The genius of the English was, for generations, that men (it was almost always men) would retire to their shed and make the future out of a few bits of bent metal, a couple of cogs, some string and a pot of grease. 

And hey presto, we had an industrial revolution that has lasted, in diminishing scale of global importance (but not in technological development), since the 16th century. 

They were backed by that most important part of any such enterprise, the wife: men were practical, women were intellectual and inquiring. That (for the people who think they are being revolutionary in arguing for it), is why more companies should engage more women - but not only boards, every level in the organisation. Not to cow to political pressure or even to make diversity a thing but because it's good for business. And, as we will see, it's good for society. 

Wives would say "it's lovely dear but what's it for?" The man would mumble, the wife would say "now take it off the tablecloth and wash your hands. Let's have a cup of tea while you tell me about it."

That's because, fundamentally, men are the bookends of humanity: practical on the one hand, dreamers on the other. 

Women, between those bookends, fundamentally, want to know that whatever it is will make their lives simpler, reduce their workload and will free them up to do some of the things they want to do which, usually, does not mean digging around in the dirt or spending half-an-hour each evening with Swarfega up to the elbows. 

So women ask the hard questions, men live their dreams. 

Will the drive to make more women take an interest in science, technology, engineering and maths change this? No. Or at least I hope not. 

I hope more women go into those areas and I hope they excel but I hope they excel by applying some form of retardation to the uncontrolled development of products which do not serve their fundamental objective: will it make lives simpler and reduce workload and make time available for other things? 

Or are we already lost in a world where the tech is the product, not the means to an end?

A washing machine makes our lives simpler and it reduces workload and it makes time available for other things. Washing machines are a huge improvement over my grandmother's weekly task of handwashing in a galvanised bath, with chemicals that burned her hands, boiling a kettle of water over a flame and using a washboard, only to have to wring out the washing by hand, a task alleviated when she moved into a house and found a mangle in the shed. Was it only my grandmother? No, my mother did the same and the first household aid she bought was a Service Spin Dryer. This is not ancient history, it's lived history and although I joke about it I'm not actually old. Just old enough.

These are the tests we should be applying to every technological development from pens to spaceships. 

We, as a species, need dreamers, we need people with big ideas because we need something to believe in and something to hope for. Tech is the new antidote to atheism. But we also need to recognise that we can get vicarious pleasure from someone else's dreams, we don't have to live in them. That's why we have cinema. It's why we used to stand, noses pressed to the glass, marvelling at a Jaguar E-Type in a showroom. When was the last time you saw a kid gazing lovingly at the kind of car he might realistically expect to own one day? 

Philosophers have long debated the question "Am I really here or am I really just living in someone else's dream"? Douglas Adams explained the argument in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Universe. Earth, he said, is actually run by and for the benefit of the mice who control everything while a chap called Slartibafast fashions planets in a great shed far, far away. Humans are dispensible and delusional - thinking they have any control over their lives in anything other than the minutest, immaterial, detail. 

We could argue for ever over randomness (and, just for the record, we should because randomness in the data swirl is what is quickly choking the concept of computerised KYC but no one wants to talk about that). 

The fact is that, today, all those dreamers do not, as my father and many others did, produce physical engineering or, as others did, chess pieces carved from a piece of wood found by the side of the road. 

No, the dreamers now are toolmakers and around the world millions are the toolmaker's sons, using technology to build a world that does not exist except inside a computer that does not dream, does not think, does not understand but which exercises delegated control over those of us who live in that imaginary world. 

Slartibarfast said "Perhaps I'm old and tired, but I think that the chances of finding out what's actually going on are so absurdly remote that the only thing to do is to say, "Hang the sense of it," and keep yourself busy. I'd much rather be happy than right any day."

I get that. Being right isn't all it's cracked up to be. Yesterday, I opened access to the latest iteration of my first website: countermoneylaundering.com and I am slowly migrating my articles from the previous version. 

The new blog section of the new site has a new banner: I've used a graphic of my eyes for long enough. 

The new banner reflects the reality: being right makes no difference if no one pays attention. 

www.countermoneylaundering.com

And that's the world we are living starting in the moment we turn on our computers (and don't be stupid, that thing in your hand you call a phone is the nth generation of a hand-held computer and if you think anything different you are deluding yourself. So is your "smart tv").

We are, albeit not in the way the philosophers thought, living in someone else's world. 

Paying for a cup of coffee has become a technological marvel. And your purchase is tracked because that's what Apps are really for. Where did you buy your coffee, what did it cost, will you give a review? 

Finding someone to go out with is a feat of algorithmic analysis and your preferences are tracked because that's the benefit the company sells - to match you with someone with particular interests (but only insofar as they write what you want to read). 

I have a shelf of cookery books, some 100 years old, and a stack of handwritten recipes but I still look up the internet when I want to get a guide as to how to do something (yesterday, it was black pudding. More on that another time). What did I find? Dozens of carefully "curated" entries manipulated by Search Engine Optimisation (aka SEO, with no punctuation because it confuses computers that aren't programmed to take account of it; most, seemingly, are not) and an algorithm that selects which I see and a computerised "AI" summary of dozens of those entries promoted as the optimum response to my query. 

When I ask for a supplier of x in postcode y, I do not want pages full of "the five best suppliers of x" within a 100 mile radius or, even, globally. I want the actual web address of an actual shop that I can walk to. The system is corrupted; whether it is also corrupt is open to debate. 

If the internet is a library, search engines are the supermarkets in some way induced to put a particular brand of toothpaste next to the till or on the end of an aisle. You end up not with what you want, nor with what you think is best: you end up with what someone else has chosen because it benefits them most. And because it's more convenient than making an actual decision.

Have you ever stood in front of the array of perhaps 30 different toothpastes, many in slight variants and different sizes, and given up, then just picked up the one that was easiest to reach? When research was produced showing that when faced with too much choice people are over-whelmed and just give up trying to assess the information they are presented with supermarkets began to reduce the variety of products sold but to increase the number of brands, sizes and versions. More choice results in poorly considered decisions. And who determines what those choices are? Why are there 15 different bottles of milk on display but no lactose free? And why are there 100 (I'm not joking) varieties of yoghurt but no goat's or sheep's yoghurt? 

Every aspect of our lives is now not merely infiltrated with someone else's ideas of what we should have, where we should be, how we should behave and even how we should think that the world we imagine we live in is no longer crafted by ourselves. 

Why else would the entire world be convinced that Scandinavian furniture design with beige walls is the perfect way to live? (ok, so that's an exaggeration but not by much). 

We are told, falsely, that technology is creating new frauds. It isn't. It's the same old frauds using a different presentation. But as the dismal sales of my book SAFE WORD: NO show, the world would rather look for technological, reactive, measures - which create benefits for advisers and tech companies but don't address the problem which is that technology has democratised the committing of crime and expanded the pool of potential victims. We should reach people before they become victims, but where's the profit in that? 

We thought the internet would take us to the world. Now it brings the world to us.

We loved the idea of the internet, when we were in at the beginning - it allowed those of us who bothered to learn how to use it to access markets of a size we could only dream of. But now blaggards and manipulators have access to thousands of millions of people - including you and me - and it costs them close to nothing. 

Search engines have become the equivalent of tour guides who recommend shops and restaurants in return for a kickback. I was once taken, without my consent, by a tuk-tuk driver in Bangkok to a warehouse. I'd asked to go to a specific silk shop but that was not where I was taken. The shop owner was delighted to see me. "It's the best silk", he said smarmily. It wasn't. It was polyester. "It's man made silk". 

Have you seen the imprecision of results in search engines these days? Search for "leather furniture" and listings are full of PU: fake leather. This is calculated to decieve. 

Such charlatans are everywhere: I've seen "sheep bacon" and "beef bacon" - often just listed as "bacon" in restaurants - and if you've tried to get proper Greek Yoghurt, genuine Feta or halloumi, you'll know what I mean. Huge global brands mislead us. A friend recently told me that his daughter is extremely allergic - EpiPen allergic - to all things coconut. She can't have ice cream any more, he said. I suggested he make his own, using the brand of whipped cream I've been using for decades. "It's just cream", I said. Then I checked: it's got all kinds of things in it now, including some that are in his list of things that are, sometimes but not always, made from coconut which is not a notifiable allergen. 

Misleading is now done on an industrial scale: from fake social media profiles to automated approaches for the purposes of fraud. 

I've a friend who has a long "relationship" with an extraordinarily beautiful, very young, entrepreneur from a family that is well off. He's even had online chats with her. "She's got a funny mouth," he said. He is under no illusions, he's just wasting the time he would, in other times, have spent in the shed, waiting to see what the eventual pitch is. 

We lauded the garagistas that turned into Lotus, McLaren and Williams, we loved the plucky little guys in the Cosworth hut, we even kowtowed to Aston Martin when it built its cars in a little warehouse with an amazingly dark pub over the road. They worked with hammers and spanners and jigs and welding torches, they sewed leather and bent tubes and used micrometers to check the tolerences inside the bits that screamed and made us smile. We liked Jaguar's Browns Road factory and my father's bus depots. We liked the fact that the buildings were, or were replicas, of industrial revolution architechture. 

Most of all, we knew what was being done in there and we knew that they wouldn't be engaged in a global fraud (despite the rumours about Colin Chapman and De Lorean) and we knew they would never turn up on our doorstep and tell us we have a leaky roof or send us a photo and say "I've seen your picture and I'm in love with you - send me money and I'll fly to you and make you happy."

We would not have been funnelled into the inevitability of that happening to us by someone else deciding that they will design and build tech that doesn't serve us but, rather, controls and manipulates what we see and then tells us whether our reactions are acceptable under some imprecise so-called "community guidelines." It's tech which facilitates, for profit, fraud, extortion and online child abuse, to name just three things. 

Here's a point: Da'esh managed a global campaign because internet companies included their output in search engines and they had access to potential victims through social media. (1)

During the Spanish Grand Prix a couple of days ago, Charles le Clerc said to his engineer "I'm too old for this. I need morphine."

He wasn't even in a car with various forms of "driver assistance" doing as it had been told by a faceless programmer in another country weeks, months or even years ago. Remote control in space and time.

He had control that is denied, in real life, to all of us all the time because of the technology built in coding warehouses and used by criminals. 

It's not true that the tech is the product. We, that's you and I, our loved ones and that girl down the road you'd like to ask out for coffee but an algorithm hasn't approved it, are the product, not for our own benefit, but for the benefit of someone controlling us from afar.

Squeak Squeak. 

There is no World Money Laundering Report Digest this week due to commitments to other projects. 

More on those as the week goes on. 

(1) The Ten Real Life Exploits that Da'esh/ISIS use to Hack the World

Images include computer generated images from various sources. 

Nigel Morris-Cotterill is at www.countermoneylaundering.com . 

Nigel Morris-Cotterill Author

Financial Crime Risk specialist. Author "SAFE WORD: NO" "How not to be a money launderer", "Understanding Suspicion in Financial Crime", "Cleaning up the 'Net", "Trade Based Financial Crime". Consult: Teach: Inform.