Don't Get Me Started..

Robots. Abundance for All, or Just the Survivors?

mail@andaluciasteve.com (Admin) — Sat, 27 Dec 2025 20:55:00 GMT

I loved robots when I was a kid. They seemed to be everywhere in popular culture. From the Amazing Magical Robot Game, an educational toy that appeared in my Christmas stocking, to the weekly dose of “Danger, Will Robinson” while watching the cult American classic series Lost in Space, I was hooked. So when I was seven or eight years old and "Tricky’s" the local toy shop, put one in their shop window, I had to have it. Beyond the reach of my pocket money, I devised “The Robot Club” with school friends John London and Ian Collie, whose club subscriptions coincidentally covered the price of the robot, though I don’t recall John and Ian getting much time to play with it. (Sorry guys!)

Fast forward fifty-five years and the robots are here for real. However, the reality lacks the magic conjured by my childhood imagination. In fact, to me, the whole robot business seems just a little bit scary.

For starters, why aren’t there any purple robots? Or blue, pink, green, etc.? Even robots in black-and-white movies, like Gort in The Day the Earth Stood Still, were clearly not monochrome. I don’t know what colour Gort was, but he had a metallic shimmer that suggested silver or grey, as did Robot Maria in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis.

Today, though, I bet you a Buffalo nickel that all the humanoid robots you’ve ever seen have been white, or worse, white with black faces. I don’t think this is an accident. I think the way in which robots are presented to us is a representation of the intention of the people behind them. The robots of yore were the product of the creative minds of science fiction writers, who cast robots as angels or demons as their narratives demanded. The folk behind the robots being sold to us today are the products of billionaire tech futurists. Their intended narrative appears to be somewhat different.

In the old stories, the robot was always a character. It could be comic or tragic, loyal or murderous, but it was always a someone. Even when it was a menace, it had personality. It had colour. It had a face you could read, even if it was only a blank mask of rivets. The robots coming to an online distribution outlet via your billionaire-controlled tech device of choice are blank, faceless soldiers of servitude.

These are not characters; they’re appliances with limbs. That they’re white is no accident. White is a cultural signal: clean, clinical, neutral, safe. White is the colour of hospitals and laboratories and the myth of objectivity. A white humanoid says: don’t worry, there’s no ideology here. This is just engineering.

There is more going on here, and I’m not the only one who thinks so. In a recent interview, Subhadra Das, historian of science and author of Uncivilized: Ten Lies That Made the West, revealed a hidden dark agenda. Speaking to Myriam François on The Tea YouTube channel, she outlined some of the motives behind the forthcoming robot revolution.

She says that it’s a myth that science and technology are automatically neutral, “truth with a capital T,” floating above politics. As was the case with eugenics, this aura of neutrality has historically been used to give harmful social ideas a clean bill of health, because if something is labelled “science”, it becomes harder to argue with and easier to obey.

That matters, because the robot revolution is going to force society to answer a very old, very ugly question: what is a person for?

When machines can do more and more of what people currently do for wages, there will be more and more humans who are “unnecessary” to the labour market. In a sane world, that would be the start of leisure. In a less sane world, it becomes the start of sorting.

She talks about how eugenic thinking worked, not as cartoon villainy but as something disturbingly mainstream: decide that society has a “problem”, identify a group you can blame for it, then present control over that group as rational, scientific, and even compassionate. What gave me a chill was the way she described how this thinking can return in softer packaging: not “inferior race”, but “burden”, “low productivity”, “won’t contribute”, “won’t pay taxes”. Those aren’t just insults. They’re the vocabulary of a future in which citizenship is conditional on usefulness.

If that sounds dramatic, consider the mood music coming from the billionaire futurists themselves. The same people who sell “abundance” also flirt with demographic panic: talk of “Western civilisation” in peril, fear of replacement, the sense that the wrong people are multiplying. My earlier point about robot colour isn’t separate from that. If you’re anxious about who counts as the rightful inheritors of the future, then a white, “neutral”, “default” robot starts to look less like a product and more like a flag.

There’s another strand in her reasoning that helps explain why this ideology arrives with such confidence: the belief that the future is inevitable. In the transhumanist/AI-accelerationist framing she describes, AI isn’t treated as one possible path. It’s treated as destiny, almost a secular end-times story: history has a direction, the merger with machines is coming, and anyone who slows it down is cast as ignorant or even immoral.

Once you accept that framing, debate becomes blasphemy. Regulation becomes “standing in the way of progress”. And political questions, like “who owns the robots?” or “what happens to the displaced?” get pushed aside by a louder question: “how fast can we build?”

Which brings us back to those white bodies and black faceplates.

I’m not saying a designer sat down and said: “Make it look colonial.” I’m saying something more mundane and therefore more plausible: the industry is building the visual language of a future in which robots are framed as neutral, rightful, unquestionable. The whiteness is laundered as safety. The black “face” is blankness: no ethnicity, no history, no individuality, nothing that might prompt you to empathise or to ask who is being served. A humanoid, stripped of the human.

In the fiction of my childhood, robots were angels or demons depending on what the story needed. In the marketing of today, robots are neither angel nor demon. They are presented as inevitable infrastructure. And when infrastructure is inevitable, the people who control it quietly become inevitable too.

So the question I want to ask, before the robot revolution is declared “AMAZING” and the press releases start writing the future in permanent ink, is this:

When the billionaire futurists say “abundance for all”… who exactly is included in “all”? My fear is that it will be “all who remain” after the dust has settled on what may turn out to be the most turbulent period in human history.

Admin ...

Bitcoin Is Doomed And So Are We

mail@andaluciasteve.com (Admin) — Mon, 06 Jun 2022 22:32:00 GMT

I had an epiphany last week. Do you get those? Suddenly the clouds part and you see the way forward in a moment of clarity. Only rather than being a positive experience, this one was dark. Very dark. End of days dark.

Photo by Kanchanara on Unsplash

This is going to be a tough one to explain as it is a bit technical. I'll try to simplify as best I can.

I had a similar epiphany the first time I used the World Wide Web. I was already an Internet user as I'd been working in the field since the late 80s. I'd been sent a CD with the first Mosaic web browser on it. When I fired it up and clicked on a link, this buzzed the modem, dialled up the Internet and pulled down an external web page from a server in California. I knew in an instant this was transformative. I could see this was going to make the Internet available to the man in the street. I instinctively knew we would all soon be shopping online and that one day, delivery would be as important, if not more, than retail premises. Soon after, I quit my comfy Civil Service job and embarked on a career in the private sector doing all things Web related.

My most recent epiphany wasn't quite so instant. It came about through watching a couple of unrelated Youtube videos, coupled with a little insight into digital money, a subject that has interested me for sometime.

I first grappled with the notion of digital money when I read an article about the invention of Bitcoin. I recall I was sufficiently intrigued to print out the article and put it to one side with the intention of downloading the software and investigating the brave new world of Bitcoin mining. In the manner of 'boat-missing' that characterises my life however, this was 2009 and I was in the process of moving from one side of Spain to another having met a new lady on Facebook. I never returned to the article. Had I done so I may well have mined enough Bitcoin to be a multi-millionaire by now. Call me Captain Hindsight!

Now I won't get into a protracted explanation about how Bitcoin works or we'll be here all day. For the purposes of explaining my epiphany it's sufficient just to know that Bitcoin enables a financial transaction to take place between two individuals anywhere in the world, without the need for any intermediary. There is no need for a bank or any other kind of money manager taking a cut for providing the infrastructure in between. All you need is the Internet and the right software at each end (remember that bit - it becomes important later!) This means you have personal sovereignty over your own money. You are your own bank. Now I think 'the powers that be' don't like this notion. My epiphany is that events are conspiring to prevent us enjoying our own financial independence.

The first video that kicked off this train of thought was by a savvy Australian called Naomi Brockwell

whose YouTube channel is a watchable way to keep up with the latest news in crypto, privacy etc. In the video she alerted me to the new EU law which is planning to ban people from running their own crypto wallets, instead forcing them to use regulated exchanges ( https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_21_3690 ).

So going back to what I said earlier, it is currently possible for you to download software like Bitcoin Core on to your personal computer and be your own bank. Over the years, Bitcoin exchanges have sprung up that can run crypto wallets for you. However they're the weak link in the chain. If you've ever read any horror stories about Bitcoin fraud or hacking in the press, chances are it was an online exchange that is the victim (or culprit). E.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mt._Gox

I was initially quite sanguine on hearing this news as it would be almost impossible for the EU to block or adequately police Bitcoin given that I can run whatever the hell software I like on my own PC. Then I watched the second video. This is by a veteran PC repair guy called Jody Bruchon who is new to me, as it was a video YouTube's algorithm suggested as one I might find interesting. They weren't wrong!

I won't go into all the gory details but long story short, you may be aware if you are a PC user that Windows 11, the latest incarnation of the operating system imposed on us by Microsoft, has some very specific hardware/firmware requirements. As the video explains, there are some potentially sinister issues with this, as it means Microsoft is taking control of the software you are able to run on your own computer.

[BTW, Jody contacted me to request I also include his follow-up video which addresses some comments in the original video Here it is…]

Like me, you may have been slightly affronted when you got your first smartphone and discovered that you could only run apps on it that you downloaded from the app store. Jody is suggesting that this is the way Microsoft may be headed. Even alternative operating systems like Linux can only be installed now on a Windows 11 compatible PC because they are issued with digital keys by Microsoft. If those keys are denied at some point in the future, Microsoft could force all PC owners to use only Windows and software it has vetted through it's own app store. And, by extension, that app store could potentially deny users from downloading software that allowed them to run their own crypto wallets.

I don't want you to think of me as a conspiracy theorist, but do you see where I'm going here? My guess is the EU didn't think to introduce such draconian, freedom-busting legislation all by itself . Occam's Razor suggests to me it was probably arm-twisted by 'the powers that be'. I doubt Microsoft is really going to all this trouble to lock down personal computers for commercial reasons. There is a lot of resistance to Windows 11 and many people are already jumping ship, deciding to run Linux on their PCs instead, so they are potentially risking the loss of many customers. Occam's Razor leads me to think it is more likely that 'the powers that be' are arm-twisting Microsoft to lock down software with the express intention of ambushing the very notion of personal financial sovereignty. This is because there is a lot at stake. In fact, everything is at stake.

Governments and central banks around the world are currently engaged in the development and testing of digital currencies - (CBDC - standing for Central Bank Digital Currencies). The aim is to do away with cash altogether, then the government will have complete control over the money supply. They will literally be able to track where every penny goes.

Now you may be one of those flag waving 'God Save the Queen' types who trust the government and thinks it should be doing everything in its power to protect us from those dastardly criminals and funders of terrorism. To that I'd say absolute power corrupts absolutely. We're entering a new era beyond Big Brother, where the government could, for example, attempt to control inflation with negative interest rates - literally taking money out of your account to limit your ability to spend, and there will be nothing you can do about it because you have no cash or crypto to move your money into. They could seek to make you healthier by restricting your expenditure on certain types of foods - 'no sausages for you this week citizen Smith, you're going on a diet. We're banning you from spending your money on certain foodstuffs - only lettuce leaves for you'.

You may think this is science fiction but China has already for some years had a system of social credit scoring where offenders are punished by being denied travel tickets etc https://www.businessinsider.com/china-social-credit-system-punishments-and-rewards-explained-2018-4 China is further down the road to the development of a CBDC than any other nation, already having trialled it in some states and it will be interesting to see how that pans out. We tend to think that the difference between China and the West is of state control. China isn't a democracy they say, China has the communist party and central planning, while the West has the freedom to choose its leaders via the ballot box. Do we though? Or are our two party systems really as independent as they may seem?

I don't think it an accident, fashion or fad that all countries are moving towards CBDCs, I think it is arm-twisting by ‘the powers that be' It is a global system that we won't be able to vote out. Real power isn't with the jackboot, the gun or the ballot box, it is in the control of money. The race to eliminate personal sovereign money i.e. cash and crypto will be the end of liberty and personal freedom. For thousands of years we've enjoyed that freedom but I fear in the next five to ten years it will be taken away from us and we will never get it back. 'The powers that be' that control the money will have achieved absolute power. And will they be corrupt? Absolutely!

Note this a backup of the most I originally made on Substack

Admin ...

Sunday Blackout

mail@andaluciasteve.com (Admin) — Sun, 22 Nov 2020 00:05:00 GMT

Last Sunday was a funny old day. As occasionally happens at this time of year, work was scheduled to upgrade the electricity supply, so it was announced that the power would be off between 8am and 10 or 12 depending on which part of the town you live.

Midday came and went but my electricity remained off. I had some chores to do and visits to make to recycle some bottles and plastics, so I just got on with it, expecting the problem would sort itself out. By the time I finished it was 14:30 and still no electricity. I visited my neighbour across the street and found her electricity had been restored some time previously. Perhaps it was just me.

I tried phoning the number of the electricity company but I butted up against an automated system and none of the available options resulted in a connecting me with human being. Then, for the first time in the two years it has been in my possession, my phone froze. The touch screen wouldn't respond. Phones these days don't have removable batteries and I didn't know how else to turn it off and on again. [I've since learned holding the power button for 20 seconds restarts the thing. Who knew?] All of a sudden with no phone, no computer and my neighbour now apparently repaired for comida, I felt completely out of touch with the world. I felt marooned.

At this point I started to be concerned. Everything in my house is electric except the hot-water boiler. I worried that I'd be eating fruit for dinner by candle-light, unable to heat through any of the meals I had in the freezer.

I thought perhaps the first thing to do is ask the police for help. This is very nearly an emergency, surely they must know what to do? I couldn't phone them, so I trotted off to the police station. It was closed. So then I thought I'd knock on the door of a few friends in the area, hoping they would be able to phone the police mobile number for me. Problem was, it was such a warm, pleasant, sunny day, that nobody was home.

On about the third door I knocked on I finally got a response. It was my old neighbour up in 'La Cilla' in the old town. I explained my plight and she found the mobile number of the police and gave them a call. They told us that if the problem was in the street it was the electricity board's problem but that they wouldn't come out if it was a problem within the property. They recommended getting an electrician first, to determine whether the problem was local or not, then if it was a problem with the supply outside the house, we should get in touch with them again and they would get hold of the electricity company.

So now the problem was how to find a domestic electrician on a sunny Sunday afternoon when Olvera was like a ghost town because so many people had gone off with their families to enjoy their houses in the country. My friend thought for a moment and rang her cousin, who knew an electrician. He was out of town, but her cousin asked if she had thought to try another distant family member, 'Cristobel'. She gave us his number and Cristobel was called. Thankfully he was in town and agreed to come right away.

I hot-footed it back to the house as fast as my over-weight frame would carry me, as I was walking whereas Cristobel would undoubtedly be in a car. As it happened I got back with about five minutes to spare, so was able to get my breath back. Cristobel arrived with another gentleman and started flicking the switches in my circuit-board. Everything in the house was absolutely dead.

Outside the house there was a fuse box. Cristobel requested a chair and he climbed up to test the fuses. I jokingly assured him I'd paid my bills. (When they cut your electricity off here, these fuses are removed by the electricity board!) He tested the supply with his meter but there was no juice. He took the fuses out and tested them but they hadn't blown. He explained they now had to test the next junction box on my neighbour's house to see if current was reaching there. However this box was much higher up on the wall, and since both Cristobel and his mate were quite short, something more than a chair was required. He knocked on my neighbour's door to see if he had some steps but to no avail. Then he had the bright idea of parking his car underneath the junction box and standing on the bonnet. It is a bit of a squeeze to get a big SUV down my road but soon he was on tiptoe peering into view the state of the fuses. He gave one a tap with the handle of his screwdriver as it appeared loose, and banged it back into its housing. Then he tested the supply voltage with his test meter. There was a loud 'bang' and a flash as he had forgotten to change the meter range from continuity testing to volts! Fortunately he didn't fall off the bonnet or otherwise injure himself, but he knew from the shock that current was reaching this junction box so he asked his colleague to check the supply inside the house. He flicked the switch and the lights came on! Yay! Tapping the fuse home had done the job. It was now 16:30 but at least I knew I would have hot food that night!

I asked Cristobel how much I owed him and he said twenty euros. I was more than happy to pay, and as I did so, wondered how many years ago it would have been England to get a pair of electricians out on a Sunday afternoon for the same money!

Admin ...

Why isn't the world worshipping Elon Musk?

mail@andaluciasteve.com (Admin) — Sun, 03 May 2020 15:26:00 GMT

We all know who Elon Musk is, Tesla, Space-X yada yada, yet he seems underrated by the press and positively despised in the comment section of tabloid newspapers. I'd like to address that here by highlighting some of his thought processes. Normally I aim to blog about 1000 words for a nice bite-sized read, however to cover Musk's brain in such limited space will be a zesty challenge so please forgive if I overrun!

Musk is seen by some as a nutcase who smokes dope on the Joe Rogan show, makes unfortunate Tweets about the 'pedo guy' and who got into a very public altercation with rap artist Azealia Banks about acid-taking etc. Only last Friday (1st May 2020) he made a seven word tweet that devalued Tesla stock by $14 billion dollars. Yet despite his maverick social media profile he is capable of thoughts of the loftiest brilliance.

I can't for the life of me remember where I originally read it (and I've been unable to find a source - doing a weekly blog doesn't allow as much time to research as I'd like), but the thing I first heard about Elon Musk that really impressed me was the simple idea he had to validate the ownership of bank accounts for use with PayPal. I was a web developer back in the 1990s involved in building e-commerce websites. We used to do them from scratch in those days before generic e-commerce platforms had matured, so I was familiar with the problems involved in taking and making payments online. Systems soon evolved to take payments by credit cards since the card companies had a more modern infrastructure, expiry dates, CV codes etc. Banks however, with their systems rooted in the dark ages had no way to validate the ownership of an account online. Say a client sent you an email with his bank account and you needed to send him some money for the exchange of goods, how did you know the bank account was actually his and not that of some hacker?

Elon came up with the simple yet brilliant idea of paying two micro-payments to the account, say $0.34 and $0.83. The client had to read these numbers from his bank statement and enter them in the PayPal website. Musk had therefore generated the equivalent of a PIN number to verify the account. At first I thought how dumb, to give money away to verify a bank account, but as I thought more about it I realised it was genius. The two numbers would never cost PayPal more than $1.98, an expense which would easily be offset by the reduction in fraud and that would enable PayPal to transact directly with bank accounts, which had much cheaper transaction costs than anything else. You could for example send cash via say Western Union, but then the Western Union agent, usually the post office, would need to be paid to validate the identity of the payee by physically checking the passport which is a costly process in comparison. So from then on, I hailed Musk as a genius capable of conceiving ideas the like of which I could not.

PayPal was not even Musk's first multi-million dollar venture. He'd already founded an online city guide, Zip-2 with his brother Kimbal in 1995 which was sold in 1999 with Musk getting $22million for his 7% share. Prior to that, while in college, Musk has spoken about his musings on the essential matters which would most affect the future of humanity and came up with five things. These were:

The Internet

Sustainable energy (both production and consumption)

Space exploration (more specifically the extension of life beyond earth on a permanent basis)

Artificial Intelligence.

Rewriting human genetics

Clearly the guy thinks big. Unlike other students with big ideas however, Musk is realising them one by one. With the founding of Tesla in 2014 Musk helped create the first successful new car manufacturer in America in over 90 years. Right now, as CEO, Musk is on the verge of winning a 3/4 billion dollar remuneration payout as part of compensation plan that depended on the company achieving a six-month period of $100 million dollar market capitalisation. This would make him the most highly paid executive in US history. The incredible thing about this is that when Musk negotiated this contract, such a target was unthinkable. The company was only worth $60 billion at $250 per share back then. Musk made it happen, even though he's a part-timer dividing his hours between several other companies. The other somewhat unsung truth about Tesla's success is the way it is transforming the automotive industry away from the dealership model that has pervaded for over a century to a direct model where cars can be bought online. The low maintenance of electric vehicles is also challenging an industry that fed off consumers need for servicing and repair. Musk doesn't just compete in a market, he smashes it to pieces.

Musk also heads Space-X, the rocket-company he founded in 2002. In case you've been living under a rock, Space-X has been successful too, winning a number of private and public US defence contracts. By making as much of his rocket technology as reusable as possible, he has undercut the price of all competition for launching satellites. Musk has said many times he sees the future of mankind as multi-planetary. The idea is that by sticking only on planet earth, mankind could (in fact probably will) succumb to some sort of extinction event. Only by having colonies on other worlds can the human race escape such events and survive into the future. This is a lofty goal but one which Musk is edging towards. Again, one of the things that most impresses me here is how Musk is funding Space-X. One of the key planks of the strategy is the Starlink Internet programme, a network of satellites designed to bring Internet connectivity to all parts of the globe. As well as the much publicised plan to bring affordable Internet to poorer countries in Africa and so forth, Musk has another trick up his sleeve. The satellites will exchange data using line-of-sight lasers. Because space is a near vacuum and there is no medium in space to slow the light signals down, transmission of information will be even faster than the fibre optic cable used on the ground. This lack of latency is expected to be of extremely high value to certain commercial sectors that depend on timely information such as stock brokers. The premium service is expected to provide big bucks for Space-X to fund its future developments.

Somewhat crazily, these achievements in themselves would be remarkable enough, yet Musk continually applies his brain to disrupt other industries. Tesla's energy grid batteries are beginning to change the way electricity companies handle the storage of electricity, while boosting the future of fledgling solar and wind-power industries. The Boring Company is set to revolutionise travel by establishing a tunnel network that promises to reduce congestion and journey times. Tesla has recently entered the car insurance industry. By using the data from its own network of cars, Tesla can fine tune risk assessments allowing it to offer insurance at up to thirty percent less than its competitors who themselves are tentative about insuring Tesla automobiles because they have only been on the roads for a decade so the old school actuarial data they use is insufficiently mature. Neuralink is Musk's foray into the world of medicine, developing high bandwidth brain to computer interfaces. He also founded and Artificial Intelligence organisation called Open AI. (He's done all this and yet I have trouble finding something to blog about once a week!)

Doubtless in all these other industries, Musk has probably figured out the way to get them to pay for themselves, and has envisaged a sneaky way to undercut competition leading to a big disruption in an existing market.

The thing that most impresses me about Musk is that his innovations, which drive market change and arguably the direction society is taking, all take place from within the private sector. I'm a dyed-in-the-wool lefty who believes at some level, the state should be planning the future of society through policy, either with a totalitarian boardroom strategy like China or with a presidential "let's get man on the moon" approach like Kennedy. Musk is proving to me that isn't necessary. He's teaching this old dog (and many like me) new tricks!

Admin ...

My Timemachine of Technology

mail@andaluciasteve.com (Admin) — Sun, 29 Mar 2020 15:57:00 GMT

I feel very fortunate to have been born when I did and to have observed the revolutionary change in technology that I have. Things whizz along so fast these days. My father woke me up in the middle of the night to watch man's first moon landing, but the rocket that took man to the moon only had a 16 bit processor and a tiny amount of memory by modern standards. These days we all have far more power in our mobile phones! It's all happened so blindingly quickly!

In fact I feel very fortunate to be born at all, as my parents were quite ‘elderly’ when they had me. Dad was 54 when he had me and mum in her mid forties so I'm lucky to be here. Accordingly the environment I grew up in was full of old technology that had been accumulated over many years. We had a valve radios and television that took ages to get hot before they would work. The family camera was a ‘box brownie’ – little more than a black box with a lens and a winding mechanism to advance the film. The film wasn’t cheap so we took each photograph with care, posing and saying cheese! Then it took days or weeks to get the prints back from the chemist! All these artifacts smelt old and musty, but also everything felt frozen in time as though they had been around forever.

Then around the mid-sixties I remember my elderly grandfather went through a number of transistor radios, all of which were made in Hong Kong. My grandad was a bit clumsy and used to drop these ‘trannies’ repeatedly. Invariably the case would break and after a few months of being held together with rubber bands and sticky tape, they would be replaced with another which was always smaller and lighter than the last.

I loved to take the old radios apart and figure out how they worked. The valves of old had been replaced by small blobs which were transistors. The other components had all been shrunk too, as had the printed circuit board. Even so, every component was identifiable and it was generally possible to figure out which did what.

By the time I reached secondary school things started to change a whole lot. My physics teacher explained to me about integrated circuits. Tens or hundreds of transistors were now being fabricated together on one piece of silicon to form whole circuits. These were found in the first pocket calculators. My first calculator, made by Prinztronic cost a fortune but only did +-/* and percentages!

It wasn’t long after that I saw the first microcomputer on the television. This was the commodore Pet, which today still looks more like the sort of thing you would find on the deck of the starship enterprise. The Pet seemed unimaginably expensive to a youngster like me, but pretty soon my school purchased a bunch of microcomputers in kit form (NASCOM 1 if you're curious) and us school-kids were co-opted to spend hours soldering them together.

I inevitably found myself working in computers and during the 1980's the IBM PC became the default architecture for most business users. My first experience of these was the Olivetti M24, which was a dinosaur by today's standards but crucially the office had them networked together with this clever thing called co-axial cable. The first time I met with this concept I remember thinking what a waste of money! Surely if two people wanted to work on the same spreadsheet they could copy it to a floppy disk and walk to the next office with it. How wrong I was, which is a recurring theme in my life! Of course from these humble beginnings, networking really took off, bringing us to the Internet and the applications on the World-Wide Web we are all so dependent on today.

I'd moved to Spain by the time I saw my first smartphone, a first generation iPhone owned by a friend on holiday from the UK. It seemed so revolutionary at the time, and Apple had clearly got it right - the combination of touch-screen and scrolling GUI was a winner. Now we all have one (or more) in our pockets and think little of it. When you do think about it though, today's smartphones are far more advanced than the communicators used in the first series of Star Trek, which themselves were considered light years ahead at the time.

An example of how far things have advanced is the disdain people have today of optical media, the CD/DVD discs read with a laser, which are now seen as quaint and clunky like the horse and cart of the digital world. With today's Internet speeds it a lot easier to stream a movie from Netflix than it is to watch an optical disk. A laser based tech becoming near obsolete in my lifetime! How amazing is that?

You might think then, like the apocryphal story of the commissioner of the US patent office, Charles H. Duell, that everything that could be invented had been invented. (I traced the quote - it was more likely a joke prophecy made in Punch magazine). This couldn't be further from the truth. the 21st century is the age of materials, where scientists are gaining insights as to how to manufacture new things at an atomic and quantum level. Quantum computers are in their infancy but promise to bring unparalleled levels of computing power. Graphene, the single atom thick layer of carbon famed for its conductivity of electricity and heat as well as tensile strength has already made its way into a commercial battery. Though at the moment it is only used to assist and enhance conventional lithium batteries, it is expected that graphene only batteries will be used in future mobile phones and electric vehicles that will be a fraction of the size of those used today.

So I've seen the world move from valves to the quantum computer in a couple of generations and technological progress is still accelerating. We're living in a world none of us could have envisaged 10 years ago. Who know what the next ten or fifteen years will bring.

Admin ...

Working From Home. Why Not?

mail@andaluciasteve.com (Admin) — Sun, 15 Mar 2020 13:49:00 GMT

With the relentless advance of Coronavirus and the Daily Express asserting this is the 'End of The World' predicted by Nostradamus (as it does regularly as clockwork about anything from the latest Near Earth Object to God's face being seen in tub of lard), governments across the globe are asking as many of us as possible to work from home.

As I touched on in a previous blog, I've had plenty of experience of this since I first tried it in the early 1990's. In fact for the best part of a decade I was a paid up member of the UK's Teleworkers Association.

In theory, modern communications are so advanced that they should make travel irrelevant save for the transport of goods. With a video camera, a microphone, even 3D virtual reality spaces like Rumii and Meetingroom.io available to anyone with a smartphone, there seems on the face of it, very little reason to leave one's house, nor even ones bed in the morning.

Human nature however works differently. I worked in a organisation many years ago with four geographically dispersed offices in different parts of Britain. Someone had the bright idea that if they invested in a video conferencing system, the cost would soon be recouped by the savings in travel and expenses. In those days, before the Internet and with the insistence on studio quality cameras it was a six figure investment. Despite much goading from above to try and get executives to use it, the system soon became a white elephant. I doubt it ever achieved the return on the investment that was hoped for.

The reasons seemed to be twofold. Firstly many people are inherently camera shy. Especially if they don't appear in front of a camera very often, most people have that feeling of being 'put on the spot' and of having their natural spontaneity sucked from them by anxiousness. Secondly, people enjoy face-to-face meetings. In contrast to camera shyness, people open-up in the physical presence of another human being. Also, as my boss at the time remarked "nobody wanted to use the thing because they would rather go on a jolly, leave the wife at home for a few days, have a few beers in the evening with their mates and maybe squeeze in a round of golf".

When the Internet became popular in the early to mid 1990s I really thought remote working would finally take off. Why on earth would employers maintain offices in expensive locations when they could move to a cheaper place out of town? Why have an office at all if employees could network remotely? Then when the Twin Towers (and building seven) were destroyed in a terrorist attack there seemed to be even more incentive for large concentrations of workers in cities to become a thing of the past. Surely businesses would see the value in dispersing geographically? Incidentally I was working at home on 9/11. In the interests of self-discipline I made a point of never turning on the TV while I was working, so as to avoid distraction. One day, I had a yearning to break that rule. I made a cup of tea and turned on the TV which happened to be tuned to Skynews. The first plane had just crashed into the Twin Towers. I watched open mouthed as Kay Burley mistakenly interpreted the incoming footage as being the same crash from another angle. It was the second plane. I don't know what made me turn the television on that fateful day to see the live action as it happened. What did stick in my mind is the sense of being alone in a crisis. There was just me and a two dimensional representation of Kay Burley. I really needed another human being to turn to and just say "what the absolute fuck?", but there was no one other than my cat who was not really interested in the matter. The isolation of working at home can be very frustrating.

Anyhoo, despite 9/11, businesses continue to concentrate in ever taller buildings. Twenty years on and the web has made very little impact on employer's desire to keep people in chair so they can keep an eye on them. Most companies have vertical hierarchies, and managers love to manage. Many get into it because they are psychopathic control freaks, the sort of folk who like standing over you watching what you do - seeing how long it takes you to go to the loo and what time you choose to knock off in the evening. Home-working has a different dynamic which old style managers cannot get their heads around.

So will generation Z be any different? We're talking about people who were born into being videoed so feel very comfortable with it. They also seem to handle isolation well, being that they are welded to their phones from early childhood and no longer seem to bother talking face-to-face.

Somehow I doubt it. At the end of the day, interaction is at the root of markets, it is at the root of our psyche and it is fundamental to who we are as humans. So however good virtual reality gets and how comfortable future generations become with it, I feel there will always be the last nine yards in which there is no substitute for direct human contact. Also any companies of the future pioneering teleworking seemed doomed if they try to use the hierarchical management structures of the past. They will need to be more co-operative and have a flatter management structure that is less dependent on monitoring and more reliant on collaboration. I think if such companies do arise they will find big rewards in being agile and competitive. The snag is as, with big open source projects like say, Wikipedia, they end up begging for funding because despite a huge amount of volunteer working they don't have a format that impacts sales in a way that a vertically structured company does. It seems you need an arse at the top banging on doors, making deals and keeping profitability in-check, while confident enough in delegation to keep management structures flat.

I saw an interesting video recently in which Elon Musk was ascribed just these qualities. Apparently in both Tesla and SpaceX he promotes a results-driven culture in which people are encouraged and rewarded for delivering ideas across what in other companies would be considered 'cultural' divides. So if a person working on one aspect of production had an insight into another unrelated field, he or she has free-reign to approach that area's director to make a suggestion. This has led to some quantum leaps in Tesla's development and is the sort of management that is required of companies in the 21st century. I don't know the degree to which Musk encourages homeworking, but presumably because he can't be in two places at once, he must himself be a remote manager for some of his time at Tesla, SpaceX and the Boring company. Perhaps Elon is the chap we should be keeping an eye on. Tesla's market capitalisation has just hit $100 billion which is a trigger built into his contractual compensation plan that could be worth $55billion or more, making him the richest person on the planet. Not bad for a part-timer!

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A Growing Lifetime of Not Understanding

mail@andaluciasteve.com (Admin) — Sun, 16 Feb 2020 13:53:00 GMT

I rarely visit the UK, but the last time I did I confronted one of those new-fangled self-service tills in a shop for the first time. It confused the hell out of me! I had to get my niece to show me what to do. This was particularly embarrassing because I'm supposed to be a techie guy - Computer Steve - the dude who has been bothering microchips since the early seventies. The odd thing is that while this is factually correct, the world has progressed while my understanding of it has become increasingly muddy.

I'm not talking about things I don't understand about life in general, like why women fashion hats out of towels at some point during the process of taking a shower, or why dogs don't chew their food whereas they're so adept at chewing on furniture. I'm specifically concerned with the wall that has been growing between man and machine since electronics has been migrating from analog to digital.

If you are old enough to remember the 1960's this wall didn't exist. If you owned a radio or a TV, the chances are it had two dials - one that turned the volume up and down, the other which tuned the device through different channels. There was also a good chance that these were labelled 'volume' and 'tuner' in English.

The first suggestion in my world that things were about to get ugly came with the Cassette Tape recorder. Do you remember those? We used to use them to record the top 30 pop songs on a Sunday night. A tune I remember fondly was Queen - Seven Seas Of Rhye which was as near as I got to liking heavy metal back in the day! Anyway, the thing that was lost on me and probably many others at the time, was that the controls on these machines had a language-independent interface. This allowed the manufactures to streamline tooling so they could basically knock out the same machine and sell it to different countries with the minimum of changes, perhaps with just a different mains plug and user manual. This was a subtle but important turning point as it meant we, the great unwashed public, had to start learning a new language of symbols. (The posh word for this is semiotics but lets not get ahead of ourselves).

Now a cassette recorder wasn't rocket science but it was more complicated than a radio. One had to express forward/back, stop, record/play and pause. This was done with the use of symbols and sometimes colour, with the red being used to signify record. Us old folk have had forty years to forget how we first learned this interface but I understand it still foxes kids today when they see a Sony Walkman for the first time.

Household appliances of all kinds have undergone similar 'progress' since those heady days. Our washing machine back then was so simple a child could use it. There was a dial that had labels in English that said meaningful things like 'wash', 'rinse' and 'spin'. The washing machine I use today has a dial with dozens of signs on it that look as though they were invented for the purpose of confusing the hell out of me by some insane professor of Aztec hieroglyphics! Fortunately the Devil's spawn was already here when I moved into the house, so I just leave the dial where it has always been, throw my washing in, switch it on and hope for the best! Seems to be OK but God only knows what all the other settings do. As for the washing instructions they put inside clothes, don't get me started!

It's the same thing with steam irons. No idea! Turning the dial clockwise seems to make them hotter but as for the other symbols, not a clue!

Things really started to get mysterious when appliances became digital. An old analog microwave oven was a joy to use. There was just a timer and a power level control - easy. Does anyone really understand the interface on a conventional digital microwave? Weird images of chicken drum-sticks and steaming bowls? I would never buy a microwave with an interface like that, but I had occasion to use one a few years back, and in the absence of a manual (or anyone else that was in possession of the sacred knowledge of how it worked), I eventually managed to cook some popcorn after about five minutes of trial and error, randomly pushing buttons and trying my best to gauge the results.

The removal of language in favour of internationalization is only one of the problems. The other is that all signs are not equal. If it were just the case that a picture represented something recognisable, things wouldn't be too bad. Think of a public toilet for example. There is an image of a man, an image of a woman and an image of a person in a wheelchair. It's not easy to confuse these icons for the things they represent in the real world.

Icons however are only one of the three categories of sign recognized in semiotics, the study of signs. The other two are symbol and index. Icons are reduced depictions of the object they represent, such as our toilet folk. Symbols however are signs that represent an object without resembling it. Most national flags are abstract symbols, which clearly represent a national identity without imaging a real thing (there are exceptions - some flags may contain stars, lions etc but for the purpose of the example I'm talking about plain flags with just lines and colours). Indexes are pointers to a concept that often cannot easily be represented directly, e.g. drawing three horizontal squiggly lines doesn't look much like water but it does suggest a river or sea and maybe used to indicate water, swimming, tide and many things water related.

All three types of sign are found in the earliest cave paintings dating back hundreds of thousands of years. The paleoanthropologist Genevieve von Petzinger has been doing a study of the objects represented in engravings and paintings in caves across the world and has discovered that all the designs can be reduced to a basic 'vocabulary' of 32 separate signs. She mentions in her excellent and fascinating TED talk on the subject that "There is a striking lack of diversity in the earliest rock art from France and Spain to Indonesia and Australia". The thought that the outlook of people across the human world hundreds of thousands of years ago could be expressed in 32 signs is a sobering one. Hold onto it while I describe what happens next in my story.

Computers, as you will know, are a lot more than glorified adding machines. Since the early days of punch cards and paper tape, the interfaces through which we connect to computers has been gradually evolving. From my earliest contact with them during the 1970's until the middle of 1980s, all interaction was mainly through a 'terminal' model, where one would see a command line on a screen, type in commands and get the answer back as lines of text. Later, many alternative custom graphical interfaces came and went but the one that endured was called the WIMP interface (standing for windows, icons, menus and pointers - or mice and pointers depending on which version of computer history you believe). This found its way into the Apple Macintosh in 1984 and other home computers such as the Atari and Amiga until eventually being reinvented by Microsoft as their flagship interface, Windows.

I was a command-line ninja having been a Unix programmer who had worked in this type of environment for so long, so I personally found the move to a graphical user interface a very painful one. Implicit in all these interfaces was the dubious conceit that they represented your desktop and the items within it, such as files, printers, waste-bins and so on. I couldn't see what was intuitive nor useful about say, clicking my cursor on a file and dragging it onto the printer to print it. In my experience, dropping a physical A4 document onto a the top of a physical printer or photocopier would not induce the latter to print, so why should it be so on my computer? It really took me decade to get my head around it.

Meanwhile the academic thinkers in the process of constructing the Tower of Babel we jokingly refer to as Computer Science had another trick up their sleeve. The number of printable characters back in the 60's was originally a lowly 128, due to the limited bit-length of early computers (the size of the blocks of numbers the computers were able to work with at a low level - this grew over time time from 8, 16, 32 to 64 etc as technology improved). The size of the possible 'alphabet' was extended throughout the years, but the huge uptake of computers internationally and the need to represent different character sets such as Japanese Kanji text meant a complete overhaul of how characters were represented was in order. The boffins came up with Unicode, a standard which is now used to represent hundreds of thousands of characters.

Now you will probably be aware that techies used smiley symbols 🙂 back in mainframe days. When mobile phones became a craze in Japan during the 1990s, their phone manufacturers extended this idea and ran wild with it creating the sub-culture of the emoji, those crazy little images that almost substitute for text in messages exchanged by young people. This soon spread beyond Japan and cutting a long story short, emojis are now represented across technical platforms worldwide using the Unicode standard. They are now mainstream!

Smartphones didn't come out until I was well into my forties, by which time the last thing I wanted to do was learn yet another interface. The gestures, swiping and pinching all baffled me for some time. I still get the shivers If I have to copy something from one app to another on my phone or have to print something out, but I'm getting there.

My Waterloo however is messaging. I sometimes get messages, especially from young people, that look like they were copied from the walls of an Egyptian tomb. Icons, symbols and indexes all in the shape of modern emoji. I know what they are, I just can't figure out what they mean, because there seem to be thousands of these things. When I see them I often think back to Genevieve von Petzinger's fundamental 32 character vocabulary and wonder how old I actually am, because I often feel nearer to our cave-dwelling, stone-age ancestors than I do to our couch-dwelling Generation-Z!

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