The Future of Tech: Grim

This post is a piece of opinionated prose. Please, if you disagree with any of the statements made, respond in a calm fashion. This post is not designed to attack any group of persons, but rather to express an opinion.

Tablet computers are another push in the right direction for computing.

Technology. A word much more frequently associated with computers, phones and tablets as much today as it was 60 years ago. But in the years since the first real computer, everything has seemed so positive. The world has been revolutionised by the computer. The mobile telephone. There’s computers in everything ranging from complex supercomputers monitoring the weather and space, to the teeny digital labels on boxes in supermarkets.

Computers are frankly amazing, in my opinion. Disagree? Think about how you’re reading this post. Think about how easy it was for me to publish it – just typing it out and tapping a button to have it displayed to the whole world. All you had to do was click a link or an image on the front page to view this post. Within seconds, this kind of news is rapidly delivered to anyone who wishes to see it. That’s incomprehensibly amazing. I’m typing this on a small screen. That recognises my fingers. And this is only the start.

And this is probably just the beginning. Someday I can see computers that you don’t even have to touch to interact with – like, houses that talk to you, or other crazy things like that. Robots, I can also see being a staple in computing. Which’ll probably be quite sad, in a way. But off that subject, comes what I need to stress. The technology world that is so free at the moment – you know, anyone can set up a website. There’s brand-new computers for $99 if you search hard enough.

Information is freely flowing on websites like Twitter and Facebook. Anyone can express their opinion easily, simply, quickly and efficiently, from almost anywhere there’s an internet connection. Everything from Smartphones to Fridges can be Twitter enabled. It’s easy to write, publish, share and promote news anywhere.

The US government recently ruled against net neutrality's favour.

So you might as, “What could possibly be grim? If the future of technology is growing like this, then why is it a problem?”. The answer to that is that it isn’t a problem. What is a problem is the growing fear of a restricted Internet. Comcast was recently apprehended by the FCC for reducing download speeds to file-sharers, and the U.S. courts ruled that FCC was in the wrong – Comcasts actions, however wrong, were given the go-ahead.

You might recall recent issues with China and Google over censored searching. China, if you’re not aware, block people from finding out about things that they’ve done wrong – such as people Googling the Tiananmen Square Massacre of 1989 – and various other things. Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, YouTube and  a lot of other information-sharing websites are all blocked, to stop people sharing news about events in China. People who blog about political events are arrested. Everything has to play by China’s rules or is cut from the country – Google China is no more, and China is blocking most of Google Hong Kong.

The internet can’t survive much longer, as I see it. Things are going to change for the worse, and if the U.S. government allows censorship of the Internet, if the government bans Net Neutrality and allows networks to have websites pay for faster load times, the creation, ability and innovation of the Internet will cease to exist.