I remember hearing about these as a kid in the mid 00's.
Back then, the idea of a futuristic toilet that could automatically detect early signs of bowel cancer and other health risks seemed like a technology that, while not "cool", would improve hundreds of millions of peoples' lives.
It's so sad that we've reached the stage now that our first reaction is not how many lives this could save, but how big tech are going to use it to fuck over the rest of society.
BigTech did actually what we suspect them to continue to do in the future. That, and a lot of the promises from 20 years ago either led nowhere or just ended up pushing more ads.
Some people figured out that acquiring data on anyone and everyone, from every source possible, and collating it, could be used to make a profit. In the absence of any laws forbidding this, unregulated capitalism did what it always does: strip-mined the fuck out of this newly-discovered resource, without a single care for any damage done to the world in the name of their profits.
Anyone who had moral qualms with this was ignored in favor of increasingly absurd piles of money for the people running the companies doing this. These companies now have enough cash on hand to make it much harder to pass laws forbidding what they are doing.
The difference between the two mindsets you describe is not that events have changed our expectations: it's that the former was a kid's fantasy and the latter is an adult's reality. Any informed, serious adult at the time could and did have similar (albeit vaguer) concerns along the same lines.
Decades before the modern form of Big Tech, there was plenty of serious conversation about the dystopian potential of our technological present and future. Every trope you can imagine was well-represented in these conversations: centralization, panopticons, loss of user/customer control; hell even addiction to online communities was well-trod ground in at least fiction.
These hazards are just inherent to these technologies. I won't go as far as claiming there was no way to avoid them as a society, but as a baseline everyone expected to be grappling with these issues.
Your framing bothers me because it implies the current situation was inevitable. Sci-fi was the way to we grappled with these possibilities. And for the most part, us technical people were very concerned with dystopias, both the cynical and the wide eyed dreamers.
Then venture capital got here, latched onto the terrible centralizing technologies like AJAX, and paid everyone enough to stop thinking - "don't be evil", etc. But even at the time, looking at the incentives, these businesses' benevolence was clearly unsustainable. But "it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it".
Now we're down to simply playing catch up. I can roll my own eyes every time some article cries about big tech cutting them off, safe knowing that I run my own infrastructure. But I'm well aware that I spend time and effort to maintain it. And doing so does little to change the larger societal expectation that people's digital lives can be arbitrarily destroyed at any time.
I can envision a Free and easy future story for things like private communication, filesharing, etc. But hardware like toilet sensors? Large scale analysis? I've got nothing. Best result is that someone reverse engineers a proprietary device's protocol, does some simple analysis on their own turds, and creates a niche community around it. Until the larger company gets word of that "security problem" with their hardware, smites them, and the community is stuck refurbishing used toilets off eBay until their numbers dwindle through attrition.
The real problem is there is little widespread pushback on these defective-by-design technologies before they're even adopted. The "average person's" expectation has been completely neutered between a combination of overwhelming advertising and the politics of corporations first.
As dysfunctional and regulatory captured as the US Government is, I'm increasingly thinking the only way forward for wider society is some GDPR equivalent legislation. Ideally we'd end up with a fiduciary relationship for personal data (after all, personal data is more sensitive than money). Or in the worst case storing personal data just becomes toxic such that most companies want to avoid it, and the behemoths that remain can be gradually reigned in through successive legislation and focused public concern.
> Your framing bothers me because it implies there was no alternative
No, I went out of my way to emphasize that I wasn't saying this:
> I won't go as far as claiming there was no way to avoid them as a society, but as a baseline everyone expected to be grappling with these issues.
The _challenges_ were inevitable. Failing to surmount them (to whatever extent you think we did) was not. But those two don't add up to where-did-that-come-from bewilderment at what happened, as failure was always a possibility.
If we've utterly failed at handling climate change in twenty years, a reasonable reaction wouldn't be "20 years ago we thought we'd be living in a perfect solarpunk future, who could have predicted climate dystopia?". The presence of a difficult problem implies the possibility of failure, which is incongruous with the GP comment's Pollyanna-ish view of the future when he was a kid.
> for the most part, us technical people were very concerned with dystopias, both the cynical and the wide eyed dreamers.
Yes, these are the people I was referring to when contrasting the GP's framing that when he was a kid, he didn't worry about the privacy etc concerns of technology.
This is a well known target for data collection, going back well beyond 20 years. It has been proposed before that municipal sewage systems be monitored for byproducts of explosive and chemical weapons manufacturing, as well as surveying illicit substance use. Ambassadors have long been careful about where they take their dumps, and porta-shitters occasionally pop up on embassy grounds during periods of high tension - despite having a functional sewage line.
My pooping opsec is weak, I'm learning. Time to start keeping a bottle of bleach next to the porcelain throne. And perhaps one of those webcam covers that slide open and closed on the anus for when I'm on an untrusted toilet.
The truly security conscious will be forced to implement something terrible, something not unlike a bitcoin tumbler... obviously they'll be branded as crazy conspiracy theorists and told that only criminal defecators have anything to hide in the panopticon.
Sewage sampling has been used to survey disease for a long time, but we are at a point now where it is technically feasible to automate the collection and analysis of DNA. If that isn't disconcerting enough, we'll be operating on fairly rough race/familial markers for some time - so just enough evidence to initiate life ruination, but not enough to exonerate. Sewage surveillance was allegedly offered as a viable tool in the hunt for OBL once they narrowed down the Pakistani village.
The good old days of pocket protectors, strong passwords, and web-browsers less complex than entire operating systems have clearly yielded to faraday colostomy bags and the proxy anus. And if we could save those millions of lives, think of all the extra data we'd have!
That's what western societies have become - the state and corporations are 100% an adversarial to society and individuals. Nothing they say or do can be taken at face value and most people assume anything they say (their words) is 180 degrees opposite in intent and inevitable future deeds.
This is what you get when you either outright lie regularly or are not careful about appearances of your words!
> Loo design has barely changed in 150 years – until now.
This is incorrect on many levels.
Post internet, design has accelerated even more.
This is more than bidet technology.
The construction materials and standardisation for instance. Connectors are easier. Reduced cleaning and clogging designs and self cleaning like in-tank cleaning tablet (1978). The slow close seat was patented in 1996. These techs have improved since invention.
On top of the many things like composting/pressure assisted/Wall-Hung etc, etc
Yes, 'if' this happens it's also a major step but I'd hope everyone realises this is quite like Theranos.
You can't just do diagnostic tests using a camera and electronics. You'd have to install chemical tests, which then becomes a bit pointless. Just ask your teen to do the drug test. Perhaps collecting a mixed household sample for a month and drug/xxxx testing would be a workable plan. Keep your family healthy/under surveillance.
Your Toilet Session has Expired. To Use "Sniffr Loo (TM)", please log in here. If you have forgotten your password, you can reset it here.... A Reset Password link has been emailed to you....I'm sorry, that password does not meet our complexity rules... Installing updates; please wait. Please do not restart or defecate in "Sniffer Loo (TM)" until the update process is complete.
> “It turns out that you can detect compounds that are diagnostic of exercise [show you have done some]; you can see when an over-the-counter medication comes into the system and clears out; you can see molecules that correlate with how well you slept, how much fat you had in your diet, what your calorie intake was.”
I know the intentions are probably good, but imagine how the tech industry will abuse that much data. This shows the risks of failing to regulate big tech. We’ll miss out on genuinely useful data because a handful of people needed to get super rich by disseminating our personal, private info.
23 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 69.3 ms ] threadBack then, the idea of a futuristic toilet that could automatically detect early signs of bowel cancer and other health risks seemed like a technology that, while not "cool", would improve hundreds of millions of peoples' lives.
It's so sad that we've reached the stage now that our first reaction is not how many lives this could save, but how big tech are going to use it to fuck over the rest of society.
What the hell happened in the last 20 years?
Some people figured out that acquiring data on anyone and everyone, from every source possible, and collating it, could be used to make a profit. In the absence of any laws forbidding this, unregulated capitalism did what it always does: strip-mined the fuck out of this newly-discovered resource, without a single care for any damage done to the world in the name of their profits.
Anyone who had moral qualms with this was ignored in favor of increasingly absurd piles of money for the people running the companies doing this. These companies now have enough cash on hand to make it much harder to pass laws forbidding what they are doing.
Decades before the modern form of Big Tech, there was plenty of serious conversation about the dystopian potential of our technological present and future. Every trope you can imagine was well-represented in these conversations: centralization, panopticons, loss of user/customer control; hell even addiction to online communities was well-trod ground in at least fiction.
These hazards are just inherent to these technologies. I won't go as far as claiming there was no way to avoid them as a society, but as a baseline everyone expected to be grappling with these issues.
Then venture capital got here, latched onto the terrible centralizing technologies like AJAX, and paid everyone enough to stop thinking - "don't be evil", etc. But even at the time, looking at the incentives, these businesses' benevolence was clearly unsustainable. But "it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it".
Now we're down to simply playing catch up. I can roll my own eyes every time some article cries about big tech cutting them off, safe knowing that I run my own infrastructure. But I'm well aware that I spend time and effort to maintain it. And doing so does little to change the larger societal expectation that people's digital lives can be arbitrarily destroyed at any time.
I can envision a Free and easy future story for things like private communication, filesharing, etc. But hardware like toilet sensors? Large scale analysis? I've got nothing. Best result is that someone reverse engineers a proprietary device's protocol, does some simple analysis on their own turds, and creates a niche community around it. Until the larger company gets word of that "security problem" with their hardware, smites them, and the community is stuck refurbishing used toilets off eBay until their numbers dwindle through attrition.
The real problem is there is little widespread pushback on these defective-by-design technologies before they're even adopted. The "average person's" expectation has been completely neutered between a combination of overwhelming advertising and the politics of corporations first.
As dysfunctional and regulatory captured as the US Government is, I'm increasingly thinking the only way forward for wider society is some GDPR equivalent legislation. Ideally we'd end up with a fiduciary relationship for personal data (after all, personal data is more sensitive than money). Or in the worst case storing personal data just becomes toxic such that most companies want to avoid it, and the behemoths that remain can be gradually reigned in through successive legislation and focused public concern.
No, I went out of my way to emphasize that I wasn't saying this:
> I won't go as far as claiming there was no way to avoid them as a society, but as a baseline everyone expected to be grappling with these issues.
The _challenges_ were inevitable. Failing to surmount them (to whatever extent you think we did) was not. But those two don't add up to where-did-that-come-from bewilderment at what happened, as failure was always a possibility.
If we've utterly failed at handling climate change in twenty years, a reasonable reaction wouldn't be "20 years ago we thought we'd be living in a perfect solarpunk future, who could have predicted climate dystopia?". The presence of a difficult problem implies the possibility of failure, which is incongruous with the GP comment's Pollyanna-ish view of the future when he was a kid.
> for the most part, us technical people were very concerned with dystopias, both the cynical and the wide eyed dreamers.
Yes, these are the people I was referring to when contrasting the GP's framing that when he was a kid, he didn't worry about the privacy etc concerns of technology.
This is a well known target for data collection, going back well beyond 20 years. It has been proposed before that municipal sewage systems be monitored for byproducts of explosive and chemical weapons manufacturing, as well as surveying illicit substance use. Ambassadors have long been careful about where they take their dumps, and porta-shitters occasionally pop up on embassy grounds during periods of high tension - despite having a functional sewage line.
https://www.wired.com/2015/10/familial-dna-evidence-turns-in...
This is what you get when you either outright lie regularly or are not careful about appearances of your words!
This is incorrect on many levels.
Post internet, design has accelerated even more.
This is more than bidet technology.
The construction materials and standardisation for instance. Connectors are easier. Reduced cleaning and clogging designs and self cleaning like in-tank cleaning tablet (1978). The slow close seat was patented in 1996. These techs have improved since invention.
On top of the many things like composting/pressure assisted/Wall-Hung etc, etc
Yes, 'if' this happens it's also a major step but I'd hope everyone realises this is quite like Theranos.
You can't just do diagnostic tests using a camera and electronics. You'd have to install chemical tests, which then becomes a bit pointless. Just ask your teen to do the drug test. Perhaps collecting a mixed household sample for a month and drug/xxxx testing would be a workable plan. Keep your family healthy/under surveillance.
I know the intentions are probably good, but imagine how the tech industry will abuse that much data. This shows the risks of failing to regulate big tech. We’ll miss out on genuinely useful data because a handful of people needed to get super rich by disseminating our personal, private info.
#itsmyanus