Big Brother is watching you
Between hard news and paranoid fantasy, we’ve all become aware this year just how much of our data big tech companies have on file. They are gently, politely sucking out facts about our travels, finances, personal tastes and connections through our phones, laptops, tablets and watches. Some people even keep a cylindrical surveillance machine in their house, supervising everything from TV and internet shopping to lights-out time. Not so much Big Brother as nosy little sister. Its creators actually applied for a patent enabling said device to eavesdrop uninvited on conversations without being called for (a bit like a nosy parlourmaid, ear pressed to the keyhole). This means that ‘she’ could pick up hints on what to try and sell you next. Or, in some dystopian near future, diagnose you as an undecided voter and send you persuasive political messages from a creepy committee in Cambridge.
They say they won’t do these new bad things – perish the thought. But the future rolls ever more rapidly towards us, and some people’s devices have reportedly started giving chuckling, sinister laughs. Well, they might: several people I know admit to sleeping with their iphone under the pillow because it’s ‘in charge’ of monitoring whether they have a good night’s sleep or not. That thing is probably listening to you breathing, assessing your snores and drawing dark conclusions to pass on to your health insurer…
But what has this to do with yachting, you cry? Aha. It may have been a cheese-fuelled dream the other night, but I woke up convinced that we, the proud free sons of the waves, were definitely up next. Who is more of a patsy for new technology than the modern yachtie? Who is it who succumbs, despite costs rising year after year, to little boxes containing everything technology can invent, moving from basic echo sounder and RDF, to Decca, then to GPS and AIS? Who was it who greeted with excitement the refinements which saw plotter and sounder and compass and autohelm and engine and batteries talking freely to one another, and to an app on the skipper’s phone? Who squeaks around boat shows in deck shoes with a credit card and a happy daze, throwing their heart over the windmill for every new gizmo?
Us, that’s who. Proud boat owners, lovingly lavishing new kit on the beloved craft. Already your plotter knows where you’ve been, which may have already led to a few fraught marital conversations: ‘Darling, this line here – in what sense was Deauville “on the way home” from the club rally to Port Solent? Are you sure you were stuck for three days on a mudbank in Beaulieu?’ There are now enough voice-activated nav apps for cars to make it likely that it won’t be long before boats get them, and Vice Commodore Pugwash of the Royal Mud Lump YC is able to snap, ‘Waypoint East Bramble’ or ‘352° magnetic!’ without putting down his gin.
If an appliance can hear commands, it can also listen. As AI becomes ever more sensitive, it might also draw conclusions, and act upon them – bleep, flicker, flash and it’s diverted the boat smartly away from a destination it knows to be a dangerously boozy weekend with the lads. Which, moreover, also carries – bleep! *checks the bank* – a risk of exceeding stated overdraft limit. Expect a grating voice from the future to say, in the tones of Nurse Ratched, ‘Illegal Operation. Does not compute. Course adjusted, 360°, ETA Ramsgate 1800.’ Well, it was just a nightmare. Or was it?
We throw our hearts over the windmill for new gizmos