Tuvalu is celebrating its first ATM, but here\u2019s a warning from the UK, where human contact has been lost to the self-service age <\/p>\n
Life is about to change on the remote island nation of Tuvalu<\/a>. And not, in my opinion, for the better. To great fanfare, Tuvalu \u2013 an entirely cash-based society \u2013 has unveiled its first ever ATM<\/a>, marking its move towards financial modernisation. But while the 10,000 people living in that country may be celebrating no longer having to queue at the bank, I fear their happiness will be short-lived. It\u2019s the start of the slow erosion of human contact that heralds the dehumanisation of yet another society.<\/p>\n The world\u2019s first ATM<\/a> was introduced in Britain in 1967, but <\/strong>for me the tyranny of machines that promise convenience but erode human contact <\/strong>really began about 20 years ago, in the form of self-checkouts in our local Sainsbury\u2019s. Having watched the Terminator movie franchise during my formative years, I railed prophetically against them, aware that it was just a small slippery slope from \u201cunexpected item in the bagging area\u201d to the extinction of the human race. I wrote about my fear of these machines with their Dalek-like commands and even started a short-lived and extremely unpopular Facebook campaign against them. But like a modern-day Cassandra, I was doomed to be ignored.<\/p>\n Hilary Freeman is a journalist and author<\/p>\n Continue reading…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Tuvalu is celebrating its first ATM, but here\u2019s a warning from the UK, where human contact has been lost to the self-service age Life is about to change on the remote island nation of Tuvalu. And not, in my opinion, for the better. To great fanfare, Tuvalu \u2013 an entirely cash-based society \u2013 has unveiled … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-39433","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39433","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=39433"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39433\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39433"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39433"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39433"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}