HUBRIS AND CYBERPHOBIA

Dick Pountain - 07/02/95 11:17 - IDEALOG 6

Q: How many Pentium designers does it take to screw in a
light bulb?
A: 1.99904274017, but that's close enough for
non-technical people.

If you're in the computer biz you've probably seen that
joke before: I got it off CIX, which got it from
Compuserve, which got it from.... who knows. It's not so
special anyway, because the big manufacturers like Intel
and Microsoft have been the butt of computer folk's humour
for years.

But how about this quote from a story in the Guardian's
financial pages about the new super-computing centre at
Farnham? The centre's manager apparently boasted to
reporters that his new super-computer was more powerful
than the "intellect of the world's entire population" (!),
leading the Guardian scribe to comment "Let's hope that
no-one used one of those flawed Pentium chips in stitching
the whole project together". This is no longer the
computer press - flawed Pentiums are becoming a subject
for mainstream spite, and that IS something new.

That Pentium bug is far from unique; there was a well
reported bug in the floating point unit of the 486 at just
this same point in its product cycle (it had to do with
error codes), but that never got into the daily
newspapers. What's more, in electronic terms the Pentium
bug is trivial to fix, and doesn't reflect badly on the
chip's design, only on the wretch who proof read that
look-up table.

It seems to me the difference today is that many ordinary
citizens are eager to see the Pentium bug as evidence that
the god of information technology has feet of clay, and
quite frankly I don't blame them one bit. It wasn't the
bug in the Pentium that irked people so, but Intel's ill
advised initial attempts to make little of it by claiming
that it didn't matter much to 'non-technical' people. This
was the worst sort of psychological faux pas. Intel has
spent millions of TV dollars flying through the gleaming
innards of a PC with 'Pentium Inside' - making people
aware of technical details that are of dubious relevance
anyway - then the firm turns round and in effect says, it
doesn't matter that the chip doesn't work properly because
it's wasted on you anyway.      

The sheer arrogance of Intel's initial reaction was
hastily corrected, but that can't undo the PR damage. In
any case Intel is not the only contender in the hubris
stakes; every nerdy article about how the Internet is
becoming a new life form; every bug-eyed TV program about
Bill Gates (or W. Gibson, or N. Negroponte); every
merchant bank that mislays $126 million through computer
errors as Salomon recently did; all these things and many
more feed into a popular discontent with the computer
industry that could turn ugly. Hubris traditionally brings
down nemesis on the transgressor.  

There's actually plenty of evidence that a back-lash
against the overweening claims of the IT industry is
already in full swing. In a recent poll for the Washington
Post 49% of white collar workers described themselves as
'cyberphobic'and 57% claimed never to have heard of the
Internet. The business pages now regularly host articles
that question whether IT really delivers the productivity
gains that are claimed for it (between 30% and 40% of IT
projects realise no net benefits, HOWEVER MEASURED,
according to Business Intelligence).

The most articulate of these IT-knockers that I've seen so
far was Pat Kane in an article for the Sunday Times (22
Jan 95) called "Let's not get too wired up", where the
author mounted a spirited defence of a new Luddism. To
quote, "Many of us are Luddites now - at least to the
extent that we silently exult when the reality of
high-tech falls far behind its hype". The only word of
comfort in that is the 'silently', but who knows for how
much longer. Kane quite plausibly lambasts Negroponte's
frothings about the new personalised electronic media
("The Daily Me"), on the grounds that once everyone can
read and view only what interests THEM, all trace of a
common culture will have disappeared and we'll be left
living in Tarantino-land.

The truth is that we're living through an unstable period
of changing employment patterns (perhaps unprecedented
since the first industrial revolution) and many people are
scared, confused and resentful - it wouldn't take much
prompting for them to blame all their worries on computer
technology. The original Luddites of 1813, that "Army of
Redressers", didn't smash the power-looms because they
hated machines per se, but because those machines had
taken their jobs away. In a most alarming article in the
London Review of Books last year, well before the
Republican electoral landslide, US economist Edward
Luttwak documented the way that US industry is using
information technology (in the guise of 'downsizing' and
'business process re-engineering) to decimate the ranks of
middle management and depress the earnings of white collar
workers in general. The article was called "Why Fascism is
the Wave of the Future". 

Perhaps its time for a little more humility in the
computer industry, for stressing that computers are simply
tools (albeit the smartest tools we've yet invented)
rather than accessories for a futuristic lifestyle that
most people don't want and many can't afford. After all,
you rarely hear people complain about an ECG machine.