Martin Banks, Personal Computer World 01/88 - checked

It is easy for us all to get desperately excited about the sheer wonder of the technology and what it can do. Coupled to this is the very obvious fact that its capabilities are being developed and enhanced so fast that we continue to be surprised. No sooner have we come to grips with a new product or application idea that seemed stunningly original just a month ago, than another is thrust down our throats. `Gosh', we say, `now isn't that clever'.

This is happening so fast, and with so many different ideas occurring at the same time, that it is difficult to see where it all might be leading. Indeed, it is so much fun to be playing with the gizmos of the here and now that most of us don't care about the future. If it's fun now, the future will be absolutely bloody wonderful. It stands to reason, doesn't it.

Does it? The pace of technological development is now so fast, and so varied, that we owe it to ourselves to take time out; to start considering just where it might be going and, if I dare use such words in public, try to consider what moral values are driving it.

Now I know that to even consider using words like `morals' these days is a sure sign of my advancing years, but I don't care; and I am not talking about the type of morals the tabloid press eschew, where blacks, gays, lesbians and feminists are considered implicitly deviant from the `norm' of white, Anglo-Saxon, rich, male values of conspicuous consumption.

I am thinking more of the moral values of yesteryear, often refered to as `Victorian Values'. We all think we know what these mean, we all have the cosy little image of the nice little family unit round the piano. We forget that us, the great unwashed masses, learned to read stuff like this primarily because in them fine old days, those that owned the factories needed workers that could be given written instructions. It took them a further 30 years or so before they twigged that they also needed written input from the shop floor - production figures and stuff like that. Only then were the rest of us taught to write as well.

No, this isn't a diatribe about the redistribution of wealth. But the moral values that underline the lack of it can still be seen. Take, for example, a quote heard on the Radio 4 Today programme on the 29th September. The presenter quoted Alan Sugar, he of Amstrad fame, as saying something like the following: he just wants to make what people want to buy, and if that means portable nuclear weapons then so be it.

Welcome to the new incarnation of the old morality. Look in the Financial Times of October 1st and see the Technology Page feature on a report from the US Office of Technology Assessment. What do we find?

You all think that networks are a good idea, don't you. The ability to link together a large number of computers around an organisation so that users can communicate files, data, programs, spy data, send mai....spy data?

Yes, this is the new in-thing for corporate users, it would appear. As well as having a natty networking system that allows the staff to be more efficient in communicating effectively with all parts of the company, it also means that the company can become far more efficient at spying on its staff's work.

If your PC is linked into the network, there is now the chance that the company may also be using software that will allow them to accumulate details of any individual's working efficiency. For example, it is quite simple to collect data on someone's time at work, their speed and their accuracy by using software that monitors and accumulates data on workstation keystroke activity.

The OTA report points to the possibility of such techniques, justifiable - moral even - as they are in corporate terms, being used to create new `electronic sweatshops' where staff performance is monitored continually and where the merest slip of the finger could mean the sack. Who fancies being given the sack for being 0.001 over the median inaccuracy level?.

Anyone who has witnessed the love affair I have with my DELETE key would know that I would be one of the first out the door.

Out of interest, the next story on that day's FT Technology Page is about using the techniques of genetic finger-printing, developed to help solve serious crimes, to isolate the perfect workforce. Show a genetic weakness, and you won't get a job. Now, many of you may be sitting there thinking `so what, that will be then and now is now; the spreadsheet is working fine and the flight simulator is great fun'. All I would say is that if you don't take this opportunity to raise your head above the parapet and have a good look, then you will deserve all that happens to you.

I am not saying that the future is an inevitable orgy of profit seeking by unscrupulous corporations that will exploit the very life out of you if there is a penny to made on the deal. What I am saying, however, is that the signs exist (as they probably always have) that the future could go that way. The whole reason for this magazine, personal computers, provides the very tools through which it could happen.

I must admit that I hope many of you have watched the BBC TV series, `Welcome to my World' (as dictated by publishing schedules, this is being written before transmission but after seeing a preview). This set out to paint some of the potential scenarios that might occur in the future if some of the moral values seen today are left to propagate.

We may all like the PC, and have fun with the technology: I'm as bad/good as the next person at that. All I am saying that the time has perhaps come for us to look beyond that immediate sense of gratification and ego (after all we must be a smart-arse to be able to control all that POWER) and wonder where it might be taking us, why it might be going there, just who might be doing the real driving, and whether we, the mere unwashed, might actually like it when we get there.

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