The writer Aldous Huxley, famous for his ground-breaking novel Brave New World, concluded that “technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.”
Too often people who ought to know better, being enthralled by technology which eliminates jobs humans should do, take a different view. Yet no machine can match the insight and imagination of men and women, nor should we underestimate the benefit of personal relationships. So while it is beneficial to automate jobs that don’t involve human interactions, those that benefit from personal contact must not be lost. That’s why, last year, we successfully fought off plans to replace staff at Spalding railway station with ticket machines.
Huxley’s words resonated as the wrongful convictions of more than 700 sub-postmasters between 1999 and 2015, returned to prominence following the ITV drama 'Mr Bates vs The Post Office'. To date over 100 of these convictions have been overturned, with more expected to follow. Others found guilty have been dissuaded from appeals, given the fearful trauma of retrials.
This shocking miscarriage of justice was, in large part, the result of blind faith in technology. Accounting software known as Horizon, written by the Japanese firm Fujitsu, created the illusion that large sums of money had been stolen by postmasters when, in fact, it was software that was at fault – not people.
At the time, many were staggered when postmasters and postmistresses they knew well - often respected members of communities – were accused of such crimes. How appalling that convictions were secured because courts – taking no account of possible flaws in software – presumed that evidence from computers cannot be questioned.
Given the extraordinary scale of these mistakes, the Prime Minister was right to announce a new law which will quash all outstanding convictions of sub-postmasters as well as speeding up access to compensation for those unjustly punished. To date, around £148 million has been paid out to 2,700 victims – but the people who were imprisoned can never get that time back. Their names must be cleared. For the families of those convicted postmasters who have died since, exoneration should be matched by compensation.
To ensure such a tragedy can never happen again, the Government should change the law to end the computer is always right fallacy.
Fujitsu have won £6.8bn in public contracts since 2012. No business should profit from failure, and so the Government must insist that in future when serious mistakes happen, the firm involved pays. Fujitsu, a global corporate giant which made profits of £22 million in Britain alone last year, should pay into the compensation scheme for the sub-postmasters. This scandal risks shaking faith in our legal system. Straightforwardly, those complicit in this injustice out to themselves face the consequences.
As we become ever more dependent on technology, we must take greater care to make sure we never place blind faith in the intelligence of machines. It is the wisdom of people that matters most.
