The short answer is yes. In China, they’re implementing a social credit system where if you do what are considered bad things, i.e. smoking, or jaywalking, they will ban you from doing certain things. Also, robots already exist that are eerily similar to the ones in a black mirror episode that were trained to kill humans.
But the lecture wasn’t meant to necessarily frighten you about the future. But more so to get you to look at the future in a different way, to get people thinking and talking. And, instead of dreading finding creative ways using speculative design. One way people are already doing this is through the True Love Tinder Robot, which takes the your reaction to profile pictures on tinder, through brain chemistry and what your eyes are attracted to, and swipes right or left for you. Another design took hundreds of pictures of people of color killed by police and made a composite face of them. She then attached this to a gun. If the gun saw a face that looked like the composite face, it would lock and wouldn’t be able to fire, thus removing racial bias/profiling.
So yes, while we are technically moving towards the technology used in Black Mirror, it doesn’t have to destroy us the way it does in the show. It can be used for good.
