In the future I expect the commercial sector to target little children with their full enormous range of online demographic databases and privacy-shattering customer-service profiles. These people will be armed and ready and lavishly financed and there every day, peering at our children through a cyberspace one-way mirror … We need to make some conscious decisions to reinvent our information technology as if the future mattered. As if our children were human beings, human citizens, not raw blobs of potential revenue-generating machinery.
Predictor: Sterling, Bruce
Prediction, in context:In a 1993 speech for the National Academy of Sciences Convocation on Technology and Education in Washington, D.C., author William Gibson makes the following remarks: ”In the future I expect the commercial sector to target little children with their full enormous range of online demographic databases and privacy-shattering customer-service profiles. These people will be armed and ready and lavishly financed and there every day, peering at our children through a cyberspace one-way mirror. Am I naive to expect better from the networks in our schools? I hope not. I trust not. Because schools are supposed to be educating our children, civilizing our children, not auctioning them off to the highest bidder. We need to make some conscious decisions to reinvent our information technology as if the future mattered. As if our children were human beings, human citizens, not raw blobs of potential revenue-generating machinery.”
Biography:Bruce Sterling, a writer, consultant and science fiction enthusiast, wrote or co-wrote “Schismatrix,” “The Hacker Crackdown” and “The Difference Engine” and edited “Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology.” In the 1990s, he wrote tech articles for Fortune, Harper’s, Details, Whole Earth Review and Wired, where he was a contributing writer from its founding. He published the nonfiction book “Tomorrow Now: Envisioning the Next Fifty Years” in 2002. (Author/Editor/Journalist.)
Date of prediction: May 13, 1993
Topic of prediction: Controversial Issues
Subtopic: Privacy/Surveillance
Name of publication: National Academy of Sciences
Title, headline, chapter name: Literary Freeware: Not for Commercial Use
Quote Type: Direct quote
Page number or URL of document at time of study:
http://www.eff.org/Net_culture/Cyberpunk/William_Gibson/sterling_gibson_nas.speeches
This data was logged into the Elon/Pew Predictions Database by: Anderson, Janna Quitney