Blade Runner 2017

Just watched Blade Runner (2017) it being forty years and a generation on from Ridley Scott’s original (1982); a great opportunity to observe our cultural changes. Be prepared; it’s not good. The original was a complex, hazy, an amazing visually articulate story that shared its search for a meaning with its audience. It was daring, bold and confident. The second Blade Runner is none of these; it’s a pleaser. The story was un-discernable, the dialogue mumbled and the acting inert, until Harrison Ford appeared, a human being shining amongst a cast of replicants. That’s why I’m writing this. Forty years on and the replicants are making the film to please a replicant public. We don’t have a discernable story, we aren’t daring or confident, we exist amongst mumbled facts and none facts until all about us is a sea of fiction. Our only much reduced imperative is to personally choose what we wish to believe. Our future is not a competition with a corporate biomechanical replicant manufacturer but an all pervasive insitu cognitive conversion into its equivalent. The allegory that was the first has become the reality of the second give or take beautiful destruction and overly loud background noise. “These aren’t your memories, they’re implants, they were created by a New York advertising exec, chosen for you by a Face Book algorithm.” And now in 2022, “You have shone so very brightly, but a candle that burns twice as bright lasts half as long,” and it’s all catching up with us. But luckily Blade Runner (2017) hasn’t pleased, it being on TV three years after its launch. Maybe it was just ill made, or maybe it’s a reflection so true we hardy see it. The credits lasted minutes listing thousands; it was obviously perfectly made. But then you wouldn’t expect anything less from a replicant.

Who Hates Algorithms now (a tale)

You could say it started in ‘95 with ‘Six Degrees’. Social media has come a long way since then, and selling personal information has made many rich people. Most of us begrudge them but that’s how it played out. That is until 2025. An equally young and ambitious person, JC to his friends, took a different tack. He bought a small amount of this collected information and processed it through a different algorithm with one simple task, to deduce a person’s net worth. It became a party trick. JC would amaze his friends. In public they would laugh but later in private ask, “How did you do that?” It proved amazingly accurate. He began writing more software. It became what we now know as the JC quotient, a number belonging to each social media user. He expanded this into software that takes the product’s bar code and calculates the price. He wrote his infamous book, 'A Basis for Variable Price structuring.'. People laughed, became apoplectic, it’s unnatural, it would bring down society, it’s social prejudice, communist, it’s a joke. After the brouhaha died down he offered the software to a few corner shops and it made the news again. ‘Shops that sell at different prices’. They were glad of the publicity and proudly defended their right to sell to poor people at a discount. Those against it with more money to spend only made matters worse. ‘A price is a price and I’m damn sure I’m not going to pay more just because I’m wealthy! If they’re too stupid they’ll just have to do without.’ And conversely, ‘Why shouldn’t they, they can afford it.’ The argument raged but slowly the less well off, being in the majority, began to win it. The breakthrough came when one major supermarket eager for the trade adopted JC’s system. One by one the dominoes dropped. Fairly soon even Lamborghini dealerships were selling the same car for $5m or $50,000 depending on who you were. Sure on paper they made losses and gains but it all evened out thanks to the JC quotient. When it was universally accepted because, thanks to the JC quotient there was a little more taxable profit in it, there was nowhere to go. If you were a squillionaire sprouts cost $50 a pound take it or leave it. The same with restaurants, and you’ve got to eat. OK JC made millions out of it but he was happy to pay the $50.

Tis the Season.

Off in our Christmas masks to get the Christmas turkey listening to a Christmas choir on Classic FM in Daisy, everything prefixed with the C word, tree, cake, Christmas TV, Christmas fork, Christmas bloody broken pencil and the Biro that ran out in September that everyone dutifully puts back in the kitchen pot. We sing along to a carol so nondescript any note, any word will do, and test this proposition to within an inch of its life; respectfully though because it’s, er, Christmas. “Don’t let him in!” A little Fiesta is nosing with intent. Mock road rage is one of Mothermouse’s favourite delights. Now Tchaikovsky, which for some reason is always Christmasy even if it is depicting the fall of Stalingrad to the Boshcovites. “He’s going too fast, ahah, twat. This is boring.” She turns to Sheffield FM. A plink plonk band of happy brass; we join in again with mouth noises. Age has brought us this gift of stupidity. It’s the gateway to a glorious intuitive improv, a freeing of one’s spirit from the mundanity of being responsible. “Ha ya bastard” I intone, “Where did that come from?” “Don’t know, I think I was being a pirate.” “Jesus fucking Christ what’s he doing?!” A man has seized the opportunity to exit a side road on our right, cross in front of us and exit stage left down a filter. “Well he was..” “Move up, close the gap, that’ll stop the other buggers.” We cross the lights and continue home discussing how lucky we are.

AI in Battle.

The current Reith Lectures on BBC Sounds by top AI (English) guy at Berkley focuses on its killing potential. Drones the size of a shoe polish tins, (surely shoe polish went extinct in the sixties with Brill Cream), can search a crowd for a particular faces and shoot them between the eyes like a swarm of killer bees. 4 in a purse, 150 in a suitcase, thousands in a container etc. Plate sized ones can take out a tank. English Berkley man drones on about the ethics of autonomous AI warfare and the difficulty of getting governments to sign up to a banning treaty. Unfortunately countries that already have them are sanguine about the whole thing: Sod the others. He foresees AI running amok at the human race’s expense. But lets just think about this for a moment. Molière ~1650 is famous for a play about a man with a complaint visiting various doctors. Curiously each doctor has the precise expertise to cure him. So maybe Al English isn’t the perfect guy to think about these things. Unless we’ve been getting it wrong for centuries the old adage is ‘first shoot the guy who’s shooting at you’, and I’m sure AI would figure this out in nanoseconds. ‘Screw facial recognition that tin’s trying to kill me!’ Killer bee shoe polish tins will be falling out of the sky like rain and you’ll be quite safe unless the one or two left over has your face in its memory banks. Then there’s ‘close the window’ or put on glasses and false teeth. It all becomes the Vintage Guess Who Board Game 1979 MB Games, ebay, £18.99. Or ‘they’ might decide to wipe out the Pentagon with a dinner plate, which of course would be empty, its previous inhabitants holed up under a disused petrol station in Montana. Basically unless you kill indiscriminately, another old adage of warfare, you’re not going to get anywhere. Humans will be quite safe as our AI fights their AI because we’re too slow, too big, too weak, can’t fly and are comparatively stupid. In Star Wars nobody ever considers the design and engineering effort, the mountain of resources and raw materials used to build the Death Star, just think of the wiring loom! Not to mention the meticulous selfless training of Star Troopers willing to die in their thousands for a cause they never question so long as they get the overtime. Maybe the upshot will be us humans will realise we’re just another animal like all the rest but with a hyper active brain complaint, and that won’t be such a bad thing.

The Present Crisis.

Well it’s that time of year again when Baby Jesus threatens us with the curse of not buying a present for someone who’s bought you one, and single handedly keeps the toy industry buoyant. How did the joy of giving and receiving become contorted by some evil fairy into the misery of not getting what you want and a general anxiety of looking at your January bank statement? But I can’t complain. Being a retired toy designer Father Christmas has paid my family bills for the last forty years. And I’m renowned for my lack of largess when it comes to presents. I don’t understand them. I’ve just bought a replacement hot-end cooling fan for my 3D printer and who would have bought me that? And I want it asap not weeks away. And conversely how might I know Mothermouse wants a jar of ‘Make me look beautiful’ skin moisturiser? OK she told me that weeks ago in passing, but how am I supposed to remember details like that? So, thinking I’m on a sure thing, I might get here a bumper 48 box of Rizla liquorice papers only to hear, ‘well that’s not a present/ but you need them/ exactly, that’s why it’s not a present.’ When Ben, aged six at the time, excitedly opened a box of magic tricks I eagerly joined in, as a father should, and explained how to do them. He burst out crying, threw them across the room and said, “That’s not magic!!” No it’s not Ben, it’s a bloody minefield. Last Christmas I got a cup with a thoughtfully place biscuit pocket on one side. Overlooking the fact one rarely puts a rich tea down once the dunking’s begun I’m left handed. Fail. I could buy Mothermouse a book as I know she loves to read. Have you seen how many books there are!!!! OK she may have mentioned Ore Oduba’s autobiography on the 14th September but I’d forgotten how to spell his name in the second’s transition from the internet back to this doc. My finest present hour was, I still remember it like it was yesterday. A young lady relation, I suspect a kindred spirit, needed a gift. My then wife was appalled,”You can’t give her that!” I wrapped it fearing the worst and sent it. She was overjoyed, best present ever, she loved it. A rubber chicken. You figure it out.