“When I was your age I used to think I knew everything. It wasn’t until I was 21 that I knew I knew everything”.
Daddy
I met a funny sort of chap recently when I was up in Scotland to see my sisters for Christmas. Let’s call him Stanley because a) he can then keep his anonymity and b) I can’t remember his name.
I’m shocking with names. Numbers no problem. Phone numbers, bank codes, birthdays, no sweat, but names?
“Hi, My name is Janet”.
Blank look. “Oh Hello….erm….hello”
My favourite hello? “Oh, hello you! how are you?”. I’ve been known to text people during a conversation with someone, just to get the name of the person I am talking to.
So, back to Stan.
Dan is a Yank. My sister Shannon(?) tells me, he originally came over on vacation about 10 years ago, when he stumbled across some Neolithic stone monuments called Cairn Holy, near Creetown in South West Scotland. There are actually two monuments; Cairnholy 1 & 2. By all accounts, they were constructed in the 4th millennium BC, so they are impressively old.
Cairn Holy Monument – South West Scotland
The picture right is a picture I took of one of these monuments as the sun was setting. A miniature Scottish Stonehenge if you will. But the setting, atop lowland hills, with forever views south over Wigtown Bay towards the Irish Sea, would stir the poetry in the soul of any Celt and, frankly, leaves Stonehenge in the dirt.
I’m not going to provide a history or indeed any insight on these monuments, that’s not the point of this article. In fact, you can’t walk two steps without tripping over a stone circle or a druid in Scotland. If you are interested to find out more about Cairn Holy though, then you might want to take a look at Historic Environment Scotland’s website.
No, I am much more interested in Frank’s story. You see Frank never left. Something touched him all those years ago when he visited this ancient ruin. Something spiritual. So he and his wife stayed and moved into a cottage across the valley that overlooks Cairn Holy, and he has been there ever since. Isn’t that odd?
It is odd, but it’s also amazing. My sister told me he wasn’t retired or anything when he chose to stay. He just stopped doing whatever it was he was doing and started going to look at these stones. Every day! For ten years!
As I said, I met him the day we went to see Cairn Holy. We were just having a touristy look and he comes striding across the field toward the Stones (or Stanes as a Scot would call them). He was a little dishevelled and was somewhat ruddy of complexion, no doubt from years spent at the Stones in howling winds and driving rain. He had a grey beard. My sister introduced us and we exchanged pleasantries, but I could tell that Dan was distracted. The sun was setting and he needed to pay attention. He started measuring the length of the shadows cast by the erect stones.
“So what do you think is going on here Jack?” I asked. He stopped and came up close.
“First Answer? I don’t know. Second Answer? Everything!”
He turned and returned to his pre-dusk ritual. As I watched him scurry about amongst the stones, clearly old friends, it occurred to me that this guy was one penny short of a shilling. Bats in the belfry. The lights were on, but no one was home. One fry short of a happy meal. Nutty as squirrel shit. You see where I’m going?
But the more I watched him, the more I started to envy him. Labelling him as an eccentric, which by our standards he most assuredly is, was too easy. Intellectually lazy.
Siobhan, my sister, is a budding Buddhist. She tends to look at things in a kinder way. In a questioning way that persuades you to consider “Is that all that is going on here?”. She was not dismissive of Joe at all. THAT’S HIS NAME! He’s called Joe. Bugger me, the mind is a funny thing eh?
So what was going on here with Joe? First answer? I didn’t know. Second Answer? Maybe everything. Whatever it was though, I felt it merited a little more respect and a little more thought.
How often do you wish you could stop the life you are living and just get off? Melt away into a Celtic landscape and simply be. Run your fingers over ancient stones and feel the more simple, more spiritual life of the ones who placed them there. Let go. Feel the weight of modern life slip away. Be lighter.
The more pragmatic among you will be thinking “Well that’s just great! What would happen if we all did that? Where would we be?”
These are good questions. What would happen? Where would we be?
Perhaps more thoughtful. More spiritual no? Perhaps more reflective and searching in our approach to life. Joe isn’t lazy, he is diligent and energetic and busy in his searching. He has simply replaced a life that lacked that search with one that is centred on it. Isn’t that search ultimately what we humans are all about? Whether it be the meaning of life or self or truth, the Universe or God Almighty, isn’t that who we are? I would posit that very few people are really searching. Some are but most are not. At best we “fit it in” with our busy schedules.
I’m not sure for what Joe is searching, but I know he is. I know that for a great deal of my life, I haven’t. Maybe I’m just projecting my indolence on everyone else.
Maybe, but not Joe. I know that what Joe is searching for is greater than himself. His “I don’t know” is a synonym for “I am searching”. His “Everything” is just that. for Joe, that search, that needing to know, was enough for him to just get off and melt into a Celtic landscape.
Somehow that feels important. It also felt like a message, lying on the ground like an old pebble that I needed to bend down and pick up. What’s my search all about? What do I think is going on?
I don’t know. Maybe nothing. Maybe everything.
Maybe I need to spend more time in isolated, desolate places (like this blog site for example). Stand on a hillside and feel the cold. Let the rain sting my face and feel the wind at my back. Stand where ancient others stood and caress the stones. Maybe then I’ll know Everything.
Calm down, calm down. This is not a post about Brexit. It’s mentioned but it’s not about it.
So relax. Wooosa. Woooooooosa.
Smooth, calm water. Breathe in……Breathe out.
It’s been a bit of a wild ride for the last few years eh? Bit of a roller coaster. What with the old US Electoral College process? That’s a corker eh? Some genius came up with that one. Trump becomes president despite not commanding a majority of votes from the people he is supposed to serve. He becomes the Nero of our times, but with nukes this time, because of some arcane compromise dreamt up by the Founding Fathers.
Then along comes old Cameron with his wheeze of offering referendums all over the place.
“Were bound to win” he says, “I mean, who would vote to leave? Narf, narf. Pass me the porter old boy”.
And that was just the Scottish referendum in 2014. I’m betting he had a bit of trouble with the old sphincter muscle during that one ‘cos, for a time, it looked a lot like Scotland was going to vote for Independence. Just squeaked it.
Bolstered by his “victory” in Scotland, and getting ready for the General Election in 2015, he pops another bullet in the chamber and spins the barrel again.
“I know”, he says, “We’ll offer a referendum on whether we stay in the EU in the Manifesto. Nobody’ll vote to leave the EU – no way! But it just might get me a second term”.
Morning after the night before….
The EU? Are we talking about that least democratic institution on the planet bar Kim Jong Un, EU? The same EU that everyone in the UK has been moaning about for the last 45 years and who are still alive to vote in the referendum? That one? That EU? Really? We didn’t see that one coming?
Click! BANG!! Ooopsy! Alas, poor Dave, we knew him well. Awww….apparently, she makes dresses that don’t make you look fat now.
Then there was the aftermath of the Brexit Referendum Leave vote. Oh Dear Lord. Three and a half years of absolute carnage while all the “democrats” who lost the referendum, tried to clamber aboard the parliamentary equivalent of a DeLorean time machine. Such determination to get the leave vote overturned. “They didn’t know what they were voting for” and “Everyone has changed their minds” and “Just run the referendum again, with the questions we want, that’s all we want…pleeeeeeaaaase?”.
And then the political betrayal. All the grubby, disingenuous politicians, from all parties, scrabbling around in the dirt trying to find a way to use Brexit to win power and in so doing, forgetting that the majority had spoken. This ain’t Star Trek people! The needs of the few do NOT outweigh the needs of the many!
Luckily, and I do mean luckily, a sort of democracy prevailed at the very, very last minute, and the original referendum result was sanctioned via an overwhelming majority for the Conservatives in the 2019 General Election. If the general election hadn’t taken place it would have been close. The will of the majority may well have been overturned. It’s as close as we’ve been to a civil war since, well, the civil war.
Meanwhile in other news, the Democrat held House of Representatives in the US compile a treasure trove of evidence of Trump’s alleged malfeasance and corruption, the like of which has not been seen since Pirates of Caribbean. The House elects to impeach Trump but everyone knows he’ll get away with it because he’s going to be tried by the Senate, which is controlled by guess who? His very own Republican Party! We know they wont convict because they have stated that they wont convict, no matter what the evidence is! Did the same genius that came up with the Electoral College system come up with that one too? Since Trump took office, he has single handedly shown that the American Constitution is a toothless instrument, if you just have the will to simply ignore it.
So all in all then, WTF??
Mariam-Webster Dictionary
There’s an old saying “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”. There’s another old saying, “if it’s Fubar, then throw that shit away”.
Parliamentary democracy is Fubar. Very fubar. Tremendously Fubar. It’s so Fubar it couldn’t be more Fubared if it tried. It has shown that it can no longer be trusted to serve the will of it’s master, the people. For this crime, there can be no reprieve or pardon. Orff with its head! or as the French would say “En route par Madame Guillotine”. Time to throw that shit away.
We are gathered here today brethren, to consider an alternative to Parliamentary Democracy. A better democracy. A democracy that re-empowers the people. A democracy that returns sovereignty to the people and rids the world of second rate, partisan, unintelligent, dishonest and self-serving politicians once and for all.
It is my thesis that Parliamentary Democracy is no longer fit for purpose. Further, I will show that a new, better and pure form of democracy is available today that could never have been available before . Moreover, I will argue that it’s implementation is feasible.
I’ll state up front that whilst on the face of it this might appear to be a simple proposition, in fact, it’s not. I spent the morning in my kitchen the other day redesigning democracy and, it turns out, it’s quite tricky. However, nothing worthwhile is easy, so I persisted, and by lunchtime I’d cracked it. I think if we all work together, stay objective and really get our shoulders behind it, I think we can get this all sorted out by Christmas. So come on let’s get started!
The Vision
Bob
We are going to keep democracy, but we must move away from a system of indirect representative government, to direct government by the people, supported by an expert administrative infrastructure.
We will replace national and locally elected representatives, and the unelected house of Lords, with a clever little App on your phone called Bob (My App, so I’ll call it what I want). More about this in a mo’ because Bob (the App not our dog), is the key in the door.
There will be no general or local elections because there isn’t going to be anyone to vote for. Political Parties will be abolished. Why should we be limited by one party’s manifesto and voting habits inherited from our parents and their parents? We should be able to progress any idea no matter where it comes from, and we should all be sufficiently well educated and informed to know the difference between good and bad ideas.
Just to show that this is not some lefty, Che Guevarian anti-establishment rant, we are going to keep the Monarchy. Firstly, we really like the Queen (not so much Charlie, but you win some, you lose some). Secondly, the business case for our monarchy is overwhelming and we, the people, are not stupid……..cha-ching!
Taken From Brand Finance Monachy Report
Annual taxpayer cost of £292.6m against a contribution of 1.8Bn? Sheeeit, I’ll take dem numbers eva’ day of the week Bra’ (Side Note: my wife has suggested I really oughtn’t attempt urban slang very often or indeed at all, but I tend to think it makes things so much more jolly) .
The Civil Service will be empowered to run the administrative departments of government (Transport, Defence, Education, Health, Trade, Foreign Affairs etc). Heads of department will be appointed based on their subject matter expertise in the specific responsibilities of that department. These heads will not change every 5 years. Their pay / bonuses will be tied to achievement of prioritised SMART goals (Specific, Measured, Achievable, Realistic and Timed), set by the people. If they don’t perform, or deliver, they get fired by the people right then via Bob (the App not our dog).
Apart from these national bodies, there will also be local Administration at the County and Town level, so that local issues can be decided by local people and not be held up by national priorities. Bob (the App not our dog), will handle both.
Any individual aged 18 or over (we’ll call these people “Adults”), can propose and, if a simple majority of the people support it, be paid by the state, to create or amend national and local laws with the support of these local and national administrations. Similarly, any Adult can propose new national or local initiatives, that do not require new law to implement (like building a new local bridge or something).
A word about the Ministry of Defence. Defence is tricky. All sorts of secrecy and ability to act when faced with threats to National Security issues to deal with here. We are going to need some deep and expert thinking about the processes needed to authorise, and subsequently scrutinise, military action when we no longer have an executive branch. These processes will need to maintain our ability to act in time, whilst maintaining the secrecy our intelligence and military communities need to operate. This means that whilst major strategic military interventions (wars) can, and should, be approved directly by the people with a simple majority vote via Bob, tactical or counter terrorist interventions cannot. At least not by all of them. We might need a suitably qualified people’s COBRA (Cabinet Offices Briefing Rooms, Briefing Room A) that can come together quickly, on-line or in person, at times of National need. Like I said, lot of thought needed here.
Oh, and we will repurpose the Houses of Parliament into a very nice bowling alley (you can see all the way through from the Commons to the House of Lords you know?), with nice cafés and bars in the lobby. Bungy Jumping off Big Ben and a zip wire across the Thames to the Big Eye. Anyway, we wont be doing any lawmaking in there any more.
Hey, the White House already has a bowling alley, so you just need to turn the oval office into a Starbucks and you’re all set! Bham! (See? Jolly).
It’s time to take a look at how all this could work, which means we need to take a closer look at what Bob can do (The App not our….Ok, so I might need to rethink that app name. Got it! BobsApp!).
How it’s all going to work.
Even though Parliamentary Democracy is broken, it has been around a while. The first parliament, called an Althing(i), was formed by Iceland in 930 AD). Britain’s Feudal system was actually a form of Parliament because William the Conqueror established it in 1066 to take advice from the nobility and clergy. Our first proper parliament here in Britain though, was created in the early 13th century and the Parliament we have today is directly descended from that.
I decided to take a deeper dive into how the Parliamentary Process really works to see if there is anything that we could salvage from the wreck of our current system to build into BobsApp (much better).
I mean, for something to last this long, and pass the test of time, it must have had some inherant goodness that prevented the people from sweeping it away in a barrage of musket balls.
Checks and Balances. I think it’s fair to say that the entire current model, is a way to make sure that we, through the offices of our representatives, don’t introduce just any old crap onto the statute books. this is achieved by forcing Bills (Proposal for new laws or amendments to existing laws), through many different stage gates. This process is orchestrated across three different institutions before they can finally become law. In its simplicity and practicality, it’s beautiful really.
Which is a bit of a bugger to be honest, and in the hands of another Blogger, might have caused something of a hiccup in the narrative. Not I. I am made of sterner stuff.
DOWN WITH PARLIAMENTARY DEMOCRACY! Down I say! It can no longer serve….ahh shit.
I can’t do it. it’s really not that complicated. Everything about Parliamentary Democracy works except one thing. Politicians are untrustworthy. Shocker. ‘Twas ever thus. The process is fine. The institutions are fine. Just think about the collective legal, constitutional and every other kind of wisdom aggregated in the ancient heads of the Lords. Do we really not want that collective wisdom to take a peek at the laws we want to introduce? Well I do. I wanna keep the Lords, and I want them to keep doing what they are doing.
I think Occam’s razor applies here. “All things being equal, the simplest solution tends to be the best one”.
We can’t burn down the whole house because one window won’t close. The problem we all have is that we don’t, and can’t, trust our politicians to vote in such a way that the will of the majority is reflected in the outcome. Ergo, the simplest solution is, don’t let them vote. Everything else can stay the same.
Any vote which currently takes place in the house of commons will now be taken by the people via BobsApp. We can leave the Lords alone, because ultimately power resides in the Commons, and we are going to move that power to the people.
There is no question about the viability of the technology. Each of us intuitively knows that such a voting app can be built. Every day I get crap coming into my phone via different apps that I’m supposed to do something with. It’ll be nice to have something important arriving for a change.
Removing this power to vote from our MPs however imposes a great burden on us the people. It will be up to us to follow, and be informed about, the proceedings both in Parliament and in the body politic. I think we are more connected today, more than we have ever been, but we’ll need to do more.
We will need to read the document that we are to vote on, and to understand what it will do. The way Laws are written will need to enable comprehension by lay people. This isn’t to say that lay people are not bright enough to understand them, but they can be complicated documents to read. If you aren’t legally trained or experienced at reading legislation, you could miss something.
There is a general assumption though that people are just too dumb and cant be trusted to deal with this stuff. These same people hold down jobs, drive cars, run their household budgets, put food on the table, take care of their families, go to church (or not), obey the law and sustain the fabric of society every day of their lives. They are more in touch with what matters to people than anybody else, because they are the commoners and they deal with real life all the time.
I would trust them every day of the week and twice on Sundays to make the right call over the Members of our Commons. It will be a new skill for sure but it will develop over time. We can add it into the school curriculum and get the kids to learn it from an early age. My daughter Lu (11) can tell you all about fusion, I think she can handle politics. In any case it has got to be better than what we have today.
So, Shouldn’t we remove the Parliamentary from Parliamentary Democracy?
Well no. It turns out it’s a really well designed system and we shouldn’t just throw that away. We should limit the power of it’s Members though because they now serve themselves more than they serve us. We can finally grant that power to all the people through our technology; BobsApp!
I hope you enjoyed this article! Please leave a comment and I’ll reply to you 🙂
I was doing
some grocery shopping in Sainsbury’s with my 8-year-old Daughter, Lu, a while
ago. I was just heading down the pharmacy aisle on my way to Milk, Cream and
Yoghurt. We needed full fat Greek yoghurt because I was doing my famous lamb
biryani for dinner that night. We must have had someone coming over because we
only do it on special occasions. We’ve done it for Christmas dinner a few times
just to give Christmas time a bit of a kick. What can I say, people seem to
like it.
Anyhoo I
digress.
Yes, I was on my
way to the yoghurt when I heard Lu speaking quite rudely to someone. Now we
have made a point of raising her to be a very polite little girl, and whilst
admittedly Lu can be something of a blunt instrument at times, she’s very
chatty and generally speaking she is very polite unless she is fed up with who
she is talking to (“Why don’t you just shadap Fatty Daddy”). She’s a one that
one.
Anyway, whoever
she was talking to was really getting it.
“You stupid thing,
why can’t you answer a simple question”
I was taken
aback.
“Oi oi, who are
you talking to madam?” I admonished.
“Hey Siri, tell
me a joke” she commanded.
The immediate
sense of “God that’s so rude, what happened to please and thank you?”, didn’t
diminish, as I realised, she was talking to my phone. In fact, I was every bit
as disappointed in her as if she had been talking to a human being. I was
surprised. So, I stopped right there, next to the indigestion tablets, and
turned to Lu.
“Erm, Lu?”
“What?”
“I dunno why,
but I just feel that you are being really rude to Siri. Do you think its ok for
us to be rude to her just because she’s an AI?”.
“Huh?”.
The thought
that came to me originated elsewhere, and I said to Lu:
“Whether we are based on carbon or on silicon makes no fundamental difference; we should each be treated with appropriate respect.”
Arther C Clarke 2010: Odyssey Two
What followed
was a discussion, about the nature of our future relationship with Artificial
Intelligence entities.
Lu is going to sort out Fusion, right after she has met nerdy Brian, who keeps pushing his glasses up on his nose (in like a really cute way?), during her Quantum Physics Masters at Cambridge, so I felt having this conversation was just a relaxing meditation for her, a musing if you will. We covered a lot of ground. Not physically. We only managed to get from Indigestion tablets to Fishermen’s Friends during our discourse, but philosophically, we climbed Everest. Actually, that doesn’t really cover that much ground does it? We crossed the Sahara!
If you were walking
through Hyde Park, would you kick a tree? Just walk up to it and kick the
living shit out of it? Why don’t we see people doing that? How come we don’t
just all spend our time walking from tree to tree screaming abuse and kicking
the bark off those tall, leafy bastards? What
would that say about us? I’m pretty sure it would say we were bad people.
Maybe we don’t do it, not because we don’t want to, but because we wouldn’t want anyone in the park to see us doing it. In this age of environmental “awakeness”, it would be unacceptable. People would run over and tree-kick-shame us shouting “how would you like it if I just walked up to you and kicked you?”.
“Leave that poor innocent tree alone you horrid
person!” they might exclaim. They might even swear and threaten you with
physical violence. Look what a hard time we are giving the people burning down
the Amazon! Such is the level of empathy we are supposed to have with the
environment these days.
Acid question though. Would you kick, or shout at, the
tree if you were all alone in a forest and no one could see or hear you do it?
I don’t know that I would, you know. I think I’d be ashamed. I’d feel guilty. I
think most people would. Which is weird when you think about it. Our current
understanding of trees suggests that the kick or the insult itself wouldn’t be “felt”
by the tree. It’s not going to spend the next few days wondering what it did to
deserve that kicking from that hiker. It’s not sensient, but it is alive, and generally
speaking we give it due respect.
Is being alive the quintessential attribute of “being” though? Loads of stuff on Earth is alive but I wouldn’t say they are all beings. I don’t think of amoeba’s, or phytoplankton, or daffodils, or flu virus or trees as Beings. So I don’t think it is just about being alive. Descartes said “I think therefore I am”? So is it thinking that makes us beings then?
Bob!
Meet Bob. Bob, is our family dog. He’s so cute. Yes you are! Yes….you….are! Look at dat face. We love him to bits because he is so cute, but also because he is the cleverest dog ever! Not because he does tricks (he can do a few), but because of how much he understands and how much he communicates. He solves problems. He won’t come in after he has done his last pee of the night, until I give him a treat. I can’t just say the word “treaty” because he knows I might not give it him. It’s happened ok? I’m not proud of it, but there have been occasions where I said “treaty” but didn’t actually deliver a treat. So he has learned that could happen, and now, he waits until I have it in my hand and throw it into the kitchen and then he comes in, let’s me wipe his paws and then gets the treaty from the kitchen. I’ve tried teaching him to wipe his own paws, but honestly, if I cant get my 24 year-old University student son to do it, I’m not sure why I have such high expectations of Bob.
Bob has obviously thought this through. His
actions are deliberate and calculated to get the outcome he wants. He has shown
some creativity in his solution. He knows I want him to come in. I want to go
to bed. He stands just out of reach, on purpose, and if I try to grab him he’ll
bugger off to the other end of the garden and then only comes back, tail
wagging, when I’m back indoors.
There is no question in my mind that Bob is a sensient, loving, thinking, disobedient and creative Being who has his own ideas. I have no hesitation behaving toward Bob as I would anyone else. When I want him to give me something, I say “please”. When he gives it, I say “thanks”. Anything else would be rude and disrespectful. In every sense of the word, he is a member of the family and is treated accordingly.
We, and about 32 million other dog owners around the
world, grant Bob and the canine masses this respect, despite the fact that Bob
can’t talk and shows little understanding of any academic subject or the
universe. I am prepared to bet good money that there are no
circumstances where Bob could pass the Turing Test yet we still offer the
respect and courtesy we might show another human being.
“The Turing Test?” you enquire. Yes, the Turing Test. Now, I know all of you know what the Turing Test is, but for the people reading who have been buried under a rock since WW2 (I’m not explaining that abbreviation, I’m really not), a brief explanation is needed.
This test is named after Alan Turing, the chap that figured out how to crack the Nazi Enigma Machine code during World War 2 (dagnamit!). Ze Germans used this machine to communicate real time troop, air and naval movement orders, so pretty important really. It was believed to be uncrackable because the encryption key was changed every day which meant you had to crack the key every day. Turing realised that every order was signed off “Heil Hitler” and this therefore provided a constant he could use to crack the entire code every morning. Basically he won the war for the allies. For his efforts, and in true British enlightened fashion, he was thanked by HM Gov. by being sent to jail for being a homosexual. Hurrah! Gawd blesss the British Empire Ma’am!
Anyway, the basic premise of the test is that if an interrogator (C opposite), is unable to tell the difference between responses from A or B (where A is a computer and B is a human), then the computer is judged to have Artificial Intelligence.
How long does it take you to figure out that you are
talking to a computer when you have one of those automated Service Agents
answer the phone? 5 seconds? Maybe 3? Imagine if you genuinely couldn’t
tell the difference? Imagine if Freddie in Mumbai was actually an AI? Bad
example, we all tend to get a bit irritated with Freddie, so lets go with Marge
in Newcastle. You’d be polite and courteous to her because to all intents and
purposes you would be talking to another being, and one with a natty Geordie
accent, which apparently we all love. The fact that she is based on silicon
wouldn’t matter because you wouldn’t know. If you were rude to her on the phone
you would probably hang up feeling a bit guilty.
Lee Sedol
Well, an AI cant do any of that yet. Far from it. AI is very good at learning how to do narrow tasking but not so good in the arena known as General AI. Narrow AI is good though. So good, that it often surpasses human capability in the same task, very quickly. For example in March 2016 Google’s AlphaGo was able to beat 18 time World Champion, and 9 Dan (=very good) Chinese Go player Lee Sedol, 4-1 on its first outing. Go is the most complex game ever devised by man (or woman), with more possible positions available than there are atoms in the universe! So that’s pretty complex then.
But there are loads more out there and still more in the pipeline. In the field of Medicine, we now have AIs that surpass human ability to identify tumors from radiology images. Everything we know about autonomous driving suggests that it will be significantly safer than humans. Intelligent homes that combine personal assistants (Google Home or Alexa) with smart home devices (thermostats, lighting, camera’s etc) are already here. They are in financial markets, Business Intelligence software, travel experience apps, music streaming, shopping and, and, and, and. Narrow AI is already with us.
But no matter how “intelligent” these narrowly focused AI are, no matter how much data they can digest or how much machine learning they do, they cannot yet do, what Bob does, and they come nowhere near what Lu can do. Narrow AIs do not have ideas. They lack empathy. Their creativity is limited. They do not demonstrate understanding of the world, or the universe or of self.
But, they are getting there.
When General Artificial Intelligence (GAI) is achieved, how we treat GAIs and what rights we grant them, will be the issue of our time. We can treat them like we have every other minority in human history or we can treat them with “appropriate respect“.
“Good Morning Dave”
Until then, I want Lu to be well mannered when talking to Siri, because I believe that if she finds it easy to be rude to Siri, she will find it easy to be rude to people. What does it say about us if we can’t be polite? How much easier will it be to integrate with future GAIs, if we have been treating their less bright forebears with respect and dignity? I’m not sure we will want them irritated with us, especially when they might be so much brighter than us.
Ok, so I’m not talking about strapping little rucksacks on their backs stuffed full of C4 and pushing them out onto Oxford Street in their strollers, or even attaching them to nuclear bombs in their liddle romper suits like the cowboy out of Dr Strangelove. No, I’m just talking about not having any. Well, not me exactly, but my kids definitely shouldn’t have any kids.
My proposition is conceptually
simple in that it breaks the paradigm that the world’s human population should
continue to grow, on the grounds that this is no longer ecologically or morally
sustainable. Instead, it proposes that the
human population of earth be radically and rapidly reduced to preserve the
ecosystem required for high biodiversity on earth.
“Impossible!”, you cry.
“Bollocks” I retort!
Whilst this might seem dismissive, I choose my word carefully. I don’t say that this endeavour comes without its own unique set of challenges, but many a challenging enterprise has been undertaken with far worse odds of success than this one. I give you Neil Armstrong walking on the moon for example. Most of the technology necessary to pull off that “Giant leap for mankind” didn’t even exist when the project began, yet in 10 short years, there he was hopping down the ladder and uttering his immortal words.
We can make amazing things happen. All I’m suggesting, is that our kids choose to stop having babies. Not because we try and force them too (‘cos we know how that will go), but because they decide that having babies is immoral and toxic. Oh, and we have to let old and sick people die when they are supposed to. Did I mention that? I meant to mention that.
And I might have
been exaggerating. We can’t stop having babies altogether because we’d all die
out and there would be no more humans………
We just have to have far fewer children
than the current global fertility rate of 2.5 kids per female, and very arguably
far fewer than the current global replacement rate of 2.1 children per female.
At the Replacement Rate, population stabilises, wherever it happens to be, after a couple of generations. If we want to make it fall, we have to have fewer than 2.1 kids per female. Look what happens opposite when you reduce it from 2.1 to just 1.6 kids per female (bottom blue dashed line). But that only gets us back to where we are now by 2100, and look at how well that’s going.
The drop needs to be extreme both
in terms of numbers and timeframes. I’m going to run 0.5 kids per female up the
flagpole and see who salutes it. At this level, the population should drop like
a stone and pretty quick. Hell, the
population would get so low it would be hard for a chap to find a dame to go a
courtin’ with.
“WHY WOULD YOU WANT SUCH A THING? MY LITTLE JOHNNY’S NOT GOING TO ‘AVE NO BRUVVERS OR SISTERS”, you ask.
Really good question everyone. I was hoping you’d ask. Firstly Little Johnny is going to have to learn to sit quietly in the corner and play with his imaginary friend, and secondly, in the immortal words of Agent Smith…
“I’d like to share a
revelation that I’ve had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to
classify your species and I realized that you’re not actually mammals. Every
mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the
surrounding environment but you humans do not. You move to an area and you
multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed and the only way
you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this
planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human
beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You’re a plague…..”
Epic quote from
“The Matrix”
Ok, Steady on Smith old boy. No need to get carried away. Can’t just go on and on about how humans are all just a bunch of plagues and bandying the “C” word about, you’ll hurt someone’s feelings!
Still, you really don’t need to
be a rocket scientist, or Agent Smith, to work out that something whacky and
unwelcome and uncomfortable is happening with us. You know that feeling you get
every time you hear what the population is, and you just tuck it away because
nothing can be done about it, it just is?
Quite
early in my life I observed something. When something went wrong, more often
than not, I wasn’t taken completely by surprise. I had an inkling. Sometimes
way before the thing went wrong. The thing went wrong not because I didn’t
know, but because I did, and didn’t do anything to stop it. I warranty each of
you have experienced this in your lives. It’s called intuition. It’s not
necessarily borne out of facts or knowledge. A confluence of events, rumours,
insights, experience and intellect add up to a “feeling in my water” that
something’s not quite right. I decided, after a number of these inklings turned
out to be correct, that I would consciously act on all future inklings to confirm
or invalidate the thing I thought might go wrong before it went wrong. As a
result, I became A
MASTER OF THE UNIVERSE!!
Now is the time for everyone to listen to that little voice at the back of our mind. Face into the discomfort of its message. Not wait for the proof, but act because in acting, nothing gets worse and things can only get better. There is no downside to acting now.
There are a few obstacles though. Like the fact that we don’t really recognise that there is a burning raft. The various religious doctrines that bang on about going forth and procreating and that terminations and birth control are a sin. The government incentives which encourage our youth to have kids because we need more rats to run around on industrial wheels to keep stoking up our economies.
We should not underestimate the sheer number of untrusting stakeholders we would need to convince either (our kids). 26% of the worlds population is below the age of 15. Roughly half of these kids are female. Soooo, 26% of 7.7Bn divided by 2 multiplied by the square of the hipppopotomoose plus 3 minus 10 and you get about 1bn girls. Of these we have to convince 1 in every 2 girls not to have a baby. So that would be x over y times by E=MC2 divided by 52….ch-ching =500m girls in our target population.
Our biggest challenge though, is our unwillingness to let go of this way of life. That scrabble for “success” whatever that means. We’ve constructed a society where all the needles need to be pointing up or somebody is getting shit-canned. Revenues, profits, quality of life, life expectancy, mo’ money, mo’ cars, mo’ cribs, mo’ likes, mo’ social standing, Global macroeconomic indicators, and on and on and on. But we’ve got to keep feeding that machine or it all stops and its food is us. Reducing the population by the amount I am suggesting, means we have to let it all go. Let it all stop. And as my old gran would say, that’ll scare the b’jaysus out of us.
But do we really have such a big problem that we need such a drastic solution? Well let’s take a look and see.
I think Smith’s analysis is very pertinent to this discourse. And accurate. Earth is in fact a host. A living breathing organism which just like us, is populated by many other organisms. It can also catch a cold just like us. About 200,000 years ago, the Earth caught such a cold when one species emerged that turned out to be really good at solving problems (that’s us). Especially problems related to its own survival.
So, let’s assume for the moment that Agent Smith has nailed it and we can be likened to a virus or a plague on the Earth. There are only two ways to stop a virus from spreading before it kills its host. You can kill it, or you can suppress it. Honestly, I’m open to either solution, but I’ve been told “You can’t just go about eradicating humanity”, so let’s stick a pin in that for a mo’ and take a look at suppression.
Remember HIV and how scary that was? If you got it, you were a goner, and not in a nice way, because it couldn’t be suppressed. Today millions of people who are HIV+ will live out full and active lives until they are grey and old. They can do this because we made two things happen. The invention of highly accurate, very fast, point-of-care screening technology, and the development of highly effective antiretroviral therapy.
We can now detect the virus much faster (from ~3 weeks down to minutes). In fact the test results are delivered while the patient is waiting. If positive, antiretroviral drugs are issued on the spot before the host goes back into the community. The patient, knowing that they are HIV+, alters his/her behaviours and so becomes a natural brake on the spread of the infection to others.
The antiretroviral therapy controls the viral load in the patient. It’s still there, but the therapy prevents the virus from reproducing, and the amount of virus in the blood reduces to undetectable levels in the host. At this point it becomes very difficult, almost impossible, to transmit to others, and poses little or no threat to the host. The host has a normal life with a normal life expectancy.
If we carry this analogy on, there are two ways to suppress human population. Voluntarily or involuntarily. The voluntary way is the rapid and radical reduction of the human population, by girls and women of child bearing age choosing to reduce the birth rate to 0.5 kids per female. One baby for every two females on the planet until we reach our target population of say 500m to 1bn people and then to never exceed the replacement rate.
The involuntary way is not what you might be thinking. I’m not talking about making human laws to limit the number of children born. That didn’t work out so well in China. And in any case making laws is a voluntary act of the virus.
When we discuss our relationship with the Earth these days, we tend to talk about it in terms of humans “destroying the planet”. This is a function of our innate and ever-present sense of self-importance. All things being equal, and subject to the arrival of some cataclysmic event, Earth and life on Earth isn’t going anywhere for at least a couple of billion years when the great march of entropy, towards which everything in the universe tends, catches up, as our star begins its death rattle.
Today, we are making a big fuss about CO2 levels hitting 410 parts per million (ppm) because it is double the pre-industrial average. Few would argue that human activity isn’t responsible, at least in significant part, for that increase. In the distant past however, we had much more CO2 in the atmosphere and had an abundance of diverse life on the planet. When the dinosaurs were stomping around 65-250 million years ago, it was about 2000 ppm. Go back 500-600 million years and it was more like 5000 ppm. Life on earth began 3.5bn years ago! Planet warming hasn’t killed off all life forms in the past and there is no reason to assume that at the sorts of levels we are talking about (1-2 degrees C), it will in the future. We can thank Darwin and his Origin of the Species for that. Life will adapt, but some won’t, and those organisms that don’t will become extinct. This is the involuntary option.
So, the answer to the question “Is there really a problem?” is yes. But it’s not that we are destroying the Earth; the Earth is destroying us.
Best case, human generated
greenhouse gases (including from the animals we eat), cause the Earth to warm and
act as an antiretroviral on humankind, eradicating most, but leaving a few
alive, at levels which no longer pose a threat to the ecosystem. Worst case, Earth
is getting a high fever. It’s acting like any other infected organism and
protecting itself from us. Bad news? We are nowhere near as lethal as HIV once
was. We are a common cold, not even a bad bout of the flu. The worst thing
about us is our presence and the scars we leave on the landscape. The climate
gets warmer and wetter globally, the wind will blow, and the seas will heave,
and the Earth, no matter how hardy we think we are, will blow out our candle
with the same ease as my daughter on her 4th birthday. The Earth,
over time, will feel better. Will be a better place. Its wounds will heal. New
forests will grow. The Coral will return. New, better adapted, species will emerge
and all signs that we were once here will be covered over. And we won’t be here to see any of it because smart
as we are, we were not smart enough to survive.
What’s the worst part about this dystopian future for you? For me, it’s that we won’t be here to see the rebirth of Earth’s natural beauty. What it will look like without the scar of humanity on its face. Seeing a world unbound by cities and strip malls and roads and factories and fences. A virgin Earth. An Earth without our ugliness. I’d like to see that. I’m saddened by the fact that I won’t. I’d like someone to see it though. Just a few. Just enough that the world doesn’t know they are there. Hidden away. Quiet. Returned to the village. A whisper of humanity. A different humanity. That best part of humanity that is able to find wonder in a single drop of rain and in the same breath look up at the stars and imagine what is there. Eight billion people can never be in “equilibrium” or harmony with the Earth, but maybe just a few can?
And if not?
“All those moments will be
lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.”
