Smart Shift

In an economy based on resources we could easily produce all of the necessities of life and provide a high standard of living for all.

A Resource Based Economy would make it possible for us to use technology to overcome some scarce resources by applying renewable sources of energy, computerizing and automating manufacturing and inventory, designing safe energy-efficient cities and advanced transportation systems, providing universal health care and more relevant education, and most of all by generating a new incentive system based on human and environmental concern.
The Venus Project, www.thevenusproject.com¹

A familiar image of the city of the future involves large, tree-lined plazas and waterways, these towered over by dome-shaped buildings with points reaching into the sky. A monorail slides soundlessly into the horizon, carrying contented citizens from one leisure activity to another. We will be as well-educated tourists, going about our lives and bringing up smiling children without a care. No doubt, underground service tunnels will supply food and other supplies, ensuring our every need is met. How wonderful.

Just how realistic is this vision? Very, thinks New Yorker Jacque Fresco², architect and instigator of utopia itself (though he denies use of the term). Fresco grew up in the depression to Jewish immigrant parents, and is no stranger to setbacks; despite this he has remained true to his vision. In 1969 Fresco released his seminal work, ‘Looking Forward’ (whose name harks back to Looking Backward, a 19th Century work by Edward Bellamy); 25 years later, he announced the culmination of everything he had worked towards — a globally ambitious vision of resource sharing he called the Venus Project.

At the heart of Fresco’s vision is the principle that, despite a growing population, the planet’s resources are more than enough to meet human needs in a sustainable manner. Indeed, the concept of ‘needs’ goes away if they can always be met. Such an idea is not without its challenges, not least that it does away with capitalism. For it to work, the few would have to hand resources over to the many. But some believe that technology will drive out such archaic concepts as market forces, however entrenched they appear. , “Different modes of production are structured around different things. Feudalism was an economic system structured by customs and laws about “obligation”. Capitalism was structured by something purely economic: the market. We can predict, from this, that post-capitalism – whose precondition is abundance – will not simply be a modified form of a complex market society,” wrote commentator Paul Mason.

Interestingly, while many are looking optimistically towards the practicalities of such a future, darker predictions remain the stuff of science fiction and academic essay. Technological dystopias see resources in the hands of very few, exploitation of the general population the norm rather than the exception, happiness sacrificed on the altar of commerciality, choice non-existent, and people hungry, unclothed and lacking basic sanitation. Authors from Aldous Huxley, John Brunner, William Gibson and Margaret Atwood, and films from Blade Runner, The Matrix and, indeed, the Terminator franchise capably set out just how wrong things might become. One way or another either the powerful, or the computers themselves, deliver nothing but slavery and mass control of an ill-equipped population.

Mapping out a realistic view of the technology-enabled future is a challenge, but we can nonetheless start to map a path based on a relatively simple premise: that while more positive outcomes cannot be guaranteed, they stand a higher chance of happening if the probability of negative outcomes can be reduced. Indeed, to many commentators, the dystopian view does not sound awfully different to some aspects of the world that we see around us today. Just as we’re getting lots of things right, there’s plenty to we have already done wrong. At the risk of creating too great a generalisation, our digital future is subject to the same forces as the rest of the universe: that is, do nothing and it will slide into chaos. So, what precisely do we have to ‘do something’ about? Let’s review the potential opportunities, and dangers, based on what we have seen so far.

First, the wealth of data we now have at our fingertips enables us to know so much more than we could. On the upside this is already leading to unprecedented levels of insight, giving us the potential to eradicate some diseases and generally make our lives better. Equally however, we are faced with the potential for such insights to be abused. Consider, for example, the tragic case³ of 92-year-old Olive Cooke, who was receiving 10 letters and repeated phone calls from charities every day, before jumping to her death from the Avon Gorge bridge. Or the bereaved father who received⁴ a letter addressed to ‘Daughter Killed in Car Crash’. We are all well aware of government desires to harvest as much data as possible, ostensibly in the name of law enforcement but in doing so, breaking national and international law — such as the US government abuses of the Safe Harbor agreement breaching⁵ of EU privacy regulations. We are all culpable, to an extent: our ability to copy and use digital media frequently makes a mockery of principles such as copyright.

Speaking of ourselves, a second area of blessing and curse is how we can communicate with people across the globe as though they were in the next room (in the future, potentially, it will appear like we are in the same room, given current advances in Virtual Reality such as Microsoft’s Hololens⁶). That individuals can make their views heard is generally applauded – activist sites can shine a much brighter light onto despots, dodgy dealings and indeed, miscarriages of justice. Society’s voice has become several decibels louder – and more reactive – by virtue of the all-amplifying Internet. At the same time however we have invented cyberbullying, online trolling and on occasion, replaced the wisdom of the crowd by sheer rabble rousing.

At least, perhaps, such incidents are obvious, and therefore can be dealt with — but the response can sometimes appear heavy handed: consider Paul Chambers for example, whose ‘joke’ on Twitter about Robin Hood airport led to him losing his job and gaining a criminal record. Or Jacqueline Woodhouse, jailed for 21 weeks having launched a racist tirade, all of it captured on a mobile phone. Or Liam Stacey, whose remarks about critically ill footballer Fabrice Muamba earned the student a 56-day sentence. Or indeed, Jordan Blackshaw and Perry Sutcliffe-Keenan, the likely lads jailed for four years each for incitement to riot, having created the Facebook event "Smash d[^o]wn in Northwich Town" in August 2011. The fact that no such event took place was seen as irrelevant by the judge; according to then-Communities Secretary Eric Pickles, “exemplary sentences” were necessary.

As Mike Lynch has pointed out, transparency is a two-edged sword. When Hunter S. Thompson first wrote, “In a closed society where everybody's guilty, the only crime is getting caught,” he clearly wasn’t taking into account the impact that technology would have on both crime and its consequences. Against such a many-faceted, context-sensitive and interpretation-based background, we are able to catch a great many more folks at it.

Which brings to a third area of concern: how sensors make it increasingly straightforward to create interactions between physical and the computer-based worlds, generating data as they go. The benefits are legion; but this, too, is open to abuse. Consider speed cameras, which in principle offer a genuine way of making roads safer, but which have been called out as a revenue generator⁷ for local councils. It’s not even as if speed limits are clear indicators of criminality. Each country creates its own legal frameworks according to a variety of factors and these can change. The motorway speed limit is set at 130kph (about 80mph) on the continent, or 110kph (70mph approx.) if it rains, whereas in the UK the latter is statutory.

Even as we argue such points, the technological flood gates open wider. Today, for example, mobile phone companies hold all the information anyone needs to determine whether a citizen has been speeding: all it needs is a subpoena. But perhaps it’s not Big Brother we need to worry about, it’s the scurrying mass of little sisters, each equipped to the teeth with tech and with a tale to tell. One way or another, the message can get through.

The trouble is, in many cases there are so many unknowns that we don’t know what the laws should be — and without clear laws, we are left with the moral judgements that drive them. For example, in the case of stores using facial recognition to identify people as they enter a shop, is that a good thing or a bad thing? It’s difficult to tell. To return to the case of Mr Chambers, it’s not just whether his act was ‘criminal’, but also the impact it has on anyone else who now feels a little less inclined to express humour, just in case it is misconstrued. If the goal is to make society better, general terms such as ‘better’ need to be reconsidered, as do the things that make society ‘worse’. To return to speeding for example, the reason behind such a law is the relationship between speed and risk of danger. Should such risks be reduced through safer, connected cars, or through the ability to vary speed limits and send the information straight to the vehicle, then perhaps the law should change.

Laws— sets of rules that govern behaviours between people and collectives — generally exist to protect the rights of others or of the collective, to prevent individual abuse of the system, or indeed to prevent collectives, public or private, from abusing the individual. Of course we all need to be responsible for our actions, online and offline; of course we need to take into account the victims; and of course we all want to live in a safe, just and open society in which the perpetrators of bad things face the consequences of their actions. Trolling, cyber bullying and other activities are no less despicable because they use the Internet.

Equally, we need to be sure that the powerful can be held to account. Technology has the potential to be the great leveller but equally, it puts much in the hands of the few. This goes to the roots of our sociological, legal and commercial models. Technology has also opened sudden chasms of potential difference, so easily exploitable by startups that it has enabled the creation of billionaires from students and peasants alike. This serves to illustrate just how powerful a tool it can be, in both the right and the wrong hands, whether or not they are on ‘our’ side. Even if we do not have megalomaniacs, we have the potential to hamstring ourselves. Even if we manage to avoid the surveillance society, we are being drawn inexorably towards a more transparent world in which the smallest actions can be logged. From Snowden to Ashley Maddison, we have no shortage of cautionary tales to draw upon.
Nobody is denying that our laws are increasingly inadequate. But not only this, the way we make our laws also has to change. Laws also exist to describe how laws can be created and modified and enacted. Meanwhile, legal principles offer background to laws, and outside of all legal frameworks are codes of practice and self-regulation — we need to reconsider the entirety of the moral and contractual frameworks we have, on the basis of what really matters and how to deal with it. But we are not working in a perfect world, and cannot act as such. Given that imperfection will aways exist, we need laws and policy frameworks based on what we do know: that cost and size thresholds will continue to fall as capabilities increase; that sudden events will change how we interact; and that the dynamic between community and corporation, between individual and governmental will remain a constant theme even in an uncertain future.

Crime and punishment go hand in hand and punitive measures have changed over the years. Crime is not absolute and punishment, be it a fine, incarceration, community service or whatever, aims to serve consequences to the convicted, recompense the victim and discourage anybody who might be considering a similar path. As such, a punishment can increase for a similar crime if a judge, or government deems that additional discouragement is necessary – a situation we saw clearly at the time of the 2011 riots. It is an irony that we laugh at the incongruities of older legal frameworks while feeling assured we are more civilised now. But the human animal is no more criminal, nor noble, than it ever was.

All this would remain true were technology not encroaching on the final frontier: not only is it closing the gap with the physical, but it is enabling the physical to exist. 3D printing has been used⁸ to create a working kidney, which indicates just how amazingly brilliant technology can be in the right hands. But if similar facilities are in the wrong hands, might it be possible to 3D print a dirty bomb, or a genetic modification plant that could create an unheard-of disease? Hopefully not in both cases, but ‘innovation’ is not a luxury available only to the pure of heart.

Technology doesn’t care about right and wrong, of course. As we have seen, since its arrival it has been indifferent to its effects. It should be democratising but corporations and self-interest of both individuals and institutions will get in the way. The use of technology to monitor citizens, to steer behaviours, to exploit very human vulnerabilities is already all too apparent; it would be foolish and complacent to suggest that its future consequences will be only positive, without negative impact. This will not only be through malice, but also through stupidity and simple, unintended consequences — some of the best examples of technology misuse could be greeted by the exhortation, “But that’s not what it was for!” But is it right to blame technology for the bad in the world? That’s like blaming the sea as a major cause of drowning.

In fifty years time we will likely look back and chuckle at just how primitive we were. New developments in facial recognition⁹, data aggregation and analysis, the increasing use of embedded cameras, each innovation offers new ways of finding things out, of capturing and sharing the moment, of linking one piece of information with another. Or maybe we will be disguising our features, thinks¹⁰ Adam Harvey at CV Dazzle.

To end on a positive note, many can feel fortunate that they live in liberal parts of the world. But we all need to take appropriate steps now, to ensure that we continue to benefit from this freedom. Otherwise, if Hunter S. Thompson is right, on the one hand we’re going to need a lot of jails, even as we struggle to work out if new actions are indeed a crime. We need to renegotiate the contracts that now exist between ourselves as individuals, as a well-governed society, and as the series of collectives also known as corporations. Against this background we have some fundamental questions to consider — accountability and responsibility, exploitation and recourse, personal and public protection. However too many elements of existing law are based on a balance of past probabilities and, in the absence of hard data, an underlying acceptance as to what constitutes right and wrong.

With this in mind, let’s start with the thing that connects us to our inevitably techno-topian future — data.