PassWord – 9th December 2015

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Speaker B: Hello and welcome to Password on Resonance FM with me, Peter Warren, the show that tries to put technology in its place. In today’s program, at last, the EU has imposed mandatory hacking breach reporting on the companies running the critical national infrastructure and plugged a gap that most experts have been demanding be filled for years. But is it enough, and should it be expanded to include all of the industries that are victims of hacking? And in the week that the world has debated climate change in Paris, we’re bringing you a climate change special. There are some beams of light on the horizon, and there are some signs of a wind of change. According to renewable energy experts, there is real optimism that they are making headway in the battle and that wind turbines in particular are achieving more success than was at first thought possible. Another victor in the battle is solar power, where great strides are also being made by harnessing the surface area of reservoirs for giant floating solar panels. The largest one in Europe has just been completed in Hyde in Manchester. And still on the subject of water and global warming, The recent floods in Cumbria might be averted in the future if we can sort out the gas emissions that are causing these fluctuations in the weather. But if we can’t, then we’re going to have to rely on the early warning systems that have already been deployed in Scotland and Cumbria to tell people when the waters are rising. And finally, in this uncertain future, author Jeff Crocker tells us why the future is going to be based on a state benefit system that is the polar opposite of that being put in place by the present Chancellor because of the march of the machines. But first, the announcement on Tuesday afternoon that 28 EU states had signed the text of a document that made it mandatory to give notice of any hacking breach if you are in the finance industry or part of the critical national infrastructure was met with whoops of delight by the cyber security professionals. According to the EU, Those companies that the Network and Information Security Directive targets will have to let people know almost as soon as a breach occurs or risk punitive fines and sanctions. I asked David Spinks, the chairman of the CNI specialist organisation Cyber Security in Real Time and until recently a top government advisor on the CNI, on what he thought of the announcement.

Speaker C: I think it’s a very positive step. But a step that should have been taken by governments and regulators years ago. The fact that companies are allowed to sustain significant cyber attacks, to lose data, and who are not either mandated by their regulators or mandated by governments to report those security incidents is totally unacceptable., and we should have been doing this for years. If you look at the safety, the way safety systems are in the safe condition they are is that there is a healthy mandated regulations and laws to report safety incidents. The same needs to be done for cybersecurity and security incidents., and it’s well overdue.

Speaker B: Just how about another thing though?

Speaker D: I mean, this is about the critical national infrastructure. Uh, one of the things that George Osborne said in his announcement of another billion pounds to, uh, shore up our cyber defenses was that one of the things that he wanted to do was to make the critical national infrastructure more robust against terrorist attacks. And they haven’t done this, have they? The first £650 million was meant to make the critical national infrastructure more robust and it didn’t appear to have been spent on that. They need to spend a lot more money.

Speaker C: I think the government have almost an impossible task because they can only spend money on their own infrastructure. So therefore, and they can only make in many instances recommendations. So shoring up the critical national infrastructure needs to be done by the critical national infrastructure itself. So if you take the utilities, the water industry, the airlines, the airports, and many of them are privatized, of course, they need to invest much more heavily in security than they have been. And the way to do that is if organizations had to report security incidents, then they would be embarrassed not to invest and stop them happening.

Speaker D: I mean, that’s one of the points, isn’t it? Because investment is the key point here. Because prior to the year 2000 anomaly where everybody thought the system would grind to a halt if the, uh, um, computers couldn’t do— or the programmable logic controllers couldn’t deal with the, uh, the changeover to the new century, um, yes, apparently, uh, the programmable logic controllers were not changed. What happened was that it was found in modeling exercises that they would actually turn over and that wouldn’t actually have any impact. So is it right that we’re still dealing with some very old technology, or did it get replaced?

Speaker C: Virtually nothing happened of significance in embedded systems when the date clicked over, but there was a level of confidence in various industries— the oil industry, the aviation industry— because they’ve done the testing, and therefore they could demonstrate that actually they’d done all they needed to do to satisfy themselves that this thing would not be a disaster. They’d also, with encouragement from various people like myself, said, well, look, even though you know, you know, the tests show that things aren’t going to be a disaster, make sure you’ve got business continuity plans in place and you’ve got all the people standing by in the event of an unlikely glitch. And that again was investment that all those companies said it was a good idea, irrespective of nothing happening. I mean, the worst that can happen is somebody can override the control system. And when you override a control system, particularly one that is safety-related, nasty things can happen, e.g. Chernobyl. E.g., that nasty accident on that Big Dipper. Somebody had overridden safety control systems and something else happened, and then there was a disaster. It’s when you override the safety control systems, you know, that nasty things happen. The nice thing about computers is as long as they’re programmed properly, they will always do what they’re supposed to do, as long as they’re tested The nasty things happen when somebody decides they don’t want this safety control system working anymore because they want to do some engineering work and switch it off. That’s what causes your big bangs.

Speaker B: That was David Spinks, an expert on our technological life support system. And now to the winds of change. Companies around the world are opting to use wind power to charge their factories and not because they are being right on. It is because it makes economic sense. Here’s Giles Dixon, the head of the European Wind Energy Association, on why he thinks the answer to our energy woes is blowing in the wind.

Speaker E: Well, first of all, it’s the cheapest form of power plant. If you want to build a new power station today, anywhere in the world, the cheapest way of doing it is through onshore wind. It’s cheaper than coal, cheaper than gas, cheaper than nuclear. It’s zero carbon, and a lot of people are increasingly concerned about the CO2 footprint of their power station. Then it’s good for energy security and energy independence because it’s using a local resource, which is the wind. You’re not having to import oil or gas or coal. And then wind farms and the wind industry creates jobs. So in Europe, there’s over a quarter of a million people working in wind today. If you look at the UK, Siemens are building a huge new factory in Hull to manufacture offshore wind turbines. It’s one of the largest industrial investments anywhere in the north of England. At the moment, and at a time when, you know, the government is keen to promote the northern powerhouse and attract new investment. Great example of how wind and clean energy can help create jobs and growth.

Speaker D: I mean, all of this sounds enormously optimistic, doesn’t it? We’ve just been battered by huge and unusual storms in Cumbria, which a lot of people are blaming on global warming. Does this mean that we are beginning to turn the corner?

Speaker E: Well, the technologies are certainly there to help us move from an energy system that relies primarily on oil and gas and coal and dirty fossil fuels to one which relies primarily on wind, solar, and low-carbon forms of energy. And if every country in the world can do that, then yes, we will be able to put a stop on rising CO2 emissions, even start reducing CO2 emissions, and start tackling climate change properly. So yeah, there’s cause for optimism.

Speaker D: But Chatham House and the Vegan Society both pointed out within the last month or so that actually it’s probably our diet that’s causing most of the problems, because there’s so many people, and there’s so many people wanting to we eat meat and therefore we need to have a lot of animals and the animals are creating a lot of gas.

Speaker E: Well, look, there are a lot of things out there in the world that create a challenge for us. The population is growing. The middle class is growing in countries like China and India. So there are more and more people every year with higher expectations, not just of the sort of diet they want to eat, but also their access to electricity, having televisions, fridges, and we’re going to see even in Africa, not just in China and India, more and more people consuming more electricity. Okay? And the challenge there is to make sure the electricity that they are consuming is as clean as possible. Just a few examples of what industry is doing now. It’s wind that is keeping the lights on in their stores. I mentioned Google as well. SAP, the computer company, all of their electricity now comes from renewables, and most of it is from wind. Lego are also building their own wind farms to power their factories.

Speaker D: And you mentioned the wind turbines being used by Lego. Presumably they are also made of Lego?

Speaker E: “Not yet, the technology hasn’t got quite that far yet.” Giles Dixon of the Wind Energy Association.

Speaker B: And now, even brighter news. Our reservoirs are also providing energy. A French company, Ciel et Terre, are covering reservoirs that are not used by the public with solar panels. Their project at Godley Reservoir in Manchester will provide enough power for 600 households, and another scheme in London will be even bigger. Here’s Eva Pauli, the company’s head of marketing, on the thinking behind the idea.

Speaker F: An irrigation reservoir will be an irrigation reservoir for the next 20 years, and the benefit of the solar is this will change nothing on the main purpose of the reservoir. It will just be an additional benefit and revenue to be able to generate solar electricity on top of the reservoir that keeps its main purpose, which is provide water for irrigation. Or treatment water drinking reservoir, or if it’s an aggregate company that has formed gravel pits, or industrial clean water for thermal plants. The possibility of use for industrial batteries is very large.

Speaker G: Just tell us a little bit about the economics of solar panels. One of the problems with solar panels is they look like wonderful things, but when you’ve got a little solar panel, it’s not really generating a huge amount of energy, is it? And you can get so much more if you have very, very large solar panels.

Speaker F: It depends. You’re looking at the efficiency of the solar panel. Every technology is getting better and better every year in terms of efficiency of the solar panels. After, it depends obviously how you do the electricity and of your complete system and how can you optimize it. And the good thing, and not many people know about this, is obviously solar panels, you know, when it’s really, really hot. They overheat and they produce a little bit less. So the whole advantage of being floating is you have this natural cooling effect that is due to the proximity to the water and the air-water exchange that will naturally cool down the panel and have better generation which helps the efficiency of the complete plant because the panel will not have a reef and the cable will not have a reef. So overall, you will have better solar generation on the floating PV plant than on the ground mount or on the rooftop system. But obviously, the technology itself is improving every year in terms of efficiency.

Speaker G: But I mean, it has been suggested, hasn’t it, or it was suggested to me that 30 solar panels 100 kilometers square would be able to provide all of the power that we would need until 2030, if such a thing were possible to make?

Speaker F: Well, there is for and against about it because obviously, yes, you can build a very large power plant in the middle of nowhere, but you will need to transport that electricity in addition to make a very large plant. To be able to supply a demand of people that will consume electricity locally and can self-consume. So there is different approach on the solar business, but I think both are complementary anyway.

Speaker G: But Eva, are there enough open spaces of water in, say, Europe or just generally for this to be viable? One of the things about the land is that unfortunately most of the available water is at sea.

Speaker F: Yes, of course. But what you do not realize is the amount of water bodies through Europe. For example, let’s take an example in the UK. You have at least 3,000 reservoirs over 3 hectares that are just made for irrigation reserve purpose. Okay? Because every agriculture farm and everything has the obligation to have water reserve to be able to irrigate during summer because they cannot pump in the tanks or, you know, there is regulation around it. Okay? So just in the UK, there is 3,000 reservoirs near big farms, wastewater treatment plants, or things like this, that do not have any recreational purpose. Okay? So it’s not used for sailing. It’s not used for natural purpose. It’s simply used for industrial use. Okay? And obviously, just by, you know, using even, let’s say, 20% of those, you can already produce in a massive way providing a lot of electricity where you have a consumption for it.

Speaker B: Eva Pawley of Siel Eter. Now, if anything should have been a wake-up call on why we should change our energy policy, the recent events in Cumbria and Scotland which saw unprecedented flooding in the wake of Storm Desmond should have been. There have been calls for the authorities to be able to take over social media at such times to alert people. Here’s Justin Bowser, a director of HTK Horizon, which runs the flood alert service in Scotland, on the issues.

Speaker H: So how does it work? It’s reliant on people to sign up for it with their phone, landline phone and mobile numbers, and then the people in the Scottish Environment Agency can define flood warning and flood alert areas., and as their monitoring systems tell them that river levels are rising and so on, they can push out active alerts to people by phone and by text, and they also can publish information to their website, which can be syndicated to other websites, and they publish information to an automated phone service, so people can receive alerts and at any time can phone up or visit the website to find out what’s happening in their area. It’s largely a kind of one-to-one system. They push information to individual households. What it doesn’t do is anything to really, on a community level, help people to help each other, which I think is really where technology like this needs to go, in terms of not just giving information to individuals, but giving them the tools they need to not just help themselves but help each other as well.

Speaker D: So basically what it is, is you can opt in. If you opt in, the system knows where your postcode is, the modelers know what the projected river level rises are, and so they can then send out alerts to those people that they know and say, look, we think that within about half an hour or so, 40 minutes, you’re going to find water lapping at your door, so if you want to get out, you better do it now.

Speaker H: Yeah, that’s right. They have 3 levels: flood alerts, flood warnings, and severe flood warnings. So the alert is coming to let you know that there might be things, you know, extreme weather, rainfall. The flood warning is to say there is a likelihood of flooding in the area. A severe flood warning is basically saying Flood is imminent, it is going to happen. Do what you can to prepare, but it is very likely to be happening.

Speaker D: I mean, at what level do you start moving the furniture upstairs?

Speaker H: Luckily, I’ve never been a victim of flooding, but to be honest, I think on the whole, I think they do try and give adequate warning on a severe flood warning. There were two severe flood warnings in force for Scotland over the weekend, one for Hoyk, or however you pronounce it, and there was another one as well, which I think were the main areas. I suspect people get into, sadly, a rhythm on these things, but I would suspect a severe flood warning, you’d be moving the furniture. On a flood warning, you’re probably looking at sandbags, although I noted I was looking on Twitter earlier on and trying to find hashtags and looking at one for Hoyk flooding. And Hoyk, the village just north of Borda where they had the really severe flooding, has its own flood group on Twitter. And one of the few tweets they gave was to say, sadly, that sandbags have run out of the local fire station. So I suspect people do watch these things pretty closely and are used to, you know, doing what they can, but it looks like they weren’t possibly as prepared as they, um, they could have been, unfortunately.

Speaker D: Okay, so, you know, that’s then, um, that was last week, um, I mean, I’m sure some people are still recovering from it now. In Carlisle, they were saying the same. Well, you know, 6 years ago we had the floods, we put in these, these flood systems, and we were told it wasn’t going to happen again for 250 years. Unfortunately, it’s happened 6 years later.

Speaker H: What needs to be done? I doubt anyone would predict— what was it, about 340 millimeters of rainfall in an hour? Whether you can mitigate that ever without putting, you know, concrete walls around towns, I don’t know. But it is To me, it is surprising that still the Environment Agency, and listening to what they were saying on the radio, that they are still prioritizing flood defense schemes which were identified years ago, still haven’t been implemented. I think a lot of people would question, question whether the balance there is right, to be honest.

Speaker B: Justin Bowser on why flood warning systems need to evolve. Now, if that wasn’t enough on our changing world, Jeff Crocker, author of “A Managerial Philosophy of Technology” and a leading Liberal Democrat economic thinker, says that the changes brought about by technology, which will see a third of all jobs going to machines over the next 10 years, will mean that we will all have to be paid to do nothing. It might not go down well with George Osborne, but according to Jeff Crocker, there may be no other option.

Speaker I: There are technological possibilities out there in nature, whether we like it or not, that we can’t change that potentiality. But I think the point I make in the book is, look, if we choose, for example, not to indulge in stem cell research, some other society on Earth, an Asian society, for example, certainly will. So stem cell research will find a crack somewhere. To come through and establish itself. The same with GM food technology. If we choose not to implement it, some other nation on Earth with a different set of evaluations, both ethical and economic, will implement it.

Speaker B: So the technology has a way like water of finding a gap to come through.

Speaker D: And that’s because we’ve gone down this path, is it? I mean, it’s interesting you saying all of this because a week ago, Chatham House, the well-respected think tank, released some research saying we had to look at changes in diet, we had to stop eating meat because of, you know, where we are in terms of the amount of people in the world and where we appear to be going. So what you’re saying is we don’t have choices.

Speaker I: I think our choices are pretty limited. Yeah, I don’t think we could have resisted steel, and I don’t think we could have resisted plastic. I mean, so for example, now could we say we’re not going to have any more polymers? We’re not going to have any more polymerization, any more plastics, because we find them deleterious to the ecology. I think it would be hugely difficult for us as a human species to make that decision because we’d never get unanimity on it, for a start.

Speaker D: But how about, um, obviously at the moment we’re trying to reverse out of an oil-based economy because it’s bad for our environment, apparently, and so is also meat production, by the way.

Speaker B: That one is one of the finding some Chatham House research. So, you know, we can reverse out of things, or are you saying that no, actually those choices have already been made for us?

Speaker I: Well, that’s why I say that I think there is this symbiosis. There are certain aspects where human agency can be effective, and there are others where the technology is objective. So if we want to heat our homes, we’ve either got to burn gas or some fossil fuel, or harness solar power, or something. So we are dependent upon the technological possibilities. We can research them, we can find them out, we can re-engineer them and reconfigure them, but ultimately, we depend upon whether they’re there or not. We depend upon an objective externality.

Speaker D: Okay, but, um, People will say technology is always progress. It’s an inexorable journey into life getting better and better and better. So yeah, fine, we’re now having to heat our houses, but in the past we were cold and we used to die of cold.

Speaker I: Yes, but I doubt if we choose to go back and die out of cold. It might be forced on us.

Speaker B: But we wouldn’t choose it.

Speaker D: Okay, now one of the things that’s very, very topical at the moment is artificial intelligence. The Bank of England warned a couple of weeks ago that we now face the very real prospect of one-third of all of our jobs vanishing. There’s going to be some societal implications of that, aren’t there? I mean, what’s going to happen? You’re, you’re not only a technologist and a philosopher, you’re an economist.

Speaker I: Yes, I mean, I do think this is a very real threat. I mean, it always has been a threat, and Keynes pointed out, as you probably know, in his lecture many years ago, that the technology could well lead us to a position where we were satisfied with our output and worked less and less. Now, if, as you say, a third of jobs disappear, and it’s certainly a theoretical possibility that a third of jobs could disappear, Therefore, it’s possibly a practical outcome as well. Now, in that case, we’ve then got to rethink our whole economic order, which is so based upon the concept of employment. I mean, people still are pushing towards the idea of full employment in the face of the technology inevitably pushing us away from full employment. I mean, the drift of the technology has to be towards less employment, i.e., more output for less labor. Um, the, the requirement of the social model is that we have full employment, and we’ve got to rethink that and say, well, what if we had a situation where we only have to work 3 days a week, 2 days a week, 1 work— 1 day a week, and get all the food and clothing that we want? In that case, how are we going to distribute the income, as you said earlier, to create the demand in the economy for that output? Put when there aren’t the wages there. That goes back to my argument. The only way of doing it is through a citizen’s income. That’s why my paper on this is called The Economic Necessity of Citizen’s Income. I do think it is an economic necessity.

Speaker D: But people would say, hang on a moment, this is the death of capitalism.

Speaker B: You’re giving out money for free.

Speaker D: They’ll, they’ll say this is communism.

Speaker I: Well, it’s not communism, it’s technologicalism, isn’t it? It’s, uh, it isn’t driven by saying everybody that should own all the means of production. It’s saying that whoever owns those means of production, to some extent, doesn’t matter. Because if one person owned this machine you could plug into the earth to produce £1.4 trillion GDP each year, one person could in no way consume all the sausages and wear all the clothes that that would produce. So inevitably, there is a social surplus. I wouldn’t call that Communism, because I think communism is driven by a different objective. It’s driven by some sort of political feeling. This is technologicalism, and our response to it has got to be, in my view, to install— to put in a citizen’s income. And how we distribute it is the next big question, but I’m having a big fight to get people to even recognize that it’s an economic necessity.

Speaker B: Jeff Crocker on the strange new world. You’re listening to Password on Resonance FM, and I’m afraid if you’ve just turned on, you’ve missed it. To find out more about these stories and the technology that’s changing our lives, log on to our website, www.futureintelligence.co.uk. Password is brought to you by Angel Media and produced by Tim Smith.

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