Maybe Einstein's the wrong guy to ask. Maybe Werner Braun would be a better candidate. Either way, someone with a real feel for having been involved in creating an idea, a technology, that was possible and feasible but maybe just wasn't a good idea. Just because we can do something doesn't mean we should.
Problem is, these days, if something will have a buyer, then it will get done, regardless of whether its good for people in general. The people with the real money for R&D into new technology are the big multi-nationals, not the governments... and the capital markets don't like being stopped by a few moral objections. Profit motive pushes them on.
Governments used to be the ones with all the hi-tech secret stuff - and maybe they still do get it a few years ahead of the mass market - but now they're buying it from arms, pharmaceutical and tech companies at a high price - not developing themselves. So they get this hi-tech stuff a bit before us, but we'll still get a watered down, free downloadable version in a couple of years. Governments can't afford to randomly research new technology when they're bailing out banks - they'll leave all this research to the market.
What's my point? Good question. None of the above is new, but I was genuinely scared last night by something which could be seen as a bit innocuous. The new iPhone. Not that scary. But what it incorporates is a fairly new bit of kit which is a... wait for it... "natural step" on from having GPS and an internet connection on your phone. You also need a camera. Its called Augmented Reality. Hiroshima was a natural step or two on from E=MC2, doesn't mean we should do it.
"AR" basically allows the iPhone user to walk down the street looking at the screen which is displaying what the camera sees, augmented by internet searches of whatever the user wants. So if you typed "pubs" into the search, it would allow you to "see through" buildings on the screen to display a tag of the pubs in that direction, with name, distance, reviews, blah blah... anything you can get off an internet search. Cool huh? Very useful no doubt. Bit like TomTom so far. The bit that got me was that this could be so easily linked to face recognition technology.
Take a quick look at www.readwriteweb.com/archives/augmented_id_augmented_reality_facial_recognition.php
Picasa - Google's free photo programme - contains a face recognition thingy which will scan your computer for photos and group pictures of the same person regardless of if that was taken as a baby or as a full grown adult. Apparently there's a bunch of ways this can be done, from retina scans to 3D face profiling. Again very clever.
I am getting to the point, slowly. As you can see from the link above, a really obvious natural step is to link the GPS/AR stuff to face recognition. Say you walk down a street, holding your iPhone, it could recognise people's faces, internet search images, and present information on them - on EVERYONE - to you. Facebook would be a pretty good starting database I'm guessing. This technology is available now, and by free download to everyone - can you imagine what the hi-tech, paid for surveillance version would be like?
I wonder why the government gave up its incredibly expensive and cumbersome national identity card scheme? Maybe because every police office and cctv camera could be used to identify every person continuously. This is 1984, this is Terminator identifying Sarah Connor at her front door, this is... me ranting.
Just because we can identify everyone around us, all the time, with this technology, should we do it? Apart from the policing implications this could be the end of privacy.
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