Juha Saarinen: Law of unintended consequences rules

if you don't want to provide easy access to your phone, turn off the excellent Touch ID fingerprint sensor. Photo / Jason Oxenham

A visionary in the tech industry is someone who gets things mostly right and doesn't suffer too many misses over the next five to 10 years.

That's an impressive feat in itself in a fast-moving industry, but it's still interesting with hindsight to see how limited even the brightest visionaries were, when the tech they created collides with unpredictable humanity.

Did Steve Jobs, for instance, imagine that the "revolutionary and magical" iPhone would be so trusted as a repository of personal and other sensitive data by users that crossing borders with a smartphone is a liability?

Border agents around the world are starting to make it so, forcing travellers to clean out the data they want to store on devices but not share with strangers, which is quite ironic.

Likewise, if you don't want to provide easy access to your phone, turn off the excellent Touch ID fingerprint sensor because it's kind of difficult to refuse gruff requests by armed border agents to unlock your device with your digit.

Oh, and turn off the device as well before going through immigration and customs to make sure it's well and truly locked and protected.

This is the kind of tech tale of the unexpected that's great to write about, as it shows that often we have no real clue how powerful the hardware and software we create are until millions of people have started using them in a manner not intended.

It's almost magical, that phenomenon, and most certainly revolutionary as it flips aspects of society on their head. Some of the things happening you can predict, especially if you're hands-on with tech and learn directly what it does and how people use and abuse it.

I would challenge anyone to imagine things like Australia's Department of Human Services hacking into its Centrelink clients' phones using the exploits from Cellebrite, the company that helped US police break into the San Bernardino shooter's iPhone after Apple refused to decrypt it.

The hacking is apparently done to track suspected benefit fraudsters but it seems like a mind-blowing invasion of privacy and overreach by the DHS, not to mention a dangerous move if the exploits are unpatched and fall into the wrong hands.

A fine irony here is that DHS and Centrelink encourage clients to use smartphone apps, for improved and lower cost service delivery.

Technology continues to spread everywhere and in the past few years I can't think of a single week without something surprising happening. Often, it's negative surprises but that's what you get when there are people involved, unfortunately.

Over the next decade or so, I expect there will be work done to better predict the unpredictable use of technology, by using machine learning and artificial intelligence, to build on what visionaries imagine and what has happened in the past.

Getting such predictions even more or less right would bestow enormous power, and I'm sure it'll happen if it isn't already.

When it does, though, the magic and revolutions that tech bring will be gone, and I'll hang up my journalist hat for good, I promise you that.