The Wired World
In this era of techno intoxication, we have become accustomed to reading about the extraordinary changes awaiting us through technology. “The Death of Distance” is the first book, in my recollection, to predict that global peace will figure among them. Frances Cairncross foresees a post-Darwinian world in which human nature will at last be tamed. People will be kinder. No one will make excessive profits. Taxes will go down. Governments will become more sensitive and responsive. Business will be more trustworthy and reliable.
Yet Cairncross quotes Robert Allen, the outgoing president of AT&T;, who has a more modest sense of the future. “One could, within reason, expect the chairman of AT&T; to be able to predict how technology will transform his business a decade hence. He can’t.” But he knows that “something startling, intriguing and profound is afoot.”
Cairncross, senior editor of the Economist, has set herself to the task of predicting how communications technology will change not only companies like AT&T; but the world at large. When she sticks to reporting, she is consistently interesting about what is happening with telephones, television and the Internet. But when she takes out her crystal ball, she fails to convince. “Increased knowledge will lead to increased understanding which will foster tolerance and global peace,” she writes, thereby one-upping MIT’s Nicholas Negroponte who, in his 1995 classic, “On Being Digital,” saw the nation-state “eroding like a mothball.”
But for the doubting Thomases, Cairncross does not offer very strong evidence to support her theory. Around the globe, even in developing countries, she says, all of us will eventually be equipped with the latest mobile telephones, interactive television and PCs with modems hooked up to the Internet. We will be so well informed about companies, governments and our next door neighbors that we will have no choice but to love one another and to cooperate on the highest moral ground. How this scenario translates to strife-torn Bosnia, Belfast or Jerusalem is not mentioned.
So let us begin with what we know. Can we see glimmerings of this coming utopia? In certain countries, we see the opposite. In fact, technological tools are being developed to screen out unwanted information. In Israel, Toranet, an independent company catering to Orthodox Jews, sifts out anything remotely offensive and guarantees 100% Orthodox fare on the Net. In China, all domestic Internet users are obliged to register with the police; the country aims to set up a giant national intranet, connected to the Internet under surveillance. Singapore has set up proxy servers to blacklist certain sites.
In other parts of the world, the problem is far more basic: How do you bring electronic advances to those who cannot read or write? Ingenious methods are being devised to coax people in remote townships into the digital world while guaranteeing their privacy. In South Africa, pensioners now have a bank card with an electronic record of their index fingerprint; a mobile bank truck makes the rounds of villages with an automated teller machine equipped to read fingerprints.
In developed economies, Cairncross admits, there is a real problem of the rich getting richer and the poor poorer. She cites chilling figures showing that the lowest paid 10% of men in the United States have seen a decline of almost 20% in their real wages since 1980, while the top 10% are up 10%.
Is technology to blame? Cairncross touches on the familiar scenario of automated systems eroding jobs, middle-aged office workers replaced by young techies and, more recently, computer programming outsourced to Israel and India. But there is now a further equation: Salaries have become less equal among occupations, and even within them, depending on how far companies or professions are plugged into areas in which technology is sparking explosive growth and globalization. The author takes note of “the celebritization of the economy,” by which skyrocketing returns are offered to those who can take advantage of it--be they chief executives, bond dealers or film and sports stars delivering huge audiences and spectacular returns. Against this Darwinian landscape, many get left by the wayside.
Even corporations do not totally embrace the new technological utopia as they grapple with the enigma of the “productivity paradox,” the failure of statistics to prove that massive investment in technology translates into higher per capita output at the national level. Since 1973, the U.S. has had the lowest productivity increase of all developed countries, despite spending the most on information technology. So far, this bleep is explained by an error in data gathering that will soon be corrected. Nevertheless, it is worrying and gives credence to the complaints of some managers that information technologies are like black holes, sucking in huge sums of money that can vanish with scarcely a trace.
Admittedly, predicting the future is a very imprecise game. In 1995, Microsoft’s Bill Gates wrote a book about the future of the computer and communications industries, with only a short mention of the Internet. He soon recognized his mistake. Telephone companies were hostile to the Internet until they woke up to the explosive growth of second telephone lines. Regional telephone companies in the United States earned more than $3.6 billion in revenues between 1990 and 1995 installing additional lines for faxes and online services.
Large sums were spent to develop interactive television, but the hardware costs too much to tempt most couch potatoes from their lethargy, so it has been temporarily shelved.
Digital television, based on reproducing binary signals or bits, is the successor to the much-heralded high-definition television, which was based on reproducing pictures and promised improved quality. This technology required an $8,000 investment in a new television set and was outdated before it was born. Despite all these advantages, both digital and hdTV are too costly to be popular, and experience thus far suggests that the task of putting something interesting on each of the thousand channels is beyond corporate capacity.
Although we may not agree with Cairncross about technology leading us to a new and better world, we must admit that the communications revolution has in many ways changed our lives.
According to Cairncross, in the 21st century, the personal touch will often be made obsolete by technology. She shows how “tele-medicine” will take medical services into the realm of technology. Elderly folk will soon be able to live alone at home. Nursing groups will make remote-control tele-visits. Robotic voices will be programmed to prompt patients to take their medicine at regular intervals. If the patient doesn’t touch the “yes” square on a screen, the machine tells a nurse to telephone. Even operations will be done at home, directed by distant doctors “manipulating remote forceps, scalpels and needles.”
Despite technology’s triumphs, the “death of distance” is a difficult notion for me to accept. Perhaps Michael Bloomberg, Reuters’ arch-rival, has the better interpretation when he says that distance may be conquered but not time zones. The Northern Hemisphere is awake when the South is sleeping, and vice versa. Physically, we Aussies face a grueling 24-hour flight Down Under, plus jet lag for days or weeks, to travel home. The flight could have been cut in half by the Concorde, but the supersonic jet proved too expensive, too elitist and was judged, perhaps erroneously, to be destructive of the environment. As we have seen, new technologies don’t always make it through the consumer barrier.
