Editing 1539: Planning

{{comic
| number    = 1539
| date      = June 17, 2015
| title     = Planning
| image     = planning.png
| titletext = [10 years later] Man, why are people so comfortable handing Google and Facebook control over our nuclear weapons?
}}

==Explanation==
Big companies have always tried to get the greatest amount of information from their customers, because that translates into more money earned. However, ability to gather, store and process such information is limited by the technology available. With the recent development of computers, this ability has grown far more than anyone could have suspected just 20 years ago; to the point that companies like {{w|Google}} or {{w|Facebook}} get almost unimaginable amounts of data from their users; and this data is gathered and stored automatically and can be efficiently accessed.

This data is routinely used to, for example, tailor online ads to the browsing history of the user seeing the ad. They could potentially be used for more evil purposes, like selling the medical history of users to insurance companies. Many users don't feel that they're giving out so much information, and in fact that few of them have given Google or Facebook their medical history. However some leaks have proven quite the opposite. In the [http://www.somethingawful.com/d/weekend-web/aol-search-log.php AOL leak] referenced in [[155: Search History]], searches for "how does a male's cocaine use affect a fetus", "hysterectomy" or "8 alcohol drinks a day", surely would be interesting for a medical insurance company to know.

In the comic, [[Ponytail]] is puzzled because people are not worried about Google or Facebook using their information in evil ways; however [[Megan]] raises a quite fair point, namely that the huge amount of {{w|nuclear weapons}} in existence is much scarier, and that was worrying to the general public in the 1980s, however people have grown tired of that and now concerns have moved to internet privacy only because it's "new". What is perceived as dangerous or worrying follows trends and fashions not directly related to real danger (i.e. "happen on auto-pilot"). The point Megan is making is that maybe it's better to just accept that things work in this way and go with the flow. This is very similar to what happens in [[1480: Super Bowl]] or [[1534: Beer]].

The title text hypothesizes a similar conversation being held ten years later (presumably in 2025, ten years after the comic was published), in which the two aspects of the above have been inexplicably mixed. A future equivalent to Ponytail asks why we all think it is OK to hand over the control of our nuclear weapons to Google and Facebook, which would certainly be a nonsensical (and deeply troubling) route to take. This could also be seen as another step toward the {{w|technological singularity}}, from which perspective handing over control of nuclear weapons could be desirable, catastrophic, implicit and/or unavoidable. Google and Facebook have not ever requested or been given control over nuclear weapons, even that far in the future, so far as anyone yet knows.

This comic was posted on the day after {{w|Vladimir Putin}} had [http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/17/world/europe/putin-40-new-missiles-russian-nuclear-arsenal.html announced] that Russia would add 40 new {{w|intercontinental ballistic missile}}s to its nuclear stockpile within the year.

Within a year Randall has made several other comics about nuclear weapons, the first of these, [[1520: Degree-Off]], came just 1½ month before this one. Later  these two comics were released early in 2016: [[1626: Judgment Day]] and [[1655: Doomsday Clock]]. Nuclear weapons are also mentioned twice in ''[[Thing Explainer]]'', specifically they are explained in the explanation for ''Machine for burning cities'' about {{w|Thermonuclear weapon|thermonuclear bombs}}, but they are also mentioned in ''Boat that goes under the sea'' about a submarine that carries nukes. All three comics and both explanations in the book, does like this comic, comment on how crazy it is that we have created enough firepower to obliterate Earth several times (or at least scourge it for any human life.{{Actual citation needed}} Google and Facebook are not the only unlikely organizations Randall has imagined could become military powers - in the title text to [[1953: The History of Unicode]] he imagined the {{w|Unicode Consortium}} apparently taking over arbitrating world peace from the United Nations.

==Transcript==
:[Megan and Ponytail are walking]
:Ponytail: Why are people so comfortable handing Google and Facebook all this control over our lives?
:Megan: I dunno.
:Megan: Our species built thousands of nuclear weapons, scattered them around the planet, and then moved on to other things.
:Megan: Maybe it's best to accept that some of this big-picture planning is just happening on autopilot.

{{comic discussion}}

[[Category:Comics featuring Ponytail]]
[[Category:Comics featuring Megan]]
[[Category:Singularity]]
[[Category:Nuclear weapons]]