TOO MANY CONNECTIONS CAN BE DANGEROUS

Everywhere you look people are checking e-mail, browsing the Internet, checking social media, shopping, reading books, or watching videos and playing games online. All of this connectivity via the Internet is fraught with peril. We may be reaching a tipping point that leads to disaster. Because every bank is interconnected with every other bank we have destabilized the banking system. Because of automated trading controlled by powerful computers interacting with each other, we have had a “flash crash” in the stock market that evaporated $600 billion of equity in a few minutes! Increasing connectivity, speed, and complexity, can have surprising results that lead to horrible events. A strongly-networked system of smartphones and computers has the potential to eliminate privacy and expose us to identity theft.

Smartphones connected by networks to computers is a recipe for disaster!. Cyber researchers have invented a device to extract the memory of a mobile phone. Computer software can extract the phone’s memory consisting of call history, text messages, email, images, video, and banking information. Yes, it could be helpful for police as evidence in crimes but it would also be very useful for criminals to steal your identity and your money. Even the government could use it to spy on its citizens. My advice is to be careful how connected you get and be vigilant about keeping your eyes on what the Internet is capable of. There will soon be computers as powerful as our brains and that sounds dangerous to me. If they are able to make computers that have empathy, sympathy, and emotions then humans will be obsolete.