The Bloor Perspective: BT, WAP and why IT is threatening the human race

At last - the local loop looks like it is to be opened up to competition. A set of draft guidelines were released by Oftel just over a week ago which set out the requirement for BT to open up competition to its "last mile" by June next year. Two thousand and one could be a good year for telecommunications users in the UK, but maybe not such a good year for BT.

Given the current challenges that BT is facing, from quarters such as free ISPs and government announcements about reducing telephone charges still further, this is one extra problem that BT could really do without. Inevitable it may be, but pleasant it is not.

What is worse, the companies lining up to threaten BT's monopoly position (from telcos like AT&T, cable providers such as NTL and ISPs like Alta Vista) are, in general, global players with few restrictions on what they can and can't do. BT still faces a number of restrictions on its own practices: it is still unable to deploy cable services and, according to Oftel, is facing increasing pressure from the international calls market.

BT expressed fears about being bought following its recent share price falls - this may be the best bet for a company that is seeing its monopoly replaced by a regulatory framework which may leave it unable to compete.

BT has been slow to move in the past, and its privatisation needed such a framework, but the world has moved on. The June 2001 date marks the end of an era for BT it should also mark the beginning, with the company free to compete against some of the world's largest communications companies. Even if its bonds are broken, these are battles that the company is not guaranteed to win.

** To WAP or not to WAP**

Witnessing the stream of announcements of new and proposed WAP services, we are prompted to look at the sorts of services that are likely to be winners and those that are probably not going to get off the starting grid. Looking at some of the proposals we think WAP is being taken as synonymous with mobile computing - it isn't. WAP is relevant to the particular sector of mobile computing that needs to be delivered to the very limiting form factor of mobile phone and some small-screen PDAs. The most successful WAP models will be time-critical or location-dependent, plus those that are coming to be regarded as essential ecommerce services.

Essential ecommerce services could include email, but things like ticket booking will be a natural fit for such services. For the investor, stock portfolio access and all the functionality you need will also be a money spinner. But time-critical does not necessarily mean business-critical. Constantly updated news headlines, categorised and prioritised according to user preference, have a time-critical nature - even if there is no direct monetary value in the information.

Unfortunately, for each of these appropriate uses there is an abundance of ideas that just seem to be non-starters. A WAP phone is not the ideal device for browsing catalogues to order last minute birthday presents, or from which to do your weekly e-shopping. But what really concerns us is Antal's announcement of a WAP job-seeking service, which is neither time-critical or location-dependent - not to mention being more suited to a bigger device.

** IT's the end of the world as we know it**

Bill Joy, co-founder and chief scientist at Sun, has always been an influential thinker. Now he's concerned that there is a significant downside to a world dominated by computer technology. Combined with the controversial development of genetic engineering, he believes that the human race faces some serious threats.

Joy quotes from a passage of Theodore Kaczynski's Unabomber "Manifesto". It posits a scenario in which computers become sufficiently sophisticated to make their own decisions without human oversight. Any human control over the systems devolves to a "tiny elite" that will either find means to eliminate the masses or - "if the elite consists of soft-hearted liberals" - tend to their physical needs while eliminating their free will through biological or psychological engineering. "These engineered human beings may be happy in such a society, but they will most certainly not be free," Kaczynski wrote. "They will have been reduced to the status of domestic animals."

While decrying the Unabomber's campaign of violence, Joy sees merit in the argument. The emergence of antibiotic-resistant bacteria is a problem that still confronts us. It could be that nanobots [molecular-size, intelligent machines that can be programmed to alter microscopic structures such as DNA] present a dangerous amplifying factor: They could self-replicate. One bot could become many, and quickly get out of control.

Within 30 years - a single generation - Joy estimates that molecular electronics will yield devices that compare with the human brain. It is interesting to find an eminent technologist expressing concerns about the ability of our society to manage and control these developments.

One of the issues goes right back to the foundations of computation. Before there were any number of computers, Alan Turing was working out the fundamental theories that govern general-purpose computers. At the same time, he speculated about the potential "intelligence" of computers, and defined what he meant through his famous "Turing Test".

There are some difficulties, though, that Turing didn't grasp. Mathematicians and philosophers concentrated initially on the logical capabilities of computers, and compared them with human beings in that respect. Computers are already highly capable as logical devices, but there is now a feeling that rationality is more than mere logic. Neurologists have joined the argument with the significant observation that emotions are also a significant factor in rationality. Where brain damage causes reduction of emotional capacity, so too rationality is damaged.

So it seems that Joy's concerns are well founded. We don't understand human emotions or how to keep them channelled into constructive ends. We understand still less how supposedly intelligent devices without emotions might behave. Scientists are generally deficient in their understanding of the risk. Bill Joy is the exception.

For more analysis, see http://www.it-director.com