Can We Handle the Present?
We’ve been thinking a bit about the future, but I’d like to know how UK information and information security infrastructure would cope if some of the new toys and behaviours migrated here overnight from places where they are currently used in an almost everyday manner.
What would happen here if South Korean style use of broadband showed up overnight? Specifically, increasing use of massive online multi-player games and MyNews? My thinking about MMRPG is that anti-social and asocial behaviour hides well behind an avatar, and for the other, I don’t know what would happen if the populace in the UK decided to become mass amateur journalists with their mobile phone cameras, but the activist portion would probably be considered intrusive by the military and animal researchers, not to mention journalists who actually get paid…
What would happen here if Japanese usage of mobile telephony was instantly adopted here? They have more services available and the Japanese are much more willing to use them, and some of these services have identity management issues attached. For that matter, if Japanese use of domestic robots came here in a magic flash, it would also have implications–would they be licensed as child minders? Could they work in hospitals?
Closer to home, the Scandinavian countries, and Belgium as well, can do all their banking with a mobile. What would happen here if this poppped up all of a sudden?
If German and American use of RFID was instantly adopted, would we cope? Would it integrate well with our camera-based tracking and satellite surveillance? Would the combination of the three tip us over into Orwellian nightmare land?
And if UK activists for issues such as animal rights and the environment adopted the use of social media in the same way that anti-abortionists do in America, or Al Qaeda for that matter, would we be able to adapt?
Can you think of other examples of cutting edge use of technology that would cause issues here in the UK?
July 18th, 2007 at 9:24 am
The small groups of interests in any of the above are already doing this. Look at how many photos the BBC got of the recent floods for example. The activists are already wandering round with digital cameras and camera phones - they’re the people with the most to gain so are the early adopters.
Banking on a mobile phone probably wouldn’t change much - we already have internet banking and we’d just use the same sites. If you’re talking about paying for things, that infrastructure would take a while to be put in place.
However, the impact of every point of sale terminal in the country being outfitted with bluetooth to communicate with other devices would be very significant in a reasonable timeframe after it was wide enough and standardised enough for it to be useful. Not because it’s an easier way of doing what we do already, but becuse of what else could be possible as a result that is currently impractical (do you have a list of everything you buy?).
Nothing springs up overnight if it’s infrastructure, and even facebook has taken 9 months to become everywhere.
July 19th, 2007 at 12:05 am
I see that in the 24 hours it took me to finish my post you’d already started the same thread.
Ooops.
wg
July 19th, 2007 at 10:32 pm
[…] I learned that this idea has recently graduated from bon mot to research program. Tom Fuller asks: We’ve been thinking a bit about the future, but I’d like to know how UK information and […]