I think it would require some REAL, HUGE mess-up on the part of many nations and political parties at the same time for such sort of thing to happen. Sure, it's not impossible - let's say people in most developed countries keep electing Nazis and megalomaniacs to power, who then subtly kill the democracies in their respective countries, and then do nothing about the growing gap between the rich and the poor, convincing the public that this is how it was supposed to be in the first place. I can such a scenario taking place, but do so in the same vein as I see a false vacuum bubble engulfing Earth, or a Solar-system-facing gamma-ray burst cooking our plane to Death. All of these scenarios are certainly possible, but neither of them is likely to happen.
The view that big corporations are evil seems to be quite popular nowadays, but I don't think that it's justified. First of all, what is the worst thing that big corporations have done? Your answer to this question would probably be something like "they neglected our privacy". Is that really enough to merit a group of people who have done so much good to society a title of "evil"? Like Ivan the Terrible- or Stalin-level "evil"? I mean, okay, perhaps you may respect the privacy of your data more than others, but if that's the worst that their morals allow them to do, then there is little risk of the human race being put in jeopardy. In my opinion, politicians and religious leaders are much more dangerous - take people like Putin, Rouhani, and Jinping, for example - Jinping is not ashamed to execute people based on their religion, and nor does Rouhani, who also wants to return his country to the Middle Ages, and Putin can leave an entire country in a state of stagnation just for his own personal wealth and power. Imo, if we can avoid electing politicians such as these guys (although Jinping at least cares for the people of his country, so maybe exclude him from this list), we'll be just fine. The aims of corporations and consumers mostly align, anyway.
Interestingly, I am one of those "complacent" people. I turn all the privacy settings to minimum so that I can have the most personalised experience and so that the corporations have more data to work with and improve their final product. I don't really care if some information about my location or web activity or microphone activity gets represented as a data point somewhere in Google's code if that means that I get a better experience. Honestly speaking, I don't really understand why people would worry about this, either: it's one thing if your personal information gets disclosed to the public, but in this case no one even looks at it, so why would you worry? Unless you have engaged in illegal activities or are a very famous person, no one will ever get to look at your private data. Perhaps you can explain this bit to me, because I am genuinely curious.
To address your last point, acting stupid and being stupid are two completely different things. The smartest people have held the silliest beliefs, and their justifications for holding these beliefs were anything but rational (to give you an example, Bobby Fischer believed Jews to be an inferior race, and Newton believed in alchemy). So don't judge people's intelligence by their opinions. Even so, though, the current generation is much less susceptible to PR, scams, and propaganda than older generations. Belief in pseudoscience (including ideologies such as New Age, creationism, homoeopathy) is by far the lowest among the younger generations, and older generations are also much more likely to fall for a scam/fake news story than are younger generations. Of course, these areas are still problematic, but they are definitely less of an issue now than they were previously.
Invading our privacy is nowhere near the worst thing corporations have done. Just off the top of my head:
(1) McDonalds and other corporations have lobbied to lower and even abolish the already abysmal minimum wage, even though their CEO's get paid millions.
(2) Food companies have deforested the Brazilian rainforests to produce beef and palm oil, even though it'd mean the death of all the wildlife, orangutans and indigenous tribespeople living there
(3) Apple, Nike and lots of other companies have used Chinese child slave labour to make their products
(4) Google and others have taken advantage of the tax system, setting up branches in other countries (tax havens), to avoid paying their fair share
There are countless cases of all of the above done by hundreds of companies, I honestly don't know too much about it all because I get too angry to look into it.
Well the principle should be more than enough for you to not want to let the corporations spy on you. They intially tried to do it without your knowledge or consent, they actively tried to secretly spy on us and steal our personal information, that's just vile. Nowadays it's more known about but that's despite their attempts to suppress it. They then sell our personal data to companies to profit from spying on us. We then have to suffer targeted advertising psychologically manipulating us into spending our money. These companies can end up building up a sophisticated psychological profile on us that, combined with future AI, could predict our interests and spending habits so well to subtely drain money from us throughout our lives. This isn't even to mention the illegal things they could do with it behind closed doors, like giving the government access to it all for more lenient tax breaks, or allowing health insurance companies to view our health-related queries.
Humanity will invariably reach a state of utopia in at most 200 years
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I think it would require some REAL, HUGE mess-up on the part of many nations and political parties at the same time for such sort of thing to happen. Sure, it's not impossible - let's say people in most developed countries keep electing Nazis and megalomaniacs to power, who then subtly kill the democracies in their respective countries, and then do nothing about the growing gap between the rich and the poor, convincing the public that this is how it was supposed to be in the first place. I can such a scenario taking place, but do so in the same vein as I see a false vacuum bubble engulfing Earth, or a Solar-system-facing gamma-ray burst cooking our plane to Death. All of these scenarios are certainly possible, but neither of them is likely to happen.
The view that big corporations are evil seems to be quite popular nowadays, but I don't think that it's justified. First of all, what is the worst thing that big corporations have done? Your answer to this question would probably be something like "they neglected our privacy". Is that really enough to merit a group of people who have done so much good to society a title of "evil"? Like Ivan the Terrible- or Stalin-level "evil"? I mean, okay, perhaps you may respect the privacy of your data more than others, but if that's the worst that their morals allow them to do, then there is little risk of the human race being put in jeopardy. In my opinion, politicians and religious leaders are much more dangerous - take people like Putin, Rouhani, and Jinping, for example - Jinping is not ashamed to execute people based on their religion, and nor does Rouhani, who also wants to return his country to the Middle Ages, and Putin can leave an entire country in a state of stagnation just for his own personal wealth and power. Imo, if we can avoid electing politicians such as these guys (although Jinping at least cares for the people of his country, so maybe exclude him from this list), we'll be just fine. The aims of corporations and consumers mostly align, anyway.
Interestingly, I am one of those "complacent" people. I turn all the privacy settings to minimum so that I can have the most personalised experience and so that the corporations have more data to work with and improve their final product. I don't really care if some information about my location or web activity or microphone activity gets represented as a data point somewhere in Google's code if that means that I get a better experience. Honestly speaking, I don't really understand why people would worry about this, either: it's one thing if your personal information gets disclosed to the public, but in this case no one even looks at it, so why would you worry? Unless you have engaged in illegal activities or are a very famous person, no one will ever get to look at your private data. Perhaps you can explain this bit to me, because I am genuinely curious.
To address your last point, acting stupid and being stupid are two completely different things. The smartest people have held the silliest beliefs, and their justifications for holding these beliefs were anything but rational (to give you an example, Bobby Fischer believed Jews to be an inferior race, and Newton believed in alchemy). So don't judge people's intelligence by their opinions. Even so, though, the current generation is much less susceptible to PR, scams, and propaganda than older generations. Belief in pseudoscience (including ideologies such as New Age, creationism, homoeopathy) is by far the lowest among the younger generations, and older generations are also much more likely to fall for a scam/fake news story than are younger generations. Of course, these areas are still problematic, but they are definitely less of an issue now than they were previously.
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Invading our privacy is nowhere near the worst thing corporations have done. Just off the top of my head:
(1) McDonalds and other corporations have lobbied to lower and even abolish the already abysmal minimum wage, even though their CEO's get paid millions.
(2) Food companies have deforested the Brazilian rainforests to produce beef and palm oil, even though it'd mean the death of all the wildlife, orangutans and indigenous tribespeople living there
(3) Apple, Nike and lots of other companies have used Chinese child slave labour to make their products
(4) Google and others have taken advantage of the tax system, setting up branches in other countries (tax havens), to avoid paying their fair share
There are countless cases of all of the above done by hundreds of companies, I honestly don't know too much about it all because I get too angry to look into it.
Well the principle should be more than enough for you to not want to let the corporations spy on you. They intially tried to do it without your knowledge or consent, they actively tried to secretly spy on us and steal our personal information, that's just vile. Nowadays it's more known about but that's despite their attempts to suppress it. They then sell our personal data to companies to profit from spying on us. We then have to suffer targeted advertising psychologically manipulating us into spending our money. These companies can end up building up a sophisticated psychological profile on us that, combined with future AI, could predict our interests and spending habits so well to subtely drain money from us throughout our lives. This isn't even to mention the illegal things they could do with it behind closed doors, like giving the government access to it all for more lenient tax breaks, or allowing health insurance companies to view our health-related queries.