“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

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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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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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.

BBC Democracy Live

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“…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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The BBC’s Horizon is perhaps not the TV programme  it once was (some have accused it of dumbing down of late) but it can still provoke thought. Monday evenings TV outing tried to answer what exactly is consciousness albeit simplified to the question ‘Where am I? ‘. I’m not sure that anyone can answer that for certain but for me it raised an almost worrying prospect that the body influences the mind just as much as the mind influences the body.

In my own thoughts (wherever they may begin and end) I’ve probably just thought of the body as a shell for the ‘I’ inside.

I and you without a body move

The prospect that consciousness could even just  be the side effect of neurons firing in a particular way and reliant on a certain biological structure in the physical brain perhaps dents my own feeling the ‘I’ inside the body would desperately enjoy being freed from the constraints of the physical body. It sound much more like a co-dependency arrangement.

The point at which we become self aware seems related to a certain point in our development. Perhaps even at a point that the physical brain reaches a certain point of physical formation. The body may even be the one that’s really in the driving seat.

The programme also dealt cast a modicum of doubt over the notion of autonomous free will and determination. Maybe we are more at the mercy of random electrical impulses than we would like to contemplate.

For UK viewers the Horizon programme is still available for a while on the BBC iPlayer

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The phone-in on the radio in the background tells me that there’s not a lot of love lost between the public and the humble postal worker as the prospect of strikes loom.

I find it quite sad how many people can only see the how a strike would inconvenience them rather than any degree of empathy for a rapidly diminished workforce who are enduring an antagonistic management and a government hell bent of paving the service for part privatisation.

Meanwhile much of Britain at times unable to put themselves in the shoes of others and finds it easier to believe that everybody else is having a cushier time than they are.

Striking, it has to be said, is seen in this instance as akin to a man with a gun at his own head and threatening to blow his own brains out if he doesn’t get what he wants. Unlike say France striking seems to be a less effective bargaining chip in this country  perhaps because in Britain today there is much less of a sense in the wider population that we are all ‘in it together’ any more.

In this environment it would seem that the public has probably now been won over to the prospect of opening up the domestic postal service to commercial competition.

Another one bites the dust. Will we miss it when it’s gone or is it just  now a service that is past its metaphorical sell by date?

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BBC4 explores the historical quirk that was Synth Britannia on October 16th (with the usual time shifted repeats on and around that date). Obviously of interest to anyone who ever fiddled around with a synthesizer (that’d include me then) or anyone who has a passing interest in the influence that the early years of electronic music had on the British music scene of the late 70’s to early 80’s.

Also this autumn BBC4 will be exploring Metal Britannia. Not sure I’ll go out of my way for that one but each to their own musical tastes eh.

John Adams premieres his ’son of chamber symphony’ in the UK this weekend when he conducts the London Sinfonietta at The Queen Elizabeth hall on London’s South Bank (27th September).Adams is best known for his minimalist influenced Opera ‘Nixon in China‘ and although often cited alongside Philip Glass and Steve Reich is perhaps  more accurately amongst the generation after them.

More info

I caught this amusingly creative trailer the other night about an upcoming series called Electric Revolution on BBC Four which apparently will examine Britain’s current love affair with technology. Looks like it’ll go into the history of gadget dependency and then subject families to periods without modern tech. What will we learn if anything?

Source: Household energy bills explained