STEVE CASSIDY-"Getting workers to do simple jobs in the 16th century was not much different from the 21st"

Why 16th century "networking" legislation still has an impact, and why the term AI is confusing to punters as well as a waste of natural resources

If you've read William Gibson's visionary cyberpunk novels, you'll remember the idea of the "oracle". I won't go into the back story, but this static unit was mounted low down in a wall, in a back alley, equipped with nothing more than a red laser that scanned the pre-millennial brickwork within line of sight.

Now take a look at my picture below of an exterior mounted fibre termination box in a sparsely trafficked alleyway somewhere in the City of London. Disappointingly, there's no scanning, baleful visible laser. Not even a power LED: modern fibre devices don't all need electricity.

Still, seeing it immediately made me think of Gibson's universe.

Putting this aside, there was something about the copious, overlapping loops of black exterior fibre, wrapped around and around the Openreach fibre splitter device, that made me curious. A bit of kneeling in the dirt let me identify the rogue fibre as being the property of Hyperoptic, a direct fibre provider in competition with BT Group's Openreach and various other internet access sub-brands. I'm sure a lot of readers will share my hallucination of the black coil of fibre trying to strangle the little grey plastic box, even though the relative sizes of the two companies would put the pressure the other way around.

The first thing to say about "sloppy" installations such as this is that this arrangement could sit there and work for the next half a century. It's on a pedestrian-only street, well sheltered from sun, rain and the risk of flooding.

It draws no power, by taking in a multicoloured fibre-based signal stream and using laws of physics perfectly familiar to Isaac Newton to break apart the rainbow and thereby represent the composite information stream as a spread of separate, monochrome signals.