There is another type of screen which faces us every day; invisible but very real. We are on one side of this screen; the power elites (the corporations and the politicians) are on the other side. The media is the one-way filter which prevents us from seeing what is on the other side but leaves Them free to monitor our every movement. The rules are entirely different depending on which side of the screen you are situated. Even the language on each side is different.
On our side if people print money it is called 'counterfeiting' and they are sent to jail. On the other side it is called 'Quantitative Easing' and the culprits are praised for 'saving the economy'. On our side if people trade in weapons it is called gun-running, on the other side it is called creating jobs and helping the export industry3. OK its jobs for killing people. But they're not our people. They are 'unpeople' as described in Mark Curtis's book of that name4. On our side of the screen if a person is held under water until he is on the point of drowning it is called torture. On the other side it is 'enhanced interrogation'. For us, starting a gratuitous war is called 'the crime of aggression' for Them it is called 'humanitarian assistance'. On our side if a business person ruins his business by greed and incompetence he is declared 'Bankrupt' and losses everything. On the other side such a person's organisation is given billions of pounds of money which rightly belongs to those on the opposite side and he, the perpetrator, is given a multi-million pound bonus as in the banking fiasco. On our side arsenals of nuclear weapons are a nightmare waiting to happen. On the other side they are what get the feet of the political elite under the 'top table'.
Electronic happenings in the real world
As we spend ever more time in cyberspace, and on the opposite side of the screen from the movers and shakers, the electronic/machine incursion proceeds apace and not necessarily to our benefit. On our side of the screen millions suffer from lack of work. On the other side people are replaced by machines in the interests of 'efficiency' (for 'efficiency' read increased profits). It is early days for machines in the life of the consumer. But already the number of cashiers at the supermarket is dwindling. You are given the option of a machine. They call it 'self' service. For 'self' read 'machine'. How long before it is all machine-service and not just in food stores? High streets are being abandoned as the traditional retail outlets are superseded by on-line shopping where machines sort and store the goods, take the orders, arrange and execute deliveries. We still sometimes have the option of talking to a human being. How long will it be before it is just that calm machine voice telling us if you want option 1 press button one, if you want option 2 press....?
In manufacturing the automotive processes become ever more sophisticated and all inclusive. CNC machines are Computer Numerically Controlled. By their use machine component design is highly automated. This is called end-to-end component design. And it is not just design. As well as computer aided design (CAD) there is computer aided manufacture (CAM). These computer systems are used to direct machine tools in the creation, modification, analysis, or optimization of a design and then to build that design. Traditionally tools were instruments for the use of people, increasingly machine tools are moving them towards being the tools of other machines until the factory itself becomes a super-machine as the dwindling number of workers are edged towards the exit. There is still space for some people in the manufacturing process but that space is rapidly getting smaller.
Parallel developments are coming in agriculture as electronically controlled machines become ever more adept at cultivating, planting, harvesting, and sorting.
In construction and architecture the tendency is in the same direction. It is very unlikely that Frank Gehry's designs with their doubly curved surfaces and intricately interlocking of forms could have been designed and built without a huge electronic input.
A 2014 article in The Economist states that almost half of all jobs could be automated by computers within two decades.5
War is being privatized. With the aid of electronics it is also being automated. The use of drones is the first major use of automated weaponry. It is likely to spread to land and sea-based weaponry since automation is popular with the politicians who are responsible for starting inter-state wars. Automated weapons minimize and could eventually exclude deaths of combatants, never popular with the voters. In modern warfare already many more civilians than combatants are killed. In the Iraq war about 26 civilians were killed for every US and Coalition combatant6. As more and more weaponry is automated enabling the combatants to be risk-free in their offices and bunkers thousands of miles from the killing we seem to be moving to a time when just about the only deaths will be those of civilians.
Most terrifying of all
Our electronic devises and their associated machines have senses and abilities way outside the abilities of humans. They can 'see' parts of the electro-magnetic spectrum of which we are totally unaware. They can look down from space and record what they see. They can perform billions of calculations per second and can analyse vast quantities of data at the speed of light. We use these electronic abilities to perform task which we are unable to perform ourselves, like monitoring and controlling the most dangerous source of power man have ever devised. Tragically, as we know from Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima electronic controls are not up to the task. But most terrifying of all we use electronic warning systems to let us know when some state has launched an arsenal of nuclear weapons against us. These systems are neither full-proof nor foolproof. On many occasions they have warned us falsely that a nuclear attack is underway. The most famous near-Armageddon 'incident' was on September 26th 1983 when Stanislav Petrov7, a lieutenant colonel of the Soviet Air Defence Force was the duty officer at the command center for the Oko nuclear early-warning system. He knew that when he reported to the government that his electronic system was telling him Russia was under a massive nuclear attack the rigid power structure was such that a retaliatory strike could ensue and the world would come to an end. He did not tell them. As it turned out the warnings were false. He was honoured in the United Nations as 'The Man Who Saved the World' and was demoted by his superiors for not having obeyed orders.
Even if such a warning was correct the missiles would be approaching at more than 15 thousand miles an hour. The recipients would only have minutes to decide, first, if the electronic warnings were reliable and, second, what they were going to do about it. So the people who set up this system have arranged, by using the light-speed abilities of an electronic system and coupling them to the relatively snail-like abilities of humans, to trap us all in a nightmare situation in which the outcome could well be a nuclear holocaust.
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