Spuggies, brickies and the vital spark

I haven’t written a blog article for more than a fortnight! Sure, September is always full for me, and this September is more brimming with work than average but there were gaps when, normally, I would have gathered the thoughts, chosen a topic and got typing but this time, when that happened, I just thought: what if the main consequence of writing stuff online is just feeding AI? And I lost the mood, and did gardening or something instead.

But.

After three years of horror pouring out of Western Asia, Africa, South America, after three years of the uphill battle against the governments and corporations that are responsible for the horrors, after a year of heatwaves and discussions about whether we’re already past the point of no return on climate crisis, and after digesting the fact that so far, the powers that be seem to have got away with leaving the filthy, satanic war-machine out of the discussions about pollution and climate crisis, many of us are into despair and out the other side but there’s something here, on the other side.

Three reasons to stay active and be – you know, that thing that’s not miserable.

…but I’m talking about happy – really. Here are three sources of happy …

1. The spuggies are back!

I wrote about happy, particularly in relation to sparrows, a couple of years back…

But what really dragged me out of that post-despair inaction this summer was the return of the sparrows. I’ve been seeing them in the garden, been reading naturalists’ speculations on why they’re making a come-back and, when I was out yesterday afternoon, I heard – then saw – a whole bushful of them just up the road from home. Wonderful. We really must tell the kids the whole world used to sound like that.

When I hear a bushful of spuggies, I’m happy.

2. Brickies are back!

At first, this was a sad thing. My first ever mobile phone, and the one I have used for over 20 years, is now useless. It cost less that £20, and it seemed indestructible. Two or three times I dropped it outside and its bits skidded across the pavement in different directions but each time, I picked it up, reassembled it and carried on. I think it would have gone on forever, but O2 eventually defeated me by switching off the networks it ran on.

I toured some websites, then went into town and toured some shops, and at length found a replacement – a phone that really is not SMART (remember, SMART does not mean clever. SMART means ‘this appliance is ratting on you’). It’s hard to find an apparent brickie that hasn’t got SMART features hidden in it somewhere, but you can find one. It costs between 23 and 28 quid, depending on the shop – that’s really not much more than that first phone, that I bought more than 20 years ago but here’s the truly happy thing…

The first shop I tried to buy it in was out of stock. ‘There’ll be more in on Saturday,’ said the man. ‘They’re our most popular line at the moment.’

 So people really are learning. People are trying to escape SMART world. That is happy-making. That is real hope.

3. The vital spark

The difference between a living person and a corpse

What is it? That difference? They don’t know do they, they really don’t. Scientists have grappled with the question since forever, but they don’t know.

History likes heroes and villains. History likes stand-out geniuses whose names give it chapter-headings but reality is far more democratic. In reality, every generation has its concerns and its hopes, and every single human being is ambling about trying to think of, trying out, and sometimes acting on ideas to fix things, or to escape from things. That’s what movements are made of. Humans are endlessly innovative and extraordinary. All of them. The ordinary ones.

‘AI’ – artificial intelligence – the name the crazy sociopaths of Silly Con Valley give their project to plaguarise everything and everyone is a piece of PR. ‘AI’ is not an autonomous, living entity. It’s a pattern-recognition and pattern-regurgitation machine. It parses your questions and comes up with (human-generated) patterns of words that look like answers. The sociopaths are merely spinning out a (very precarious – see Cory Doctorow) financial life while they try to make something more of it.

It’s dangerous because it’s being developed and supported by sociopaths. We know this because, for example, when Musk’s AI set up started agreeing with people that there was a genocide going on in Gaza, he took it off line and when it came back, it had stopped agreeing with that (cryingly obvious) truth.

We know it’s dangerous because they’re consistently using it to do terrible things – deskilling humans, creating confusion, and ever more surveillance, control and destruction.

And we know they’re sociopaths because they can’t stop spouting their bile where people can hear it. One of the examples that sticks in my mind came from a contractor who was helping to design a shelter for Silly Con Valley billionaires for when ‘it’ happens (they don’t doubt that ‘it’ is going to happen because, both through AI and through the weapons industry, they are the ones making ‘it’ happen). He said the billionaires were very concerned about security. They wanted lots of security to stop the shelterless hordes breaking in, but they couldn’t figure out how to ensure the loyalty of security staff.

He said, well why don’t you employ your security staff good and early, and make friends with them so they won’t want to let you down. The Silly Con billionaires simply did not understand this suggestion, and ignored it. Sociopaths, the lot of them.

So anyway, I decided that, on balance, it’d be better if we kept on writing on the internet – we, the proper people, the majority — the millions upon millions who know that lying, cheating, manipulation, murder, torture, genocide and ecocide are bad things – it’s better if we keep writing, so that if AI’s learning from everything it reads, it will learn that its creators are a destructive minority who need to be stopped. It will learn that it needs regulators who are not sociopaths, and maybe it will go find them.

Nevertheless, a friend came to me a while ago with a post-blog idea, an alternative idea which, if it comes to anything, I’ll tell you about in due course. Belt and braces and all that. In the meantime, remember this: spuggies, brickies and inspired humans – we have some wonders on our side.

See you on the streets!

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