Automation, a curse or a blessing?

As a result of the individualisation of the mind, we have closed our so-called own minds to the universal spirit. As a result, we are, with the exception of a few unspoilt mountain tribes, hardly capable anymore of conscious telepathic communication with one another. Fortunately, the function of telepathy has been taken over by the mobile telephones of our telephone companies. By means of the 'green point' phone, the wrist television and the Walkman radio, we are now reconstructing on a physical level what we have lost on a subtle level.

We used to do everything by mail. Nowadays, it seems as if everyone is connected to one another through television, radio, telephone, and of course the fax machine. This enormous amount of communication channels is, however, being taken over rapidly by communication networks. This gives us the possibility to communicate with each other more effectively and efficiently, to overcome distance as well as time in an almost holistic way, the air buzzing with electronic signals (wireless networks). The earth will be larded with glass fibre cables that penetrate every home with a capacity up to one gigabit22) per second. A laser connection between my study and the rest of the universe, lonely, but not alone.

A recent phenomenon in electronic communications is the 'bulletin board system'. A bulletin board is a facility in a network or the telephone network, that can be best characterised as a public swap-meet, where you can electronically exchange all kinds of things, such as electronic messages, computer software, fragments of music and video clips, with a slight risk of a fatal virus infection. The first supplier has already started offering bulletin board applications for professional use, under the label 'community exchange': a facility to build an electronic community for business transactions.

And all this only seems to be the very beginning. Futurists paint an alluring picture of tomorrow's digital society:

After getting up in the morning, woken by my 'personal', I take a bath to start the day clean and fresh. From my hot bath, scenting of wild lemons, I digitally order the articles I need to get through the day. My ‘personal’ has suggested the menu for the dinner to which I want to treat my golf mates this evening. Thank goodness, my ‘personal’ saves me from blundering by serving my friends the same meal twice. I then electronically check the situation of my stock portfolio and look into the various possibilities, and I decide to transfer some money from my current account to place it on deposit.

Meanwhile, the water in my bath has become cold. I therefore rub myself dry and walk over to the closet to pick out a suit. I am not satisfied with what I see, so I browse through the electronic catalogue and order a tailored suit, for my ‘personal’ knows all my measurements. When I am having breakfast, my mailbox tells me that I don't have any important appointments at the office, so I decide to work from home and I have the relevant data electronically transmitted from the office to my ‘personal’. I work for a couple of hours, communicate from a distance with my colleagues, who are probably also working somewhere. Then I download a few videos from the network onto my television set and I am seduced into having a mental showdown with a computer game. That is how I kill time until the arrival of my golf mates.

As you will understand, this brief picture can be extended a great deal, and perhaps your imagination is capable of conjuring up an even more sophisticated picture of the future than mine. Will this be the electronic land of leisure that awaits my children?

An important trend on the one hand, stimulated by network infrastructures, is the increasing integration of computers and databases; on the other hand, the mainframe is eroding. Thanks to fast data connections, optimal use can be made of processors at different locations. This phenomenon, which professionals call 'distributed computing services', will eventually lead to the phenomenon of the omnipresent computer. This means that using a smart card as a key, you will be able to work via networks all over the world, just as if you were right at home behind your own ‘personal’. The same smart card is also used as a credit card and as a registration key to gain access to a large number of buildings and other facilities. The omnipresent computer will always know where you are, what you are doing and perhaps even how you are doing. A kind of electronic mother, or do some of you perhaps have some 'privacy' problems23)? This electronic 'mother' does not give any guarantees for a fair society. There will be clever people who will obtain a powerful tool to gather and distribute data for their own financial gain, and so-called computer-illiterates will be excluded from the universal information provision.

But let us return to networks. Well-controlled use of a network saves a great deal of work. The controlled use of E-mail, possibly illustrated with video clips, promises great improvements with respect to the use of the telephone for business, which is now characterised by the possibility that the person one wants to talk to is not available, or that a call is inopportune. I cannot help but wonder, however, about the use of distributing more and more information at an increasing rate, as long as people cannot get more than 24 hours out of each day. When distributing data, even via the computer network, we have to ask ourselves whether the people on the other side are really waiting for this information, or whether we just want to give it to them so badly.

Computer networks offer a wonderful opportunity to better synchronise and integrate companies and individuals. Just consider the exchanges in health care, between general practitioners and the hospital, and between hospitals, or in the insurance business, between the insured, the agents and the risk bearer, or in banking. Creating a modern, sophisticated communications infrastructure with access to gigantic public data bases ought to be one of the main concerns of a facilitating government. However, computer networks also offer the opportunity to pump ‘giga’22) amounts of nonsense round the world at ‘giga’ speed. Because of the great lack of moderation we, unconsciously I suppose, send each other increasing amounts of rubbish. After all, we have already been practising this for years in a non-automated form, and still are, judging from what I find in my mailbox every day. The unasked-for mountains of non-information stuffed into it every week are simply appalling. Are you still able to hear that silent Word, remember, that Word in the beginning, behind this deafening deluge of data flows?

The use of the telephone network has already degenerated (or debased, if you like) due to the 0800 party lines. Let us please use computer networks in a more business-like manner. And anyway, do you really think that videoconferencing will enhance the team spirit? If your answer to that question was affirmative, here is your question for the second round: ‘Does true co-operation take place on a physical level?’ Wouldn’t teleworking lead to undesirable individualisation? Shouldn’t the main question for EDI be: how do I send less information, rather than how do I structure it? With (automated) communications, it is important to realise that information consists of data that is relevant to the user. It is therefore the receiver, not the sender, who determines what information is.

The question is whether society is mentally ready for those all-connecting network infrastructures. Transportation by cars has taken on ill-considered, ever increasing proportions, while no fundamental consideration has ever been given to human transportation in the physical world. The clogging motorways are now starting to work in a counterproductive way with respect to greater mobility. Is this also what the future of network communications will be like? Will we also get a proliferation of ‘data highways’? Or will we recover our self-discipline and sense of moderation in time?

Perhaps the above suggests that networks play a passive role, a role that may be enhanced by adding all kinds of extra services which professionals in the field call ‘value added networks’. It is, however, conceivable that a certain intelligence were built into the network, so that the network would control its components, a phenomenon that was already alluded to in the discussion of the omnipresent computer. From a passive role to an active role of the network, therefore: to professionals this means a reversal of the client/server principle.