Topsy-turvy times

Pratap Ravindran

FIFTY years after it rolled out UNIVAC I, the world's first commercial computer, Unisys Corporation, on June 14 this year, issued a tongue-firmly-in-the-cheek ``public apology for the many human inconveniences resulting from its invention.''

The company quoted its Corporate Vice-President and General Manager (Product Development & Technology), Leo Daiuto, as saying: ``Directly or indirectly, our invention of UNIVAC led to a whole new industry and a new way of life for all of us. Today, we are still inventing bigger, faster, more cost-effective enterprise computers. But sadly, the many benefits of the Computer Age have been accompanied by a number of transaction-based annoyances - all unimagined 50 years ago. As the company that started it all, Unisys feels that it is only fitting that it mark this historic anniversary with an apology for those inconveniences.

In specific, Unisys, in a press release, apologised for:

- Making it impossible for anyone to do more than five minutes' worth of work without being interrupted by an e-mailed joke, Top Ten list or chain letter;

- Ensuring that if something goes wrong with a piece of equipment, intelligent, well-meaning people armed with hand tools and mechanical knowhow will no longer be able to fix it;

- Relegating to obscurity the smell of fresh-cut flowers because the only flowers you ever get to smell nowadays are the ones you see in online pictures when you're ordering them to appease an irate spouse who's feeling neglected because you're spending every spare minute online;

- Making trips to the mall unnecessary because anything you can get there is available online at a steep discount;

- Ending that great morning tradition of newspaper and coffee because, by the time your coffee is hot, the news in your newspaper is already two generations behind the online edition;

- Giving government, business and the average 12-year-old the means by which to find out more about you and your personal tastes than you yourself ever know;

- Getting you so used to receiving responses in nanoseconds that you can no longer wait the ten seconds it takes for your microwave oven to warm up your bagel;

- Making it impossible for you to justify a trip to the training workshop in Cancun because all the training you'll need is now available on your desktop;

- Making it possible for you to vacation in Cancun without ever losing touch with your boss back at the office;

- Forcing you to go through a five-minute startup routine every time your computer crashes while you're creating a three-minute memo;

- Giving SPAM a bad name;

- Making it easier for the IRS to spot discrepancies between your tax return and objective reality;

- Reducing your life and everything in it to a series of counterintuitive acronyms;

- Giving you a false sense of security regarding the spelling and grammatical accuracy of your next memo;

- Increasing your volume of in-mail to the point where you have to devote significant time outside of regular working hours to get through it all;

- Eliminating the concept of regular working hours;

- Providing you with the means to lose money in the stock market at an unprecedented pace;

- All those Monday morning deadlines you didn't know about because they were e-mailed to your laptop at 10 p.m. on Sunday;

- All those theatre tickets you can no longer buy at the doorstep because every seat has already been sold online;

- The dotcom bubble

- The bursting of the dotcom bubble;

- The concept of multitasking; and the avalanche of press releases that any company with a media directory and access to e-mail can now generate at a moment's notice.

You've probably got the idea by now. Computers aren't all that the Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister, N. Chandrababu Naidu, Nasscom evangelists and other techno-faddists make them out to be.

There is no epiphany involved here. People have known about what is referred to as the law of unintended consequences and its application to technology ever since Guttenburg invented the printing press to popularise the Bible -- and caused socio-economic shifts that were so sweeping and powerful that they changed the course of world history. That, of course, was not what he had in mind - but that is what he got.

The first attempt at systematically collating the unintended consequences of technology was made by the science writer, Edward Tenner, is his classic work, Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences (Alfred A Knopf, 1996).

Tenner, in his book, used the Titanic as a classic example of the law of unintended consequences in technology at work - in this case, safety systems that encourage a degree of additional risk-taking that makes for accidents. Tagging this the ``revenge effect,'' he wrote: ``While the Titanic's owners never actually claimed their ship was unsinkable, the crew's and passengers' over-confidence in her advanced construction proved fateful.''

Tenner also referred to the Chicago Fire caused by over-confidence in technology: ``The Iroquois Theatre in Chicago was deemed so fire-proof that it opened before its sprinkler system was ready to operate.'' When the theatre burned down during a performance a few months after opening in 1903, more than 600 people lost their lives in what remains the largest American disaster of its kind.

As for computers in offices, Tenner pointed out that they hadn't resulted in increased productivity, that they had actually increased the consumption of paper at the workplace (much to the dismay of the paperless office rah-rah crowd) and that personal computing environments had become so complex that ordinary people needed the help of experts just to stay functional.

Incidentally, the unintended consequences of information technology don't have to be negative. You just have to look at what happened when Delta Airlines, Ford and other big US companies virtually gave away PCs to their employees with the objectives of retaining workers in a competitive job market and ushering their workforce into the Knowledge Age in a relatively painless manner. But what these companies got was more productive employees who insisted on hooking up their PCs to their employer's intranet and e-mail systems so that they could work on their own time.

It's just as well that there aren't too many firms doing this in India. It's hard enough avoiding work at the office without having to do so at home as well....

Please e-mail us at bleditor@thehindu.co.in if you have queries on computer usage or if you find an interesting way of using the computer.