Holy Brit

A few years ago I turned my computer on to discover that I had 1500 emails in my Inbox in the space of a few hours. Thinking this unlikely, I looked carefully and discovered that two of my email accounts had been patiently sending each other automated replies for several hours. It was my mistake but also a little spooky.
Today the BBC has a story about slightly more sinister automation. It mentions a sort of hyper version of my email when the Amazon pricing software went a bit mad, started bidding against two different parts of itself and set the price of a book at millions of dollars. Whilst this is amusing in some ways it is also more than a little worrying. Naively, I had not really considered that large corporations were using computers to judge and manipulate markets - although I should know that they are if I get emails about the latest offers on things which I have browsed online.
Whilst marketing might be cynical to a degree it is worrying that there might be more sinister undertones to all of this - especially if we are not rooted quite solidly in the first place. Our online worlds and the world of people around us have become blurred - what is real after all? Into this confusion add computer code, so powerful, that it can predict our behaviour  - and you might have a recipe for a much easier life....or a highly manipulated one.
Knowing who we are at heart is important - as is being able to see the influences which we are under. It is important, in the face of all this predictive and life changing technology, that we do not forget to make up our own minds, to form our own opinions. I like technology, I like its challenge and capabilities and I use it a lot. But I also know that I am capable of thought and ideas, I do not abdicate that to someone else, God gave me a brain for a reason - and most of the time when a computer send me a "we thought you might be interested in..." email - I tend to hit delete and enjoy the sunshine.