From the Independent’s Andrew Griffin: Commentators had for years been threatening and falsely heralding the year of the “social media election”. And then in 2016 it arrived, messier and uglier than anyone would have expected. It was a fittingly frustrating and bizarre end to a year in technology that saw long-predicted futures arrive, but often not completely – and with more than a few problems.
It could all have been so different: this was supposed to be a year of elections and referendums in which the most informed citizenry of all time was going to vote, thanks to a combination of the knowledge powers assembled by companies like Google and the ability to discuss them that Facebook gives us.
Instead, it ended with both of those companies being implicated in a “fake news” scandal that saw them blamed for having confused an entire electorate. And other things were supposed to arrive last year, too, such as the beginnings of the smart home, with all our appliances hooked up to the internet, giving us the ability to control them from afar and them the ability to control themselves.
Virtual reality was supposed to begin, letting us inhabit faraway worlds by strapping screens to our faces. And other technologies such as artificial intelligence and robotics were supposed to continue their benevolent march on humankind, solving our problems and making us happier. Only some of those things happened, and most of them came with terrifying negative effects that threatened not only to hold back progress but undermine it entirely.
Over 2016, for example, it gradually became clear that the smart home – powered by the internet of things, or the various web-enabled appliances and gadgets in people’s houses – was also the most powerful cyber weapon ever developed. Connecting all of those things up to the internet might help them work better – but it also helped hackers take down huge parts of the internet with barely any effort at all. That was seen in October, for instance, when many parts of the world lost contact with the internet thanks to a massive cyber attack.