Life in Brooklyn

But the company that made the refrigerator passes you off to the factory that made the user interface, which pawns you off onto the chipmaker, who says it’s a problem with the operating system — which is so widespread and well-known to hackers that there’s nothing you can do. A few grudgingly admit that it’s unfortunate that your devices did not have firewalls or antivirus (there’s no room), but they blame you for not changing the passwords. You did know there were factory default passwords, right?

Now she had no idea what it was doing or how it thought. Or maybe it had something to do with the amazingly innovative schematics it was churning out, which appeared better than anything she’d yet seen out of her so-called genius colleagues. But it wasn’t all bad. At this rate, she wondered, how much longer would it still need us? Somehow, it had begun sending her money, possibly via stock market manipulation.

Someone — possibly cyberterrorists or a Russian or Chinese faction — has brought down the power grid. According to a 2014 Federal Energy Regulatory Commission report, knocking out a mere nine key electric-transmission substations could plunge America into a wide-scale blackout. Roads are snarled, emergency systems are overloaded. America’s top security personnel admit that infrastructural vulnerabilities exist and that terrorists see cyberwarfare as a key battleground. Backup systems are failing, too, and even now underwater tunnels are filling with carbon monoxide and water, doomed by dead fans and lifeless pumps. Has it already begun? Meanwhile, China, Russia and other countries have successfully cracked the U.S. Is this the prelude to a larger attack?

8: An Internet of Stool Pigeons? So what happens when we pile on data gathered by our fitness apps or wearables, appliances and loyalty cards? It doesn’t take an actuarial genius to guess that all that data will affect insurance rates down the road. Welcome to the Internet of Stool Pigeons. You open your insurance bill to discover that your rates have gone up yet again. Insurance companies promise safe driver insurance discounts if we’ll just plug a monitoring device into our cars.