Technology changes so fast that our lives are radically different from even a decade ago, yet slowly enough that sometimes we don’t even notice the changes.

We live in the future, in other words, and sometimes it takes a moment to realise what an odd, and perhaps unsettling, future it is. So I’m going to try laying it out for you in plain English.

Mind-reading billionaires

Not one, but two, controversial billionaires have created projects aimed at reading minds.

Elon Musk, the South African co-founder of PayPal, unveiled the latest step in his plan to build mind-reading implants two weeks ago. Musk suggested that the technology would be important for when an artificial intelligence takes over the world. “Even under a benign AI, we will be left behind,” he told reporters. “With a high-bandwidth brain-machine interface, we will have the option to go along for the ride.”

Meanwhile, Mark Zuckerberg, the American founder of Facebook who built an AI to run his home, has revealed his company’s own success at building a mind-reading device. Facebook’s version of the technology currently requires invasive probes to be inserted into user’s brains, and successfully recorded answers to nine set questions from a list of 24 potential responses. Asked about the privacy implications of the technology in February, Zuckerberg said: “Presumably this would be something that someone would choose to use.”

The end of ambiguity

Television shows such as CSI often resort to the cliche of a technician being told to “enhance” a photo, resulting in a pixellated image magically sharpening up. It’s a joke among fans, because enhancing images in that way isn’t possible: the maximum resolution is the maximum, end of.

Except that’s not true any more. Machine-learning techniques for creating and manipulating images are able to take a blurry picture and sharpen it. They can take a picture taken at night and insert detail that simply wasn’t captured by the sensor. They can recognise faces from images of just 88 pixels.

Once, we had a moderate amount of anonymity as we went about our lives in public. That is increasingly coming to an end: cameras, both state, privately, and personally controlled, are high-resolution; AI can increase that further; and facial recognition techniques can link us back to other databases with comparative ease. What is merely a cautionary tale in the west is reality in Xinjiang province, China, and is why protesters in Hong Kong have taken to marching with laser pointers, to shine in the lenses of police cameras.

Voluntary surveillance, audio version

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘Always-on microphones like Alexa, regularly mishear conversations as commands and upload recordings anyway.’ Photograph: Juan Diego Oliva Plaza/Alamy Stock Photo

We have always-on microphones in our kitchens, cars, pockets and wrists, with brand names such as Alexa, Siri and Google Assistant. They’re supposed to only transmit information when we actively command them to, but they regularly mishear ambient noise or background conversations as those commands and upload recordings anyway.

Some proportion of those recordings are listened to by human beings for quality-control purposes. None of the companies that collect the recordings have explicitly disclosed that fact, instead requiring whistleblowers to come forward and reveal that yes, humans listen to Alexa, Google Home and Siri commands. Apple says that happens to less than 1% of recordings, but none of the companies let users find out what aspects of their lives have been overheard by strangers.

Hey Siri! Stop recording and sharing my private conversations | Roisin Kiberd Read more

“There have been countless instances of recordings featuring private discussions between doctors and patients, business deals, seemingly criminal dealings, sexual encounters and so on,” an Apple contractor told me last week.

Voluntary surveillance, location version

The operating system that runs on 88% of all phones sold today, Google’s Android, constantly transmits your location back to the company if you enable the “location history” setting, which most users do the first time they open a mapping app.

Google also makes the first- and second-most popular navigation apps for the operating system that runs on most of the remaining 12% of phones, and constantly transmits your location back to its servers if you use those as well.

Google is fairly open about this fact. Users can see the vast amount of location data that they’ve semi-voluntarily handed over by visiting a website that will show them a decade’s worth of their location history, and they can, if they know about it, disable the historically unprecedented levels of surveillance.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘Google’s Android system constantly transmits your location back to the company if you enable location history.’ Photograph: NurPhoto/NurPhoto via Getty Images

Many of them do not, however, because the constant monitoring of your location by an unaccountable private firm is used “to give you personalised maps, recommendations based on places you’ve visited, and more”.

Robots pretending to be humans, and vice versa

Last year, Google launched a service called Duplex. At a user’s request, the company will call up a restaurant or hairdresser, and, using a machine-generated voice, verbally book an appointment. It answers follow-up questions, and even inserts human-like umming and ahing, then adds the resulting booking to a Google Calendar.

The company discloses that the call is coming from Google, but doesn’t explicitly say that it’s a robot on the other end of the call. Given the quality of the voice interface, it seems likely that many won’t realise that’s the case.

At the other end of the spectrum are companies such as X.ai, Expensify, and Edison, who have sold AI products to users, only to turn around and use a lot of human labour to do the work.

The ambiguity could lead to a situation where people are polite to machines and humans alike. But that hope seems misplaced; a far more plausible future is one in which low-paid service work becomes less pleasant as employees’ humanity is literally obscured from the people they are serving.

Not everything about our weird cyberpunk future is disturbing, of course. We have cruelty-free low-carbon veggie meat, 3D-printed bionic limbs, and near-instant machine translation between hundreds of languages.

But sometimes, it’s worth just pausing to take stock. The world is different. But is it better?

• Alex Hern is the Guardian’s technology editor