Liberal Democrat MP Greg Mulholland told the House of Commons on 23 July 2007 that the guidance from British Educational Communications and Technology Agency (Becta) failed to establish a legal requirement for schools to acquire parental consent before collecting their child’s biometric data. He cited an online poll of 1,400 parents conducted last summer by civil liberties group, Leave them kids alone, which found that 94% were against schools taking biometric data without parental consent.

Many people are uncomfortable about to the willingness of various public and private agencies to turn ordinary management and administrative tasks into surveillance activities, and usually support their case with civil liberties arguments. The threat to privacy is compelling, but for schools the issue goes much further, because such systems ultimately compromise the learning environment schools should foster. In his book The Uses of Disorder, Richard Sennett argues that an excessively ordered community freezes people into rigid attitudes that stifle personal growth. He observes that the accepted ideal of imposed order means people never learn to develop inter-personal skills for themselves, and their behaviour tends to become authoritarian, narrow and sometimes violent.

The long-term social costs will be profound. As Oscar Wilde said in The Soul of Man Under Socialism:

“Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man’s original virtue. It is through disobedience and rebellion that progress has been made.“

But according to a recent article in Economist magazine, more information may in fact lead to worse decisions. Horse-racing handicappers were given varying amounts of information to rate horses. The more information they received, the more confident they became about their answers, but the worse their predictions became. Five pieces of information produced more accurate predictions than forty.

Investment analysts suffered the same problem, but unfortunately they are bombarded with information through Reuters feeds. It should be no surprise then that many eschew what they know in favour of who they know. A recent US study reports that the old-school tie rules the information economy for mutual-fund managers. They are more likely to favour of shares in companies in which one of the senior officers went to the same university as they did. The effect is strongest when they were there at the same time and on the same course.

Understanding Digital Inclusion reveals that:

75 % of people counted as socially excluded are also digitally excluded and lack convenient access to the internet.

those who are out of work, in poor health, live in social housing, live alone, or have a low level of qualification are being set at a further disadvantage by digital exclusion.

Kablenet reports that:

“These people are missing out on the opportunities, choices, savings and services that computers and the internet provide. Neither government policy, market forces, nor demographic trends are making any significant inroads to bring more people online, the report finds.”

“Technology is opening new doors and new worlds for 61% of the population, connecting them to better paid jobs, instant information, new forms of communication and social interaction, community infrastructure, government services, consumer power and convenience,” commented UK online centres managing director Helen Milner. “But for a stable 39%, those benefits remain firmly out of reach. And it’s unacceptable those already at a disadvantage are three times more likely to be the ones missing out.”

The impressive growth in the sophistication of computer technology through the latter part of the 20th century coupled with laboratory experiments in artificial intelligence convinced many that fiction would soon become fact, and intelligent machines would soon relieve us of those tiresome tasks that require us to think.

So where are the intelligent machines now? They didn’t arrive fully formed like their fictional counterparts, but sneaked into our lives in the shape of AI programs in everyday applications. Google uses automatic class detection, an AI classification technique, to link documents to search terms. Not very exiciting maybe, but it’s been the search engines that have levered the web into everyday life. More recently, both Google and Microsoft are investing heavily in speech recognition software to enable voice-driven mobile search technology.

On a more familiar dystopian theme, the US government has a research programme on “sentiment analysis”; AI programs to automatically inspect publications in the US and abroad for unsympathetic or negative opinions of America. And, of course, there’s always robot wars.

It is a further irony that London authorities seek to adopt 1940s artistic genres to publicize their surveillance networks.

Above an image from a 1954 BBC dramatization, below a recently produced London poster.

One day Michael Chorost suddenly and unexpectantly went proundly deaf. In his autobiography Rebuilt: How Becoming Part Computer Made Me More Human he describes this experience of restoring his hearing through a digital cochlear implant. Through first hand experience he describes the increasingly blurry distinction between artificial and human intelligence, and gives a unique perspective on the difficult relationship between humans and technologies. He talks lucidly of his cyborg identity on AfterTV.

But what about Chorost’s claim that his digital implant made him feel more human? Restorative prothesis such as Chorost’s have a long history that includes spectacles and pacemakers and so on, so his experience maybe uncontroversial. But why wait until you’ve lost something? The most common cyborg development is the technology that augments or enhances human powers, such as enhanced vision systems used in combat to prevent so-called ‘friendly fire’ killings. In fact most consumer technologies fit into this category. Mobile phones augment our power to communicate, ICTs connect us to eBay and extend the market into our homes.

We thereby technologize the environment we live in and become low-grade cyborgs ourselves in order to thrive in it. Obvious examples are the communication and transport technologies that have transformed the world so radically throughout the past century. Less obvious candidates are vaccinations and immunizations that transfigure our bodies to allow us live live in high population densities without risk of genocidal plagues of diseases. Timothy Luke calls this the ‘end of nature’ or ‘denature’: humans are no longer confronted by a vast realm of autonomous, unmanageable, non-human wild activity, but a ‘planned habitat’ that requires scientific management.

Il-considered pronouncements like the one above are often made about AI by people too easily impressed by computers, but they detract from a serious point that Turing was attempting to consider. Turing was an academic mathematician who during the second world war was engaged by military intelligence to produce mathematical procedures that could decipher German coded messages. Working through these procedures was extremely complex and could only be done by rooms full of ‘computers’, which in the days before digital computers were humans, usually women, employed to make routine calculations.

Turing was impressed that although these people were unaware of what they were doing, collectively their achievement, code-breaking, should be judged as intelligent. As he was also working on rudimentary computing devices he was aware that the tasks done by ‘human computers’ could one day be done by machines. In his celebrated Turing Test he subsequently speculated on whether or not intelligence had to come from a human, or indeed whether it needed a source that was singular, human, or conscious at all.

Rather than have a machine pretend to be human, in the Chinese Room mind experiment, John Searle makes the human act like a machine, and thereby attempting to prove Turing wrong – that appearance and essence can be very different. We may want to attribute intelligence based on what seems to be the case, but we have no grounds for doing so. While these may appear esoteric academic disputes they address issues that confront us in our everyday lives of which, it seems, our understanding is extremely shallow.

Carol Beer in “Little Britain” gets a lot of laughs everytime she says “computer says no“, but how often do we, in our everyday lives blindly follow instructions without any understanding of what they mean. Surely these scenarios have their representation in both the mind experiments above.

Perhaps we can take comfort in relying on people who know better than us, but what happens if the experts are doing it too? An interesting point was made by the US economist Frech in a paper titled European versus American Economics, Artificial Intelligence and Scientific Content, who noted that it was the US economists who won all the Nobel prizes. Unlike their European counterparts, the US academics were concerned almost exclusively with symbols and the relationships between them, and they had little or no appreciation of what they meant in the outside world – just like the person in the Chinese Room.

So if Nobel prizewinners are doing, what hope for the rest of us?

Second Life is an ingeneous experiment in on-line identity. After 3 years of running its founder has now introduced a class system. Members can be Trusted, Untrusted, Verified and Unverified. This is loosely based on the ability or willingness to pay, just like in real life.

Bill Thomson reminds us that identity has been a long term philosophical problem and it may be just as well that it is ambiguous and we can continually update or contest identities. You can hear his talk on the subject here.

The possibility of a totally transparent identity on the net where anyone could access any detail about you would be a chilling prospect to most people. David Lyon suggests that this type of total surveillance ultimately exhausts people of their identity. Yet few would wish the reverse of total anonymity either. Most wish for some control over the representation of their identity, but also respect the judgment of others. The world we experience would be a lonely place if our identities were the sole responsibility of ourselves.

One distinction between traditional society and modernity may be in how identity is granted and acquired. Traditionally identity is tied to the body, physical presence and appearance, and may be based on class, caste, tribal or occupational stratefications, which were also deliniated geographically and temporally. Modern society is assumed to have diluted these constraints, and postmodernism and the network society is regarded to have abandoned them entirely. Identity representation may be thought to exist somewhere along a dimension of traditional, given and compulsory, to postmodern, elective and voluntary. Accordingly, nowadays the representation of identity is much more the responsibility of the person, and the body is a fluid or plastic category which may be virtualized or reconfigured according to need. The most radical examples of this are to be found in social network sites. Yet as David Lyon and others have suggested, biometrics, ubiquitous or pervasive computing, and many forms of digital surveillance, bring the body and categories of time and space right back into the identity equation, but in this case in the traditionally compulsory way.

Steve Mann has pioneered the uses of sousveillance which can turn the spotlight onto the authorities themselves. Witness the recent controversy surrounding the video of Los Angeles Police brutality posted on YouTube. Mann terms this “watchful vigilance from underneath”, which has powerful democratic implications.

China has one of the largest online populations in the world and has a whole police department dedicated to web surveillance. The so-called Great Firewall of China censors what people see using technology built in to the country’s basic net infrastructure. More sophisticated firewall technology spots when people are searching the web for particular words and hijacks their session to stop them getting the information. Censorship is generally discouraged in western democracies, but that doesn’t mean nobody cares about internet use. In fact some people couldn’t care more, as Bill Thompson documents for the BBC in an excellent article “Who is watching the watchers?“

Take MySpace as an example. Extensive file-filtering scans old and new content to weed out any copyrighted material, while Wired reports US police automatically trawled through MySpace accounts finding 744 known sex offenders. Like other social networking sites, MySpace also serves as real-life electronic panopticon environment for the security services looking for evidence of subversives.

Surveillance is deeply embedded in the fabric of our societies and sometimes something we welcome. However, its efficacy and social impact are contestable. “If you’re doing no wrong, you’ve nothing to hide, and nothing to fear.” Quis custodiet custodes ipsos? (“Who watches the watchers?“) “Absolute power corrupts absolutely.” These are familiar sayings that point to our confusion about it. Maybe Cardinal Richelieu understood the value of surveillance when he famously said, “If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged.”

Most of the digital technologies we embrace have more inbuilt surveillance capability than Richelieu could ever have dreamed of. Without this they would have limited functionality. Suspect terrorists have been traced through their mobile phones, Amazon synthesizes more sources of customer information than most are aware of to provide a unique service, and Tesco is quietly building up its on archive of its shoppers’ activity. The dystopian aspects of this have been neatly satirized by the American Civil Liberties Union in this video.