About the future

It is inevitable that the most perceptive prediction about the near future I’ve seen so far this year comes in the form of a meme. It’s also appropriate that I have no idea who created it, and rather piquant that, partly because of the technological and social changes it implies, hardly anyone under the age of 45 will get the joke.

About the singularity

(Note: Small Boo had these thoughts, not me. But she hasn’t got a blog, at least not that I know of.)

There’s an idea knocking about in the tech world called the singularity. Essentially, it’s the point at which artificial intelligence transcends human cognition, where machines become cleverer than brains. It’s long been assumed that the singularity, if it happens, will be a case of machines playing catch-up, of AI’s thinking power developing faster than that of homo sapiens. 

But then a news story broke a few days ago, about the budget airline RyanAir seeking to identify people travelling with fake South African passports by setting them a general knowledge test in Afrikaans. This has inevitably caused great offence as Afrikaans is still seen by many South Africans as the hated language of apartheid; but aside from the PR blooper, it’s a pretty pointless exercise, since only 13% of citizens speak the language – Zulu and Xhosa are more widespread. Add the fact that the questions on the test are littered with grammatical errors and it really looks as if some junior RyanAir apparatchik ran them through Google translate, operating on a vague memory that it’s one of the languages that they speak down there.

And the thought presents itself – could the singularity arrive as a result of AI standing still, while humanity’s intelligence declines to meet it?

The guilty bibliophile (TIMATOV)

Two or three years too late, I’ve just finished Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story. It’s set in a dystopic near future with the US economy on the verge of meltdown and picks up on some of the same concerns – such as the interconnection of fear and technology – that I addressed in my book about the Noughties. It also depicts an era where post-literacy is the norm; but rather than facing the legal sanctions under which readers operated in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, they have to cope with the more insidious pressure of social disapproval. Bibliophiles receive the same sort of treatment we mete out to smokers, languishing under a combination of contempt, pity and incomprehension, forced to spray their books with air freshener to disguise their defiantly analogue smell; normal people are instead in thrall to devices called äppärats, a sort of high concept smartphone that also communicates a user’s age, credit rating and sexual attractiveness. When the hapless hero Lenny Abramov explains that his precious books are in a building that’s been condemned, a surly, disgusted security guard responds, “I think I just refluxed my lunch.” Of course I’m on Lenny’s side in this fight. Although I have to admit, I read the novel on a Kindle. Does that make me a bad person?

PS: “TIMATOV”, one of the creative äppärat-based acronyms with which Shyengart peppers his text, means “Think I’m about to openly vomit”.

Editing: obsolescence and apathy

Every wage slave cowers under the cloud of potential obsolescence, the fear that changes in technology or economics or consumer behaviour will send us the way of chimney sweeps, tin miners, unicorn wranglers. You may be in some well established profession and think that we’ll always need doctors or accountants but are you sure? Are you really sure?

I work with words. It’s no secret that it’s become considerably harder in the past few years to make cash from writing alone; one EL James doesn’t make a boom. But I don’t just write; I also play with other people’s scribbles, cutting them down to size, shaving off any dangling participles, giving them a little something for the weekend. Even if writers can be persuaded to write for free, very few editors are willing to labour in tedious anonymity unless they’re offered a few shekels. So I was a little nervous when I heard about a software product called Grammarly, which claims to “check your writing for grammar, punctuation, style and much more”; and then relieved to read this piece in The Economist concluding that it’s a bit rubbish, really. Phew.

But of course it’s not technology that’s going to make editors obsolete. We rely not so much on the fact that we know what “literally” and “surreal” and “unique” and “disinterested” really mean, the difference between “which” and “that”, between “infer” and “imply”, where to place that pesky apostrophe; but on other people who don’t know these things, but want to look as if they do. At some point, though, they’ll realise that none of the readers know or care, so why should the writers? And once that happens, editors may as well learn how to sweep chimneys.

I’m looking over the Wall and they’re looking at me

Yesterday, Small Boo bought one of those sparky thingummybobs that you use to light a gas hob when the built-in ignition’s gone wrong and you don’t want to get someone to come in and fix it because they’ll see how mucky your oven is. It’s called a Robotron, and perusal of the packaging informs us that it was made in the GDR. Which ceased to exist in 1990. Everything was the future once, including this:

wwwaugh

Whenever anybody asks, and often when they don’t, I declare that my favourite book is Vile Bodies, by Evelyn Waugh (1930). That said, I hadn’t actually read it since some time in the last millennium, and my battered orange-and-cream copy is currently hiding in a box somewhere in the south of England. So when I noticed it – an American edition from 1977 with a cover in that retro style that’s supposed to bring to mind the glamour of the inter-war years but really makes us think of the Gatsby movie with Redford and Farrow, and thus the 1970s – in a second-hand bookshop the other day, it just had to be mine.

I was dreading it not being as good a read as I’d remembered (although I might have explained that as a case of me being a better reader) but it’s held up remarkably well. Some of the scenes, such as Agatha’s appearance in the breakfast room of 10 Downing Street, remain laugh-out-loud funny, and plenty of Waugh’s sardonic little phrases still work their magic.

But one thing that I’d completely forgotten was Waugh’s own preface:

The action of the book is laid in the near future [which means that Cold Comfort Farm took even more tips from VB than I realised when Patroclus finally persuaded me to read it], when existing social tendencies have become more marked; I have postulated no mechanical or scientific advance, but in the interest of compactness and with no pretensions to prophecy, I have assumed a certain speeding up of legal procedure and daily journalism. In the latter case I have supposed a somewhat later hour for going to press and a greater expedition in distribution than is now generally the case.

Evelyn Waugh, it seems, invented Twitter.

I ♥ Herod

So this is the future:



The Midwich Cuckoos with marketing diplomas and a serious sense of entitlement.

D’oh!

So, is The Book As We Know It dead?