“If that underclass increases relentlessly over time, and if you start seeing more educated people getting dragged into it, then we are going to have a huge problem. I think that may happen as machines and computers keep getting better until eventually they can do the jobs of even people with lots of education and training. At that point I think you have to do something,”
Martin Ford identifies the possible down sides of technology in a capitalist society in his book: The Lights in the Tunnel: Automation, Accelerating Technology and the Economy of the Future
Ford is presumably no Luddite by nature. His main profession is as a computer engineer.
30 years ago similar sooth sayers were predicting a future of increased leisure time as technology took the drudgery out of work and provided an unprecedented standard of living for all. The decade that followed that prediction saw, in the UK anyway, a huge increase in the number of hours that people worked and as old industries crumbled to give way to a service based economy, a growing underclass and social divide. Martin Ford seems to hint that it’s probably capitalism that needs to be regulated rather than the growth of technology in isolation.
At the same time as this forecast of a utopian world of increased technology there were more realistic forecasts such as Alvin Toffler’s The Third Wave with it’s vision of a post industrial society and the end of ‘a job for life’.
We seem to be some way into that post industrial third wave. Is Ford hinting that technology is merely hastening the collapse of the post industrial society or just highlighting that with out certain checks and balances many of us in the future may unexpectedly travel rapidly backwards along the metaphorical escalator of social mobility.
Is technology just a tool? It’s how we deploy it that creates the benefits and/or disadvantages isn’t it?
Photo by Sammy0716 under this creative common license
- Image via Wikipedia
There are, believe it or not 600,000 Freesat users in the United Kingdom. In the run up to Xmas there will be a renewed awareness campaign for the free-to-air satellite cousin of Freeview (the free-to-air via your TV aerial digital service).
Xmas Bonus
Freesat owners will be getting an early Xmas present with the arrival of the BBC iPlayer service for Freesat boxes that can connect to the Internet. Mostly this tends to be for HD boxes that already have the requisite ethernet socket.
Also a small number of (OK two) locations will be enabling HD content for Freeview itself as the first generation HD capable Freeview boxes go on sale. Expect to see existing non HD set top boxes and PVRs drop in price as old stock is cleared.
Blank Canvas
Meanwhile the BBC trust has been told that Project Canvas, the joint venture between BBC,ITV, Five and BT to bring on demand content to viewers via suitably enabled TV sets and Internet enabled set top boxes will likely cost more than £115 million in the first fours years of its operation with £17 million recouped via revues the service will bring in at the end of this period. Questions remain as to what extent ITV and Five would be in a sound financial position to afford the estimated £25 million a piece that they’d be required to put into the funding pot.
Project Canvas has been a contentious undertaking in that it allows non-public service broadcasters to become partners with the bbc which was not the case when originally conceived. BSkyB would be welcome to provide services on the platform but cannot become a partner in the project.
Kangaroo Court
Canvas also has to walk carefully in the shadow of the now defunct Project Kangaroo which proposed a consolidated video on demand (VOD) platform with content from BBC Worldwide,ITV.com and Channel 4’s 4OD which was planned to launch in 2008 but was eventually blocked by the competition commission this year.
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- BBC spends nearly £1m on unapproved Project Canvas (telegraph.co.uk)
The Beeb looks at how Sweden, known as probably Europe’s most transparent democracy manage their own MPs expenses and accommodation needs. Whilst watching the report I kept saying to myself ‘ah but how much is their salary’ and it turns out it’s on par with our own UK politicians.So no excuses then?
OK, I’m never sure how useful it is to examine how other cultures do things especially when it would take a sea change in our own culture sometimes to achieve the same though it’s probably a useful yardstick for the ideal (wanders off to daydream of the ideal).
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- MPs prepare for combat with Kelly over reforms (guardian.co.uk)
- Peers to be banned from taking money from lobbying firms (telegraph.co.uk)
The BBC has launched a new web site dedicated to live and on demand coverage of the UK’s national political institutions and the European parliament. Interesting to launch at a time when our faith in political institutions is being sorely tested. Who knows maybe such sites are a flag stone on the road to a greater interaction between voters and the institutions that claim to act on their behalf.
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- BBC launches Democracy Live with ’speech-to-text’ search (blogs.journalism.co.uk)
“…They just looked at me and said, ‘What? We really can’t show that at all.’ So I said what do you want, and they said, ‘We had Patsy Kensit in today and that was good.’ She said, ‘Culture is buying my daughter an ice-cream at the Natural History Museum.’ So that’s what you’re up against. That’s the level of banality that’s desired.”
Frankie Boyle shares his views and talks about ‘My shit life so far’.
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