A Feline Cliffhanger.

Time was me and Mothermouse as the dominant species fed the cats, plus the crows, pigeons, squirrels, hedgehogs and other small birds visiting our back garden. That was how it should be. Lately though by the looks of things the cats or rather one of them has taken on the role of sub feeder. It’s difficult to know which one exactly. Britney has the intelligence but not a maternal bone where Betty has the neurosis and a vestigial motivation to snuggle up with Dave and smell his bottom. Anyway one of them has taken to placing a small woollen toy with ears and eyes in a feeding bowl presumably in the hope of rearing it. Granted the bowl was always empty but then as a responsible parent one must always feed first in order to continue one’s caring responsibilities. Nevertheless there it was three or four times carefully placed in a bowl. Until, as is often the case, the maternal instinct failed in the face of a night time feed not going to plan. In the morning the said woollen toy was de-stranded on the dining room carpet like the remains of a jet plane hitting a hillside. Strands of orange wool all over the place in no particular order. End of cat toy number 1. A week went by. A grey material blob of a toy with arms and legs, god knows what it’s supposed to be, appeared in a bowl last Sunday. But this is made of sterner stuff, fabric sewn together in an unknown Indonesian factory by an unknown Indonesian factory worker brought into this world to make indefinable cat toys. What will be its fate? Will the maternal instinct win out? Or will the teeth and claws of Betty, we think it’s Betty, cause another infanticide? It’s a right cliff-hanger. 

Get Your Finger Out.

At the risk of repeating myself Therapy Today is the BACP monthly journal for therapists. BACP stands for British Acronym Creation Program. If you’re no good at redacting words to letters or reversing the process it’s a difficult read. It always reminds me of the gold rush where hard working diggers and sifters are fleeced of any profits by ancillary providers. In this case room renters, insurance brokers and course providers. With twenty pages of these to two of jobs it’s clear where the opportunities lie. Simply think up a new acronym and create a training course for it. As an off the cuff example; Integrative Trans-anything Co-anything Counselling. Maybe the difference is an ITCC course to twenty people can earn considerably more than providing counselling to one. And as the general public would far rather shell out for the latest Sky package as a route to happiness than contemplate self examination with a stranger a counsellor’s incomings are unlikely to cover their outgoings. But there’s a new hopeful helper born every minute, and there’s a mysterious kudos to counselling. According to some eminent therapist, Fritz Pearls or Rogers or someone, we aren’t very good at it, our understated British reserve not having the necessary cutting edge. A friend was accompanied by a Slovakian colleague on a visit to a depressed guy. Where Suzymouse went the positive encouragement route the Slovakian gently explained he had no friends, was lazy, didn’t go out and smelt, and was making no effort to change things. Though lacking in positivity at least it gave him something to think about. GYFFO counselling. I have just the course. 

Human Artificial Intelligence.

A Japanese woman demonstrated an AI robot that could easily pass an entrance exam to a top university. She wasn’t excited as you might expect but worried because she knew her robot had zero understanding of what it was doing. It simply looked words up in Wikipedia, statistically analysed related words and chose the highest probability answers. That’s basically what all AI does. Though it can analyse language a thousand times faster than a human it doesn’t ‘read’ its meaning it runs maths on the words as simply numerical values. Now I passed a similar exam and went to uni. I spent three years learning maths and physics and got a degree. So far so good. Then I went into industry and quickly learnt I didn’t know a thing. I had artificial intelligence. Luckily I had acquired experience and cunning elsewhere and quickly assimilated the two into useful real intelligence but many, often those who got good degrees, persisted with their version of AI and though they got good jobs they didn’t often move things forward. They only knew how to think inside the box. (think Rick Astley compared to Queen, Michael Jackson or the Beatles) The corollary of the above demonstration is that our current form of education is teaching kids to achieve what artificial intelligence can do a thousand times better, i.e. regurgitate facts and choose the right tick box. We’re teaching our kids to come a distant second to a laptop. Already algorithms and AI are being used to coerce us mere humans into doing their will, well the will of their owners, and it can’t be long before their owners are relying in them coerce themselves. For what it’s worth learn to think upside-down. Take a problem or a set of facts and turn them upside-down, throw them up in the air and see how they land like a snow globe. Put together unrelated facts, an unrelated use, a different material over and over till an answer appeals. AI can’t do that because it doesn’t understand. 

Remembering Tommy.

1969, I was twenty six sharing a flat with Sam Wanamaker’s daughter in Highgate, babysitting little sister Zoe and dating their Swiss au pair Anne Marie. And The Who released Tommy. Later at the famous London folk club, Les Cousins, the guy singing was wailing about his ex, Cherry, who was, well sitting next to me. Looking back it was verging on the exotic but at the time it was just life. And I listened to Tommy. And that line, “See me,    feel me,    touch me,    heal me” reverberated in my emotional space like the tingle of a feather touching my own deaf, dumb and blind kid. Not of course in the usual sense but somewhere I knew life was at arms length even though I was in the midst of it. I was immersed but not getting wet. I’ve recognised that distance time and time again from some fear, some impinging belief, some involving abstraction, always knowing a closer connection was possible. And listening to Tommy somehow summed this all up and gave a lift to the possibility, that is until some toe rag broke into my flat and stole it. This is The Who playing it live in Los Angeles in 1989, one amazing hour of musicianship. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dX0fOyoyOlE Art is always elusive and the narrative of Tommy is no exception. It’s confusing because to the deaf, dumb and blind their processes of understanding cannot reach it. It exists as a flavour, a taste, a blurred emotion, as conflicting images that in seeing resolve themselves, in hearing make sense without understanding. Much later in therapist training we tried to unravel the processes of damage, of help, of resolution and sure there are endless books on the subtle mechanics of it all but for me at least in the end it comes down to art and the reckless rock and roll energy of Tommy, “See me,    feel me,    touch me,    heal me”.

Artificial Progress.

It can’t have been lost on future entrepreneurs that with the advent of robots, AI etc the market for their new gizmos will be for ever diminishing because there’ll be fewer and fewer people employed and able to pay for them, and computers and robots have no need of products aimed at human beings only an adequate supply of electricity. Already a growing proportion of society is influencing the market to make cheaper and cheaper products because they can’t afford quality on account of being unemployed or on minimum wage. At times it seems our best efforts are aimed at designing ourselves out of the loop. No need for the butcher, baker and candlestick maker when you can buy six Mr Kipling apple pies for 80p made by the thousand in a massive machine a kilometre long with two operatives on a zero hours contract. When AI can design the machines, CAD can machine them, computers can control them and big data can find the one remaining person with enough money to buy one one begins to see the fault in the logic. It’s rather like the new self guided personal drone transporters that look a great idea when viewing the grid locked traffic from above but forward twenty years and the aerial chaos will be horrendous. And it’s the same with AI itself. Anyone who’s every used a computer will attest to the absolute and total arrogance of anything digital. Miss out a nondescript semicolon or forward slash and no amount of swearing and threats will cause it to change its mind. Turning the bloody things off and on again may work in binary but for humans it’s tantamount to a near death experience. So for any AI experts out there remember if you finally reach you goal of true human intelligence all you’ll achieve is, well true human intelligence and consider where that’s got us. And remember unintended consequences only occur when you’re operating at the level of a ten-year-old boy who thinks playing cricket in a greenhouse is a brilliant idea. It’s not a brilliant idea. 

Neoliberalism and Guns.

Just read a squillion words about Hayek and neoliberalism. I’ll simplify using firearms. Once guns were the province of kings and governments for use in wars. In the UK at least society at large didn’t have them, being too expensive or restricted by law, moral values and common sense concluding they were harmful to social well-being. Hayek argued that this arbitrary restriction was unnecessary in that every individual would of his own volition regulate the marketplace in firearms. When morality held sway his ideas were laughed at but as pseudo economics gained prominence moral values, being not numerically quantifiable, could be dismissed as mere opinion. The marketplace, as the product of all minds, would more perfectly reflect human activity and aspirations than any government. Thatcher and other political leaders commenced deregulation. The market place in firearms grew as people took advantage of their newfound freedom, the economy prospered and explosives manufacturers made healthy profits. People wishing to better themselves exchanged their handguns for automatic weapons and grenades and the wealthy for tanks and rocket launchers etc. Manufacturers promoted their use to settle neighbourly disputes and resolve differences of opinion. Comparethemarket.com showed tables of firepower, accuracy and speed. This economic boom created a new wealthy set that was armed to the teeth and unassailable. Even the government couldn’t control them. The poor soon found guns didn’t solve anything and reverted to moral values but were dismissed as irrelevant losers, though they still secretly hankered for a guided missile of their own. There ensued a great divide in wealth, firepower and morality.

Hayek’s grand plan had a basic fault. He failed to account for a variance in integrity. Some would approach the marketplace honourably and some with various amounts of self-interest and duplicity. The latter would gain sway due to their lack of honesty and distort the market towards the baser traits of human nature in effect forming a negative feedback loop. Good will would equate to failure. Given time an unregulated marketplace will inevitably support and empower the most morally corrupt. It will corrode human interactions and thus harm the common good. Who knows what will happen when I get my AK47 off ebay. 

Not Watching Phantasmagoria.

Just bumped into Jackson Oz an Americanzoologist, Abraham his Kenyan safari friend, a Los Angeles reporter, a quirky veterinary pathologist and a French intelligence agent in ‘Zoo’, a CBS drama about an army of genetically modified kids taking on animal powers, imagine teeth, claws and super senses, and attacking us generic humans. What will they do? I’ll never know, I turned it off. There seems a lot of this high quality phantasmagoria around, weeks of the stuff going direct to TV from Netflicks, Sky etc. I turned it off because it was virtually indistinguishable from news footage and factual documentaries. It began to worry me that my donkey brain might at some future moment conflate this ‘Zoo’ with a News at Ten report about Nigerian immigrants and conclude AlQuida are actually a genetically modified sub race created by Mosad to enlarge Israel to include North Africa, India and most of New York state. In other words I will begin to believe everything and nothing is or isn’t true. And in other other word lose all sense of what I know and either become malleable to the propaganda of the loudest voice or not trust my own senses to do anything about it even if I don’t believe it. Is Netflicks an arm of the KGB, is Donald Trump an Umpalumpa? See what I mean, you don’t really know do you? So I’m not going to watch any of it. I recon when the shit hits the fan they’ll need people like me who can still glimpse the real world. (and put up guttering)