DAVOS - Imagine a world where mosquito-sized robots fly around stealing samples of your DNA. Or where a department store knows from your buying habits that you're pregnant even before your family does.
That is the terrifying dystopian world portrayed by a group of Harvard professors at the World Economic Forum in Davos on Thursday, where the assembled elite heard that the notion of individual privacy is effectively dead.
"Welcome to today. We're already in that world," said Margo Seltzer, a professor in computer science at Harvard University.
"Privacy as we knew it in the past is no longer feasible... How we conventionally think of privacy is dead," she added.
Another Harvard researcher into genetics said it was "inevitable" that one's personal genetic information would enter more and more into the public sphere.
In the same way we can send tiny drones to spy on people, we can send the same machine into an Ebola ward to "zap the germs," Seltzer said.
"The technology is there, it is up to us how to use it," she added.
"By and large, tech has done more good than harm," she said, pointing to "tremendous" advances in healthcare in some rural areas of the developing world that have been made possible by technology.
And at a separate session on artificial intelligence, panellists appeared to accept the limit on privacy as part of modern life.
Rodney Brooks, chairman of Rethink Robotics, an American tech firm, took the example of Google Maps guessing -- usually correctly -- where you want to go.
"At first, I found that spooky and kind of scary. Then I realised, actually, it's kind of useful," he told the forum.
Anthony Goldbloom, a young tech entrepreneur, told the same panel that what he termed the "Google generation" placed far less weight on their privacy than previous generations.
"I trade my privacy for the convenience. Privacy is not something that worries me," he said.
"Anyway, people often behave better when they have the sense that their actions are being watched."
The World Economic Forum in the swanky Swiss ski resort of Davos brings together some 2,500 of the global business and political elite for a meeting that ends Saturday.
Copyright Agence France-Presse, 2015
