• DW.com, Thursday, May 19, 2016 9:05 AM

Alas, we should have seen it coming - if only we'd been watching the screens that have so clearly been watching us. Even before this age of networked TVs and near permanent connectivity the future was well written - way back in 1975 in John Brunner's novel, "The Shockwave Rider." Reading the science fiction classic today, you would be forgiven for thinking Brunner had a Samsung smart TV and the year was 2057. This is a novel in which the protagonist, Nickie Haflinger, has inhabited numerous coded personalities, including that of a priest. A child who comes to him can't confess, because the confessional booth is wired - "the secrecy of the confessional doesn't apply when you're talking to a microphone." It's "science in the service of morality" - and almost everything is decided on statistics and controlled by computers.

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