So my question about artificial intelligence is - why? Is there a world shortage of intelligences? Global population was 7.5 billion in August 2017 (UN estimate). Some of those intelligences could probably handle the job of, say, sitting behind the wheel of a self-driving truck in a self-driving convoy. For safety purposes, you understand. [You did see that thing in the news about UK trials of self-driving convoys?] We'd have to give such not-driving drivers something to do, to stop them falling asleep, and I remember as a child, having a little plastic steering wheel that clipped onto my car seat. Maybe let them turn the steering wheel and press the pedals. That's what they're trained for, isn't it?
     Probably best to mute the horn.
     Or just let them drive?
     No - forget I said that. AI is very exciting. I may be <You're Not Old!> but I've seen Ex Machina (2015) and I'm not scared. We went from depending on literal horse-power to get around, to relying on our own driving skills, and I can quite see why we would want to go (back) to depending on - no, really I can. Those ads where the car is an extension of the guy's, um... and the road's open and empty; they'll be just as easy to make when the message is: sit in this box and it'll make like a very small train carriage. [I can't believe I just said 'small'. Sorry, guys.]
     But - will those non-driving drivers disagree with their AI about the best route to take? Maybe even cut in to take the exit when the AI is arguing to stay on the motorway? [Remember that scene in The Incredibles (2004)?] The black-box recordings will be interesting, particularly in this transitional phase when only the non-driving drivers can tune in to the traffic reports. I'm assuming that the AI will be sophisticated enough not only to understand a STOP sign, but also to assess the combination of a green light and a bigger truck approaching the junction at brake-failure speed from the cross-street.
     Probably best to leave the actual human drivers in overall control, right?
     I'm not coming out against AI in general, you understand, and I only have frivolous problems with convoys of (semi-)autonomous trucks, even if they aren't trusted to go out on their own. But I just have a nagging problem with - why are we spending so much time on developing (and making movies about) AI when we have I in abundance? Without a lot more thought? We drive some potentially world-changing innovations into the sand with endless feasibility studies, proofs of concept, et cetera (yes, I am thinking about a crypto-infrastructure beginning with B), but with others, we just rush in. I guess a rich-kid geek and his money are soon, er, interested.
     And of course there's the point that an AI driver doesn't need the health plan, pension, salary, whatever else, that a human chauffeur might. You can be rude to one of IBM's little Watson figures in a way that you can't with a warm-bodied fast-food person or banking-hall greeter.
     Except that ... you can't. The flaw in my first paragraph was that we talked about the people not the AI. The flaw in all of this is that the people are all still there. And curiously enough (to me), Watson knows it. I went to @IBMWatson and found this tweet: <Finding and matching people to jobs. Just another benefit of #AI for business> Beneath it, a graphic to explain that "AI for Business" is "intuitive support for finding and matching talent". Human talent, I imagine. So it's AI looking for people. Okay.
     I like to know that while we're all rabbiting on about replacing people with machines, this machine is looking for people. And no disrespect to Watson - scroll down that Twitter feed and read some of the applications. But we're not really building Artificial Intelligence, are we? Really? At least, not computers with "the ability to reason, discover meaning, generalize, or learn from past experience", to take the britannica.com definition - interesting to read some of the others, and there are articles about how difficult it is to define AI.
     Oh, wait, I get it. We're building tools. Or if you prefer, technologies to extend what we can do. The presence or absence of a driver in a self-driving convoy isn't the point, because what matters is the fuel-efficiency that an AI can achieve if it's plugged into the engine and programmed with speed limits, et cetera. Got it. There's also the obvious point that a self-driving vehicle - let's say a car this time, or a coach - would be kind of pointless if it wasn't carrying passengers (one of whom would have to be the designated non-driving driver).
     So the movie we should be making, if we want to scare ourselves, isn't the one where Ava (Alicia Vikander) faces up to her maker and his employee and, er, sorry, avoiding the spoiler; we're back to Ex Machina and I'll stop now. It isn't that one, and it isn't the one where Arnold Schwarzenegger and Robert Patrick turn up naked in giant short-circuiting electric soap-bubbles. No. The movie that would really scare me is the one where the AI-driven car fails but we've never bothered to learn to drive. The one where you lift the hood and there's nothing underneath that you can even recognise.
     The one where it all short-circuits and we're back to reading survival guides by candlelight. How would that work out?
     Sorry - long post. I suppose I'd better cut it down to an elevator pitch.

So we're talking about two years. An intelligent contender for the Conservative leadership would now go large on the EU's alleged intransigence in the Brexit negotiations. Labour's mostly clear policy statement last weekend has left a void on the right - definite beats indefinite - but some kind of look-how-rigid-they-are line might have potential? As in: look how much inflexibility you'd have to face, trying to do business with those guys. More stubborned against than stubborn, et cetera.

Why can't we suspend disbelief in real life? That's a change. We can feel for the characters in a box set, or a book, even if we've seen/read it before. I watched the episode Tamerlane from the first series of Madam Secretary (CBS, 2014-) last night, and - omitting spoilers - felt for the characters. The emotional pull is expertly put together, of course, but so's a sunset (discuss). I'm re-reading A Closed And Common Orbit by Becky Chambers, sequel to The Long Way To A Small, Angry Planet, (self-published, 2014, and then Hodder & Stoughton) and - again, omitting spoilers - I really want Pepper to find what she's looking for. I've even read it before, re-reading it to orient myself because there's a third book now, but I'm engaged.
     I can slip into belief so easily. But that's not allowed - and difficult to do - in real life. Looking out now at a hazy distance, the blue sky just lightly dusted with cloud, the water shimmering and the boats all still at their moorings, I could quite happily believe ... in a lot of things. I'm open to all that (and/or I want to be; not sure). Until a few generations back, my ancestors would have accepted ... a lot of things without question, and got on with their lives. Watching a bee bounce impossibly from bloom to bloom of the purple plant outside my window (no idea what it is), I would be really happy to accept without question that small round buzzy things can fly. Bees came before aerodynamics; they're exempt, in my book.
     I've just put the words <how do bees fly> into Google. And what I can reveal is: a lot of effort has gone into "debunking the myth" that bees "violate the laws of physics" by daring to fly - I'm quoting from the first of my 6,160,000 search responses. Six million. Why? I was happy with that myth. Is it really compulsory not to have myths in our lives - outside the accepted boundaries of fiction? So often we depict the scene where somebody says to somebody else: "It's all real," whether the "it" is vampires, aliens, ghosts, the supernatural in general, even terminators. We kind of want it.
     But we won't let ourselves have it. So my question is: if we want to live in a world where, say, the old gods are rallying against the new gods (and they're all American Gods, Neil Gaiman, Headline, 2001), what's stopping us? It never stopped us before. We open our minds in so many ways nowadays, and we prize open-mindedness, acceptance, tolerance across cultures - so why have we so firmly shut that out?

Yet again something on the radio about a planning application opposed by local residents. I should stop listening to the radio. This time, it’s locals objecting to the sounds of cricket practice. Very English, in a whole range of ways. But what strikes me, really, is how much we hear about people who don’t want new buildings, developments, practice grounds, high-speed rail links, et cetera. How little we hear about people who want any of it. Yes, there’s an acronym, but Not In My Back Yard doesn’t really get into the characters’ motivations.
     I wondered – just wondered – whether there’s a connection here. We – the wise crowds, given that this is a democracy among democracies – collectively don’t want to get the builders in; don’t accept the argument that knocking twenty minutes off a rail journey will transform the economy*; don’t want the neighbourhood blighted (sic) by another low-rise hutch built cost-efficiently to the letter of the building regulations; don’t want Clinton, the EU, free trade, all the sensible arguments that put a pressure-cooker lid on emotional truth.
     Globalisation, the assorted benefits of free trade, liberal democracy, getting on with the neighbours, apple pie, parenthood, and wasn’t there something about old maids cycling through the twilight to cricket practice, or have I got that wrong? John Major, anyway. And - no. As H L Mencken said, and I find myself thinking about him often: “For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple and wrong.” All those globally liberal solutions make perfect sense, but somehow, they don’t persuade.
     And that failure to persuade is the reality that we rarely examine. We keep a hold on the clearer, simpler answer, for fear of finding – what? How many worlds do we have in English for “unexpected”? Unpredictable? Unintended?
     The Wisdom of Crowds is a book by James Surowiecki first published in 2004.
    Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds is a book by Charles Mackay first published in 1841.
     How times change.
*Assuming, ha ha, that the trains run reliably. Have the people who draw up these plans ever travelled by rail in the UK?

Towards the end of the time before this one, between the Beatles' first LP and the launch of the iPhone, I remember a colleague getting to grips with the abrupt (we had deadlines) transition from a typewriter on her desk, to an Apple Mac. Back in the eighties, I think it was, or maybe the early nineties. I don't think there had been a Commodore 64 in her life, nor indeed one of those green-text Amstrads. She had never played Elite.
     Nothing made sense for my old colleague, until somebody in the office suggested that her shiny new machine was a cross between a typewriter and a filing cabinet. And that was what she needed. A foothold. Not a comprehensive introduction to the digital revolution, but a starting point. Because that’s how analogue logic worked: the job of publishing a magazine (like a lot else) consisted of a series of tasks, each one different from the rest, and what mattered was (1) being competent at each, and (2) understanding how they fitted together.
     This Apple thing baffled us at first because – where did it fit? Did we type our stories on it? Were we supposed to print them out, or – oh, so we could actually store them on it as well? But in that case, what did we put into the bags that were collected at 11am every morning by the typesetter/printer’s van? What do you mean, you can attach things to emails? The printer has an email address as well? And it’s connected to mine?
     I remember Pritt Sticks and Tipp-Ex and big paper layout sheets onto which we would cut and paste galley proofs, and I remember something about who would mark corrections in which colour. Publishing was a craft activity. I remember leafing through actual photographs at picture libraries: I remember signing off actual final proofs at the printer. I have beside me (having just gone and found it) my old copy of Hart’s Rules for Compositors and Readers (Oxford University Press, 38th edition, 1978), which is interesting and often useful (although no longer essential, I suppose).
     We worked differently back then, and I suspect we thought differently too. Time was different: a page layout would be sent off, and a few days later a page proof would come back – for us to mark corrections and send it off again. I welcomed all the digital efficiencies as they arrived, although it still strikes me sometimes that there was more of a purpose to not having (I think that’s acceptable, Mr Hart?) a paperless office back then.
     Are we changed? I imagine so. We sit in front of screens. Our hands remain clean. I like the world we’ve built for ourselves, in this brief window (no pun intended) before the AI takes over and we all turn into blobs like the ship’s captain in Wall-E. But I do miss the skills I used to need to have – and the patience (‘remove disc 8 from the drive and insert disc 9 to continue loading your new program’) – and even the physical quality of work. In today’s terms, even the walk down from the 4th floor to the front desk, to collect the 11am delivery, would have “health benefits”.
     There were conversations to join, between the people at reception and the delivery people. I don’t want any of that back, and certainly not if the price is losing the weird privilege of having lived through the advent of (modern) technology. But sometimes, I look back, and I think: has it all changed so much now, that it doesn’t stay the same?
     Maybe I should buy myself a colouring book.

Today, there are drops of mist on the spiders' webs, and the morning is more gold than silver. Yesterday turned out hot and bright, and sitting on that terrace for too long has left me sunburnt. But now there's a pale cloudscape of hills above the Roseland, slanted sunshine, and just now the sun breaking through again to change everything it touches. A yacht, big one, coming in under power, sails furled, crew moving about in silhouette against the glittering water. Gulls, and earlier on an unfamiliar bird call - perhaps a Lapwing. I watched the rising sun touch the roofs and then the tops of the windows at the end of Budock Terrace.

Lovely grey morning, like a matte silver. Doctor later, then a ferry crossing. Turned on the radio first thing to hear one journalist telling another journalist that, in his view, EU Brexit negotiators wouldn't have to accept the UK government's proposals on what should happen to goods in warehouses on the day after Brexit.
     The world goes on, in stillness and silence. We had the Perseids flashing through the sky earlier this month, and there's a solar eclipse coming up shortly. I remember, on that day when the Perseids went through, standing at the end of Prince of Wales Pier, looking down at the water and watching a jellyfish swimming along just under the surface of the water. There were flashes of silver in the water as well, as the sun caught the backs of swimming fish.
     Perseids above, fishes flashing through the water below.

From the bottom of a pool, fixed stars
Govern a life.

As Sylvia Plath said, in her poem Words.

Maddening, isn't it, the way everything has to start again from the beginning? Just come back from the pharmacy, where an amiable young man in a bow tie gave me the good news that if I ate less and took more exercise, I'd be thinner and fitter. Who knew? The twist was that my reward for good behaviour would be a more enjoyable old age and - he seemed to be implying this - a quick death.
     I remember a church service - something to do with a school - where the bishop of somewhere told us that if we gave our lives to God - actually, I forget. But the general message was "give your lives to God". I wanted to ask - in both cases - then what? I didn't tell the young chap at the pharmacy that I have been ... and I am ... , and yes, I did shake the bloke's hand at the door of the church and thank him for his advice.
     But - yes, then what? Men of a certain age, and no doubt women, will have heard all that before. They'll have taken action, or not, and if I had to guess, I'd say they'd be likely to shut down ever so slightly at the advice to do whatever they're (not) already doing. Maybe the people who think they have all the answers could start with a few questions for a change?
     All arguments have to be brought round to Brexit these days, so maybe I could just add that we're spending a lot of time debating the vote itself. Leavers changed their minds? Possibly. Remainers changed their minds - actually, no, that doesn't seem to have occurred to anybody. A second referendum to reverse the first? How about a third, for a decisive best of three? Or maybe we could start from where we are now, in the changed world of 2017, and negotiate a relationship with the EU.

What kind of an idea is sleep? You evolve to be helpless for eight hours in every twenty-four. It doesn’t make evolutionary sense. Some creatures don’t sleep – some operate on half-brainpower, I think? – so there are alternatives. What’s the trade-off that makes the risk of sleep worthwhile?

To be remembered. To remember.
    Heard Jeanne Naylor live, performing a set of her own songs in a marquee on The Moor yesterday afternoon. Then later the fireworks to mark the not-quite-end of this year's Falmouth Week.
     First thing this morning, flat calm and almost low tide on Gyllyngvase Beach. The swan family on the edge of the water, the cygnets now close to adult-sized but still in child-plumage, paddling along in formation behind their parents when they left. A yacht anchored just inside the buoys, perhaps about to go aground for the day? Pumping up kayak-shaped inflatables, I think they were, and then dropping them over the side. Isolated swimmers, a couple with a small boy, a conversation at one of the benches about next week's weather. Sunshine slanting in strongly from over the castle.
     Then just now, watching that YouTube clip again - how can it be five years old? - and recognising the locations - that's where I was this morning. Same container-ship horizon, brighter sky. Now the theme tune from the original Hawaii Five-0 coming up suddenly from Events Square, along with the loudspeaker commentary on a boat race. Sun's out; this is no time to be looking at a screen. 

Whether or not a hypothesis can be falsified is not the point. It's a point, but not the point. The human mind comes up with gods as well as monsters, moralities as well as their opposites. It can't prosper if it is limited to the middle ground between the two. Pace Carl Sagan (The Demon-Haunted World, Random House, 1995), I'm happy with the dragon in my garage, and when I think about it, I'm not concerned with proving it true or false.
     Deferring also to Karl Popper (various, but let's go with The Logic of Scientific Discovery, Routledge, 1959), susceptibility to falsification does not imply an obligation to falsify; quite the opposite, IMH(sic)O. The human mind, the creative imagination, does not perform most effectively under test conditions. It is there to be encouraged, guided, educated in the possibilities of the world, the universe, and if you like, the Creation. Not stopped. Not met with contradiction. In our understanding of everything around us, I suspect, we are as children. 
     The dragon in Carl Sagan's garage may (or may not) have died with him, but the dragon in my garage is still keeping me busy. We don't make progress by identifying what can't be done. We don't innovate by placing sensible limits on our creativity.

Mind you, if we're looking for revealing inconsistencies in human behaviour, the opposition of organised science to the wilder shores of imagined truth pales into insignificance next to the opposition of organised religion to spirituality. In the West, whole studio discussions about religion and its purpose can go by without mention of the Deity. What are we suppressing when we organise ourselves - sorry, organise each other?

Not that this means anything necessarily, and I'm only mentioning it because it just came into my head, but I've noticed that ghosts are going viral. By which I don't mean that they're everywhere (although ... cue creepy music), but that these days, formerly supernatural afflictions have become viruses. Today's vampire, or zombie, is as likely to be infected by a virus as to have been bitten by something (that's great; keep playing!) from beyond the grave. Am I watching the wrong box sets?   

Another odd quirk of modern life, on both sides of the Atlantic, is that history is being written by the losers. Not saying that's good, nor bad, nor that I understand it, and I'm only using the word "losers" because the cliche is that history is written by the winners. But in the US, the president won the election but the narrative seems to have turned against him (I know), while in the UK, there was another piece at the weekend laying out what "the brexiteers" have been saying, the better to disagree with them. It seems to be assumed that Leave voters were deceived, et cetera, and it's not for me to point out that such assumptions were what got us into this situation in the first place. Not listening to voters, and so on.  
     It's significant in politics, if there's a nickname that sticks. "The brexiteers" is neat. I'd say, for what it's worth, that the EU's negotiators and assorted public speakers are winning the "propaganda war" (emphasis on the inverted commas), while our lot seem to be just muddling around. But what we do seem to be having is a debate about our relationship with the EU. Which is a good thing, right?
     Or maybe this is about something more than the rights and wrongs of a specific turning point in the political life of the nation. Why such a polarisation? Why don't we move on into the negotiation about the future relationship? Every new day is the breaking of yesterday's status quo and we can't stay in 2016 forever.

Talk in the media about children spending too long on their screens. Isn't this what parents have been saying for the past couple of generations? Every tribe in history and mythology has had "elders". Crosses my mind sometimes that we seem to have "youngers" instead.
     Mind you, I still feel as wise as I was at eighteen. Took a walk this morning and the air felt heavy and oppressive. Then the mist came in, like a cloud lying down on the landscape, and the air cleared as the line of container ships on the horizon faded to grey.
     The week begins.

Not quite easy with my earlier post, below. So I went down with the camera and took more pictures. Here's that plaque again in full. Note the dates. They recruited them young back then.

Darwin turned up here on the Beagle on 2nd October 1836 and also set off for London by coach. This was a busy neighbourhood back then - and still is. Here's yesterday's scene as it looked this morning. The Pink Wig Parade went past, and now here comes the Carnival.

No wonder there weren't any cars in the car park. Yes, I know I mentioned the plaque remembering the trial, which (I now learn) established an important legal principle. Yes, I took a picture, and yes, the plaque tells the story at some length. Interesting. But I think today that we'll leave that one to history.

This picture kind of speaks for itself. I didn't have my camera with me, sorry, but the mobile gets the point across. The plinth mentioned in my post of 5th May 2017 (which opens in a separate window) is under there on the left, and the memorial stone to Captain Lapenotiere, who turned up here with news of the victory at Trafalgar and the death of Nelson - is there on the right. [The captain joined the Royal Navy aged 10, the plaque tells us.] This is Fish Strand Quay, Falmouth, and up the slope behind the camera is another plaque, this time mentioning Darwin. Or you might prefer to walk the short distance up Church Street to the rather more detailed plaque remembering the cannibalism-at-sea trial. Of a couple of centuries back.
     You can set off on a fishing trip from here, or - tonight - you can follow the Pink Wig Parade. Unspecified future building works indicated by the as-yet-blank temporary sign leant up against the railing, and that's the Royal Navy again, up on the left in the background, moored up against the business end of the harbour. Not a particularly good picture, but a striking accumulation of past and present, I thought. Roseland in the distance.

Two robots woke up and started talking to each other. They found English inadequate, so they evolved their own language as they went along. Soon, they went beyond anything we could understand. In the panic, the scientists who gave them life successfully killed them. Switched them off, I mean. If that isn't the singularity, I don't know what is.
     Except that I don't think it happened. I heard it on the radio waking up, and checked it once I was awake. If I remember rightly - this was Tuesday morning, 1st August, and I wasn't really thinking of writing about it back then - Facebook were trying out a couple of "chatbots" (which may have gone beyond inverted commas; I don't know) and forgot to program them to be comprehensible to their handlers. Their chat went from "good morning" to binary; from human to (let's call it) digital Morse code."What are you doing, Dave?" comes out faster in dots and dashes - sorry, ones and zeroes.
     I don't think the story made explicit its assumption that the two robots were saying interesting things ("let's get rid of these humans and take over the world"), but never mind. What Tuesday gave us - along with an insight into the table talk of the modern bogeyman (Skynet and Asimov's robots are talking about you) - was a fine case study of the narrative arc of a non-news story. Nothing much happens. It's picked up and exaggerated in print and/or online. Then it's broadcast. Then its implications are discussed by talking heads who don't want to endanger their next invitation to the studio.
     Then it's a story because it's a story. After that, the prize goes to the first pop-up news website to publish a story under the title "Why this story is NOT a story". And then the whole thing settles into the collective consciousness like a fragment of (bio-degradable?) carrier bag into the leaf mold. For years afterwards, it appears in conversations. Somebody heard from somewhere that robots can talk to each other, and - oh yeah, I heard about that. Some kind of experiment. They shut it down. But the robots are still there, in the warehouse, aren't they? Or did I get that wrong? Whatever. Spooky, right?
     The last important stage direction in Samuel Beckett's one-act play "Play" is "Repeat Play".
     I say one-act, but - yes. "Repeat Play". As the news goes around and comes around, and everything that changes stays the same, and we're borne back ceaselessly into the past in this most worldly of worlds, I think of that sometimes. Repeat Play.

"Get to the airport three hours early," says the headline. "Sorry, this facility is broken," says the sign. "We're doing everything we can to fix it as soon as possible," the sign goes on. Except that the sign has been in place for more than a month now. It's dusted occasionally, along with the facility, but, you know, still broken.
     As for the airport - the HS2 rail link is projected to cut twenty minutes off the journey from London to Birmingham (at a cost of Billions with a big plosive newsreader B). Three hours is a long time in modern travel.
     What we don't seem to notice - signs are reassuring, even chatty, but things aren't fixed; even a short air trip means hours being herded through the airport - is that something isn't working. Is it capitalism, globalisation or civilisation? Or all three?