wednesday, January 16, 2008

The rise of the machines

Am I the only one who, on seeing people walking around with Bluetooth mobile phone headsets seemingly permanently attached to their ears, is irresistibly reminded of the Borg in the later Star Trek series?

How far will man/machine hybrids go? We already have thousands of people walking around with artificial pacemakers and plastic hip joints. That's fine, but now there are proposals to insert a computer chip into convicted criminals (as we already do to dogs). And you would have to be very naive indeed to think that governments will be content with only chipping criminals - all in the interest of preserving our freedom by destroying it, of course. Welcome to 1984.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Not being 'au fait' with the Star Trek series I'm afraid very little reminds me of it, and '1984' covers a multitude of horrors. But as I read your piece I couldn't help thinking of Arnold Wesker's 'Chips With Everything.' If he hadn't bothered with the play and just published the title we would all now be saying 'My God, that guy was prophetic!'