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"It would be a bit glib-and more than a little clichéd-to call this some kind of technological dystopia. Actually, dystopia wouldn't be right, exactly: Dystopian fiction is generally speculative, whereas all of these items and services are real. At the end of September, Amazon announced a suite of tech products in its move toward "ambient intelligence," which Amazon's hardware chief, Dave Limp, described as technology and devices that slip into the background but are "always there," collecting information and taking action against it. This intense devotion to tracking and quantifying all aspects of our waking and non-waking hours is nothing new-see the Apple Watch, the Fitbit, social media writ large, and the smartphone in your pocket-but Amazon has been unusually explicit about its plans. The Everything Store is becoming an Everything Tracker, collecting and leveraging large amounts of personal data related to entertainment, fitness, health, and, it claims, security. It's surveillance that millions of customers are opting in to."

"There is growing concern that as well as addicting users, technology is contributing toward so-called "continuous partial attention", severely limiting people's ability to focus, and possibly lowering IQ. One recent study showed that the mere presence of smartphones damages cognitive capacity - even when the device is turned off. "Everyone is distracted," Rosenstein says. "All of the time.""

"Instead, the robots are here not to replace this lower tier of underpaid and undervalued work. They are here to smugly sit in the middle, monitoring and surveilling us, hiring and firing us. Amazon has recently replaced its middle management and human resources workers with artificial intelligence to determine when a worker has outlived their usefulness and needs to be let go. There is no human to appeal to, no negotiating with a bot. "

"Vast sums are being spent by governments across the industrialized and developing worlds on automating poverty and in the process, turning the needs of vulnerable citizens into numbers, replacing the judgment of human caseworkers with the cold, bloodless decision-making of machines. "

"When they opened their eyes, they did indeed see that the Digital Nation had been born. Only it hadn't set them free. They were being ruled by it. It hadn't tamed politics. It sent them berserk. And it hadn't brought people closer together. It had alienated them."