Politicians and magic bullets
Last month I spoke about the Cloud Computing bandwagon and how one idea being put forward was gas and electricity meters which connect to the utility companies via the Internet and let you check your energy usage online. A few days after I wrote that, the government announced its smart meter initiative.
The government has announced that Smart Meters will be fitted to all homes and businesses by 2020, resulting in significant cost savings in meter reading. One might wonder why the government is now setting commercial policy for privatised power companies, and the answer is surely that legislation will be needed to enable the scarcely-discussed remote control capabilities which have been included in the plans.
The Smart Meters will be linked to demand management and load balancing systems and interact with devices in the house to better manage power distribution when demand is high. If I'm reading it right, its saying that Smart Meters will be able to ration out electricity and cut gas supplies when demand is high, by switching off non-essential devices such as washing machines. That worries me. It worries me because my idea of "essential" might be quite different to a remote operator's idea of essential, and it worries me wondering how bug-ridden this system is going to be, and the potential consequences of badly written and poorly tested software.
Of course, for this to work, it is going to need universal broadband. I wrote back in June about government plans to introduce a phone tax of 50p per month which would be used to subsidise the provision of broadband to rural areas, despite the fact that the phone business is still highly profitable. The Treasury has now confirmed that this tax will come into effect from next October and it will be a fee on each individual line, whether that is a copper phone line, a fibre connection, or a connection from a cable company. It will apply to all lines, whether or not they are used for voice calls, fax or internet. This will provide a subsidy of around £175 million per year to the phone companies.
The government has also announced that it will give PCs, IT training, and a personalised webpage to the unemployed as part of an overhaul of its unemployment strategy. The plan is to get the unemployed to do their own job searching online. So once again the politicians think computing is a magic bullet and think training in IT skills is the answer to unemployment. Once again it is implying that the problem of unemployment is caused by people who are incapable of creating a CV for themselves and who don't apply for enough jobs, and its nothing to do with jobs not being there in the first place. Once again it is dreaming up a project which will no doubt command huge consultancy and development fees for one lucky IT company. whilst furnishing each job seeker with a laptop will be a great boost for an overseas computer maker. But what will it all do for the British economy? Will it create jobs? I doubt it.
17th December 2009
This article comes from the SKILLZONE email newsletter, published monthly since January 2008, and covering topics related to technology and the internet. All articles and artwork in the SKILLZONE newsletter are orignal content.