What happens when the digital network shuts down?

The joy of being on holiday is the ability to ‘book-end’ your life and, of course, to reflect.

We allow ourselves to relax and take a break from the relentless pressure that we subject ourselves to in the ‘modern world’. All too soon, though, it is back to the daily routine; something our ancestors would have experienced when they went back to work at the factories which, after the industrial revolution, had utterly changed many town and cities.

Early industrialisation based on the techniques which are usually referred to as ‘scientific management’ have evolved into the modern systems that have come to almost literally, dominate our every waking moment thorough the ability to exchange information and communicate with one another via mobile telephones, computers and tablets.

Increasingly it seems we cannot escape these systems though, as we are all aware, there is the off button! Equally, though, if we lose the ability to access the internet or our mobile network to make calls we feel isolated and the sense of being cut off.

Whether in business or simply to keep connected with friends, being connected is essential. But for most of us ‘the network’ is something of a mystery.

However, the ‘system’ we unconsciously rely on is based on vast amounts of data and increasingly complex algorithms.

The consequence is that these systems are showing the strain of being so overloaded as to be prone to the breakdowns that have been experienced by the likes of Amazon, Apple, Google and Microsoft.

Even more recently the American Stock Exchange in New York – the Nasdaq – was crippled by a three-hour network shutdown caused by what was referred to as a “communication failure” resulting in a third fewer shares being traded that day (an estimated loss trillions of dollars though many would argue that it is all somewhat notional).

According to experts we may need to get used to such breakdowns. As they believe, the incredible development of the internet has been so inexorable that data requirement is surpassing expectations.

We increasingly live our lives in cyberspace through accessing websites to shop, deal with financial affairs, book holidays and access the multitude of entertainment sites such as YouTube.

Some 20 years ago I recall Billy Connolly calling the world-wide-web ‘the world-wide-dustbin’. Whilst there is undoubtedly a great deal of rubbish on the net, we now rely on it.

The numbers are mind-boggling and, I guess for most, increasingly devoid of meaning (similar to ‘light years’).

Apparently, something like 90 per cent of all data in the world has been generated in the last two years. There are believed to be approximately 2.7 ZB (zettabytes) in the ‘digital universe’ where a ZB is a billion terabytes (TB).

As a comparison, the maximum storage capacity of a typical computer is usually half a TB of data.

Estimated demand and consumption of data will continue at such a rate that, according to computer systems manufacturer Cisco, by 2017 the amount of data equivalent to all firms ever produced will be transmitted through the internet in three minutes.

On a personal level the average amount every human currently sends is six gigabytes. By 2017 it is thought that this figure will have at least trebled.

So, like the engineers and planners who, in the aftermath of the industrial revolution, recognised that the infrastructure of towns and cities needed to be developed to cope with urbanisation, there is an urgent need to ensure that the computers and the system that is used to link them are enhanced.

Certainly as far as the devices we use there has been compliance with the Gordon Moore’s eponymous 1965 law which asserts that their capacity doubles every two years as manufacturers developed chips capable of storing data.

However, the need to continually develop the network is proving more problematic.

Creating a system that can cope with the exponentially increasing demand is not just expensive but incredibly complex. This is where the analogy with Victorian sewer and water-supply construction starts to become erroneous as simply putting in more cables (now fibre-optic) is not enough.

Indeed the equipment that is needed to serve all of this is hugely expensive and increasingly owned by a handful of ‘key operators’.

Increasingly we are exhorted to store all our data in the cloud which, effectively means on the super-computers owned by these operators who, handily for governments, willingly grant them access.

But as those who have used ‘cloud storage’ may have discovered, as soon as there is a problem, you cannot get to your data - something only avoided by storing it on the increasingly full hard disk.

Though we use the internet to do things that would have seemed fantastic a generation ago such as using it to make online transactions for goods and services we are now discovering that our payment details may not be as secure as we were told.

Encryption is effectively based on very large numbers, employing algorithms that should in theory take thousands of years to crack.

We have been led to believe that encrypted messages should be impossible to break and mean that shopping and banking on the internet are absolutely safe.

The fact that governments through their security services have the ability to afford computer power which will crack encrypted signals is probably no surprise.

However, the realisation that hackers are able use modern graphics processing units capable of making 8 billion guesses per second is.

This should give cause for concern the next time we put our bank account details into a secure site.

There are many who have consistently been sceptical that the internet would lead to the degree of freedom and liberation that advocates have suggested would be possible.

Jaron Lanier is one though his pedigree as a computer philosopher who argued that digital technology could be a force for good means that his message should be taken seriously.

In his book Who Owns The Future (published by Allen Lane 2013) Lanier believes that the digital revolution has concentrated power into the hands of the few corporations with the largest computers.

He thinks the system should have more human intervention to ensure it underpins and supports society. As he Lanier believes, “We don’t yet have a design for society that can run this technology well. We haven’t figured out what the right human roles should be.”

The need to better understand how digital systems work in the interest of society is also considered in Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work and Think by

Viktor Mayer-Schonberger and Kenneth Cukier (published by John Murray, 2013). Though the digital revolution has given us great benefit they contend it has a dark side.

They warn that there is a danger in assuming machines can be allowed to take decisions especially to regulate human behaviour.

Interestingly the current edition of New Scientist includes an article written by Katia Moskvitch, ‘Penal Code’, in which she considers the potential impact of using what is known as ‘algorithmic enforcement’.

This would allow policing to be carried out by computers using an array of programmes to predict potential crimes. George Orwell’s imagined ‘big brother’ finally comes to fruition.

The thing is, as Moskvitch concludes, whatever the benefits, “if we embrace the world of algorithmic enforcement, it will come at a price.”

For anyone younger than 45, certainly in this country, it is probably hard to imagine a world in which there is no power supply.

But this happened in the early 1970s, caused by the effects of the miners’ strikes reducing the output of power stations.

Any failure in the digital system would have a potentially worse impact now.

And as many are predicting, we may be much closer to such failure than we choose to imagine.