TECHNOLOGY IS A DANGEROUS FRIEND

Conversations about technology go back a long way. Progress has always been symbolised by technological advances. Yet what it’s constantly done is to promise a better life. Promises. Promises. 

The most difficult conversations in recent times have circled around communication which is curious given our glorious command of language for hundreds of years. People I knew learned swathes of Shakespeare . Richard Burton was said to have all 39 plays off word perfect. I guess that was his job. Now I’ve been told forget about memory because that’s best left to machines.

I’m puzzled.

The idea was surely that technology would make life easier and give us more time for leisure and thinking. Instead it’s become divisive, separating those who can and those who can’t or those who will and those who won’t.

Take a recent video of the smart-home where  everything in a house operates to voice commands. The owner asks for jazz to be played, smoothies to be made, heating to be turned up or down and the front door opened and closed. In the 17th century slaves did that sort of thing;  now we use virtual slaves which is rather ironic. The owner goes to the dentist. He has various injections and returns home with his paralysed mouth and muffled voice. His smart-home proves impenetrable as his anaesthetised voice commanding “open the door” is not recognisable.  To his fury he is not the master any longer. 

Social media was allegedly a concept for improving our ability to “share.”  Yet an ex-President’s primary way of running America was through Twitter. I know smart young people who have abandoned social media as trivial, time-wasting and potentially a source of acrimony. I see little evidence that social media is social or sociable. Quite the reverse as Twitter belatedly realised.

Is it easier to write using technology? I’m using a PC now. It’s kinder on arthritic hands and enables me to edit more vigorously and effectively. Does it let me write better? Probably not. Quicker? No. But it provides me with a strange illusion. That what was in my head has magically become the work of a third person. An author who writes in perfect Calibri or Garamond ready for publication.

Technology exists like Outwrite or Grammarly which claim to “help you eliminate errors and find the perfect words to express yourself.” 

Scholarcy and Summly are tools for summarising articles or books. Is this such a good idea?

Here are some famous summaries – at least they’re quite funny.

“War and Peace” – everyone is sad. It snows.

“Moby Dick” - Man v. Whale. Whale wins.

“The Odyssey”- the hero takes forever to get home. Then he kills everyone.

So am I antediluvian and a technophobe? I hope not. I just think we’ve become deluded by devices for the sake of cleverness or money…

At $7.2 trillion Apple, Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Samsung dwarf the GDP of the world’s third biggest economy -  Japan (just $5 trillion). So they’re selling stuff that people want to buy. 

That’s why my mobile phone provider keeps ringing me about “an upgrade” – the new Samsung S21 5G. When I say I actually want a downgrade – a tool that  does what I need, they laugh.

It’s time to think, not get machines to do it for us – which they can’t. 

The inventiveness of man is stupefying but I wonder if people like Elon Musk’s and Jeff Bezos’ ambitions to become space travellers isn’t indicative of them realising terrestrial technology isn’t enough: that the Tesla’s already maybe just a bit out of date.

TECHNOLOGY HASN'T CHANGED OUR LIVES

New technology hasn’t fundamentally changed golf, cricket or football. Although in football, VAR (video-assistant-referees) has been so contentious we may go back to old on-the-field referees’ judgement. 

But there are very few who’d agree with me on this luddite thinking. 

On Friday I was working in my office whilst my wife was taking exercise – I avoided it as I usually do. I waved affectionately at her as she walked round our large communal garden and opened the window to bellow good natured encouragement. And then it happened. I leant forward and my mobile phone spun out of my grasp, out of the window and landed with a loud thwunk on a roof below.

Getting to it was going to be complex and a crawling-over roofs job. At my age, un-exercised, it was going to be lunacy. No Spiderman me. So I started to think.

I wondered if this accident had been divine intervention. Freedom from those countless, irritating phone-calls. Release from e-mails and texts when I was out of the house and freedom from that behaviour trait of imitating those around you and studying your screen as though it holds the secrets of the universe. First one person does it then we all do – like yawning. 

I realised that I yearn for pen and ink. I yearn for the absence of intrusion. I yearn for never again seeing a text saying “Halifax is holding a payment of several thousand pounds – send your bank details so they can  pay it into your account.”  No, you defrauding Nigerian, Russian, Ukrainian or whoever. No. No. No. 

I yearn for a world devoid of Apps and social media. Not being anchored to your phone is being on holiday.

But then I thought about contacting people. All the phone numbers are on my phone. Not having my mobile was going to be like the onset of a kind of dementia. Basically, just out of it.

Take away my PC and I can still write but with a degree of greater difficulty especially as my seldom-used handwriting now resembles that of drunken doctor - unintelligible. But without my phone I’m inaudible, invisible and forgotten.

Perhaps it’s time we should reject the “paperless society”. Perhaps assuming everyone is online is rash, ageist and classist. I shudder for the prospects of poor children living in a household without a laptop whose ability to share online learning and homework is non-existent. 

We all need to learn how to use useful, basic technology and make sure it’s available to everyone as a utility not a luxury good and that we’re trained to use it well. The overly sophisticated stuff is a waste of time as is much social media. The good side of social media is closed community groups and business tools like LinkedIn but much of the rest is, as I see it, time consuming and navel gazing. 

And as for Siri or Alexa.

They’re rather silly toys for petulant teenagers. To be ignored.

The good stuff is that the days of deliveries being left on the doorstep are over and being able to track deliveries and have accurate delivery times is usual. 

So I’ve made three resolutions:

i)   To create an up-to-date paper address book in pencil (so I can rub out changes.) 

ii)  To become proficient at using the few digital tools that are helpful and time saving.

iii) To stop leaning out of windows with anything in my hand – good heavens – it could have been a glass of wine on Friday. Imagine that.

DILETTANTE DOODLINGS

Returned, revived and restless.

That’s how everyone should feel after a holiday.  However all is not well. Indeed,  the end is nigh, according to the Guardian. This was their headline last Monday: 'Hell is coming - week-long heatwave begins across Europe'. Temperatures could hit 40C. Exams have been cancelled, sales of water have rocketed, people will fry. Funny, I thought this was summer. What we used to gleefully call “a scorcher”.

Whilst we were in Venice I was thinking about intolerance and recalled a conversation about the teenage craze-game, Fortnite, with some old friends of mine. They grumpily said they thought it was disgusting, encouraging killing and dulling intelligence (like the Cowboys and Indians of our distant youth I thought). Last week I asked our 12 year old grandson to give me a tutorial. Apart from him learning to use three fingers and his thumb in both hands, all digits independently, to track his weapon status, his store of building materials, wood, brick and metal and critically his power of defence-shields and his health status for which he seeks out bottles of health liquid, he has headphones to identify the proximity of opponents. That’s only the tip of this extraordinary iceberg. There are killer storms to avoid as they’ll empty health reserves. And there are over 90 people he’s playing against from all over the world (there are 250 million registered).

But the point is this. It’s not a game of killing – it’s a game of self-protection and survival. And it as strategic as chess with incredible graphics and animation. What should excite us is the super race of nimble-thinking and lightning-fingered, Fortnite is helping create. He came 2nd by the way (out of 96 players).

And of course it’s an example of the brilliance of technology. But don’t be beguiled by technology – it’s a tool not an ideology or strategic. As Dave Trott, the remarkable ad man said: “Technology is the Achilles heel of the lazy." Technology is there to use not to lead. Too many people talk about the vehicle not the destination and yes that’s lazy.

I was watching Supervet the other night as Kate was out and I was having my supper in front of the TV. It has everything that anyone could want. It’s an animal soap opera about indescribable medical issues, bloody close up operations, unconditional love and usually happy endings. It’s a brilliant show. All they need to do now is make a musical of it.

So, finally, age. Why the hell are Jo Biden and Bernie Saunders contending for the Democratic candidature in America? They’re both 77. In fact of the 20 candidates 6 are over retirement age. I believe in wisdom but death must be on their minds as it’s been on mine. I’ve suddenly and inexplicably been bombarded with un-asked-for life insurance quotations. The providers are betting on me living 10 more years at least. If I snuff it any sooner they lose.

Good luck with the scorcher Jo. Just keep out of the sun.

IS IT GOING TO BE LIKE THIS ALL MY LIFE?

This was a 16 year old to his mother after being persecuted repeatedly by friends on his i-Phone when he didn’t instantly reply to his voice mail and texts. It’s worth considering in this techno-age.  Bryan Appleyard author of “The brain is wider than the sky” did just that at the RSA this week. Bryan writes for the Sunday Times. There were many questions - has technology made our lives better? Are “they” out to control our minds? Is the progress to thinking machines inevitable?

He was uneasy. In his research he spent time in Silicon Valley where employees at Microsoft confessed “we are not whole people here” and everyone described what they did as “transforming” and “life changing”.
Technology is responsible for one of the things people hate most – call trees on phones where a computerised voice tells you to “press 1 or 2 or whatever” (www.gethuman.org advises you how to beat this system, by the way.)

Check out Facebook updates to discover what “seeing inside our minds” is coming to. Bryan reckons if they have your date of birth and postcode you are nailed. So, if they don’t control our minds yet but that’s where it’s leading.

The Turing Test comprises putting a computer and human answering service to see if you can tell the difference. My advice is to tell the computer a joke.

Science has moved from human experiments to human observation to computer modelling to neuro-experiments. Put “neuro” in front of anything and it certainly sound uber-cool. (“I’m on the new neuro-diet. We do laboratory neuro-research instead of focus groups now.”)  Science and its bastard offspring “singularity” and “scientism”  are worrying signs of making information neutral and fact defined…a world of “if you can’t count it,  it isn’t there.”

Then Rod Liddle Spectator and Sunday Times who looks like an out-of-condition bouncer who’s very clever laid in to Bryan calling him a “bourgeois escapist Leavisite” – in other words anti-science and reactionary.  “Can robots think?” “Yes” asserted Liddle. “Celebrities today are our most successful robots.”  Well done Rod. “I’m a robot get me out of here”.

The rush of technology as with all trends is excitingly undiscriminating. Lives are generally improved but the bearers of tech banners (to get back to my comment on jokes) have this in common. No irony. No sense of humour. Utterly self-obsessed.  Consider the late Steve Jobs. Genius is not always a good companion or right. Except when he’s called Einstein and says “not everything that that can be counted counts and not everything that counts can be counted.”

THE AGE SANDWICH

The young have technology under control, the old are willing learners of technology and teachers of other stuff. Between them they are the majority…know a little all too well and have forgotten more than they knew. This is the new alliance. Grandmother and Grandson against the world. Spend time educating and helping the next generation and the one after.

Look what the current one has managed to do. And if you are the next generation insist you get this help.

http://www.richardhall.biz