(versione italiana qua)
The history of automation in the evolution of Western societies is a fascinating one. I am no more than an amateur historian, but we have certainly seen, over the centuries, social change and automation advance together — making certain aspects of life more comfortable and allowing many people to improve their living conditions.
Consider domestic life alone (though similar arguments can be made for working life). Until the middle of the last century, the household of a member of the professional middle class would still employ a number of domestic servants, responsible for all the tasks that need to be carried out in any home. Until the spread of the telephone — which began around the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries — even conveying a message to a relative nearby required either a visit or the sending of a messenger. The number of servants naturally varied according to the income of the head of the household (almost invariably a man), and all of them reported to his wife — who was, to all intents and purposes, a genuine business manager (which may explain why women-led startups are more profitable than those led by men).
The twentieth century is the one in which automation grows with ever-increasing momentum, as household appliances supplant their human counterparts and enable women's emancipation from domestic chores. Things do not go smoothly from the outset — a washing machine is merely a piece of metal infinitely less intelligent than a servant capable of doing the laundry according to the mistress of the house's instructions, applied flexibly by their own judgment. Yet the efforts of manufacturers to produce comprehensible, easy-to-use appliances, combined with people's adaptability in using these devices for what they are actually able to do, mean that many "technological marvels" genuinely make life more comfortable today — and have allowed people who would once have been servants for life to build a more fulfilling life for themselves and their families.
With the advent of electronic automation — which quickly becomes digital automation — the trend reverses. The problem is that machines begin to operate in a context characterised by perception of the external world and decision-making based on its interpretation, a situation that is extremely difficult to manage without human intelligence, unless one is operating in very narrow domains. Industrial automation, from the 1980s onwards, does indeed make giant strides — just think of how many production processes have become fully robotised. Meanwhile, in our homes during that same period, we are wrestling with video recorders that stubbornly refuse to record our favourite programmes.
Then comes personal informatics, gradually embedded in every device — from household appliances to mobile phones — and in every service, from banks to public administration counters.
And this is where the great betrayal takes place.
People are left at the mercy of monstrously complicated mechanisms that give no indication of their internal state and offer no means of understanding what is happening. They are forced to follow, like puppets, lists of incomprehensible actions which they carry out religiously, hoping not to make a mistake, while the more superstitious accompany each step with apotropaic gestures ("you never know!"). The result is that we — who are supposed to be the masters of our machines — find ourselves transformed into slaves with no way out.
Alongside this, companies large and small (and the larger they are, the worse it gets) make a mockery of our privacy, prying into everything we do and listening to everything we say (and before long we will discover they are video-recording us too).
Digital automation, made possible by informatics, in the general absence of any industrial policy in this sector, is not being applied to make our lives better — it is making them worse. We work more and under greater stress, particularly those of us doing knowledge work. We used to have staff to handle more operational tasks — physically typing a letter, registering it, and posting it. Now, marvel of the digggital age (the three g's are intentional!), we must do all of this ourselves — while losing time trying to figure out whether the recipient's address is the right one, whether the network connection is working, whether our organisation's automated document management system requires us to tick this or that box, and so on.
To be clear: I am not complaining because I no longer have secretarial support. I am objecting because digital automation has not been delivered as promised — it has not liberated us but enslaved us, destroying our free time. "Productivity" has increased, but the benefits have not been fairly distributed (see chart below).
In the early 2000s, we find ourselves in exactly the same kind of situation. The same promises keep being made, but the reality — which we have now experienced firsthand — is terribly different.
I have no need of intelligent digital services that deploy sophisticated algorithms trying to anticipate what I might want. What I need are services that do a few things — the things I actually need — but do them consistently well, without wasting my time, and — as a domestic servant of the last century would have done — protect me and my family from undue intrusion.
In short: digital automation that is "simple, but respectful and trustworthy."
Let us start from there.
--The original version (in italian) has been published by "Key4Biz" on 22 June 2020.
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