Category: automation

A dystopian view of contactless travel

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A pigeon’s view of CCTV cameras

Amidst the airport’s security cameras, facial recognition technology and contactless check-in, it took a dog (and a human) to catch me out. We were about to exit customs in New Zealand when a customs officer with a beagle on a lead passed us by. The beagle tracked back, put his front paws on my trolley and sniffed at my black shoulder bag.

“Have you had food in that bag, Sir?” the Customs Officer asked.

“I bought a sandwich at the airport in Brisbane and ate it on the plane,” I explained.

“What kind of sandwich was it?”

“Um, chicken – chicken and avocado.”

She smiled: “Right, well he’s trained to sniff out chicken.” She gave the dog a treat and we continued on to the exit.

Apart from a side trip to the duty free shop, this was the only human contact we had, coming and going, apart from a tired-looking Brisbane customs officer at the end of a very long queue, collecting arrival forms and pointing us to the exit.

When tackling the now ubiquitous automatic check-in kiosk, I began to realise that my new passport, complete with a photo of a stern-looking 74 year old, contains a microchip which identifies me on facial scanners.

As Smart Traveller summarises:

All Australian passports, except for emergency passports, are ePassports. An ePassport contains an electronic chip that helps to confirm your identity. International airports in Australia, and some overseas, allow Australians with ePassports to use automated passport control machines.

At our point of departure were check-in kiosks where your boarding passes are printed from a machine, along with baggage tags. The first time I tried this I accidentally pasted the baggage receipt (which you are supposed to detach but nobody explained that) on the checked-in bag. A burly chap watched as I hefted my 16kg bag on to the conveyer belt. He kindly retrieved pieces of bar code from my sticker and pasted them on the side of my suitcase. Then we proceeded to Customs check-in where you had to pour out perfectly good water, remove everything from your pockets (belt, wallet, passport, phone, even a soggy hankie) and stand like The Terminator  in the X-ray machine.

I dislike having to remove my belt as I have enough trouble keeping my pants up with a belt. Once I’d passed through X-ray and been re-united with my stuff, I stood around in everyone’s way and took as long as possible to put my belt on, stuff the hankie back in my pocket, etc.

“Move along please, Sir.”

Now to the duty free shop, where assistants (all two of them), limited conversation to “$72.99 – on card?”

By the way, who carries cash in these times? One day we are all going to get caught out like we did when trapped in a post-Cyclone town.

Power cuts and cell phone outages neutered ATMs and EFTPOS machines all along New Zealand’s east coast. Did they not think of that?

(I distinctly remember whingeing about that at the time, as well as complaining on behalf of our country cousins who can’t rely on the Internet. Ed)

My lasting memory of leaving Auckland (after going through the same contactless palaver), was a life-sized cardboard cut-out of a smiling airport employee, bidding us ‘Haere Ra’ (goodbye come again).

The people that used to do that sort of job are probably working unsociable hours at one of the airport’s fast-food joints.

One of my friends who found himself unexpectedly flying to England for his mother’s funeral, clutching an emergency passport, commented on Facebook about travel in 2023 – “It’s not like it was.”

One could imagine he was not in the mood, but he’s right – the absence of friendly people making sure we end up in the right place together with the security overkill at both ends is exhausting. On a brighter note, at least no-one comes through the aircraft spraying insecticide before you disembark. Remember that?

Dirk Singer writes that the contactless travel trend began during the Covid pandemic as a means of limiting human contact. Understandably, the whole world was concerned about this in 2020 and 2021, Maybe not so much in 2022 and 2023, but the trend has been accelerated by the acceptance that our face is now our boarding pass.

Biometric scanners can be quite confronting if you are among the 40% of people who get anxious when they travel. The machine barks at us: stand there, remove your glasses, stay still, don’t smile. If we somehow manage to put our feet in the right place and follow the rest of the instructions, the little gate will slide open just long enough to let one person through. I briefly wondered what would happen if you just stood there in the gate, like a reluctant sheep? How long would it take for one of the few remaining airport employees to arrive and sort you out?

There’s more social distancing to come. Some companies are trialling robotic food deliveries within airports. How long before the food trolley coming down the aisle is driving itself? Crikey, even the dunny flushes itself.

The latest developments envisage robots staffing airport check-in desks, carrying out security protocols, cleaning and even delivering food to passengers waiting in airport lounges.

The proponents of contactless travel (airlines) like to tell us it is safer, healthier and less stressful. Yes, but what about those of us who routinely lose our minds when in the confines of an airport (or to a lesser degree, a railway station)?

According to kiwi.com, 40% of people become anxious to some extent at the thought of travelling on an airplane. Moreover, 6% of people are affected by aviophobia — the clinical fear of flying.

As for Facial recognition scanning, it has been around for a long while now. In addition to its use at airports, these days it is used by police and security services to review CCTV footage. As you probably know, Great Britain once led the western world when it came to installation of CCTV cameras (4 million). I clearly recall a Billy Connolly travelogue where he encountered one of the silent watchers on a bridge in Scotland. Billy being Billy leaned into the lens and extended his middle finger.

‘Person of Interest’, a TV drama series frequently featured investigators scanning crowds, using facial recognition technology. Suddenly they have a hit. The person of interest’s file pops up on the right side of the screen. Nowhere to hide, just like George Orwell’s protagonist Winston Smith in 1984.

The combination of CCTV and facial recognition used by governments and private enterprise has the personal freedom movement in a panic.

Last year there was considerable outrage when Choice magazine broke a story that major Australian retailers were collecting biometric information in-store. Bunnings, KMart and the Good Guys all agreed to ‘pause’ their use of the technology while the legality is being assessed.

As for the spread of CCTV cameras, Comparitech.com’s Paul Bischoff ranks China at the top of a global survey of cities under surveillance.

China has an estimated 540 million surveillance cameras (54% of the global total) to cover 1.46 billion people. That’s 372.8 cameras per 1,000 people. (The latest development in China is to identify people jaywalking and send them an instant fine (by text).

Sydney, at the other end of the scale, has 4.67 cameras per 1000 people and Melbourne 2.13. So where would you rather live?

There’s a lot in this study and it is hard to make comparisons. But the inescapable truth of it is, like Orwell’s Winston Smith, we are all being watched.

“It was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander when you were in any public place or within range of a telescreen. The smallest thing could give you away.” Winston Smith, 1984.

Holding out for a Holden (or a Subaru)

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(Holden Premier Image Jenny Scott, www.flickr.com)

I never owned a Holden motor car but I did drive one in the late 1970s. It was a 1971 HQ Holden Premier , owned by a woman I’d just met. She displayed her political colours early on, telling me she named the car Elizabeth because Joh (Bjelke-Petersen) was Queensland’s Premier at the time.

As she said, you wouldn’t want to name your car after a man who said indefensible things like (apropos industrial relations): “The 40-hour week has given the opportunity to many to while away their time in hotels.”

I don’t remember much about Elizabeth apart from the fantastic lamb’s wool steering wheel cover. Elizabeth (at the time running on five cylinders), went to an apprentice mechanic as a fixer-upper. She was replaced by a green XB Ford Fairmont station wagon, with a two-way tailgate (like a hearse). The Fairmont had two bucket seats in the back with seatbelts, which made it a handy car for larger families.

Rising fuel prices lured us to economical cars; a Toyota Corona and a Mitsubishi Magna wagon (with an awful turning circle). Later, we opted for a 4 litre, BA Ford Falcon wagon for its storage and towing capacity. We drove the Falcon on several long trips and still got $3,000 for it in 2002, when it had 285,000 kms on the clock.

Prior to the Ford craze, She Who Also Once Owned an EK Holden Ute With A Women’s Lib Symbol On The Tailgate, bought Elizabeth in 1976.

Holden produced the Premier between 1960 and 1982, so an original model would today be 60 years old and qualify as a vintage vehicle. The Southern Downs is a good place to spot vintage cars – in particular ‘muscle’ cars with big engines and twin exhausts. I spotted a few Holden models among the vintage Ford, Vauxhall and Buick cars at the Allora Heritage Day, all lovingly restored.

I didn’t spend my formative years here, so missed out on Australia’s love affair with the Holden. US auto giant General Motors infiltrated Australia in the 1920s, but the legend proper did not start until GM purchased South Australian car body manufacturer Holden in 1931.

La Trobe University PhD candidate Jack Fahey explored the history of GM/Holden in The Conversation. He explained how the American company brought then-uncommon PR and marketing strategies to Australia. GM set about selling Australians a car made for local conditions, successfully creating the symbolic myth of the Holden as the people’s car.

Prime Minister Ben Chifley unveiled the first Holden in 1948, which became affectionately known as the “FX”. Holden had previously been manufacturing car bodies for Buick, Chevrolet, Vauxhall and other GM brands. The FX (priced at £733) was such a success Holden could not keep up with demand, with 18,000 people paying their deposit sight unseen.

Holden’s exit in 2021 is an inevitable outcome for a company whose sales had been in sharp decline. At its peak (2002- 2005), Holden sold more than 170,000 vehicles a year. By 2019, sales dwindled to fewer than 40,000, all made somewhere else.

After import tariffs were scrapped, Australians readily switched allegiance to imported 4WD and SUV vehicles and smaller, economical cars. Brands like Toyota, Mitsubishi, Subaru, Hyundai, Mazda, Honda and Kia prevailed.

Watching the last of the four major car firms disappear from the landscape ought to remind us that other manufacturers have gone down the same road. Brands no longer made in Australia include Pacific Brands Clothing, Goodyear and Bridgestone tyres, Electrolux ovens and refrigerators, Golden Circle’s canned fruit operations (sold to Heinz), other fruit and produce processing plants and a long list of car manufacturers including Mitsubishi, Toyota and Nissan.

Manufacturing in general has slumped from a peak the 1960s when it represented 25% of the country’s gross domestic product (GDP). The figure was 5.77% in 2018.

FOMM reader Gary Shepherd took to his Facebook account this week to lament the dilution of local manufacturing, laying most of the blame on “that idiot team of Hawke and Keating – floating the dollar and removing import tariffs.” (The latter was known as The Button Plan, after former Industry and Commerce Minister John Button)

Cars were not the only victims of the level playing field theory, Gary said. Australia also once made great white goods.

“There are still countless Aussie homes with old ‘Roundy’ Westinghouse and GE Fridges being used under the house as beer fridges, despite being fifty years old,” Gary wrote.

Some of Gary’s friends reminded him of the role played by belligerent unions in the collapse of Australian industries.

Jack Fahey observed in The Conversation that production and sales of the Holden boomed in the 1950s, helped along by full employment for white men, high tariff protection, State-sponsored migration and amicable relations with trade unions. But he also reminded us that Holden’s history included large-scale industrial disputes.

In 1963, 18,500 men went on strike at Holden plants in Adelaide and Melbourne, asking for a wage increase of three pounds a week; about 12% of the average wage at the time.

Although Holden was already in trouble in the mid-1990s, that didn’t stop Prime Minister Paul Keating choosing the factory floor in South Australia to launch the ‘Working Nation’ white paper, in which he ironically argued for Holden’s place at the forefront of Australian nation building.

Economist Dennis Glover devoted a chapter of his book ‘An Economy is not a Society’ to the H.J Heinz factory in Dandenong, Victoria. Glover, who worked there during university holidays, described the idyllic life of an unskilled factory worker in the 1970s, in sharp contrast to the brutal downsizing and final shock closure in 2000, with a loss of 200 jobs.

The World today recalled the moment when Heinz/Watties announced it was centralising bean and soup canning production in New Zealand and closing the Dandenong factory after 45 years. Heinz said, from its Philadelphia headquarters, that it was cheaper to move production to another country than to re-invest in the existing plant.

Glover wrote that the Heinz subsidised cafeteria epitomised the extent to which companies would go to impress unskilled factory hands.

“We must remember that factories like these were built in an era when capitalists knew they had to be nice to working-class people if they wanted them to work for them.”

I had a few factory jobs in my youth and must admit I was hopeless at most of them. Production line work requires people who are good with their hands, quick and co-ordinated.

I feel for the 600 or so people who depended on Holden for a job, but they should have seen it coming. There will be more of this, as automation and global competition reduce opportunities for jobs in the manufacturing sector.

Manufacturing, which still employs one million Australians, obviously can no longer rely on the type of Federal Government financial support Holden was given. In 2012, $270 million was provided, in return for a promise to invest more than $1 billion into car manufacturing in Australia.

Paradoxically, the Australian government chooses to support and subsidise mining, while turning its back on our traditional manufacturers, even though most of our commodities are exported, with the value added in other countries. But I guess the government knows that.

 

Demise Of The Fixed-Line Home Phone

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Australian Communications and Media Authority Communications report 2017–18.

The landline is ringing. A saxophone riff from a Men at Work song plays in my head (‘who can it be now?’). Despite my better judgement, I pick up. It goes something like this. (Pause) “This is Nicole from Australian National Broadband. We have been trying to get in touch with you as we are soon going to disconnect your landline, Press 1 now to speak to a technician.”

I don’t press 1 and after 5 seconds the call disconnects. Poor Nicole (and apologies to the two women I know named Nicole). She has been robo calling our number without success for at least 18 months. How will you describe that on your CV, Nicole? (2018-2019: scam robo call voiceover).

Once again, synchronicity strikes. Just when I decided to write about the demise of the landline, I see it is National Scam Awareness Week (August 12-16). There are serious reasons for raising awareness of telephone and internet scams, as they are costing Australians about $1 billion a year.

Scamwatch estimates that NBN scams alone are ripping $110,000 a month from people who should have tuned in for NSAW last year (when the figure was $37,000 a month).

Few real people call our landline these days. Like everyone I surveyed for this essay, we average about 15 telemarketing calls or phone scams per week. They are often the 6.50pm calls, just as you are sitting down to eat. It’s someone in an offshore call centre, trying to sell you something. Most people just hang up.

My elder sister in New Zealand always calls the landline, as does John, our oldest friend in the village. They belong to a cohort who does not have mobile phones. They persist, some would say depend on, the dying communication form of a fixed copper wire telephone line.

The 2017-2018 report by the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) said that 36% (6.7 million) of Australians have scrapped their fixed home phone line and rely on a mobile service. Some may also have a VoIP (voice over internet protocol) phone as part of their National Broadband Network deal. There is one vital difference between a landline and VoIP. The major issue with a ‘landline’ that comes with an NBN package is that it stops working when you have a power failure. (This is also the case for a hands-free phone plugged into the power, rather than a dedicated phone wired into the wall).

The latter still works when there is a blackout – you can ring Fred on the other side of town to see if his power is out too. Useful stuff like that.

Nevertheless, fixed-line use declined 7% in 2017-2018, continuing a long-term trend (although 10m people still have one).  One could suggest that people are letting go of their landlines in favour of mobiles and reducing their monthly phone/internet bill. I suspect people no longer trust their landline. As FOMM reader John No 1 said: “The value of the telephone as a means of communication is being diminished because it is impossible to know if a caller is genuine…”

Meanwhile, eight out of 10 Australians own a smartphone – 64% more than five years ago. A smart phone is infinitely more useful than a one-function landline. Smart phones users can make voice calls, send texts or use apps for messaging or voice /video calls). And, as we all know, you can browse the internet, watch streaming TV, make videos, take pictures of your cat to put on Facebook, use it as a compass or a navigation device, tune your guitar, turn it into a metronome or use it as an alarm clock.

A few FOMM readers responded to my question: why do you still have a landline? John No 2 (no mobile), says he wants to stay with a fixed-line phone because mobile reception is poor where he lives. He is also a bit peeved that after paying for a silent number, he still gets nuisance calls.  Another reader told me she uses her landline exclusively for her counselling service so she can be ‘present’ (as opposed to being out and about and distracted if a client calls on the mobile).

Ian says he ended up with a VoIP phone when he changed to the NBN, but neither he nor Mrs Ian uses it, mainly because Telstra/Optus were unable to transfer his old number. They prefer to use mobiles, as they had been doing for years before NBN showed up. Ian says that until the change was forced upon him, he’d had a landline (and the same Telstra number), for 33 years.

I tend to avoid using the home phone, instead favouring text messages. She Who Likes To Talk To People always tries calling first.

“What’s the point,” I say. “It will just go to voice mail or they will get a garbled 10-second text message transcribed from voice.”

Example: “It’s Nog here, I be roundson to pick up cheers.”

The ease of text messaging (and the fast response when you use the Facebook app Messenger), has lulled us into a world where we communicate primarily by text and email (both formats which can be easily misinterpreted), in lieu of actually talking to each other.

A while ago, I realised this form of communication was the equivalent of holing up in the castle and sending a messenger on horseback to tell Princess Desiree in yonder palace that she is the fairest in the land.

Who would know if the fair damsel received the gilded message and what happened next (mayhap she was smitten by the messenger and they rode off together into the darkening forest (cue Game of Thrones theme).

Yes, so I decided I would have a telephone conversation with someone every week. I’m behind schedule, but I have excuses.

It is probably fair in National Scam Awareness Week to observe that mobile phone users are also plagued by scam calls, robo calls and telemarketers. Nevertheless, Australians continue their love affair with mobile technology. In Australia, there are now 34.54 million mobile services in operation, compared with 31.09 million in 2013, the last time I wrote on this topic. ACMA says the volume of data downloaded on mobile networks increased fivefold between 2014 and 2018. We can probably attribute a lot of it to Netflix (50% of Australians have a subscription), and Stan (13%).

The relatively slow growth in new mobile use suggests demand has peaked. Still, that’s about 10 million more mobiles than there are people. Given this huge target market, it seems likely the scammers and hard-sell merchants will keep finding sinister new ways to catch us off guard.

Robo calls are as big a problem in the US as the opioid crisis, mass shootings and Donald Trump. The regulators have been pressing the telecommunications industry to do something about it since 2014. In response, the industry has developed a solution to stop robo calls and ‘spoofing’. The latter refers to criminals and unscrupulous people altering the calling number of their outbound calls in order to deceive the person receiving the call. For example, the call may show up in your caller ID as your neighbour or a relative. The industry has invented a new technology standard to defeat spoofing and has given it an intriguing name based on two acronyms – STIR/SHAKEN.

Sounds like something you’d order at the bar when taking Miss Moneypenny on a date.

Further reading FOMM back pages: https://bobwords.com.au/friday-on-my-mind/

Self-service gets our enterprise for a bargain

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Self-service checkout, photo by eltpics https://flic.kr/p/p57BLf

You may call me a peevish old man, but these self-service supermarket checkouts give me the pip. I only encounter them when venturing out of the village, as our service-oriented IGA does not as yet have automated check-outs.

Not so a certain Brisbane supermarket which, around 5pm, seems to have nobody staffing its numerous checkouts and only one person ‘helping’ people scan their own groceries. I usually ignore the self-service corner and will wait an inordinate time to be served by a human being. Last time I was in the 12 items or less line at the same supermarket, the poor woman was switching back and forth between checkout customers and those at the cigarette counter.

Management textbooks would tell you this is successful multi-tasking and making efficient use of a staff member over what is probably a meal break. Decency would say put two people on at this location.

American Facebook page Union Thugs has a bit of a campaign going against self-service, observing that the machines (a) they kill jobs (b) they do not contribute to payroll tax and (c) they are really not that convenient.

The latter was certainly true when I returned from shopping in the city a few weeks back to find I’d charged myself twice for the same item. So back I went, burning more fossil fuel, to queue up at the lightly staffed counter where one person was multi-tasking between selling cigarettes and dealing with complaints like mine.

IGA Maleny director Rob Outridge knows the downsides of self-service checkouts but can see a time when he may be forced to introduce them. Supermarkets operate on skinny margins and the biggest fixed cost is wages, which keep on rising. So while Maleny IGA still exclusively hires people to serve at the checkouts, there may be a time when competition and the bottom line force his hand.

“The problem is your labour costs keep going up and there is no increase in productivity.”

I suspect Rob Outridge knew I was going to take a Bolshevik approach to the subject of automation doing people out of jobs. Nevertheless, he handed me his card and in that pleasant, management-by-walking-around way of his said: “Just let me know if you have any other questions.”

It’s not just that a machine replaces a worker. You (the customer) are doing the checkout job yourself – for nothing. Of course it does not stop there; we do the job of a retail employee at the ATM, the fuel pump, at toll points and just about anything someone would help you with offline is now done (by you) online.

The online world has transformed the way businesses interact with customers. In the online world there are myriad stories of businesses getting our enterprise for a bargain, as they con us into signing up for electronic bus and train cards, gadgets on your windshield which go ‘ping’ when you pass through the toll gates and so on. Last time I parked under the Brisbane Convention and Exhibition and Centre, I had to go to a machine and pay for the parking then pop it in the slot at the boom gate. There were no attendants to be seen.

It hardly seems like nine years since the toll booths closed on the Gateway Bridge and Logan Motorway. There was something refreshing about that brief interaction when you paused at the collection point and tossed your coins into the tub. When the electronic toll system Go Via was introduced in 2009, 100 toll collectors were made redundant, with 22 moving into management jobs within Go Via. Former toll collector Sharmaine Phelan told the Brisbane Times she had a tear in her eye on the last day.

“Over the years I have been here I’ve met some lovely people, some that I’ve kept in touch with who have come through the toll.”

Tolls were collected manually on the Gateway Bridge for 23 years. As a motorist, you always had to be sure to have a pile of coins ready in the console, but that was all you needed. Today, you need a beeping gadget on your windshield and an online account that has to be kept topped up or you will get a letter in the post demanding payment. Along the way, a system of debt-collecting was invented to deal with people who either didn’t have a bleeping thing on their windshield or kept forgetting to top up their account. If they are people who also ignore mail and such, then eventually the Department of Transport gets involved and pings you for non-payment of tolls.

How is that an improvement on making Sharmaine Phelan’s day, then?

Fuel stations have been exploiting their customers in this fashion for decades. Self-service fuel stations began to spread in the US and Australia in the 1970s, although at a faster rate in America. Mind you, there is still one state (New Jersey) that refuses to allow customers to pump their own gas.

Australia caught on to automated fuel service in the 1970s and the reach has been pervasive. Even in the remote outback you have to pump your own fuel and, between the hours of 9pm and 5am, you often have to go in and pay for it first. One of the downsides of self-service fuel (from the fuel retail owner’s perspective), is the minority of motorists who fill up and just drive away.

Imagine my surprise earlier this year when driving into Longreach (at night) in an urgent search for a fuel station. The only place open was not actually open but had a bowser where you could use your credit card to (a) enter how much fuel you wanted and (b) press the Pay Now button.

You might remember the rockabilly song Harold’s Super Service made popular by Merle Haggard in 1970. I suspect the writer (Bobby Wayne) was perhaps taking a dig at the about to be modernised industry with his song, in which the owner of an old Model A drives in to Harold’s Super Service and insists on getting his money’s worth.

“Gimme 50 cents worth of regular (pronounced ‘reglar’)
Check my oil too if you don’t mind.
Put some air in my tires won’t you mister,
Clean my windows too if you have time”

The National Advanced Convenience and Fuel Retailing magazine (NACS) explains how automation gained the upper hand in the US. In 1969, self-service gasoline accounted for only 16% of sales in the US. By 1982, 72% of gas sold in the US was self-service and it had climbed to 90% by 2011.

I was amazed to find, amidst the proliferating supermarket-owned and franchise outlets, that there are still a handful of petrol stations in Australia offering old-fashioned driveway service. You’ll have to read Mandy Turner’s article to find out where they are, though.

Maybe it’s just that I’m approaching a certain age, but I secretly yearn for that era when the petrol station attendant filled your tank, checked your oil and washed the windscreen at the same time – just like the song.

Harold’s Super Service, Merle Haggard and band (listener warning – it’s an earworm).

https://youtu.be/t2lIMLgB_Sg

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