Archives: 2012

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It is an often lamented truism that the UK no longer has manufacturing industry – people point at the closed steel plants of the north while recollecting a golden age of manufacturing where the UK built the wheels of industry around the world.

The statement that we no longer make things isn’t entirely true of course. Sure, we may not manufacture steel anymore, but instead we manufacture robots and jet engines.

The trend is a simple one – as technology advances and more sophisticated technologies touch more aspects of our lives, what jobs there are require an increasing degree of technical knowledge to perform.

Each worker is able to produce objects of higher economic value (robots vs steel girders), which means more money and more tax revenue, but as the economy becomes increasingly optimised towards high tech, the upshot is that, as a percentage of the economy, the number of low skilled jobs is decreasing.

The future looks pretty dire for the low skilled

Increased automation and technological advancements have always pushed sectors of the work force out of their jobs, from the mill machines of the 18th and 19th centuries to self service checkouts at the local superstores.

In the latter example, a single member of staff can now do the job of a row of checkout clerks, supported by maybe a trained engineer to fix faults in all the stores in a given region. Soon, maybe these too will become redundant (perhaps replaced by RFID scanners to scan your bags and bill your credit card automatically when leaving the store).

Being computer literate is already a requirement for virtually every job in the modern workplace, and in a few years time, not being able to code will be as big an impairment as not being able to read and write.

Bluntly, if you don’t have training in sophisticated and marketable high tech skills, you likely will be out of work soon and will also likely never have a job again.

A smart and socially responsible government would be ploughing every penny they can into education and welfare. Education to bring the technical competence of the population up to a level where they stand a chance of competing for the few ultra high skilled jobs the economy of the future has, and welfare to prevent the increasing number of those who are not skilled or lucky enough to have a job from becoming so desperate that they overthrow the government.

Managed decline

Educating a populous is of course expensive, requires long term thinking and is hard work. A more cynical short term thinking government may opt for a managed decline of a nation’s economy.

They may for example decide to cut back on education for the majority of the population and funnel what little money is left towards educating the elite classes. They may decide to cut back on welfare and make what little is left dependant on forced labour, which those in the desperate position to need welfare are not in a position to refuse.

This approach may even work in the short term if the media is managed correctly and the right spin is put on the situation, that is until the tide of human suffering rises high enough for the murmurs of discontent from the slave castes turn to cries of revolution. For those in power who think only as far as the next election cycle this would all be somebody else’s problem, and one likely to be watched with disinterest from a tropical tax haven.

Known problem

A couple of years ago I attended a conference which discussed various aspects of public sector and government, and education in particular. During this event I got taken aside by someone who apparently did something fairly high up in the department of education, probably because of my previous work on Elgg which has been linked – for better or worse – to the field of E-Learning.

During our rather meandering conversation on education and politics, he admitted that the education time bomb, as he called it, was a widely acknowledged problem, but that they had no solution whatsoever for it.

He went so far as to admit to me that given the lead time involved for any solution to have an effect it was almost certainly too late to do anything about it in any case.

His candour shocked me, and I asked what he suggested as a recommended course of action; “Leave.”, was his reply, “Before it gets really bad.”

Things look pretty bleak for the generations of wasted talent to come.

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Once upon a time it used to be easy to find free wifi. If you needed to check your email or do a bit of work while on the go it just used to be a matter of popping into the nearest coffee shop.

But increasingly these pools of signal seem to be drying up, sometimes being replaced by costly pay-for-access hotspots, sometimes vanishing entirely.

The few free (as in beer) access points still around are increasingly not free (as in freedom) to access. Many force you to enter personal details, which is, at best, time consuming if you just want to read your email while drinking your coffee, and, at worst, downright invasive. Others, like the one at my former favourite office away from home, are now requiring you to ask for an access token – again, not something you’re going to do if in a hurry or if you are just there for a coffee.

Some coffee shops (Costa I’m looking at you) have even gone to the point of requiring you to join their rewards club and / or turning off all the power points so you can’t recharge.

All of these measures give a sense that they don’t really want their customers to use the wifi they’re providing.

What could be the reasons behind this trend I wonder? Here are a few off the top of my head…

People aren’t drinking enough coffee

One possibility in the above coffee shop example is that people are setting up with their laptops, monopolising a table, and not drinking enough coffee. I think this is probably because they are engrossed in what they are doing, or are unwilling to leave valuable laptops unattended while ordering, rather than necessarily scamming the store for the free wifi.

Regardless of the reasons it is obviously a problem, but one I’m pretty sure could be solved by having table service, and the availability of accessible wifi and readily available coffee and tasty nibbles brought to your table while working would certainly make me spend more money.

Times are hard

Thanks to government overspending, the collapse of the banking system, and a few illegal wars, times are hard and we’re all feeling the pinch. Perhaps the idea of giving away something for nothing (even if that something costs nothing to provide) may not seem as attractive a prospect as it once did.

Collecting user details seems to also be a bit of a cynical attempt to monetise the customer in new ways.

The Digital Economy Act

I think that it is more than just a coincidence that the decline in open wifi started happening after Labour’s disastrous digital economy bill was bullied through parliament by the BPI.

This bill transfers liability for anything illegal that an internet user does to the person who pays the bill, meaning that a coffee shop would be responsible for any copyright infringement performed by their customers.

This is obviously a strong disincentive for anyone wanting to run open wifi in their place of business, and runs counter to the stated aims of the bill (the real aims of course being to further entrench established monopolies, but that’s a subject for another rant blog post).

Myself, I’m thinking about just getting a Mifi on Giffgaff and giving up on the whole ubiquitous wifi concept, but that seems like admitting defeat. This doesn’t seem to be a problem elsewhere in the world, what are your thoughts?

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The Raspberry Pi is a tiny, solid state, and ludicrously cheap hobby ARM based computer designed in the UK (but thanks to insane UK tax laws needs to be built in China). It has a USB port, video, sound, an Ethernet port, 256MB RAM, and can run 3 distinct flavours of Linux.

Ostensibly the device was developed with the aim of getting kids to code, and as someone who grew up with the UK hobby computing scene of the 1980s and cut their programming teeth hacking games together on the ZX Spectrum, this is something I can thoroughly get behind.

The blurb from their website:

The Raspberry Pi is a credit-card sized computer that plugs into your TV and a keyboard. It’s a capable little PC which can be used for many of the things that your desktop PC does, like spreadsheets, word-processing and games. It also plays high-definition video. We want to see it being used by kids all over the world to learn programming.

Coming out of Cambridge and with a decidedly hobbyist feel to it, the Raspberry Pi could almost be the spiritual successor to the humble and much loved Speccy. If it can get more kids coding then that’s all for the good, especially if it gives the UK tech scene a much needed shot in the arm.

This is not the reason why I’m excited.

Small. Capable. CHEAP.

The Raspberry Pi is tiny, which means it can be put in tiny things. It is low power and solid state, which means it doesn’t need much juice to run (4 AA batteries will do the trick) and it can take a fair amount of abuse.

Above all, it is cheap, and this is why I’m really excited. They are certainly something you can afford to buy more of than a traditional computer, even on a modest budget. I’d go further and say that they are so cheap that they can be thought of as practically disposable general computing units… this is game changing.

The reason I am really excited about this is that all these factors combine to make them the perfect choice for the control computer for any number of appliances or devices, and it reduces the barrier to entry for the home hacker to start putting some really cool things together.

I don’t think it will be long before we start seeing countless hobbyist developed bits of hardware; from internet radios, to cheap NAS appliances, right through to remote sensor platforms, robots, drones and maybe even spacecraft. Given the number of bits of Lego sent to the edge of space recently I don’t think this is too far off!

Increasingly you don’t need to wait for a company with a massive fabrication plant to see a market for a product in order to get one, but now micro-manufacturing is something you can do in your own home. I can think of hundreds of gizmos I could spend countless afternoons building with a Raspberry Pi at the centre.

I can’t wait to get my hands on one!