Humans remain masters of the machines
The TSB computer meltdown shows why we will never accept being slaves to technology
Iremember very clearly my father’s initial scepticism about electric car windows. He was sure that the new gizmos would soon break, and that when they did, there would be no way of repairing them. You didn’t need to be an engineer to understand the good old wind-up mechanism, and if it did go wrong any garage could fix it.
Customers of TSB must be feeling something similar today. As the digital banking technologies they have come to rely on crumbled this week, who could blame them for hankering after the good old days of cash money and chequebook and pen?
Their powerlessness has only been amplified by the very evident chaos at the bank.
It is dispiriting enough to feel, as we all have at one time, in the maw of an all-powerful, uncaring institution. But that’s almost reassuring compared with the realisation that such institutions, faced by technological meltdowns of complex, multilayered systems, are actually as impotent as we are.
TSB is just the latest example. Think of the NHS, brought low by the Wannacry bug. Or of the British Airways shutdown last summer that left tens of thousands stranded. The airline scratched its head for a while, then declared that an engineer had switched the power to a major data centre off and on again.
To millions of us, this represented a great irony, familiar as we are with mysteriously recalcitrant digital devices and beleaguered technical support teams offering the same advice, over and over: “Have you tried turning it off and on again?”
Frankly, they might as well be ancient augurs advising ill-fated Homeric heroes to sacrifice 100 bulls to this Olympian deity or that, hoping against hope that it will solve matters. Because as with the Gods in classical times, many technologies today are so opaque and complex that our fortunes appear controlled by mechanisms utterly beyond our grasp. When things go wrong our only strategy, now as 2,500 years ago, is to bow down and pray.
No wonder this doesn’t always feel like progress. And as technology gets more and more complex, won’t things only get worse? Won’t we end up being enslaved, not liberated, by technological foul-ups as inexplicable and unopposable as thunderbolts from the heavens?
The answer, reassuringly, is no. It is interesting that the shutdowns I described above – at TSB, the NHS and BA – all affected legacy operators, burdened with huge legacy IT systems that are very hard to update. I recently spoke to Anne Boden, who runs the new, online-only Starling Bank. She used to be chief operating officer at Allied Irish Banks. But then she realised that it would actually be easier to leave and start a whole new bank than update AIB’S old system.
That’s quite a message – that it is easier to win new customers than update old systems. But it ought to be a hugely reassuring one for the consumer. Because it shows that we customers – and our desires – are still the biggest prize for businesses. Indeed, this trend is only getting more pronounced as technologydriven start-ups fight for your attention and cash. Across the world, from China to Silicon Valley, new companies have a more relentless focus than ever on delivering what people want.
For years now, that has been convenience. We live in the age of convenience. So online retailers like Amazon have made it ever easier for us to shop (and increasingly watch, and listen and myriad other things) from our sofas or phones.
When convenience is married with value, it is an almost overwhelmingly tempting proposition. But increasingly we are beginning to associate value with things other than ticket price.
Facebook is the obvious example. Many of us didn’t know, or weren’t inclined to ask, how Facebook made its money. So to all intents and purposes, it was a free service. Very tempting. But that has changed. A survey out recently revealed that three-quarters of Britons now know that it makes its money largely through collecting data about users, the better to target them with advertising. Less tempting?
New legislation, coming into force in a month, will only accelerate customers’ ability to reclaim power over personal data online – part of a dance between governments, businesses and individuals that has accompanied every great leap forward.
There is no reason for that to stop now. Technology – from jet engines to MRIS to electric windows – has long been beyond our ken. That doesn’t mean we can’t challenge it, demand improvement and then benefit.
In fact, as tech gets ever more complex, an ever greater premium will be placed on those companies which cannot only deliver the benefits of, say, artificial intelligence, but also explain how they are doing so. Convenience is one thing. But without transparency, humans cannot have agency. And we’ve always put a supreme value on that.