A SoftBank Group Corp. Pepper humanoid robot, center, stands in front of a Boston Dynamics Inc. Atlas humanoid robot, left, and Spot robot as they are displayed at the SoftBank Robot World 2017 in Tokyo, Japan, on Tuesday, Nov. 21, 2017. SoftBank Chief Executive Officer Masayoshi Son has put money into robots, artificial intelligence, microchips and satellites, sketching a vision of the future where a trillion devices are connected to the internet and technology is integrated into humans. Photographer: Kiyoshi Ota/Bloomberg
DAVOS, Switzerland: Intelligent robots and all-knowing online networks threaten to drag humanity into a “totalitarian” nightmare of mind control, mass unemployment and children hooked on smartphones, experts warned at this week’s Davos summit.
Online retailers and social networks collect so much data about us that they can watch us, control us and will transform us entirely, said Yuval Noah Harari, the Israeli author of bestselling books about technology and anthropology.
