Technology is coming like an avalanche, to flatten and sweep away everything you have become used to, and cannot be stopped. Your children will not live as your parents lived. Some of this will be good, some will be bad. It is not going to be a random outcome though: how good or bad will depend on us consciously riding that avalanche to get to the future we prefer, out of the available options.



Note that I say ride rather than steer.  Nobody's steering this thing. The undead hand of the market has its usual vampire-strong grip on the steering wheel, and as usual there are no credible solutions to that. There will be attempts to legislate against some of the products of technological advance, but the incentives that drive it are an intractable problem, because they work through the desires and problems of billions of people.


So, an example.




Increasingly intrusive surveillance is going to get increasingly cheap.  Any corporation will be able to gather most of what they need to know about as many of their customers or competitors as they want. And anyone with a reasonable budget of time and money is going to be able to gather as much detail on every aspect of any individual's life as they want.




To repeat: we can't stop this. We can make practices or technologies illegal, which makes it slightly more expensive to do. It only has to be worth slightly more than the expense and more advances in technology will always drive the cost down or work around the laws anyway.




What can we do?




Re-analyse the problem.




The problem with a government or a company or an individual being able to find out about you is that it gives them some measure of power over you. Can we do something about that? Maybe.




We can commit to human rights and human values. Create societal expectations of tolerance for our lifestyle choices, devaluing secrets about our private lives to the point where there's no profit in collecting them. We can take a stand against both domestic and impersonal violence on a legal and cultural level, so that we reduce the danger to all of us from dangerous men who Know Where You Live.




We can make our voting system as fair and as resistant to demagogical attack as possible, and educate our children to think critically, so collecting data about us to manipulate us politically becomes harder.




Know as much as you like about me; it's all junk data if you can't use it to make me do something I don't want.  I'm bisexual and a mediocre writer and I have a cat. So what. Tell my employer, my wife  or my mum and they'll all say "so what." Try to sell me science-fiction-themed cat insurance maybe. Good luck with that.




But for this to work, we have to ALL say so what. We have to have ALL of each other's backs. Even if you think you're going to be OK with a little bit of intolerance for "those people" as long as it doesn't affect you? No. That avalanche is coming, and picking up speed. Some of your grandchildren and their grandchildren will be "those people" when it hits them.




So even if you consider yourself conservative, know that tolerance is both a liberal and a conservative value. Liberal because it's about freedom, and conservative because being unable to co-exist with the unusual is going to be pretty untenable basis for conserving things sooner than you think.