听力原文：Today in the techno-society there is an almost ironclad consensus about the future of freedom. Maximum individual choice is regarded as the democratic ideal. Yet most writers predict that we shall move further and further from this ideal. They conjured up a dark vision of the future, in which people appear as mindless consumer creatures, surrounded by standardized goods, educated in standardized schools, fed a diet of standardized mass culture, and forced to adopt standardized styles of life. Such predictions have spawned a generation of future haters and technophobes, as one might expect. The predictions about the future made by many writers, in the speaker's opinion, are ______.