system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
CMV: Technology will be the downfall of personal freedom and will radically alter societies for the worse.

So am I doomed? Will my adult life be grim and horrible?

These are the kinds of what-ifs that have a nasty habit of implanting themselves into my brain and troubling me until I find some sort of closure, so much so that I am beginning to view new technologies with *disdain* by default until they have proven otherwise. After doing hours of reading in various places on the Internet, I have come to the conclusion that pretty much every country on Earth is headed down the toilet bowl, either towards a highly-elitist neofeudal tech dystopia (if they can afford to maintain it) or towards collapse (if they can't). In other words, Black Mirror will be very close to the truth. I have identified two main factors that could lead to this scenario:

**•Automation**

Ever heard of the basic income? The idea that money earned from the use of robots will be paid back to a central government agency, and then distributed to the now unemployed or underemployed people allowing them to live out a comfortable life on the proceeds of society's productivity as a whole? Well, that ain't gonna happen. Even in societies where money doesn't buy you as much political power as it does in the USA, are the elites really going to want to pay taxes, or are they just going to be content with laying off millions of workers and doing nothing more to help them? If you're saying they couldn't possibly do that, they damn well could, because:

**•People will be reliant on technology for day-to-day survival.**

Don't like the fact that you are totally jobless and unemployable due to automation? Want to do something about it? Too bad, because your Alexa just heard you speaking and is now forwarding that information to central intelligence bureaus, who will cut off your cashless payment system - the only legal means of currency - and cut off the cashless payment system of anybody who dares to help you. Enjoy starving to death. This is already beginning to happen in China and although it isn't nearly as extreme as the example here, with real currency still being legal and people still being employed, I am banging my head in frustration at the countries that are eager to adopt their technologies thinking it is a good idea, and can only worry about the future. Hopefully, that future will turn out better than what I predict here, because:

**•A technological dystopia is forever.**

Back in the good old days, if King Nasty McArrogantface were to push his subjects too far, society would snap. A revolution would oust him and replace him with a government more amicable to the people. If that one soured as well, rinse and repeat. He could try to censor the newspapers and arrest people overheard discussing seditious thoughts, but there were always private houses and secluded forests into which revolutionaries could retreat and make plans.

Now let's say we have a technological dystopia where everybody is microchipped and uses cashless payment abusing its power. If microchip technology advances enough to recognise optical nerve signals and vocal outputs - no doubt something that people will willingly have themselves implanted with ostensibly as a personal assistant - there goes your revolution. Any anti-government thought spoken out loud or written on paper gets tattled on right away. Facial recognition cams will track you down, your cashless payment system will get cut off, and it won't be pretty.

Of course, all of this could be avoided by the fair rule of law setting hard boundaries to prevent technologies from being exploited. Unfortunately, I just don't see that happening. First of all, many countries *are* power-hungry and will use these dystopian technologies themselves. Secondly, in countries like the USA, politicians on the campaign finance rolls of the tech companies aren't going to ban anything they make. Thirdly, people will voluntarily adopt these dangerous new technologies out of their own will, paving the way for tech giants to create huge new pseudo-governmental structures through their control and monitoring of tech users that will relegate the old governments to a position similar to that of the Emperor in pre-Meiji Restoration Japan. 

So will I grow up in a society where personal and political freedoms can be drastically altered at the tap of a touchscreen, the fair rule of law is available only to those who can afford it, and happiness has been engineered out of daily life in favor of it only being served up through bread-and-circus diversions, most likely unemployed, bored and angry, completely cut out of any networks with those more successful than I am due to a huge income gap with no hope of ever earning a decent amount of money, or is my view one that ought to be changed?
gpt
This is an argument which has been raised with every single technological revolution for all of history. The industrial revolution saw this with the luddites, who destroyed machinery that they felt threatened their line of work in the early 1800s. They were right in that their specific jobs disappeared. They were wrong that it meant there would be fewer jobs.  

What has always happened is that there are more jobs than people suspect, because although you can clearly see what will be lost, nobody has or can have the imagination to clearly see what will be gained. It's going to happen again in the coming years, and sometime later it will happen again thanks to some technology nobody has yet begun to imagine.