Is this the Digital Dark Age?
I gave a talk last week called Is This The Digital Dark Age? I’ve blogged previously about public speaking, imposter syndrome and coping with nerves and I’m still going out there and giving it a go. During the hour before, my nerves were certainly jangling, but once I was underway, I felt good. It’s an odd experience talking to ones peers. It feels as if a different set of nerves kick in. It was nice to receive messages after the event, with people saying how much they enjoyed my talk. I chose just to use pictures on my slides, and no words. I saw this many years ago at the start of The Da Vinci Code movie when Robert Langdon is giving a lecture and always thought it was cool. I know, I get inspiration from the strangest places.
The organisers wanted a question so rather than using the original title of This is the Digital Dark Age, I simply swapped the first two words around. I think it works.
It was reflective session, looking back at a darker time in our history. Despite this, scientific progress was still being made and I used that fact as background, positioning the present day as a new Dark Age, a Digital one, in which progress is still on-going, but there is still a dark side. It then switched into a more challenging piece, posing questions, ones in the main we do not yet have answers for.
The main examples I used was the body snatchers, Burke and Hare, in Edinburgh in the 1820’s. They provided corpses to a lecturer in anatomy at the University of Edinburgh. Also the fact that when Chemistry was taught there in the late 1700’s, chemicals were dumped in the Old College quad, which became an issue during the archaeological dig of the site in 2010-11. There was no health and safety back then and those chemicals are still a threat today. I also mention manned flight and the fact it took only sixty-six years from the Wright brothers in 1903 making the first powered flight to Neil Armstrong walking on the moon in 1969. However, there were two world wars during that time and that undoubtedly contributed to the pace the aviation industry grew. Inventions can be good and can be used for bad. Today we have armed drones, reducing modern warfare to a computer game.
I continued by drawing parallels with Orwell’s 1984, the ministry of truth, destroying of data that does not fit the government narrative, the living of lives in front of telemonitors, never sure if you are being listened to. Big Brother is watching you. I then made the point that Orwell didn’t predict that many today are connecting their front rooms to the internet and leaking all manner of personal data via mobile phones and internet connected devices in the home.
I then talked about who the cyber criminals really are and if our own collective behaviour is a cybercrime. Developers cutting and pasting insecure code into apps, vendors selling insecure devices, parents giving their children mobile phones and access to the internet and the adult playground that has become. Are the social media companies the real criminals here, collecting and selling our data because we don’t read the terms and conditions we sign up to. Is that also criminal behaviour on our part? And then there is AI – is this going to be the biggest cyber criminal of them all?
I finish with saying that there is light at the end of the close (as I say). People are more aware, and there are many advances in our attitudes towards data privacy. We cannot stop progress however, and although we are now seeing a tremendous acceleration in the adoption of AI – without the health and safety guardrails around it – it’s always been this way. History shows us this. I am optimistic that AI will be a force for good, but my reading of history suggests that there will also be a dark side. It’s a digital dark age, and it is one we are all going to have to navigate as best we can.
The Fiction Factory 