When I was a child I enjoyed programming my commodore 64. I felt powerful, being able to create anything and letting the machine do what I wanted by just summarizing an idea into clearly defined instructions and rules. If this, then that. Some people think of programming as something obscure or complicated, but it’s as simple as: if it rains, I take an umbrella with me. When a gameplayer presses the left key, the character on the screen moves left. The basic principles are still the same, but the way computer creations manifest themselves has changed. And their impact too.

If we look at the developments of the computer industry, we actually see the changing role and position of computers in our society. With the capacity and power of computers growing, and their size and price shrinking, we can see a growth of the amount of tasks for which they could provide help and assist us. They started having an opinion about the world when they got connected to the internet. And with the mobile revolution, and the upcoming augmented reality revolution, a computerized vision on the world will be fully merged onto day to day reality.

But obviously we’re worried about this. We collectively complain about side-effects of being so utterly connected to the whole world, but no longer having an eye for our surroundings and people in our vicinity. And there’s discussion about the influence of social media companies. Their scripts define what we see and encounter. Mixing ads and fake news content into the flow of content we absorb each day. Currently, this only applies to what we see on our computers and mobiles. But once the age of wearables takes off, transparent screens in front of our eyes will have a continuous impact on what we see, but the impact will extent to include much more of our behaviour and what we do.

Our complaints have been heard. Facebook for example has announced to change their algorithms to let us see more of the activities of our friends and family. But why should one company decide and define this focus for all of the worlds population? Their algorithm is a black box. The only adjustment we can make is to switch on or off groups of people and their content. When switching everything off, an empty feed is the result.

There’s a growing community of people that are worried about the power of facebook which is based on all the data it feeds to us and grabs from us. Their algorithms study what we see, like and do. There are suggestions to urge these companies to let users own their own data, but that’s only halfway a solution. We want to own our data, but we also want to know which insights are gathered and which meta data is collected, and how that influences what we see on our feed.

So the split up of these social media companies needs to include their algorithms too. Just like IBM was split into a software and hardware part, and Microsoft was forced to decouple their Internet Explorer browser. As users of social media, we want transparency. We want to be able to decide which algorithm runs our feed. Some people will want ease of use. Some will want a fully customizable mechanism. If it rains, I take an umbrella. If it rains, I take an umbrella, except when it storms and I only need to walk a little distance, but not when .. etcetera.

In the case of a news feed, we can always quit a system if we don’t agree with lacking the freedom to choose the algorithm. But the discussion about deciding which algorithm runs your feed is going to be more fundamental once the social media companies are responsible for guiding us throughout our day to day life with instructive content about when and when we need to be. The mobile phone is already our personal assistant. But the assistant is becoming more than just an assistant. It’s going to be our coach, doctor and trainer, accessing stored data and live data gathered from sensors and our wearables. Instead of just matching dates and guiding us towards our appointments and bussiness meetings, it will keep guiding us throughout activities.

Currently, the devices are not having the right shape yet. Most of them aren’t inobtrusive and subtle yet, but progress is made rapidly.

Looking at the scheme of things and the flow of data, it’s clear that a black box should not be at the centre of everything, especially when the processing in the black box is increasingly based on artificial intelligence and untraceable neural networks. Instead of a black box at the centre, we should be at the centre. But for that to happen we need a new design for humans, once we really enter the cyborg era. We need an API, and application programming interface. A plug-in structure, so developers or fellow users can create scripts or services and we will be free to decide which specific components make up our day-to-day routine. We can shop around to include components by other companies, governments or open source communities. Or we can write our scripts and logic. And we’d better start doing that now, because when looking into the future by studying the patents that are already being filed today, we can see how the tech industry is getting ready to deploy us as robots. Being to big to beat, it’s going to be unavoidable that it’s going to be a battle between the big 5. Will the only freedom of choice be to choose a flavor? Will you end up in an google reality, an apple universe or will Amazon augment your reality?

Assisted by devices, it’s going to be a fantastic D I Y reality, we’re told. But are you really doing things by yourself, if you’re following the strict guidance of a device that controls you? Is it going to be a challenge to be your own robot? It will be, if we don’t change things radically right now. And that will be the real challenge.

For some people, it will be enough to at least know which scripts are running your life. For others, it will require a bit of programming. But that doesn’t mean it’s going to be complicated. It will be a matter of translating your preferences, your interests, your taste and your default behaviour into rules. Rules that will apply to you. We’ve already slowly grown accustomed to the influence of software and devices on our life, and we react based on what they tell us. So nothing is new. A device will tell us what we do, what to say and what to feel, but at least we know why this is the case.

Initially, these scripts will be basic. Definitely not comparable to the finetuned control the big companies will be able to give us, based on their years and years of monitoring us. But if we start building and shaping and creating our own behavioural scripts now and perhaps even sharing our some of our routines in an open source community, we can collaboratively create a hive mind that’s really us. Operating free of commercial purposes or stock holder interest. Start programming yourself today and escape the inevitable future! Be your own robot!