To print: Click here or Select File and then Print from your browser's menu

This story was printed from silicon.com, located at http://www.silicon.com/

Story URL: http://comment.silicon.com/0,39024711,11033484,00.htm

Devil's Advocate: We're slaves to the machines

By Martin Brampton

Published: Tuesday 21 May 2002

You might think the computers and other technology you work with serve you and your colleagues. You're wrong, argues Martin Brampton, who's seen too many cases of technology for technology's sake...

People have always hoped machines would make life easier for us. They are designed to extend our powers and complement our weaknesses. But as we create more and more machines, it feels increasingly like we are the slaves, they the masters.

If you think about it, there are some very odd features to our relationship with machines. In the eighteenth century, the most advanced were automata, complex mechanisms that imitated the behaviour of people or animals. They fascinated the aristocracy, the only people who could afford them at the time.

Yet they had no use at all apart from pure entertainment. Now the cynics among you might argue that a number of our most serious endeavours to build computer systems have turned out to have no use at all apart from pure entertainment. But that was not the original intention even if there were some who predicted the outcome from an early stage.

Until quite late in the development of machinery, the clock was the prime mechanism on which attention and ingenuity were lavished. I was surprised to find, though, that clocks were not invented to keep time. Their original purpose was to simulate the movements of the heavens and it was purely fortuitous that the astronomical bodies traverse the skies in regular ways. Otherwise, we might have found our diaries behaving in quite unpredictable ways.

What worries me today is that if a technology can be created, we feel obliged to put it into service. When magazines and television programmes decide to look into the future they often ask what life will be like in such and such a year. The further ahead the year, the more extravagant the predictions can be.

Now, who do they ask about the future and what kind of questions do they ask? Always they seem to define the future in terms of what technologists will be able to deliver in the way of new machines. Never do they ask what people want of the future or whether the technology on offer should be implemented.

There seems to be an inevitability about it, as if it were the machines that controlled us, and not the other way around. You might say there are choices in what technology is developed but the people working on innovations seem to be just as driven as the rest of us.

If anything, our control over technology seems to diminish. At one time, government agencies all had separate records and it was quite impossible for them to collate a complete picture of an individual. As the records were fed into computers, people pointed out the possibility that they could all be brought together, and that raised concerns over the excessive power accruing to governments armed with too much personal information.

In democratic societies the politicians had to respond and insisted there would be rules, keeping the various databases separate. Predictably, however, now the excitement has died down, administrators are quietly arguing for relaxation of the controls, on the grounds of efficiency. Talk of safeguards is played down.

It is true there are technologies that nobody can find a use for but most new mechanisms are put to use without any effective collective decision-making. The best we can do is wring our hands, while any questioning of the new is cast aside with talk of Luddites. The machines rule and not always for the good.

Am I paranoid? Is this merely sour grapes resulting from my inability to make my Ericsson PDA work with my PC? Or should we be taking a stand, wresting back some control from the irresistible march of the machines?

Let me know. (You can post a Reader Comment below.)

** Martin Brampton is a director and founder of Black Sheep Research (www.black-sheep-research.co.uk ), an independent consultancy providing research, writing and speaking services on a wide range of business and technology subjects. Martin was previously a director at Bloor Research, and has worked with IT as a user and analyst for over 20 years. He is a frequent contributor to silicon.com's Behind the Headlines TV programme and can be contacted at silicon@black-sheep-research.co.uk.