Sunday 15 June 2014

Discombobulation

I should offer an explanation for the pretentious title of this blog. As a guiding principle, I try to follow George Orwell's advice for writing English. He counselled against using a Latin derived term when an Anglo-Saxon one existed; arcane and obscure Latinate words are no substitute for clarity of thought. If only academics and would-be intellectuals writers took note. But there's something particularly fitting about 'discombobulation' to describe the modern experience where technology makes old practises redundant. The word itself is too long, it stumbles off the tongue in a mass of syllables, tripping out in an awkward jumble. It feels outdated and outmoded, just like many of us do when confronted by relentless change.

The bizarre protest of London's taxi drivers last Wednesday against the cab app Uber was a case in point. A revolutionary technology brings the price of minicabs down, making their use easier and simpler; the reaction of the black cabs is to protest. Maybe I would too if I had spent 4 years learning the Knowledge, which is how long it takes for the average black taxi driver to qualify. GPS tracking and sat nav have made that effort to a large extent pointless.

As an example,  last night I took an Uber from the West End to my flat. It was a mint condition S-Class Mercedes, that arrived within in 3 minutes of requesting the ride and cost £4 less than a black taxi. The driver did not have the Knowledge, he had sat nav - the whole experience was easier, less hassle and cheaper than hailing a cab. And he had a great sound system, what's not to like? There is the black cab equivalent to Uber, Hailo, but it's more expensive so I'll probably stop using it altogether.

Safety is the usual cry of technophobes, a charge levelled at Uber. The only flaw in the critics' case is that all their drivers are CRB checked, you have a record of their name and their license plate. And let's not forget than John Warboys, the serial rapist, was a black cab driver - there's risks everywhere but this system improves customer safety. Fact.

The problem with inventions is that you cannot uninvent them. Once cheap and reliable motor cars came to market, the horse-drawn Hackney carriage was doomed. Hackney carriage drivers no doubt staged a protest slow trot in Trafalgar Square, but given the option of travelling staring at a horse's bum at seven miles an hour or speeding at thirty miles an hour with no animal's anus at eye level, travellers chose the car.

Motorised rickshaws made human rickshaws obsolete throughout India, the clock cannot be turned back. Although I do remember one Western traveller ( a traveller being a tourist who stays in the country for more than two weeks, gets giardia, stays in the flea-ridden accommodation and never tips), telling me in all seriousness that he missed the poetry of the human rickshaws in Calcutta. By poetry I think he meant photogenic poverty; he was stoned at the time, so it might just have the Nepalese temple balls talking.

Balls or no balls, whether it's Uber or Kindle, iTunes or Instagram, technology moves quickly and moves faster than our ability to adjust. I liked the smell and feel of vinyl records and even toyed with the idea of going back to analogue, getting a turntable for classic albums only. And then I had a mental picture: a stack of vinyl, unplayed, unused whilst I listened to my music on Spotify or iTunes. Whilst digital music may not have the sensuality of records, it's so easy and user-friendly, you can't return to CDs or records.

Likewise photography has suffered a similar paradigm shift. Film has died a death, it laster longer than some predicted but is now the preserve of select professionals and keen hobbyists. The other 99.9% of photos are digital, many taken on smartphones. Most are terrible, but thanks to Instagram's clever filters, they look okay and much superior to the overexposed, out of focus  photos holidaymakers used to collect from Boots after their summer holidays.

As Stewart Lee said in his recent TV series, 'do you remember when we had things' and I do. I'm old enough to remember cassettes, vinyl, VHS, mini-disc and a whole host of outdated technologies. In due course, printed books may join that list. Yes, sorry to say, it's probably only a matter of time before most reading becomes digital. People are highly conservative when it comes to their media habits, yet I don't know anyone who has switched to e-reading that regularly buys physical books. None of this means that I won't miss printed books if they do disappear. Not only are they good for reading, they make you look smarter. Fill a room with intellectual tomes that you have never read, you lend yourself an aura of wisdom and learning. And hardback books are great for other uses, such as propping up things, acting as drinks coasters or raising the height of a computer monitor - to name but a few of their uses.

No matter how much I much like physical books, I'm not about to start burning Kindles in the street. They just won't catch fire, no matter how hard you try. Besides I love my Kindle, it's a library in the palm of my hand - apart from when I forget to charge it and then it's not even a decent coaster. Plus even a tiny spill of beer and it goes all funny. Some lovers of old technology say that what happens you have no USB lead, what happens to your fancy e-reader then? True, on a desert island, I would be stuck. However, a bunch of vinyl wouldn't be much use without a generator and I suspect that paper books might be sacrificed in the cause of lighting fires or toilet tissues, especially if it's a new novel by Ben Elton.

Besides if you apply that logic to our lives, then pretty everything we have is rendered useless on a desert island, save a penknife, a plastic tarpaulin and a tinderbox. The kind of people who carry around those things everywhere they go are usually the sort of people we should put on desert islands. There they can indulge their fantasies of black UN helicopters heralding the apocalypse whilst getting a really good tan.

Whether are happy about it or not, the new wave of technological change is sweeping the world and it's going to make a lot of people redundant. Uber will probably mean less black cab drivers, but more  Uber drivers and more people taking taxis. The new translation software for Skype may make translating and interpreting, at least for basic communication, something that doesn't require a person.

Lawyers, accountants and a whole host or professions will face similar disruptions. My limited experience with high street solicitors was so dreadful, I can't see how an app could do any worse. They managed to get the name on the deeds of the property wrong, three times, each instance in a different way and miscalculated the stamp duty. And at the end of the process, you pay them £1,000s. Give me Uber for solicitors any day.

Medicine will face the same issues where software replaces simple, process-based tasks. Basic diagnosis could in theory be done by an app, there I said it. These days most people self-diagnose before visiting a doctor anyway, why not formalise the process? Yes, I realise there is a lot more to it than that, but still... it's going to happen.

The real dilemma is how we react to these changes and it's safe to say that protesting about them is the wrong answer. Brussels has banned Uber, so its taxis will cost more. Europe generally seems committed to a Canute-like course of banning or regulating technologies in the hope that the status quo can be preserved. It can't. Eventually Brusssels will give in and its residents will have access to the cheaper taxis the rest of the world enjoys. We should sympathise with those affected; banning progress only makes us poorer in the long run. The best strategy is to keep the job market flexible, the business environment benign and maximise the chances for those made redundant to find new roles.

 Although on second thoughts, I'm not sure we want former black cab drivers doing other jobs. UKIP might be hiring.