the economicist

A special report on smart systems
Horror worlds
Concerns about smart systems are justified and must be dealt with
Nov 4th 2010 | from the print edition
Tweet “IT IS not possible to make a lasting compromise between technology and freedom, because technology is by far the more powerful social force and continually encroaches on freedom through repeated compromises.” Thus wrote the Unabomber, also known as Ted Kaczynski, in his manifesto, published in 1995 by the New York Times and the Washington Post in the hope that he might end his terror campaign or somebody might recognise his style of writing and unmask him.

Mr Kaczynski’s methods were abhorrent. His bombs killed three people and injured 23 over nearly 20 years. He was arrested in 1996 and is currently serving a life sentence. But his concern that technology will slowly but surely undermine human freedom is shared by quite a few mainstream thinkers. As this special report has argued, smart systems will improve efficiency and could help solve many environmental problems, in particular global warming. Yet if those systems seriously impinge on people’s freedom, many people will balk. The protests against smart meters in Bakersfield and elsewhere may be only the start.

Smart systems are rekindling old fears. Top of the list are loss of privacy and government surveillance. Internet users have only recently begun to realise that every single thing they do online leaves a digital trace. With smart systems the same thing will increasingly apply to the offline world; Google’s Street View is only the beginning.

In this special report
It's a smart world
A sea of sensors
Making every drop count
Living on a platform
Augmented business
The IT paydirt
Your own private matrix
Sensors and sensibilities
? Horror worlds ?

Sources and acknowledgments
Offer to readers

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Related topics
Sam Palmisano
IBM
Even the champions of a smarter planet admit as much. “Some citizens have expressed discomfort at living in not a safer society but a ‘surveillance society’,” said Sam Palmisano, the boss of IBM, in a speech earlier this year. He cited a newspaper article recounting that there are now 32 closed-circuit cameras within 200 yards of the London flat in which George Orwell wrote his book “1984”.




Hopes and fears

Mr Palmisano would be in the wrong job, however, had he not gone on to say that such concerns have to be rethought and to stress the economic and social benefits of smart systems. Others point out less obvious advantages. “All this technology actually strengthens the human side of cities,” says Carlo Ratti, director of MIT’s SENSEable City Lab. People who are always connected, he argues, can work wherever they like. And Mr Haque, the boss of Pachube, claims that “sensors empower people because measuring the environment allows them to make decis

ions in real time.”

On the other hand smart systems are also undeniably useful as an instrument of control. Singapore has made an impressive job of smartening up its physical infrastructure, but its network of security cameras could also be used for enforcing rules more objectionable than a ban on chewing gum. Similarly, the operations centres and dashboards for local governments in China being built by Cisco, IBM and others beg the question whether their only purpose is to make these cities smarter.

Other deep fears brought on by smart systems is that machines could be hacked, spin out of control and even take over the world, as they did in the film “The Matrix”. As the Stuxnet worm and the May “flash crash” on Wall Street have shown, the first two are already real possibilities, even if the third still seems somewhat remote—although well-known computer scientists, artificial-intelligence researchers and roboticists met in California a couple of years ago to discuss that risk.

And there is a more subtle danger too: that people will come to rely too much on smart systems. Because humans cannot cope with the huge amounts of data produced by machines, the machines themselves will increasingly make the decisions, cautions Frank Schirrmacher of the German daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in his recent book “Payback”. Similarly, Nicholas Carr, an American commentator on the digital revolution, in his book “The Shallows” claims that the internet, the mother of all smart systems, is on its way to smothering creativity and profound thinking.

A further worry is that smart technology will ultimately lead to greater inequality—and not just because it could create an “information priesthood”, in the words of Mr Gelernter. Paul Saffo, a noted Silicon Valley technology forecaster, expects ubiquitous sensors to give a huge boost to productivity—at the expense of human monitors. “We are likely to see more jobless recoveries,” he says.

Whether computers will indeed start to eliminate more jobs than they create remains to be seen. But smart systems certainly represent a conceptual change. So far IT has been used to automate and optimise processes within firms and other organisations as well as the dealings between them. Now it will increasingly be used to automate and optimise interactions with the physical environment.

Some of the concerns raised will be hard to deal with. For instance, there would be little point in passing laws that would give individuals the right to decide whether their data can be used by smart systems if cameras and other sensors are already ubiquitous. And building in circuit-breakers to keep automation from going too far could defeat the purpose of smart systems and stifle innovation.

Still, technological progress is not some force of nature that cannot be guided. “We can and we should exercise control—by democratic consensus,” says Mr Gelernter. Yet for a consensus to be re

ached, there must be openness. The biggest risk is that smart systems become black boxes, closed even to citizens who have the skills to understand them. Smart systems will make the world more transparent only if they themselves are transparent.