Why Lime Is Leaving A Sour Taste In My Mouth.

Scoot! That a vehicle every bit as silent and speedy as the bicycle has been allowed to use the footpaths, while bicycles remain prohibited, is astonishing. Serious questions should be asked about who, or what, made the decision. Was it the result of quiet (but obviously effective) lobbying on behalf of “Lime”, the company responsible for unleashing hundreds of electric scooters upon the unsuspecting cities of Christchurch and Auckland? Certainly, the extensive public consultation normally associated with activities involving potentially serious and expensive social consequences does not appear to have been undertaken.

WHAT DOES IT SAY about the times we are living in, that electric scooters are permitted to share our footpaths? These vehicles are capable of speeds of up to 27 kms p/hr –  constituting a significant threat to the health and safety of riders and pedestrians alike. Thirty years ago, the idea that local authorities would have allowed such vehicles to travel where children and the elderly expect to walk in safety would have been preposterous. That the owners and promoters of such vehicles were motivated purely by the expectation of profit would have made the notion of scooters on footpaths even more outrageous. And yet, here they are.

Now, before the partisans of electric scooting offer up the usual ripostes to this partisan of vehicle-free footpaths allow him to freely concede that pedestrians have been sharing the footpaths with mobility-scooters, non-electric scooters, skateboards, roller-skaters and, of course, cyclists, for many years. Unwillingly – for the most part.

Not surprisingly, exception was made for the mobility-scooter. Had it not been, a wonderfully liberating invention for the elderly would have been denied them. That the scooters travelled at roughly walking speed and were easily identified when still many metres away did much to ease their introduction. Non-electric scooters, skateboards and roller-skates, while potentially as dangerous as the electric scooter, at least made a fair amount of noise. You can hear them coming.

That is not the case with the bicycle. These are capable of travelling silently and at speeds even greater than the electric scooter. Not surprisingly, it was long ago declared illegal to ride a standard-wheeled bicycle on New Zealand’s footpaths. In 2016, David Clendon, then a Green MP, attempted to have the law changed, without success. Not that this stops all manner of cyclists using the footpaths as their preferred cycle-way – much to the fury and, all-too-often, the injury of innocent pedestrians.

That a vehicle every bit as silent and speedy as the bicycle has been allowed to use the footpaths, while bicycles remain prohibited, is astonishing. Serious questions should be asked about who, or what, made the decision. Was it the result of quiet (but obviously effective) lobbying on behalf of “Lime”, the company responsible for unleashing hundreds of electric scooters upon the unsuspecting cities of Christchurch and Auckland? Certainly, the extensive public consultation normally associated with activities involving potentially serious and expensive social consequences does not appear to have been undertaken.

Those consequences are readily apparent in every country where the short-hire electric scooter companies have set up shop. In the emergency departments of hospitals – and city morgues – physicians and pathologists are dealing with the entirely predictable results of people being allowed to travel at close to 30kms p/hr along crowded city footpaths and/or dangerous city streets. Pedestrians struck down from behind. Riders struck by motor vehicles; pitched over the handle-bars; dragged bare-legged across rough concrete and bitumen. Electric scootering’s victims are running-up quite a tab on the public purse. Needless to say, the hire companies contribute almost nothing towards the medical and economic costs of their “service”.

Why, then, haven’t our national and local politicians stepped in to remove electric scooters from our streets until a fulsome set of regulations governing their safe and responsible use has been drawn up? The answer lies in the culture that has evolved, both here in New Zealand and around the world, since the economic liberalisation programmes of the 1980s. In the thirty-something years since “the markets” were given their head, the whole notion of “heavy-handed” regulation has been anathematised. Those who attempt to protect the public from irresponsible entrepreneurs and their enterprises are dismissed as promoters of “The Nanny State” – a political crime only a short step away from full-throated Stalinism.

It is an interesting commentary on contemporary society that the name given to the people (usually women) whom parents hire to look after their children and keep them safe has become a term of political abuse. As if there is something fundamentally wrong with a state that manifests a similar level of concern for the welfare of its citizens.

This thirty-year disdain for government regulation in the public interest has now been overlaid with the much more recent adulation of “digital disruptors”. Entrepreneurs who have developed successful new businesses out of the opportunities provided by the global positioning system and the near ubiquity of smart cellular phones. Uber is the most famous, but it has many, many imitators. With the right app, a company can attract billions.

And with those billions the digital disruptors can hire the best advertising and public relations agencies in the world which, in turn, can make their clients unchallengeably “cool”. So cool, that no politician or regulator is going to be in any hurry to slow or obstruct the roll-out of their service.

Never mind that their service is leading to an unacceptable and ever-rising number of deaths and injuries around the world. Or, that the massive cost of this new transportation craze is being heaped upon the taxpayers of the countries in which the electric scooter hire companies operate.

After all, who wants to be called old, cantankerous and not in the “now”?

So, here they are. Electric scooters. With more to come.

Take care.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Friday, 2 November 2018.

Digitally Together - Politically Alone

You Had To Be There: National's Rob Muldoon campaigning in the 1970s. Digital political communication will feature hugely in this year's general election. But can the solitary experience of on-line politics ever match the powerful feelings of solidarity generated by the mass events of an active and participatory democracy?

 

THIS YEAR’S ELECTION will be won and lost in private. People seated in front of PCs, or, more likely, caressing their smart phones, will be the ones who decide between National and Labour. On both sides of the great political divide some very smart people are already working on ways to bring their followers together – alone.

 

What a contrast with the campaigning methods of the past. Right up until that most pivotal of election years, 1984, the opening of an election campaign was an unequivocally public event. Political parties typically hired the largest covered venues available – town halls, theatres, opera houses – from the stages of which their leaders addressed audiences of one-to-two thousand energised supporters.

 

And some determined opponents’, too. Because this was the era in which the noble art of heckling still boasted many proud exponents.

 

When Rob Muldoon kicked-off National’s official campaign in Hamilton’s Founders Theatre in 1975,  a clutch of seasoned Labour hecklers were lying in wait. As the pugnacious Opposition Leader was working his way towards his oratorical climax, one of those hecklers cried out in a voice that echoed around the auditorium: “Who stabbed Jack in the back!?” [Jack Marshall had been deposed as National’s leader by Muldoon barely twelve months earlier.] It took the great counter-puncher more than a few beats to recover his composure.

 

All good fun! With the entire spectacle broadcast live on the state-owned radio and television networks. Political leaders truly earned the right to rule us in those far-off days before auto-cues, headset microphones and carefully screened audiences waving pre-printed party placards in front of the cameras.

 

None more so that the revered Labour leader, Michael Joseph Savage, who barnstormed the country in 1938. Diagnosed with colon cancer, Savage disregarded the advice of his doctors to conserve his strength, and hit the campaign trail. Faced with near-universal press hostility, he knew he would have to sell his party’s ground-breaking Social Security legislation face-to-face. Town halls could not contain the crowds that gathered to hear him. Labour stalwarts in Dunedin recalled wonderingly the rain-swept afternoon that Savage spoke to an audience of 20,000 at Carisbrook. It wasn’t even his largest.

 

The mandatory broadcasting of campaign openings was a legacy of Savage’s prime-ministership. Like the social-media of the twenty-first century, these live broadcasts allowed political leaders to execute an end-run around the conservative gatekeepers of the privately-owned media.

 

The live broadcasting of Parliament was instituted for exactly the same reason. Working-class families gathered around their radio sets were able to hear Savage describe Labour’s Social Security legislation as “applied Christianity” – as he said it. They were also able to hear National’s leader, Adam Hamilton, dismissing it with a sneer as “applied lunacy”.

 

Paradoxically, the generation raised on Snapchat, Facebook and Twitter, will find more to respond to in this celebrated Labour legend than their Baby Boomer parents. Millennials need no instruction in the galvanising effect of instantaneity: the extraordinary privilege of being able to monitor events as they happen. A single tweet can reach 20,000 people in a millisecond – and none of its recipients are required to stand for hours in the freezing Dunedin rain to receive it.

 

Hence the sustained effort of all the major parties to craft their messages to the specifications of our digital age. Tweets, text messages, Facebook postings, YouTube videos, and personally addressed e-mails will increasingly complement the old technology of snail-mail-shots, robo-calls, pamphlets, posters, TV/radio/print ads and, of course, all those bloody billboards.

 

Parliament itself has bowed before these new digital imperatives. The mandatory broadcasting of the political parties’ opening and closing election statements has been discontinued. State subsidisation of party-political communications will continue, but now it’s to be applied across all platforms.

 

New Zealanders should, therefore, prepare themselves for an onslaught of algorithmic politics. Messages pitched with unnerving precision at our entire demographic profile: gender and ethnicity; marital status and family composition; level of educational attainment; occupation and work history; income-bracket – all the stuff Facebook and Google know already – will arrive, unbidden, in vast numbers.

 

Will they work? You bet your life! You’ll be blown away by their sky-high production values and will thrill to the uncanny resonance of their messages. What’s more, you will feel caught-up in something much bigger than yourself: a movement for change; a people’s crusade! Your determination to cast your vote on 23 September (or before!) will grow ever stronger.

 

But will it be the same as standing in a rain-swept stadium listening to a frail and desperately ill old man asking you to vote for applied Christianity? Will the sound-track in your ear-pods produce the same reaction as 2,000 people chanting Mul-doon! Mul-doon! Mul-doon!? Will your computer screen meet your eye with a flash of solidarity, or join with you in wild applause?

 

Can citizens truly be together – alone?

 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 16 May 2017.

Passing The Turing Test

Conducting The Turing Test: The distinguishing of replicants from real humans lies at the heart of the Blade Runner movie. If thousands more refugee men, women and children are not to be lost in transit, “like tears in the rain”, then the First World’s leaders must prove that they, too, are human.

 

BLADE RUNNER is one of my favourite movies. From the film’s opening sequences, introducing a compellingly dystopian Los Angeles, to the stark poetry of the doomed replicant, Roy Batty’s, final moments, we are invited to consider, exactly, what it means to be human.

 

Based on the science-fiction writer, Philip K Dick’s, novella Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the movie raises all sorts of intriguing possibilities vis-à-vis the future of the human species. Not the least of these is the possibility that, at some point in the not-too-distant future, our technology may be able to replicate human-beings that are not only indistinguishable from the original – but more honourable and compassionate.

 

The distinguishing of replicants from real humans lies at the heart of the Blade Runner story. How to prevent these bio-mechanical devices from deceiving men and women into misidentifying them as fellow human-beings – that is the challenge.

 

From the moment they were conceived, the potential power of “thinking machines”, computers, troubled their creators. As the capacity of these machines increased, and the scope of their capabilities expanded, the ability of average human-beings to differentiate the computer from one of their own kind would, presumably, diminish. It was certainly a possibility that intrigued the father of the modern computer, Alan Turing.

 

Looking fifty years into the future, Turing, the mathematical genius who, by helping to crack the Germans’ Enigma Code, shortened the Second World War by two to four years, saw the need for some sort of test. The question he posed was: “Are there imaginable digital computers which would do well in the imitation game?” His answer was an emphatic “Yes”. He predicted that the computers of the future, responding to human questioners with text only answers, would be able to pass the “Turing Test” (i.e. fool the interrogators) about 70 percent of the time.

 

Blade Runner was released in 1982. Thirty-three years ago, the year 2019 seemed far away enough for all the technological wonders appearing in the movie to have been realised. Sadly, or, perhaps,  fortunately, humanity has yet to develop a significant “off-world” presence. And, while the science of robotics displays considerable momentum, replicants of Roy Batty’s sophistication still seem a long way off.

 

And yet, the questions raised by Philip K Dick, and translated into film by Ridley Scott, have not gone away. Indeed, computers have become so critical to human existence that it is now possible to ask whether the age-old desire to make machines that replicate humans has been abandoned in favour of a new mission to make humans that replicate machines.

 

More and more human-beings are defining themselves in terms of the networks they log-in to – so much so that to suddenly find themselves shut out of those networks would severely curtail their ability to function successfully. Increasingly, we are redefining and reprocessing experience in technological terms. A century ago, people marvelled that the moving images projected onto the cinema screen were “Just like real life!” A century later, people observe real life events and exclaim: “Just like the movies!”

 

Except that the real world is nothing like a movie, or, at least, like no movie any First World audience would willingly sit through. The ridiculously short and tightly edited clips of reality that appear on our devices convey only a fraction of the enormous scale and intensity of human suffering occurring out there in unmediated space – the real world.

 

The intrusion of tens-of-thousands of refugees into the European Union; a flood tide of human misery unprecedented since the end of World War II; is setting up a kind of Turing Test in reverse. In effect, the crisis is posing the question: “Are there imaginable First World human-beings who would do well in the imitation game?” Will the people fleeing from the unending stress and horror of the Middle East and Africa still recognise them as fellow humans, or, have they become so integrated with their devices as to be indistinguishable from machines?

 

The good news is that not even in the highly-networked, hyper-mediated nations of the First World has the capacity for human empathy been totally eliminated. Indeed, the devices that objectively distance us from reality are, paradoxically, without peer in carrying powerful emotional messages across all manner of boundaries. This is by no means an unqualified good, but in relation to the global refugee crisis it is proving to be a powerful goad for official action.

 

Less certain of passing the Turing Test, however, are the First World’s political leaders. Indeed, their responses are so emotionally out-of-sync with the rest of humanity that they seem more replicant than representative. If thousands more refugee men, women and children are not to be lost in transit, “like tears in the rain”, then the First World’s leaders must prove that they, too, are human.

 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 9 September 2015.