Idly flicking through the appendices to Frank Herbert's Dune (1965) the other day, as you do, I came across a reference to the "Butlerian Jihad". This was (it predates the story) an uprising against technology (strictly, "thinking machines") for reasons not unconnected with their impact on the human (and, this being sci-fi, non-human) spirit. Thought of it today as the radio told me that within a couple of decades, Artificial Intelligence will have stolen all our jobs. That's the analog radio I mean, which switches on immediately, not the digital radio, which takes as long as a valve radio to orient itself. I remember that the analog signal was scheduled to be switched off. Perhaps it still is. Analogue, analog. Little black thing, £6.99 from Asda.
     Where was I? Oh yes.
    Now, Dune is very much a book of its time. The gender politics are not exactly compliant with modern thinking, and the plot hinges around the consumption of industrial quantities of a hallucinogenic drug. But it's a good read, if you're in the mood or mentally still in the sixties (can't remember?), and I prefer the Butlerian Jihad to straight-line extrapolations from present to future. Not so long ago, the internet was a counter-cultural haven with its own language and etiquette (I still have one or two of those opportunistic little printed guides somewhere). Now it's a commercial space fought over by global companies and governments - and all those trolls in the comments sections. Facebook may be here to stay, but it's not here to stay exactly as it is now. I remember when Amazon was a plucky little survivor of the dot-com bust.
     And what are these "jobs" anyway? Units in a structured set of activities that Henry Ford would have recognised? Office jobs? Shop floor? Nine to five? Abraham Maslow? [Dolly Parton - no!] Alfred P. Sloan? We make these structures for ourselves and hold them to be permanent - as if any worthwhile innovation has to be invented in a California garage, or lately, has to be an app dreamed into existence by a venture-capitalised start-up. Jobs, in the sense that some artificially intelligent thing can take over from nine to five, are a construct appropriate to a point in history. Straight-line forecasting mistakes the transient status quo for a kind of solid-state history.
     And you have to ask why, actually. Why spend enough money to educate a continent on developing AI capable of doing jobs that a reasonably educated adolescent could do? Why not buy food and set up schools? Is there some kind of displacement activity going on here? What part of ourselves are we trying to avoid? What advantage are we afraid of losing?
     I'd say that we're bothered by technology, not excited by its potential. There are more dystopian visions of technology expressed through our various cultural media, than there are AI-enabled utopias. We'll pay money to see HAL 9000 misbehaving in 2001: A Space Odyssey, or Mother not being straight with the crew in Alien, and of course we all know the logical flaw in Isaac Asimov's three laws of robotics. Not sure whether to mention Frankenstein or The Terminator here, but Asimov's own comment on his three laws cites Faust (thanks, Wikipedia). I'd say the human psychology behind our drive to develop AI - and more widely to "harness the power of technology" as we understand it - is more complex than we know.
     Watch any talk by the cyborg anthropologist Amber Case, on YouTube for example, for a more practical approach to working with technology and AI. Think about all the areas of our lives where money is short, and all the areas where we commit vast resources. We don't seem to see that, do we? I don't think I'd want to take too much of the spice melange (back to Dune again), although future-gazing is a side-effect, along with blue eyes, but I find it easier to believe in a Butlerian Jihad in which we all go back to buying music on vinyl and gadgets (cars) that we can fix, than in a take-over by the extrapolated calculators that we call AI.
     Skynet, you and I go way back. When was the first film? 1984? Really? Of course. How very appropriate. You're a very dated reference, but somehow still as much a symbol in today's nightmare as you were in yesterday's, and an enduring representation of our feelings towards an inappropriately intelligent future. I wonder whether we're ever going to be able to switch you off.

All those innocent children welcomed into Paradise.
Far behind them, the destroyer of children protests that he should go first. He leafs through the verses, looking for his justification. What did his teachers say?
The Creator plays with his children.
The gates close.

Timing gets weird sometimes. Wednesday I write about water-powered jetpacks; Thursday, Facebook brings me a picture of assorted young people skimming across the surface of a lake - on boards about a foot above the water. Looks a bit (not very much) like a flattened-out jetpack; has something that could be a jet of water connecting it to the surface; but, er, doesn't quack like a duck. Turns out to be the Lift e-Foil, a hydrofoil version of a paddle board (surf board?). No jet of water, but a little engine.
     Not my field after all. Except that the introductory paragraph says that the Lift e-Foil is "about as close to a real hoverboard as we're going to get". I like that. The thing that's real, the Lift e-Foil, is as close as we're going to get to the real thing, which is imaginary. Marty McFly had one in Back to the Future, right? Yeah, the second film. Yes, I did just search-engine the term <hoverboard> and find a lot of things with wheels. Yes, I also found this video, which reminds me that I was also writing about intelligent road surfaces on Wednesday.
     Friday brought a short radio piece about an English (British?) inventor, Richard Browning, who seems to be working with hand-held jet engines (I'm guessing English; he's in the West Country), and somewhere online, I also found a Frenchman who's found something to stand on while he hovers above a lake in the USA. Couldn't find video of either of those actually taking off and flying, mainly because I didn't look for very long - the frustrating absence of definitive proof began to feel pleasantly retro. There's a place in the world for blurry photographs and still-on-the-ground footage. Where would the Loch Ness Monster be, if we could answer that question?
     Reports of Richard Browning suggest that he wants to be "the real Iron Man", the film character, which of course takes us back a couple of paragraphs. But isn't this how innovation works? We dream of something, maybe so strongly that we make films about it, and eventually it becomes real. I'm not optimistic about the future because the day job brings me PR from big companies about the importance of innovation; I'm optimistic because, for example, a bunch of young people watched Marty McFly on his hoverboard, and decided to do something about it.
     They sorted the "intelligent roads" problem, without even realising it was difficult (I guess), as part of getting their board to hover. They probably didn't declare themselves to be innovators, and I'd bet that one of them doesn't have a business card with "Head of Innovation" printed on it. But think about how they came to what they did. If only we could all stop "harnessing the power of technology" and just go where our ideas take us.

Science is a jealous God. But we are living in Old Testament times. How do we best engage with aggressive belief systems? Perhaps first by examining our own attitudes to belief, faith, love - all those difficult but enduring words.

Daydreaming with enthusiasm about the "intelligent roads" idea. Haven't search-engined it, so maybe I'm behind and it's already happening. Never mind; it's a happy daydream. We invent ocean-mining ships to go into the "Great Pacific Garbage Patch" and bring back holds-full of discarded plastic to be recycled into road surfaces. Meanwhile, geeks in garages invent intelligent cat's eyes, road signs and AI-enabled roadside widgetry to communicate with the self-driving intelligent cars rolling around the roads of, say, Mountain View, California.
     While all that starts happening, other geeks in garages give up on intelligent wearable fabrics and start working on intelligent road surfaces. They use 3D printing, let's say, to transform discarded plastic into modular road surfaces: plug'n'drive, or maybe click together'n'drive. Some or all of the component pieces of these road surfaces are infused (okay, so not the right word) with circuitry, gadgetry, whatever, to make the whole road intelligent enough to hold a useful conversation with an equally intelligent car. New road networks start to spread out from, say, Mountain View, California.
     Had a conversation the other day about water-powered jet packs. Apparently jet packs can be made to work, if you don't mind having a hose trailing down to suck up the water you need to use for the jets. You can use your jet pack to travel around, so long as you only do your travelling around over water. Yes, we did start thinking about all the cities in the world where, as Robert Benchley put it, the streets are full of water. Was that Amsterdam he visited, or Venice ... ?

There's so much plastic floating around the world's oceans that it must qualify as a natural resource by now. More easily mined than coal, I imagine. There was a conversation the other day about grinding up plastic to make road surfaces. Today, there's a piece in the Weekend FT about wearable tech. Maybe sometime soon the folk at Google working on self-driving cars are going to have the idea of self-driving roads. Not like Scalextric exactly, but car and road in harmony, exchanging data/information about traffic conditions, upcoming signals and restrictions, et cetera.
     Self-driving cars at the moment are designed on the "all else being equal" principle - the roads, the signs, the jaywalking pedestrians and the other drivers all remaining a constant factor. But what if the road was imbued with signage: stop here; turn there? Make a lot more sense, surely? In the week-old copy of The Economist I was reading earlier, there was a piece on training algorithms to recognise stop signs - clean stop signs, dirty, damaged and graffiti-market stop signs. Really?

Let's just go with painting our not-1,000 words today, shall we? The picture with the painting responsibilities, below, shows the sea-level business end of Penryn - offices and shops fronting onto the water: there's a copy-writing agency in there, various web designers, yoga, alternative therapy, a bicycle shop, cafe, nursery, scuba-diving supplies and training, outdoor store - and a boat yard. Up at the top of the hill that is Penryn, by the double roundabout, there's the university campus and the innovation centre; they're twinned with other places and very designed - lots of open plan, glass and state-of-the-art technology. Those euro-billions granted for education and development haven't been wasted.
     Today's a Saturday in May: the weather's mixed and interesting, but it's now traditional to close such conversations with a nod towards global warming. Read the other day that French vineyards are buying up land in southern England. Told that to somebody, and they came up with news of the fields newly planted with vines just a village away.

Okay, bored with all that. It's one of those fresh, grey mornings, windy but foggy, on which a fallen cloud is blowing along the landscape and the sea. The leaves are moving, and a little while ago, the sky emptied a minute's rain onto the skylight. Yesterday's cruise ship gave us shuttle buses around town with their signs in German, the language spoken along Arwenack Street, and this morning, as I look out of the window, one of the grey Navy ships, the smallest, is being towed out of its berth by one of the little red tugs. I remember laughter coming out of Espressini Dulce yesterday afternoon, as I walked by, and this morning, serendipitously, I turned on the radio to be reminded that Jane Austen never bothered herself with the Napoleonic wars. It's a grey Tuesday morning in Falmouth, and a cloud has come to visit.

We forget that the biggest events of the past were inconceivable until they happened. Fall of the Berlin Wall, collapse of the Soviet Union, Nine Eleven, global financial crisis - don't be silly; can't happen. Then they all did. Today, we're all earnestly explaining to each other that it's important to keep our software up to date. Last week, major institutions were running unsupported versions of Windows XP. Inconceivable, right?
     Some years ago, the joke was that if the Russians wanted to invade, their most effective pre-invasion sabotage would be to send in spetsnaz units to put traffic cones along the roads outside UK military bases. The British proverbially queue, ha ha, and traffic cones slow us down now as much as they did then. But these days, the not-quite-so-funny joke would be: they could send in a single agent to open an email attachment. It was actually quite difficult to bring down Lehman Brothers - all that mortgage paperwork - but today, our civilisation has so far advanced that large parts of the UK's National Health Service can be paralysed with a single mouse click.
     We've made ourselves vulnerable. Technology is wonderful, et cetera, but.
     I have mixed feelings about the revelation that ransoms were paid. Small price this time to get the data back, yes, but.
     My constituent stardust was probably still pushing up daisies when King Charles I was executed (by people who at least took the Divine Right of Kings seriously as a political idea), and it clearly hadn't worked out wheat production by the time of the French Revolution. It's not difficult to come up with a list of other events that couldn't possibly happen - until they did. The lessons of history don't teach us how history works: there's a build-up to something that can't conceivably happen - then it happens. We stay sane by tracing back the causes to the point at which, oh, yeah, it was inevitable actually. For these reasons.
     Just - those people in the past weren't as clear-sighted as we are, so they couldn't see it coming.
     And we overlay that "understanding" onto the present. But the real lesson of history is: just as they couldn't see it coming, so we can't see it coming. And "it" isn't what we think it might be.
     I find it easier to believe in the imminent collapse of Western civilisation than to believe that any single political leader can achieve anything. Make America great again. Save the NHS. Whatever Macron's on about - sorry, wasn't paying attention. They promise it, but they can't do it. Outside their office windows, there's no money for anything, infrastructures are collapsing, food banks are opening, political parties are promising to solve problems that they've been promising to solve since I was poking my finger into my grandmother's Energen Rolls in the kitchen of that flat in Kensington Church Street.
     Outside my window, the leaves are moving in the wind. It's a grey morning in Falmouth. A white cruise ship arrived earlier. I walked out to Gyllingvase Beach first thing, and watched the water for a while. There are seagulls nesting on roofs, where nobody can see them.

One problem with politics these days is that there are no directly relevant, actually useful criteria on which to make a decision. Allegiance to a political party is as much emotional as it is based on rational analysis of, say, an election manifesto. Media coverage is (almost) all national, but people are local. Politicians aren't trusted. The famous examples are, I suppose, are the "Read my lips, no new taxes" promise that did for Bush Senior, and in the UK, the Liberal Democrats' commitment not to raise student-tuition fees. With rare exceptions, every political event gets fitted into the same Procrustean news format.
     If the post-Brexit disagreeableness taught us anything, it was that the last three weeks of a campaign are crucial. People believe the lies they are told in that period, and victory goes to whichever candidate paints a bigger number on the side of a bus. Yeah, right. Politics is as ridiculous as it is ubiquitous. Things can only get better, remember? We may vote according to our own idiosyncratic criteria, but we're not fools. Every significant vote of the recent past - Brexit, Trump, Macron - has been a vote against a political establishment. Politicians don't seem able to touch us any more, with their predictable arguments and their soundbites and their contrived campaign phrases - not deep down where we decide which way to vote.
     Democracy is not an exercise in getting to "the right answer". Democracy is an exercise in granting everybody the right to be consulted - and then, crucially, in giving them the feeling that they have been consulted. Democracy requires consent to the proposition: we voted, so we accept the result. Today, we seem to have something else - democracy-as-process, performance democracy, in which one side of the media-training seminar needles the other for a quote to put at the top of the next news bulletin. With or without conscious bias, everything we see and hear is mediated. And this brings out the worst aspects of a democratic election, making it more of a contest, giving the participants an incentive to over-emphasise what's at stake.
     Overlooked throughout - by the politicians and the interviewers and the pollsters, but not, I suspect, by the electorate - is the simple fact that the future is unknowable. Life goes on. No surprise, I think, that the effort to engage us in the day-to-day contest gets a diminishing return; no surprise that we vote for our own reasons rather than those placed before us on the screen. No surprise at all, really, that we vote against the political (media-political?) establishment. Voting - as distinct from democracy - is an exercise in picking somebody to manage the ongoing, fluctuating, imperfect, challenging reality of day-to-day life - not some dreamed-up set of media-friendly but shallow causes. On-screen people are talking about tactical voting, in exactly the same way that they talked about it last time. Actually, they're talking about everything in exactly the same way ... zzz.
     The sun came up this morning, after a wet day yesterday, and the air is clear. While the parties and the talking heads debate finite policies to fix clearly defined issues, as though such fixes and issues are not themselves transient, the rest of us look towards an uncertain future, and make up our own minds. The last lines of Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby talk about an unreachable ideal future and don't exactly fit here, but today's political noise will recede with us, and the political issues of today will all be forgotten, as we are borne back ceaselessly into the past.

If Sophocles is alive and well and living in some other dimension, could somebody let him know that Donald Trump has just gone public with the possibility that he might be recording his own conversations? Donald Trump himself. He said (tweeted) it. Nobody else. Seems unlikely that the US President knows any history, very unlikely, no history at all, but there's beginning to be an inevitability about the Trump presidency, the sense of an unavoidable fate that might appeal to the author of Oedipus Rex.

"Hollywood has a story problem," said somebody in a newspaper interview I read recently. The suggestion was that Hollywood doesn't come up with as many clever, original ideas as television, so we're all at home watching box sets, et cetera, rather than queuing up for the cinema. I was reminded of this on my walk this (Friday) morning: I passed a movie poster showing a pleasant-faced young woman looking anxiously back over her shoulder at the same drooling and angry-looking Alien that used to make the mistake of threatening Sigourney Weaver in the West End premieres of my youth. They never learn, those aliens. Next along was a poster showing a certain well-known pirate of the Caribbean, plus a whole boatload of familiar faces from his day-to-day life. He never gets a makeover, does he?
     There is a film coming up about a dog - a labrador, I think. Saw that on the side of a bus. Maybe, I thought, as the bus rolled on, it's a clever and original labrador, but clever and original in a way that we've never seen before. Not given to saving people who have fallen down mineshafts, nor to bringing families together, nor ... I thought about The Incredible Journey (1963), which actually includes a cat,  and then about Fluke (1995), which was based on a novel by James Herbert and is really strange (I remember enjoying the book a very long time ago; haven't seen the film). I was just thinking that the dog Bolt (2008) would make a good pet for The Incredibles (2004) when I spotted a 50p piece on the ground in front of me.
     Once, I found a £20 note. Still, 50p was a good enough omen for the day. Then maybe 100 yards further along, I found 5p. Separate finds, and no, I didn't look wildly around for the rest of the hoard. But from the 5p on, I did have a story problem of my own. Any minute now, I thought, under the "third time lucky" rule, I'm going to find a suitcase of cash, and I'm going to pick it up, and it's going to be "mob money" or some other McGuffin, and that bad guy from the film version of The Equalizer (2014), who was played by Marton Czokas, is going to step off a private jet at Newquay Airport and start tracking me down...
     This is where my mind goes during interminable general-election campaigns. Last night I caught a few minutes of an interview, possibly it was Channel 4 News, with three people, at least one of whom had written a book. Either the electorate are still miffed about the global financial crash, or the global liberal elite are failing to realise that the electorate aren't going to come round to their way of thinking because they're the ones who are wrong, or ... something else about populism. Uh huh. I woke up and reached up the remote. This morning, I flicked on the radio to hear somebody from UKIP putting a positive spin on their loss of every seat they'd contested in the local elections. You spell chutzpah - like that. But the depressing predictability of all such rebuttals is inescapable, however far beyond belief they might be.
     And so it goes on. Happily, my walk also took me down onto Fish Strand Quay, where I stopped for another look at the slab pictured below. It was laid just before the bank-holiday weekend and left to set with a wooden frame around it. In my version of the story, Holly's admirer, I assume Dave, came from his hiding place immediately after the slab-layer and the frame-maker left, and wrote his feelings into the permanent record. When he showed Holly what he'd done - yeah, but he could tell that she was pleased really. The way I see it, Holly and Dave will be on the scene, incognito, long coats out of Casablanca (1942), final scene, to watch through the Blade Runner-style (1982, if we're still doing dates) rain as a heavy nautical widget is lowered onto the slab, and then many years later, when the thing is removed again, they'll be there again to shed a meaningful tear, fade, roll credits.
     The plot in between ... oh, I don't know. The apparent involvement of Sid 'n' Nancy adds a disturbing narrative possibility, at least for anybody who remembers the late seventies, but I guess it'll be some kind of historical biopic (episodic story conducive to a  TV series, for preference) in which Holly and/or Dave is/are present at every one of the major historical events of the next few generations. And throughout all of it, in the real world as well as my imaginary version, long after all the political hot air has blown away, one enduring memorial to the events and non-events of 2017 will be a slab with the word 'LOVE' written on it.
     I like that as a final thought, on a day of election-results analysis. Thanks, Dave.