Cashless Society… Do-it-Yourself Tills… AI… All quite 1984?

I wrote this article because a friend was railing on about a Cashless Society, Do-it-Yourself Tills and AI, which she was claiming was 'All quite 1984'. The problem is many of her claims were totally inaccurate. A few were relevant, but this mixture of complete nonsence, partial truth and occasional concern didn't do justice to the issues that are real concern. And because it was muddled, it would mean people would reject the things that are real concerns because of the ridiculous claims that were mixed in.

Cashless Society

Early man used to barter. ‘Will you do this for me if I do that for you?’ ‘Will you swap a bag of potatoes for a chicken?’ 

About 2,500 years ago coins started being used. Possibly the invention of the Lydians, related to the Greeks but living in what is modern day Turkey. So by Jesus times coins were well established but still the ‘talent’ quoted in the Gospels was a bag of about 45kg of gold!

During the Song Dynasty in what is modern day China had a problem with shortage of metal for casting coins so this led to the development of ‘paper money’. But this paper money was not backed by a given quantity of gold or silver rapid inflation happened. Gold and silver, by weight were used for international transactions. Tonnes of it.

They tried paper money in Stockholm in 1661 but that failed too because of lack of sufficient reserves. The early paper money in the UK were promissory notes from the Bank of England promising to pay the bearer a quantity of gold. It worked. But every promissory note had to be signed by hand by a representative of the Bank of England! One of my ancestorial relatives was the Engineer to the Bank of England and he introduced ‘surface printing’ to the bank which enabled these promissory  or bank notes to be printed not hand signed. I bet he was popular with those who signed all the notes! All promissory notes were backed by gold.

The year after I was born, in 1958, the USA issued the first Credit Cards. There had been Charge Cards before that but the Bank America cards were the first of what we would recognise as Credit Cards today. They were sent unsolicited and, according to Life Magazine, 'mailed off to unemployable people, drunks, narcotics addicts and to compulsive debtors’ which prompted President Johnson’s Special Assistant Betty Furness to compare it to ‘giving sugar to diabetics’!

OK fast forward to the 21st century and Debit and Credit Cards are common. Indeed, during the pandemic, people preferred them to touching money that other people had touched. It’s possible that Betty Furness was right. But used wisely, they are really helpful. Use the London Underground, tap in and tap out and it works out how much you owe and at the end of the day, if a day saver were cheaper, it will only charge you that. 

My grandchildren have special debit cards controlled by their parents. My grandson, therefore, has emergency money in his pocket when travelling by train to school every day. Their pocket money is paid into these cards. It’s safe for them, safer than holding cash. When I travel, I love it compared to dealing with cash. I have my card linked to my phone and it therefore uses the authentication of my phone (Face ID) to check the authorisation of a payment. And then there are the myths… which I have annotated…

Here are my individual responses to her post claiming... 

HERE'S WHAT NO CASH ACTUALLY MEANS:

• If you are struggling with your mortgage on a particular month, you can’t do an odd job to get you through.

You can still do this. No problem. Just have to declare it (as you should).

• Your child can’t go & help the local farmer to earn a bit of summer cash.

Nonsense, the farmer can pay your child to his card easily.

• No more cash slipped into the hands of a child as a good luck charm or from their grandparent when going on holidays.

Good luck charm? I can still give money to my grandchildren on their card.

• No more money in birthday cards.

True. And no money lost from birthday cards.

• No more piggy banks for your child to collect pocket money & to learn about the value of earning.

Rubbish, they can still learn the value of earning with a card!

• No more cash for a rainy day fund or for that something special you have been putting £20 a week away for.

One of our banks has ‘jars’ you can put money into, just like the jars people used on the mantlepiece.

• No more little jobs on the side because your wages barely cover the bills or put food on the table.

Can still do jobs on the side. Just now you have to declare them. If you are really poor, you won’t be paying income tax, so it’s irrelevant!

• No more charity collections.

Can do this easily with QR codes.

• No more selling bits & pieces from your home that you no longer want/need for a bit of cash in return.

Of course you can. Transfers are quick and easy. When we went to an international food fair a couple of years ago, we could pay using a QR code.

• No more cash gifts from relatives or loved ones.

True. Why is a cash gift better than a money transfer?

What a cashless society does guarantee:

• Banks have full control of every single penny you own.

COMPLETE RUBBISH. The new e-money linked to the European Central Bank won’t be bank account-linked. It will use an e-wallet and will thus work ‘offline’. That’s quite important as surprisingly, the potential real drawback that wasn’t mentioned in the list is ‘What happens in a war when electricity doesn’t work?’ With the proposed e-wallet it will still work so long as we have limited battery power.

• Every transaction you make is recorded.

Not with e-wallets (EU proposal), they are totally anonymous!

• All your movements & actions are traceable.

Not with e-wallets (EU proposal), they are totally anonymous!

• Access to your money can be blocked at the click of a button when/if banks need ‘clarification’ from you which will take about 3 weeks, a thousand questions answered & five thousand passwords.

Not with e-wallets, they are totally offline!

• You will have no choice but to declare & be taxed on every pound (£) in your possession.

You are taxed on income not wealth. No change.

• The government WILL decide what you can & cannot purchase.

Sorry, this is laughable!

• If your transactions are deemed in any way questionable, by those who create the questions, your money will be frozen, ‘for your own good’.

Complex and partially true.  If you are linked to something dodgy then yes. We’ve seen that personally, where we had to verify all major transactions back some decades because a colleague at work was doing something dodgy! But it does help to protect us all. Yes, it was a pain. But better that than the world becoming a ‘wild west’ without any protection!

There is a current problem with Credit and Debit Cards. A big problem. Those in Europe are controlled by Visa and Mastercard… ie by the USA! The biggest card issuer in the world is in fact, CUP (China Union Pay). We in Europe are incumbent upon other countries around the world. So there are currently risks, but the European Parliament is trying hard to work a way out. But cash isn't the answer.

A recent article from Euronews is to the point: Can Europe break free of Visa and Mastercard? MEPs stall digital euro!

Do-it-Yourself Tills

When my mother and grandmother were young people there were no supermarkets. They wrote a list and took it to the grocer, who fulfilled the list and the 'grocer's boy’ delivered it. Then at the end of the month they would pay the grocer.

Then came supermarkets. I had a Saturday job working in one. I sometimes worked on the tills. Very few items had price labels. The staff had to know the prices which were displayed above the items in the supermarket. I have no idea how I remembered the prices for all the items since my memory is appalling, but I did. And supermarkets were self-service shops. You had to go around them and put the things into your basket, and then go to pay for them. So much extra work than dropping off the list at the grocer. People complained. The tills were slow; you had to enter the price of every item. People were slow. You could chat while doing so. But boy oh boy was the job boring!

Then the tills advanced. Everything was bar-coded with an IPC (International Product Code). You couldn't sell items in a supermarket without an IPC. Some saw this in terms of Revelation 13:17. Maybe it is. But what happened then is that the checkout operator's job got even more boring, and they became faster and faster and faster. No more talking. And trying to keep up with them became almost impossible. Especially at Lidl.

Then came two ‘advances’ to supermarkets, I say advances in quotes because some people think it’s a step backwards. Note only one step backwards, not to the grocer and the list. The advances were self-service checkouts. I say two because there are two ways they work: Either you scan things yourself at the exit or you have a hand held scanner you use as you go round the shop and put the items in your bag. The complaint is that you can no longer chat with the checkout person at the exit. You couldn’t anyway because they were throwing the stuff at you so fast you couldn't keep up!

I prefer the latter, but I’m happy with the former… IF THEY WORK. One of the supermarkets here has terrible scanners, and they rarely work. So you need help from the staff.  Hey ho… want to talk more with the people at the checkout then use self checkout. When it fails (sometimes more than once), you have more time to chat with the checkout staff!

But then came ordering online. We first did this in the UK about 35 years ago. At that stage it was an experiment. Back then it wasn’t very good. Now it works well. So what to you do? Create a list for the grocer (aka supermarket) and the grocer’s boy (aka delivery driver) delivers the goods and then settle (your credit card) at the end of the month.

So are the ‘self-service checkouts’ part of a dystopian 1984 world? No, not at all. The world changes and in some ways we’ve come full circle. Self-service checkouts are not the great evil some people wish to claim they are. There are some stores in Scandinavia that have no staff. You use your credit/debit card to unlock the door and enter, collect what you need and then scan the items, pay and leave. Sounds cool to me.

AI

About 35 years ago I was evaluating a product called ‘Natural Language’ you typed to it in the same way as you type to an AI chatbot. It then converted your ‘natural language’ into SQL, which is the language of databases, found out the information and then presented the answer back to you also in ‘natural language’. It was impressive. And very expensive. The test system was related to HR management. Most of the questions it answered well about different staff in the database. It croaked when I finally asked ‘Are they nice?’

This was in the very, very early days of the Internet. Before the internet if you wanted to get something published you had to go through a publisher who would evaluate if it was worth publishing. The Internet changed all that. Now, everyone could publish what they liked without the ‘censor’ of a publisher. I loved the idea, as did many of my contemporaries. I had one friend though, who was horrified. Sadly, increasingly I think he may have been right. Another friend who was also in at the very early stages of the Internet also bemoans what it has become and he too, thinks maybe we were wrong to promote it the way we did.

I heard today of a company where the staff are spending hundreds of Euros daily on AI, trying to get it to answer questions. One of the people in that company said ‘But they are achieving nothing, they are not actually productive’. 

Are we wasting time on AI? Will it be the downfall of civilisation? Maybe.

I have friends who ask AI questions as if it’s some sort of super version of Google. The trouble is AI is often, no frequently, wrong. The reason for that is that AI is really what we call LLM — Large Language Modelling. In other words, it processes vast quantities of language from the Internet. That of course, would be fine if everything on the Internet were accurate, but it’s not. A year or so ago, a lot of it was at best rubbish or at worst fake news. And people started using AI answers (often the incorrect ones) to write things on the Internet. So AI started feeding on its own fake news and untruths. Some things it gets right but increasingly it is getting it wrong. If you check what it says, you’re probably safe. Check with a reputable site. 

AI is potentially very, very dangerous. 

One of the big companies that is creating AI is called Anthropic. Within the last few days it has refused to allow its AI systems to be used by the US government because it fears it may harm democracy. Military officials in the USA have threatened to invoke Cold-War era legislation to force Anthropic to comply. Anthropic’s other fear, and remember they make AI, is that it would be used by the military for fully autonomous weapons. The USA Department of War had talked about using Anthropic’s AI for intercontinental ballistic missiles. Anthropic don’t believe it’s safe for that!

Dario Amodei, their CEO, said ‘Using these systems for mass domestic surveillance is incompatible with democratic values’. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave Anthropic an ultimatum: Open up its artificial intelligence technology for use in a ‘classified setting’ by yesterday, as the other companies have, or risk losing its government contract. ‘These threats do not change our position: we cannot in good conscience accede to their request’ was Amodei’s response.

So, whereas I don’t share the concerns over cashless society or do it yourself tills. I do have grave concerns over AI. It is a useful tool. I use it for some things. The images for this set of Facebook posts were created by chatGPT. I use AI assistance to do in 20 seconds what could in photoshop take me many hours to do in compositing or painting. But it’s under my control doing limited function things how I want it to. The problem is AI autonomy. Then as Amodei says it’s dangerous, very dangerous!