Becoming a digital human

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Wednesday 20 March 2019 10:38 AM

Being a digital human

We live in an ever more connected world.

Persistently connected and pervasive devices form an increasing, and arguably ever-more essential part of our future.

Our homes can be managed by them, they help us to quantify our health, our pulse rate, our activity levels, our calorie intake, they keep us connected to the news, social comment, the weather, the train timetable, our working lives, our communication with our friends and family, our tribe, our social selves.

But along with our ever more connected world – we also live in an ever-more abstracted world – a world in which our ability to understand, modify or even actively intervene in the workings of the devices that influence our environment is becoming limited by our own inability to understand how they work, or unwillingness to learn.

Image courtesy of Apple

By the end of 2020 over a third of the world’s population – or 2.54 billion people – will own and use a smartphone.

In 2018 66% of the UK population were smartphone owners, and most users say that they spend at least an hour a day using them.

The market for Smart Home automation devices – including the Amazon Alexa, Google Home, Apple’s Smart Home, Nest, Hive, Phillips Hue, Tado to name but a few – will grow from an estimated 600,000 homes with automation systems in 2016 to 4.8m or 18% of all UK households by 2021.

In the wearables sector, smart watches, wristbands, headsets and clothing – will increase in shipments per year from 125.5m in 2017 to 240m in 2021 according to IDC, creating a global installed base of approaching a billion devices or around 12.5% of the world’s population.

As a school-girl, I learnt the basic workings of a combustion engine.

I was taught how to identify and change spark plugs, and to use a pair of tights to replace a broken fan belt. Today, I cannot even open the sealed engine-housing of my hybrid electric-petrol vehicle. Within the next decade I face the serious prospect that I may never be required to be the “driver” of my vehicle at all. What will I become? A car-operator? A passenger-manager? A transport-as-a-service customer?

From semi-skilled and self-sufficient technician to abstracted supervisor in less than a generation.

We have been in this situation before – spinning Jennys, the Luddites, extraordinary increase in the rate of productivity driven by the rise of the machines, subsequent starvation and population-level suffering in the cotton processing workforce in India.

But where the industrial revolution targeted systems of production in specific dominant industries, the IoT revolution is both more diffuse and more pervasive.

It targets the western world’s most precious and scarce attribute – time, and by extension cost. It replaces human time with machine-delivered efficiency, in many instances it improves on human-performance of specific, narrowly-defined tasks. For some of these activities previously delivered by humans trained to the role, the machine is a better option in every regard – more accurate, more reliable, cheaper, less prone to periods of inactivity and of course incapable of dissent.

What is the potential impact on all this efficiency improvement on us, on the human beings whose actions are so effectively and comprehensively replaced by the machines?

“The smart machine can separate human mental understanding from repetitive, instructive, hands-on learning. When this occurs, conceptual human powers suffer. The difficult and the incomplete should be positive events in our understanding; they should stimulate us as simulation and facile manipulation of complete objects cannot. The issue – I want to stress – is more complicated than hand versus machine. Modern computer programs can indeed learn from their experience in an expanding fashion, because algorithms are rewritten through data feedback. The problem, as Victor Weisskopf says, is that people may let the machines do this learning, the person serving as a passive witness to and consumer of expanding competence, not participating in it”.

Richard Sennett, The Craftsman

Internet of Things (IoT) is a growing field. The core technology is somewhat mature and there are many applications for it.

It is being adopted by small and large organisations; however there is still a huge growth curve in front of it. And as public and private sector drives towards a more connected world, the question of how it will affect our society should be a topic of discussion.

The value of services delivered via pervasive and connected devices will be immense and has the potential to directly affect both developed and developing countries. In their 2016 report “The Internet of Things: Mapping the Value Beyond the Hype” consultancy firm McKinsey forecast the global economic value of IoT services to be between $4 trillion and $11 trillion by 2025. The sectors most likely to be directly impacted by pervasive personal devices – Human, Health, Vehicles and Offices will together deliver between $550 billion and $3 trillion in value over the same period.

Overall, McKinsey’s analysis suggests that over 60% of the value derived from IoT services will be delivered to the developed world. Despite higher numbers of potential deployments in developing countries the economic benefit, either in consumer surplus, customer value gained from efficiency savings or technology spend, will disproportionately be delivered to developed economies. The disparity is even more stark in terms of the categories where pervasive and connected devices are likely to be the medium of delivery or interface to IoT services. In the Human category – which covers monitoring and managing illness and wellness – almost 90% of the value derived will be in developed nations, partly in recognition of the fact that health-care spending in developed economies is twice that of developing economies.

Both sides of the political spectrum generally give the view that IoT will be a net benefit to society when it comes to simplifying things, reducing waste and making places (factories, cities, remote spaces) safer. I stand firmly with optimism about the new technology, but I do believe it will have a long-term impact on jobs.

Not the loss of jobs, but the changing nature of the work we do.