When I began my Open University course in 1985, one of the set books for the course was called “Micro-chips with everything” which was a series of essays derived from five seminars held in July 1982. In the UK, the government declared 1982 to be Information Technology Year and the seminars set out to ask questions about where technology was heading, but significantly, did not necessarily offer any answers to these questions. When I finished the OU course, I had a much greater understanding of how Information Technology was likely to change our lives. This helped me to gain some appreciation of the forthcoming revolution, but I really didn’t understand the enormity of what was approaching. Perhaps I still don’t.
At the time, I remember reading about EFTPOS, an ungainly acronym for Electronic Funds Transfer at the Point of Sale. I learned that not far into the future, supermarkets would have the ability to instantly debit funds from your bank account after you bought an item. That same transaction would also create a re-order note to have the item replaced from stock (or from the wholesaler) without any human intervention. This was science fiction at the time, but within a remarkably short period, it became reality. What was not predicted then, was that the same transaction would later trigger a process whereby Tesco (or whoever) would know exactly what you bought and direct specific advertisers to tempt you to buy other items dependant on the purchases you make. I’m more-or-less OK with the first part, but I’m really against the targeted advertising that followed. This is the reason I began to abandon Facebook in 2023. I want to decide myself what I want to buy, not to have some algorithm try and second-guess me.
At school I was taught about the Industrial Revolution as though it was a singular event and it all seemed straightforward. I was led to believe that it started in the mid-eighteenth century and lasted until about 1830, and as far it goes, that was true. What no-one at school told me was that first period was simply the Mechanisation Revolution and was the first of several more revolutions which would happen with increasing rapidity. The Electrification Revolution was the second one starting in the late 19th century, followed soon after the war with the Digital Revolution which is still unfolding and is the subject of this chapter. Sadly, for someone like me who likes to think of things happening in sequence, what I hadn’t appreciated was that a fourth revolution, now named the Cyber-Physical Revolution, had begun before the third one had finished! The fifth revolution (the Human-Centric Revolution) is already on the horizon and making itself known to us in ways I barely understand.
To clarify things (for me as much as for you), I have drafted out the essence of each revolution in the table below.
Now you must remember that I come from an era which was largely mechanical in nature. I trained as a mechanical engineer, and so I had a good grasp of how mechanical things worked. Admittedly, electricity was a mystery to me, but I accepted that it existed, and I acknowledged its awesome power even though it was invisible and probably magical. Then microchips came along and I was desperate to understand them, hence the OU courses, but I admit that I never fully grasped how they worked. Slowly, I began to accept that I didn’t need to know, but just understand how they impacted my life and how I could work with them. As an example, as a young man I maintained my own car. I knew how everything worked and could logically determine what to tinker with if the car didn’t work. I am ashamed to admit, that an unpleasant part of me looked down on those people who had no mechanical knowledge. Cars became gradually more sophisticated to the point that now when I open the bonnet, there is nothing I can adjust and I can barely even recognise what’s there. But I can still drive, so what does it matter? People who knew nothing about cars in the 1970s survived quite well never knowing how to clean the points or adjust the spark plug gap. I am now beginning to accept that my non-mechanical acquaintances may have been right after all.
But now we’re rapidly moving through the Cyber-Physical revolution and I’m wondering whether I should be concerned that I no longer know how anything works. I’ve reached the stage where telephone apps rule my life, and I’m conscious that someone, even in a foreign country, could directly affect my life without me having any say in the decision. Like most of us now, I use Google Maps when driving to a new place, and I have utter faith in its instructions, and I believe it if it tells me that there is traffic congestion ahead. Who is telling me this? Is it a man in a darkened room in Silicon Valley or a robot operating out of a nameless data centre just off the M4? Does it matter? I just have this persistent niggle that I’m rapidly losing control of things and that once I’ve lost that control, I know that I’ll never get it back.
I’ve recently bought an electric car, thinking that I understood the technology. In broad terms, I do, since they are much simpler than their internal combustion engine equivalents, but I now find that I am no longer truly in charge of it. I have a wall charger that I use to top up the battery, but when I plug it in, it doesn’t always begin charging because the government restricts charging between the hours of 8am and 11am, and 4pm and 10pm on weekdays. In addition, if I instruct the car to begin charging at, say midnight (to benefit from cheaper tariffs), the wall charger has a randomised delay function which prevents all charging points from initiating charging at the same time. At times it feels that I should be grateful to the wall charger and my electricity supplier for allowing me to charge my own car at all. At my own expense! In addition, the phone app gives me loads of data about the car: where it’s presently parked, where it’s been lately (and at what speed) and whether it’s currently locked. Of course, I love those data, but who else has access? The police? My insurance company? Criminals? I know that the mantra from big brother surveillance applies, “If you’ve done nothing wrong, you have nothing to fear”, but I’m still uneasy.
I decided last year that Facebook was annoying me with all its ads and ‘recommendations’ so I stopped using it almost entirely. I’ve never used TikTok or Instagram or any of the other similar apps but I do worry about the effect of social media on those who do use them, or worse, become addicted to them. Social media’s power to influence large sections of the population ought to be of concern to our politicians, but in truth, can they in fact do anything about it, or are they as powerless as me? Well, this chapter certainly didn’t go the way I was expecting, so let’s get back to reality – my reality – over the past five years.