I wrote an email the other day to one of my brothers. The title in the subject line was “Hello!” In the email I talked about the recent weather, told him that someone had bladed my driveway and knowing he had plans to come over soon to get the snowblower out, I told him to not worry about it. Especially as we were forecast to get more snow over the weekend and again on Monday and Tuesday. I always try and send a blind carbon copy to myself as well so I can reference it if I need to send another email with other information and basically make sure that I am not repeating myself on anything I had wrote earlier. I had included in the email, a couple of quick pics of the drive to show how much snow I had gotten in my area.

Later on, the next day, I clicked on that bcc email to see if I had asked him about my sister-in-law’s work schedule for the week. I was more than a bit surprised to see a large box at the top of that email with a new title of “Snow Removal Update” with a note saying, “Consider delaying your trip until weather improves”.

Now if you use Yahoo much, you know that they have revamped their webpage and have a new yahoo mail updated page as well. The differences are very apparent, much so with the new email page. Now I know that the response was computer generated on my email to my family member, but it does not sit well with me. It felt invasive.

There are going to be those who say if you have nothing to hide it shouldn’t matter. Well, I have nothing to hide, but the blatant obviousness of the monitoring of my email (and everyone else’s) is disturbing.

And it continues to grow, this invasiveness of computers in our lives that seem to always be taking a step further. Generated pictures, AI dubbed voices, and a general assessment of each individual of their tastes, hobbies, shopping habits that get absorbed and spit back out at us in marketing bombardments of more emails and ads each day.

It reminds me of the movie, “The Truman Show”, where complete strangers are peering into your world and casting judgement. Taking an assessment, and then pigeonholing me into a group or slapping a label on me whether to keep an eye on this individual, or to send advertisements for snow shovels and more ice melt.

Yeah, one can joke about it, but it gives me an uneasy feeling about where our world is headed. If we are all condensed into a single computer-generated page, what is to say that page isn’t modified or hacked into something else not of our own making or doing? How easy it would be for any agency or government to point a finger or make a claim of whatever they feel like making.

I don’t like it at all. Who in the end is controlling the computer? You? Me? The government? Another foreign government? The computer itself? How will our communications in the future be dictated? Phones? Email? Or hushed passed notes in fearfulness and looking over our shoulders? Don’t kid yourself if you think I am being overly dramatic. It’s apathy that contributes to man’s downfall.

It makes me uneasy. It makes me worried. It makes me question what our near future will bring. I don’t think it’s looking all that rosy.