humanITy and the Challenge of Convergence

Return to EU/UK Policy

Presentation given at the 27th Meeting of the High Level Group of Employment and Social Dimension of the Information Society (ESDIS)

Date: 23/05/2003
Venue: European Commission Centre, Brussels

1. Introduction

HumanITy was established in 1997 as a UK not for profit organisation to focus on ICT and social exclusion. We were distinctive in four ways:

We began with a European and a UK perspective - and this has been extended to an interest in Applicant Countries - but we were also deeply concerned with the North/South divide
Although we were interested in access to computer-centred systems, from the beginning we were deeply interested in access to telecommunications and broadcasting
We were determined from the beginning to act as a bridge from the laboratory to the legislature; we are partly a think tank but we still spend time working in university research departments.
We were interested from the beginning in access by disabled people but also the rest of the 'second half of the market'.

In this brief talk I am going to build on these interests and outline the following challenges of convergence:

Demographics
Exclusion in the context of ubiquity
Technologically literate policy formulation
Computer and consumer electronics development
Regulation.

2. Demographics

There are approximately 378 million people in the EU and just over 100 million in the Candidate Countries. Legal definitions vary but in the whole population approximately 8% will be disabled. The figure for the countries with the greatest longevity will be higher because disability is almost entirely a sub-set of ageing. So, let us say, then, that we have approximately 40 million people who might be classified as disabled. The fact that they are classified in this way does not mean that they all have ICT problems - a wheelchair user may be brilliant with a PC - but disability is a strong indicator of problems with standard ICT systems. It is also true that although ICT access problems and income are not co-terminal, low income is a strong indicator of a lack of access; and disability and functional problems with ICT are both strong indicators of low income. So although the classical definition of social exclusion and ICT exclusion are not precisely co-terminal, they are approximately co-terminal.

Disability can be divided into four major clusters which I will show in ranked order. Note that the largest cluster of problems, that which covers learning/cognitive disabilities, is largely overlooked by many organisations which claim to represent disabled people. It was extremely difficult last year to introduce anything on this very large group of people into the proceedings and Report of the e-accessibility Expert Group of ESDIS.

Disability Clusters ranked in descending order (base, approximately 40 million aggregate disabled):

Learning/Cognitive difficulties 40% - 16 million
Physical disability 28% - 11 million
Hearing impairment 18 - 7 million
Visual Impairment 14% - 5.5 million.

When you are considering the number of people who experience a functional gap between themselves and a standard information system, you can take all those figures above and multiply them by five. This may sound quite far fetched but you have to remember that for every person with a problem that permits them to be /classified as disabled there are many more with milder conditions in the same syndrome. So, if you think of the learning/cognitive sector, the functional illiteracy rate in the EU varies between 22% and 9%; the number of people whose first language is not that of the country where they live is rising steadily; the number of functionalities people require in order to live effective lives is rising so that we have a skills ratchet; the most notable feature of the skills ratchet is the need to use data navigation skills. Here are charts of the four basic sets of ICT skills which we think people now require:

5.1 Basic Individual ICT Skills

5.2 Basic Collaborative ICT Skills

5.3 Advanced Individual ICT Skills

5.4 Advanced Collaborative ICT Skills.

This amounts to 27 separate skills, a long way from reading, writing and counting.

If you now think of physical disability and then add to it problems with hand-eye co-ordination; arthritis; shaking hands etc, it is not difficult to see how the figure mounts. And in the area of visual impairment, it has a low incidence of cases which are serious enough to classify as blindness but approximately 15% of the working population cannot read the default on-screen print for most computers, Times New Roman 10-point.

So what we are talking about here is approximately half of the population who experience a functional gap between themselves and an information system; this is what we call "The second half of the market" for which market solutions have not yet been found and which therefore requires a high element of public sector intervention.

One key point to note here is that the idea of a functional gap between people and information systems is value neutral; it is not a statement about the inadequacy of people which might be mitigated by skills transfer or determination. Many of these problems with functionality arise because of an impairment in the human being but many of them arise because of the poor design of information, the systems that carry and process it and the user interfaces which we are forced to use.

The problem for this large population sector is that it is facing increasing difficulties in receiving a service from a competitive and fragmented economy. Ten years ago major monopolies like public broadcasters and telephone companies could only achieve steady growth through caring about the poorest or least advantaged half of the population; but now if you look for accessibility features from a commercial company you find that it is either: struggling to sell a new product or a major upgrade to the top half of the market; or it is down sizing; almost all ICT and telecoms companies oscillate between these two phases. So, for example, by the time that the bottom 20% of the market owns a current standard mobile phone the top 20% will own a 3g mobile phone. By the time that the bottom 20% of the population has some kind of IT connectivity the top 40% will be on broad band. In other words, although everybody will gain absolute advantage from ICT over time, comparative disadvantage at the bottom of the market will continue to grow.

In summary, then:

About half of the population experience a functionality gap between themselves and digital information systems
This second half of the market is generally at the lower end of the income scale
Lack of ICT access will increase the socio/economic divide
Absolute advantage may be universal but comparative disadvantage will increase.

3. Exclusion In The Context Of Ubiquity

So far, the general assumption has been that if we can overcome ICT scarcity, our problems will be solved. From very early on we at humanITy believed the exact opposite. As the number of people using a technology rises, it reaches a critical mass when everybody is expected to be able to use it. A good example of this is basic literacy. When only a few people could read and write it was not a problem for the majority who could not; once the vast majority of the population could read and write it became a serious problem for those who could not. And so, for the past ten years policy makers have been looking at the wrong problem. As it takes at least five years to formulate public policy, what we should be looking at now is what we are going to do when everybody has some kind of connectivity. The bottom half of the market will then not have an economic problem but an education and skills problem. This will be made worse because the advance in machine processing will knock out millions of jobs which only require basic literacy. So at precisely the time when everybody is connected, many jobs in the labour market will be taken over by machines taking advantage of that connectivity. Here is a simple rule:

Teaching skills which are better applied by machines do not create employability
Humans should only learn to do what they do better than machines
The basic tasks which humans perform better than machines in the area of content are:
- Creation
- Evaluation
- Assessment
- Editing
- Collation

Clearly these are skills which require a high degree of sophistication. The general assumption is that the people who are unlikely to get past basic literacy skills, are not likely to be very good at these kinds of skills but it is not quite like that. There are many people who are bad with language but good with pictures or sound. The key is collaborative content creation. Networks help people to collaborate, so they must be used to combine the narrow but varied skills bases of a large number of people. Our icon for content should not be the novel written alone but the movie created by thousands of people. If we do not work out a methodology for this kind of collaborative content creation we will be in a deep employability crisis.

In summary, then

When technology barriers fall expectations of facility rise, creating their own barriers
Networks facilitate collaboration
People with narrow skills bases need to create collaboratively.

These developments call for a totally new approach to curriculum design.

4. Technologically Literate Policy Formulation

One of the characteristics which makes humanITy unique is its ability to link technical and policy issues. We carefully monitor all public information on R&D in ICT but we also conduct our own research. Most of the time it is possible from desk research and precedent to predict accurately how a technology will be accepted and what its benefits will be; but when we are not clear about these issues we do not guess. We believe that it is irresponsible to make advisory statements on public policy that are not firmly backed by research. We have therefore undertaken cutting edge field projects, mainly in the very basic area of watching what people do with equipment. We have watched alcoholics and drug addicts, homeless people, the long term unemployed, the alienated; disabled people and those with significant functional limitations in respect of ICT. We have written tools specification, tested and evaluated hardware, software and web sites and have conducted large scale representative tasks on behalf of those who are ICT excluded. Recently we have added to our activities by becoming involved in telecommunications and broadcasting regulation. So we can

Be a bridge between the laboratory and the legislature
Explain technical problems to policy makers
Describe policy problems to technicians
Articulate the needs of the excluded to academics and policy makers
Advise on user requirements and user feedback
Inform regulation

One of the real problems which we face in ICT policy formulation is that most officials with whom we work do not understand either the potential or the shortcomings of ICT. A good example of this is the discussion about using language simplification tools in official web sites so that people with low literacy levels can use on line services. Most people in policy making positions think that a computer is an electronic typewriter with a file archiving function. When you try to explain how key functions of a computer are to analyse and process information in such areas as pattern recognition and context sensitive searching, you generally meet with incomprehension. So, to apply this to a key area. Most information systems that we use were designed by academics for academics. The official web sites we use are dull and difficult; and they will only be truly accessible if we use:

Language Simplification
Intelligent Agents
Reactive Configuration for Personal Profiles
Point Oriented navigation
Voice in/voice out
Language translation

In other words, it is as if early 20th Century publishers went on printing books of text but ignoring the whole medium of film.

The problem is partly cultural. Governments are so fixated on basic skills strategy that they find it very difficult to imagine technologies which render these basic skills redundant; it is as if these new machines are in some way helping us to 'cheat'.

Nowhere is this cultural problem greater than in the area of communication. Most governments think that computers are worthy and serious but television and telephones are both vulgar and frivolous. Three years ago we completed a major piece of work for the UK Government which would enable people to access major web sites using a computer or telephone numeric key pad, a television remote controller or simple voice in commands (particularly good for car drivers) but the work has never been used. Now that we can combine the use of numeric key pads with SMS, it will be possible to access any web site using a simple telephone or remote controller; but governments are finding it very difficult to dilute their fixation with the PC. The move to put government e-services onto digital television or mobile phones has been extremely disappointing. This is particularly so because the bottom half of the market can be reached through these consumer electronics communication devices whereas they will probably never want to use a PC with a typewriter style keyboard. In the EU the figure will vary but it is hard to imagine any country where less than two thirds of citizen transactions with government are not carried out by those who are not on line; in the UK 87% of transactions with Government involve those in the 'bottom' two social classes, those who are not on line. There are many reasons for this but three central points emerge:

The clumsiness of the technology that forms the user interface
The provider centred nature of the structure, ie it reflects Departmental divisions not consumer needs
The sterility of the information.

So, in summary,

Technical and political factors need to interact
New tools increase usability
Television and telephones are particularly good for the second half of the market.

5. Computer and Consumer Electronics Development

This leads very nicely into a brief discussion of the convergence of computing and consumer electronics.

Here is a simple statement to think about.

If in 1980 IBM had engineered computers to the same standard of reliability as Philips televisions; and if MicroSoft had designed products to the same standard of reliability as the BBC - the world would be a completely different place.

Up until now, we have accepted the unreliability of computer systems as a price worth paying. this transitional era is almost at an end. We are beginning to learn a great deal about what human beings expect of technology, such as download times, search times, report length, tolerance of repetition. If on line services are to succeed then they will have to perform to the same level as television and not to the same level as the PC. Equally, people are not going to tolerate for much longer a process of initiation to equipment which involves lengthy configuration every time they meet a new device or use a new programme. Poor design is a cost shift from the producer to the consumer but it will only be tolerated if the advantages of using a system outweigh the disadvantages. In the area of consumer electronics, for example, most adults do not know how to use a VCR efficiently but the incentive for success is very high. In the case of a dull web site accessed through a PC which crashes every ten minutes by a person with a low skills level the incentive is non existent. Here is another thought to ponder:

Draw a horizontal line;

at one end write the rich and clever need incentive and at the other end of the line write the poor and unskilled need compulsion.

underneath write:

At what point on this line do people switch from one class to the other?

Of course, the answer is that they don't; but public policy in areas from remuneration to education assume that these two classes of people are distinct. In fact, the unskilled and the poor usually need more incentive to learn than the clever and rich. The way to bring this about is to hide computing power inside the familiar exterior of consumer electronics, and particularly the telephone and the television.

Although we see the television as a key intermediate and intermediary technology, our current analysis shows that the really important breakthrough in ICT will be the firm establishment of 3G phones. Why?

Always connected
Private
Instant Access
Flexibility
Familiar Technology
Optionally non visual
No typewriter keyboard
Easy for voice in/voice out operation.

Of course, we may not think of this device as a phone. It could be a portable television with wireless capacity or a digital radio with a screen. The point is that we are looking towards a hand held piece of communications equipment which performs to the standard of consumer electronics. It will also have the great advantage of being able to interface with peripherals such as flat screens so that the whole system will be much more flexible.

These developments have massive implications for government policy from the payment of welfare benefits to the time people need to spend in nursing homes and hospitals but public policy is still not connected with these changes; it is still coming to grips with the 1980s PC.

6. Regulation

This leads to my final major topic which is regulation. In the UK we are going through the final stages of uniting our telecommunications and broadcasting regulation, although there will still be two major loose ends: the first is the unsettled status of public sector broadcasting; the second is the classification of streaming on the internet as publishing rather than broadcasting.

Both of these issues are important for the second half of the market because deregulation without a guarantee of public broadcasting will mean that these people are overwhelmed with rubbish. This is perhaps not the appropriate forum to discuss the danger of market forces overwhelming public broadcasting but it is a crucial issue for the future of citizenship.

7. Ideas in Development

I have spent rather a long time listing the aspects of ICT that humanITy deals with, and which cause problems, so I want to spend the rest of my time talking about solutions and opportunities.

Here are brief sketches of ten ideas that humanITy is currently working on:

i) Hybrid Systems

At the moment it is very difficult for people to work on a computer and make a phone call at the same time; broad band will make this easier. So, if you have a benefits enquiry you can talk to your adviser by telephone while both of you have an identical document - eg your partly completed application form - on screen. If you are involved in e-learning and give an incorrect answer three times, say, then the system will automatically ask if you want help; it can then dial your tutor who can see what you are working on. In other words, instead of having human and digital systems working in parallel, we can yoke them together so that they are complementary.

ii) Community Broadcasting.

The internet opens up the possibility of small scale broadcasting of such local events as council meetings and arts festivals. There are also smaller family events like weddings which could be streamed to relatives who cannot make a journey or who cannot arrange child care. This opens up great opportunities for people with a good visual sense who may not be good with words. We need a liberal regulatory framework for these activities but it may be necessary to regulate larger Internet publishing enterprises; perhaps on the basis of page imprints.

iii) Collaborative 7/24 Work Patterns.

Many people in our society only function sporadically. Alcoholics, drug addicts, depressives, people on medication, mothers with young children, disabled people, those who cannot fit into an office environment, may all want to work but find it impossible to stick to regular office hours; or they have the kind of appearance and personal habits which mean they do not even dare to apply for an interview for an office job. Such people, however, may be able to work from home or from a public terminal as long as there is a structure established with a facilitator which lets them know their task, its deadline and the dependencies which exist between this and other tasks in the network.

iv) Intermediate labour and Social Firms.

Related to the 7/24 work opportunity is the idea of the social firm. At the moment our labour market is trapped in a number of dichotomies; two of these are: home alone or work; and full pay or benefits. Cable free devices using broad band will allow small, mutually supportive groups of people to move from location to location for work according to child care and other domestic needs. It will also be much easier to combine the efforts of those who can earn a full wage and those on benefits in arrangement such as social firms. Our tax and benefits systems are still largely tied to the idea of the office block and the factory on the one hand and the sole trader or small partnership of people in full pay on the other.

v) Digital Twinning.

One of the major policy mistakes we have made with ICT access is that we have poured short term resources into deprived communities and serviced these with outside development workers. It is not rational to expect the poor to help the poor; it is much more effective if the better off help the worse off. This can be managed if digital twinning takes communities of different economic and social status which are close to each other geographically. People may share a soccer team, even a skyline, churches and open spaces. Virtual mentoring can be the starting point which then grows into face-to-face relationships.

vi) Public Domain Documents.

Here is a typical scenario. An official writes a public document in somewhat technical language. This is submitted to a language simplification process which states that a number of points are ambiguous. The solution is to put the simplification tool into the set of tools used by the document author so that it is checked for ambiguity before it is published. It can then be put out as a public domain document which is processable by given software on the basis of published rules. This will allow governments to issue simplified documents together with declared rules without being accused of manipulation. The public domain document should become an established artefact of government.

vii) Diaspora Content Creation.

There are many exiles/refugees in Europe and the United States and the people in the countries from which they have escaped need reliable information about the place in which they live. This can be provided by exiles and sent by SMS and other systems back to their country of origin. This gets round the problem of developing countries which only have dictatorial state broadcasting and American cable television. The provision of such information services, backed by public sector support, would provide income for overseas students and a dignified role for new citizens of our countries.

viii) Reduced Infrastructure Costs.

Surveillance systems have been used for crime prevention and pattern detection systems have been used for detecting internet pornography, but voluntarily accepted, these could be used to reassure people living alone that they are being monitored. This wold reduce hospital and nursing home occupancy and lengthen independent life. A pattern recognition system could spot if somebody was lying on the floor rather than standing or sitting and the surveillance system could process the data and raise the alarm. Loop systems would allow a community of house bound people to provide mutual support.

ix) Telephone Funds Transfer.

The combination of SIM card technology and identification cards would allow secure welfare payments by telephone, cutting fraud and cash transfer.

x) Virtual Skills Pooling.

Earlier we mentioned collaborative content creation and all of us are familiar with the mutual support we provide through email. If these systems are to become useful to people with limited skills and those who are reticent then we will need facilitators to provide virtual skills pooling.

All of these ideas which are under active consideration are technically possible.

8. Co-ordination

I want to end with a plea to the EU itself. The convergence of hardware and software, of telecommunications and broadcasting, of broadcasting and publishing, mean that access to the information society through ICT must be handled in one place. We cannot have different parts in different sub committees, otherwise there will be major gaps. At the moment, for example, we are just beginning InCom under CoCom after the winding down of the e-accessibility Expert Group under ESDIS, but neither of these committees has a central interest in broadcasting accessibility which is the biggest single medium of access for disabled people. Of course there are some disabled and excluded people who need to work in the PC environment but the majority of our people are elderly and their main companion is broadcasting.

Secondly, we need to look after that large group of people who are not classified as disabled but who have ICT functionality problems, particularly those with learning/cognitive difficulties.

Thirdly, citizenship is not just about processing material provided by others, it involves content creation.

Fourthly, we don't need any more benchmarks and milestones, abstract policies and vague resolutions; what we need are clear definitions of universal standards of service for those concerns which citizens are involved with every day such as

Broadcasting
Major Retail
Banking/Financial Services
Public Sector Information (particularly health, welfare)
Public Utilities
Education/Training

Finally, we have to change the balance between bureaucratic elegance and implementation. The information world in which we live uses consumers as product evaluators; producers cannot wait until their software is bug free because to do that would be to lose market position. Public policy is working so slowly compared with technological development that it cannot catch up through gradualism. What we need now is a big jump to put policy ahead of current technology. Unless we can do this, the least advantaged will be trapped in a permanent and futile attempt to catch up with their more fortunate neighbours.