Mr Hanbury the Gardener

I’ve been reading Paul Mason’s “Clear Bright Future”, sub-titled “A Radical Defence of the Human Being”, which rails against the use of technology, in particular artificial intelligence, to modify our species into something less than human. These are developments of the technologies already used to help maintain regimes whose leaders are so (justifiably) afraid of their citizens and their thoughts that they seek to monitor and control them, denying them the sorts of freedoms we take for granted here in the UK – even the restricted freedoms we have during the current lockdown. It’s a stark warning, but the book offers grounds for optimism. As I do here. If what follows is random, wacky and absurd, fine, that’s part of the argument.

  

There are some things that artificial intelligence can’t achieve, and knowing this with total certainty makes me extraordinarily happy. Transhumanists and posthumanists be damned; Kurzweilian singularity freaks, off with you to the exquisite corner of hell awaiting you. You won’t catch me with your human life extinction-promoting algorithms; I’ve no wish to be “smarter”, thank you very much, just more human.

No automated system would ever “think” to create what follows, simply because there’s no point. Many of the greatest human activities have no point to them; when we get pointy we get dangerous. Which – to put it bluntly - is kind of the point I want to make here. AI would never in an infinity of universes come up with this: 

Mr Hanbury the gardener

“It’s Mr Hanbury the gardener”

Said Baldy in the teeming bus

As we sped into the moody twilight

Tired and worked out of tune

Uncaring, Thursday, and Clean

But Mr Hanbury cared

Stepping back into the bus shelter where the dual carriageway begins

Dirty, with grizzled hair, he scowled

At two black blazer schoolboys waiting there also

“I think I’ve messed myself” he growled

Disappeared into the shelter’s humic depths

To busy himself with a pipe in a pocketful of rosecuttings

And faecal incontinence

The schoolboys giggled hatefully and free

Mr Hanbury scowled again encopretically

His shopping bag was zipped

Heavy with vicious turds and the remains of lunch

“Damn, it’s slipped again”

Knee deep in the shelter

“Damn there goes another bus”

“Damn Damn Damn”

“Damn it’s all over the dual carriageway”

Never in a squillion years, never again, will anything remotely like that be composed, by man, machine, Schrödinger’s Cat, or anything in between. Mine alone, forever unique, absolutely unpredictable and unrepeatable. Post-human programming I refute you thus, with a bagful of squashed turds. And just to rub it in, I’m not even sure that Mr Hanbury – a name with remotely ripperish and pharmaceutical connotations - was a gardener. Or even that he was Mr Hanbury.

We still have choice, we still have the upper hand. In the meantime, with this viral imprisonment going on week after week, perhaps I should point out in self defence that if you didn’t go mad occasionally you’d go mad. So, do go mad, just a little, but stay safe.