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.

The Algorithm of Self Destruction

If you catch a mainline train out of St Pancras, after 10 minutes or so, and shortly before you cross the M25, you may notice an industrial looking building on the left hand side. Travelling north just before Christmas I spotted it and, infused no doubt with seasonal spirit, read its name as “Turkey Lighting Solutions”. Which got me thinking. Do turkeys do much reading? Why do they need lighting? Are they afraid of the dark? Does enhanced lighting make it easier to cull them ready for a festive lunch? Or (alternative train of thought), why should a company on the fringes of north London be catering to the illuminative requirements of the good citizens of Istanbul or Ankara?

I remained puzzled until January, when on a subsequent trip I realised I had misread the sign. Actually it said “Turnkey Lighting Solutions”. Ah ha, I love those sort of names. My genre favourites include “Domestic Water Solutions” (wonder what they dissolve it in?) and “Granite Solutions” (gravestones). Mm, a tough one that - perhaps something involving hydrofluoric acid. Anyway, “Turnkey Lighting Solutions”. So, I thought, at last, someone has invented the light switch, or something close to it. They’ve solved that age-old problem. Not so much a light bulb moment as a light switch moment. Ta da !

Just in time, it seems, for last week I was told the cautionary tale of a lady going to visit a relative in another part of the country. At the time she was due to arrive she knew the house would be empty, but she had a key so she could let herself in. The problems – she feared - would start when she came to switch on the lights. No switches, just a beeping gadget sulking in the corner. “Dalek” (or whatever its stupid name was), she would have to address it, abruptly having to overcome a sense of absurdity and self-consciousness borne of a lifetime of being sensible, “switch on the light !” She knew she would feel much happier with “Exterminate ! Exterminate !” but apparently that is now deemed to be a politically incorrect command inflected with an ageist subtext. You aren’t allowed to say it this week. Well then, no switch. No flip of the finger. Just the gadget. No manual override. Here goes …. If she gets the pronunciation right (luckily she’s not Scottish or a Brummie) there will be light. If not, not. Oh, the suspense …

No override. This is where the theme suddenly lurches from farce to deadly serious. Dim hallways are rarely fatal. If it takes you a minute or two to work out how to switch on the lights you’re probably going to survive the inconvenience. If you’re in an aircraft determined to nosedive into the ground with 157 people on board just six minutes after take-off, you’re probably not going to survive at all. I wouldn’t wish to pre-judge the results of the enquiries into the Boeing 737 Max 8, or exploit a tragedy for comic effect, but it rather looks as though an insuppressible piece of software “trying to be clever” was the cause of the Ethiopian Airlines crash near Addis Ababa last Sunday, and of the Lion Air crash in Indonesia last October.

The Germans have a wonderful word, Verschlimmbesserung, which means an improvement that makes things worse. I don’t know if the Germans have another word meaning “what a ridiculously long word - I wonder how you’re supposed to get your teeth round it?”, but they aren’t stupid, and neither (allegedly) is Donald Trump, who tweeted a remark about planes getting too complicated. Bang on, Donald (allegedly). It isn’t just aircraft, though, it’s potentially most of our lives that are getting stupidly and pointlessly complicated, with “improvements” that in a very short time will make life not just worse, but almost impossibly tedious. What were for most of civilised human existence trivially simple, instantaneous, automatically performed actions will now take hours, genius-level IQs, training courses, feasibility studies, and therapies for PTSD.

A simple flick of the forefinger and the light goes on or off. Easy. No, sorry, not any more, the server has gone down - and anyway, a spotty oik six thousand miles away is having a bit of a laugh on his pizza-encrusted cliché, so you’ll have to sit in the dark. And don’t even think of trying to make a cup of tea. It’s called progress, you see. Anyway, never mind, are you sure you’ve signed up for the introductory sessions on how to switch on the telly? No? Oh dear. You’ll probably be needing a dalek, then, to do it for you. We’ll arrange a course for you so you can find out how to order one. Er, not quite sure what we do as regards arranging courses …

We love progress, don’t we. Progress can be extremely helpful. Indeed, there’s quite a strong argument that it should be. SatNav is progress – it’s just that if you rely on it all the time you’ll never learn your way around. Smartphones are progress, so long as you look where you’re going. Google Translate is progress, but it will do little to encourage you to master another language. Calculators are progress, so long as you don’t have to rely on them to work out how much two items from Poundland are going to set you back. Predictive testicle is progress too. So are spell chequers. Google itself is progress, although if you seriously don’t know what you would do without it, it has become self-harming, it has won and, basically, you’re stuffed.

The algorithms are in place, not to mention the innate laziness, to reduce us all to drooling imbeciles within no time at all, if we allow it to happen. Or hurl us to the ground. A once noble species destroyed by algorithms. What a shame, Homo sapiens had so much going for it.

 
Currently I’m reading Franklin Foer’s “World Without Mind” (Vintage, 2018;  £9.99 from Waterstone’s).