Quackery and Ignorance

In 1832, Charles Babbage made an astute observation about technology that remains true to this day: any new development is followed by a wave of “quackery and ignorance” in which hucksters offer technology solutions to those who do not understand the technology but are eager to benefit from it.

Babbage was speaking of the most basic forms of industrial automation, as during his time there were many shady operators who offered machines and mechanisms of various kinds to industrialists, claiming the implementation of a device would boost productivity and eliminate the need for dozens or hundreds of manual laborers.   In rather few cases this was a valid claim, but in most it was not: the machines did not work at all in some cases, or when they did what they were supposed to do the promised results were not delivered.

Nearly two hundred years later, I see the very same thing happening with networked digital technologies.   The claims made of the power of knowledge management, social anything, big data, and the like are always wild and outlandish, and there are a great many companies that offer solutions, but little news that these solutions ever delivered on their promises.   Any time there is a new buzzword in the media, there’s a brief frenzy followed by a guilty silence.

My sense is it’s just history repeating, and that two centuries of repetition have not driven Babbage’s message home, nor do I have the sense it ever will.    There will always be ignorance and greed, and there will always be great profit to be made by swindling the ignorant and the greedy.  

And in the end, perhaps it’s only right that those people who are willing to hand over their budgets and the success of their operations to the latest species of snake-oil salesman are taken in.  But will the lesson ever be learned?