Alternative Boris Response.

“The gatherings referred to by the opposition as boozy parties did occur and I was present. I sanctioned them for respite from months of hard work and long days. Work that didn’t make the news, isn’t glorious but has been none the less vital and stressful. Even in No10 moral needs to be maintained. To set these events against the anguish and sorrow of people dying unable to be with their loved ones is to set up a surreal Punch and Judy show, a cartoon black and white picture of good and bad that is not the case. The opposition and the media make me extremely angry and frankly disgusted by people who choose to capitalise on this spurious juxtaposition for personal gain. Would you begrudge a doctor after a 12 hours shift having a pint with his fellow colleagues or a nurse sharing her stress with friends? No. We all have stress after two long years of this life changing pandemic. My team at No10 is no different and I make no apology for these events. These are my views and I will gladly continue or resign on the basis of them.” Boris’s actual speech and demeanour was very different. He seems unable to respond in anything other than what he learnt as a pupil caught smoking behind the bike sheds. First deny knowing anything, then deny being there, then suggesting it was some sort of misguided lung experiment and finally a pathetic apology based on a bigger boy making him do it. Boris is unfit for office not because of these meeting but because he hasn’t progressed from the age of twelve, where ‘his truth’ is telling you what he’d like you to believe. He hasn’t the courage to be honest or the guts and guile to fight his corner. He is not an adult.

The Offer. (a tale)

James demonstrated on a dummy head. “the two sensors either side of the temple by the hair line define a position in the brain, the left scans vertically and the right horizontally. Where they cross indicates the position of a single synapse firing. Three point triangulation isn’t necessary as each scan defines a line on its plane synchronous to the firing” and the machine works at 20 Mhz, fast enough to capture each firing discretely.” Gareth was amazed, “You can do that!?” “Well the brain is pretty slow compared with modern electronics. So the coordinates are logged as a succession of events that we can plot in 3D here.” The screen showed a crazy zigzag trace. “We can slow it down and run a video. Here a guy is recognising a cat. You can see the activity in this area, which stops and those two areas begin doing something else, possibly memories and feelings for other cats, that sort of thing.” “Wow.” “Before we could see activity but nowhere near in this detail.” “That’s amazing.” “Well that’s just the beginning. By exposing a subject to a wide range of stimuli we’re beginning to piece together the subject’s general processing synapse by synapse.” “So put those things on me and you’ll know.. “ “No, no. Experience is built individually. One subject’s patterning will be quite different to another's, but we can see many processing similarities. Here for example the subject is remembering a cat, imagining or drawing a cat. That synapse cluster is used in all of these, perception, memory, imagination and most probably dreams. It’s the go to cluster for anything cats. It also shows there's no difference between them, just one real-time process that does them all.” "You mean we don't actually remember things?" "Well there's no such thing as a fixed data bank we can refer to. We just piece together a narative from snippets like this cat cluster into something acceptable to our real time processing." “So what are you going to use all this for? AI or something.” “No we’re not interested in alien world domination.” “But it could?” “Most definitely. No, we’re interested in human intelligence. You see human cognition, though it is quite amazing and the brain even more so considering it size and power requirements, is flawed. Well not flawed exactly, rather there are many ways it can lead us astray. Good thinking is achieved rarely and after much work and experience. Our aim is to expand good thinking into the larger population.” “You’re going to tell us what to think?” “God no.” “Well that’s what it sounds like to me.” “No. We will be able to identify destructive patterns of thought that lead to unhappiness, anger, depression, violence etc. So many people are… “ “That’s control; it’s getting into people’s heads.” “But people go to therapists and get relief.” “That’s different.” “Would you rather we use it for AI then?” “Absolutely. That way ‘it’ will get super intelligent and we’ll be able to use it, learn from it.” “And it won’t control you?” “No, why should it? It’ll just be a tool like social media.” “But is that what you really want? Wouldn’t you rather learn how to think well for yourself?” “No, I think perfectly well as I am thank you.”

Still Playing the Drums?

On my afternoon constitutional; down Frazer, along Archer, through the woods by the railway line and back along Abby lane I was hailed by a friend I hadn’t seen in ages. In my defence constitutionals are meditative, moments where one’s mind flits around the universe of time and experience like a pinball satellite, and definitely not impending dementia that’s been impending since I was fifteen if not earlier. A woman with man attached was asking how I was. I landed on the nearest planet and in an effort to prove I did remember asked, “Still playing the drums?” She said no. Assuming she had relinquished the pursuit I commiserated. “No, no I’ve never played the drums. Oh this is my husband.” I smiled with a friendly nod but obviously didn’t disguise the fact he was definitely not the man my friend was last with. From there on he seemed to view me with some sort of suspicion. “St Wilfred's” she explained. Ah! And as if by magic I was terrestrial again. “Ah now I know exactly who I thought you were, you know the one who played the drums.” In retrospect this didn’t allay suspicions. Did I now know who ‘she’ actually was? and had his wife led a secret life playing the drums with a likeable guitarist? Of course I did and she hadn’t but clarification wasn’t exactly clarified. Well after our subsequent conversation I can now clarify that she is a very lovely person that I do know who lives with her husband in a house by the red car and quite probably doesn’t know that Pina, who did and now possibly doesn’t play the drums ever existed. And if you’re still confused, welcome to my world.

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.