AUTOMATIC FREEDOM

Soon there’ll be only automated check-outs at the supermarket and there’ll be no need for people to work there. In fact people will send automated shoppers down the shops to buy things from the automated check-outs and there will be no one down the shops at all. Meanwhile drones will fight our wars and be operated by automated enemy detectors that will use an algorithm system to analyse internet content to select potential threats and then send the GPS coordinates of these potential threats to a drone that will go and eliminate the potential threat in an extra-judicial automated operation. Sadly, not all detected threats will actually be threats. In the same way that you might Google the word ‘terrorist’ and get a random picture of some sexy glamour model, the automated enemy detectors will get similar tenuous results but act upon them anyway. In short: a lot of sexy glamour models will be bombed by drones.

But it won’t matter too much. The bodies of the innocent dead will not bother us because we won’t see them. The images will be out there alright but we’ll have bot-drones looking at the media for us and filtering out such content to pick the ‘hot’ topics of the day (celebrity divorces, scandals, new products) and the tales of the innocent dead won’t make it anywhere near the top of the pile. We will be liberated of the angst such images might cause.

In the future we will come to realise that automated devices are doing a very good job of managing our affairs. The most highly regarded amongst these automated devices will be the war drone. It will be seen as a brave defender of our automated freedoms and eventually a drone that has served several tours of duty in a variety of conflicts will be elected the first automated president of the United States (and the freeish world). The drone will appear in several photo-ops with its wife, an automated supreme-court justice dispenser, and their two children, an electronic voting machine and a blender or something.

And what will we do? Us lot? The fleshy flawed humans? Well, we’ll assemble the drones of course. Simples!
. . .oh, and we’ll be bombed by the drones the odd time too. Especially if we’re glamour models.