Where are we now? Hurtling round the sun, held to the ground by a weak force that we don’t understand, arguing about trade deals between the land masses on a planet mostly covered by water. The dolphins must think us ridiculous. No wonder they only come to the shallow water to play with us, not to signal complex philosophies.
Spend long enough walking past sheep in the mornings, and you realise that they’ve developed a language. It says what they need it to say - “Where are you?” says the mother, and “I’m over here,” says the lamb, and that’s kind of it from the perspective of a man walking past with a dog on a lead. Spend long enough sitting on a bench on Prince of Wales Pier, Falmouth, eating a West Country Ham With Cheese & Pickle Tiger Bap from Warren’s, and you begin to understand the language of seagulls.
“I don’t want to fly. I want you to bring me something to eat,” says the young seagull. “That tourist is going to tread on you,” says the parent. After that, it’s a language of demonstration: this is how you swoop down and snatch an ice cream from the hands of a toddler. Or a West, etc., from an adult. Seagulls aren’t popular around here. But there is a whole language of: that guy’s dropped a piece of cheese; it’s mine because I’m brave enough to dart forward and grab it; okay, I’m just about to dart forward; hey, pigeon, that’s cheating. We have bugs in our guts, apparently, with strangely elaborate names; and we have birds all around us competing to eat our lunch before we feed it to the bugs.
I wonder what life is like for one of those bugs. More sociable than a few years back, I guess. Same coffee washing down in the morning and same Shredded Wheat, but now regular drenches of acido-bifulo-fafulofulously energetic organic-yoghurt, no-added-sugar, brighten-up-your-day bugs to, ah, lick the walls clean. And then finally - we’ll dispense with full disclosure here - the long journey South. Let go. Relax. Go into the Dark. Sorry. Birds map the world differently; organic live cultures in a plastic (huh?) bottle of Kefir from the health-food shop would probably not come up with Catholicism if you challenged them to invent a religion.
Consciousness is what we - they - need it to be, isn’t it? I woke up this morning with an idea in my head for a post about the invention of language. It might have been a dream, actually. But anyway - my first protege, a woman, senior in the eyes of her following group of close relatives and, um, unattached males, snatches up a stick and bangs it against a tree. It doesn’t break. She stands with it in her hand. She’s not dominant in the group, but the others stop and turn to look at her. Stop, she says, although without words because they haven’t got words yet. Here.
Stop. She hits the tree again and then scrapes a mark on the dry ground beneath her feet with the end of her stick. Because this is my dream, the dry ground is about the consistency of a raked sandpit on a wet day - we’ll be playing indoors today, children. She stands, this nameless woman, and her group - her tribe, let’s say, because it will be a tribe - stands and looks at her. Then they all look at the mark on the ground, and with an emphasis that is part body language, part vocalisation and all force of personality, my protege invents the idea that a mark on the ground can signify a place. Here. Stop here. These trees. This earth. All in this mark. Ours.
Considerably later, she will use a mixture of charcoal, earth and oil to immortalise a hunting party on the wall of a cave in what will be southern France. She will invent art. But for now, she has told her people, by the use of a mark on the ground, that this is their place. She has opened their minds to “I”, “We”, and”here”, and in a few generations they’ll rampage across what will be Europe in a holy war that will erase nascent civilisations across the land mass - but for now, they just gather in a huddle and start looking for bugs (not those bugs) to eat. We’ll leave them there, but their minds have been sparked: they have identity beyond instinct; a means of communication that extends beyond themselves; above all, consciousness of themselves stopped in a landscape.
Consciousness - by which in this instance I mean the ability to harness the power of communications technology (in the sense, pick up a stick, scratch a mark, thereby communicate an idea) - is what that woman needed to get her tribe to stop their aimless, just-been-imagined, no-back-story-yet wandering. There was probably a volcano. At least one well-nobody-said-anything-to-me-about-extinction giant pterodactyl. Probably a party of explorers led by an H. Rider Haggard character with a beard. I could talk about intelligence, but that's limited by being measurable; as I use the term, consciousness is all of it. Focused consciousness, perhaps.
But let's not define terms. No, let's not. Consciousness - in the sense, being able to think of a more interesting use for the amount of processing power that you’d find in a modern-day washing machine, was what got us to the moon. Consciousness is there when we find it and it's a directional thing - it’s not what we need; it forms around whatever idea we’ve got in mind - and it’s highly responsive. Acidobulufulo-cultures don’t need thought, but I bet they’re good hunters in their own way. I should probably mention opposable thumbs at some point.
I’m not sure whether it was consciousness or human nature that filled the outer, outer, outer atmosphere with so-called space junk, but I do wonder how much practical consciousness we’re going to need going forward, and what form it’ll take, now that we’ve invented a technology that takes work away from us; now that creativity and innovation amount to finding apps to do for us what we used to do. There was a small sign offering a “petrol app” where I filled up yesterday. Google just offered me "Smart Compose" for my email account. I wonder if I can use auto-complete to tick the "I am not a robot" box when I'm filling in a form.
By the way, did you see that drama the other night? The one everybody’s talking about?
If only real life was that realistic.
Spend long enough walking past sheep in the mornings, and you realise that they’ve developed a language. It says what they need it to say - “Where are you?” says the mother, and “I’m over here,” says the lamb, and that’s kind of it from the perspective of a man walking past with a dog on a lead. Spend long enough sitting on a bench on Prince of Wales Pier, Falmouth, eating a West Country Ham With Cheese & Pickle Tiger Bap from Warren’s, and you begin to understand the language of seagulls.
“I don’t want to fly. I want you to bring me something to eat,” says the young seagull. “That tourist is going to tread on you,” says the parent. After that, it’s a language of demonstration: this is how you swoop down and snatch an ice cream from the hands of a toddler. Or a West, etc., from an adult. Seagulls aren’t popular around here. But there is a whole language of: that guy’s dropped a piece of cheese; it’s mine because I’m brave enough to dart forward and grab it; okay, I’m just about to dart forward; hey, pigeon, that’s cheating. We have bugs in our guts, apparently, with strangely elaborate names; and we have birds all around us competing to eat our lunch before we feed it to the bugs.
I wonder what life is like for one of those bugs. More sociable than a few years back, I guess. Same coffee washing down in the morning and same Shredded Wheat, but now regular drenches of acido-bifulo-fafulofulously energetic organic-yoghurt, no-added-sugar, brighten-up-your-day bugs to, ah, lick the walls clean. And then finally - we’ll dispense with full disclosure here - the long journey South. Let go. Relax. Go into the Dark. Sorry. Birds map the world differently; organic live cultures in a plastic (huh?) bottle of Kefir from the health-food shop would probably not come up with Catholicism if you challenged them to invent a religion.
Consciousness is what we - they - need it to be, isn’t it? I woke up this morning with an idea in my head for a post about the invention of language. It might have been a dream, actually. But anyway - my first protege, a woman, senior in the eyes of her following group of close relatives and, um, unattached males, snatches up a stick and bangs it against a tree. It doesn’t break. She stands with it in her hand. She’s not dominant in the group, but the others stop and turn to look at her. Stop, she says, although without words because they haven’t got words yet. Here.
Stop. She hits the tree again and then scrapes a mark on the dry ground beneath her feet with the end of her stick. Because this is my dream, the dry ground is about the consistency of a raked sandpit on a wet day - we’ll be playing indoors today, children. She stands, this nameless woman, and her group - her tribe, let’s say, because it will be a tribe - stands and looks at her. Then they all look at the mark on the ground, and with an emphasis that is part body language, part vocalisation and all force of personality, my protege invents the idea that a mark on the ground can signify a place. Here. Stop here. These trees. This earth. All in this mark. Ours.
Considerably later, she will use a mixture of charcoal, earth and oil to immortalise a hunting party on the wall of a cave in what will be southern France. She will invent art. But for now, she has told her people, by the use of a mark on the ground, that this is their place. She has opened their minds to “I”, “We”, and”here”, and in a few generations they’ll rampage across what will be Europe in a holy war that will erase nascent civilisations across the land mass - but for now, they just gather in a huddle and start looking for bugs (not those bugs) to eat. We’ll leave them there, but their minds have been sparked: they have identity beyond instinct; a means of communication that extends beyond themselves; above all, consciousness of themselves stopped in a landscape.
Consciousness - by which in this instance I mean the ability to harness the power of communications technology (in the sense, pick up a stick, scratch a mark, thereby communicate an idea) - is what that woman needed to get her tribe to stop their aimless, just-been-imagined, no-back-story-yet wandering. There was probably a volcano. At least one well-nobody-said-anything-to-me-about-extinction giant pterodactyl. Probably a party of explorers led by an H. Rider Haggard character with a beard. I could talk about intelligence, but that's limited by being measurable; as I use the term, consciousness is all of it. Focused consciousness, perhaps.
But let's not define terms. No, let's not. Consciousness - in the sense, being able to think of a more interesting use for the amount of processing power that you’d find in a modern-day washing machine, was what got us to the moon. Consciousness is there when we find it and it's a directional thing - it’s not what we need; it forms around whatever idea we’ve got in mind - and it’s highly responsive. Acidobulufulo-cultures don’t need thought, but I bet they’re good hunters in their own way. I should probably mention opposable thumbs at some point.
I’m not sure whether it was consciousness or human nature that filled the outer, outer, outer atmosphere with so-called space junk, but I do wonder how much practical consciousness we’re going to need going forward, and what form it’ll take, now that we’ve invented a technology that takes work away from us; now that creativity and innovation amount to finding apps to do for us what we used to do. There was a small sign offering a “petrol app” where I filled up yesterday. Google just offered me "Smart Compose" for my email account. I wonder if I can use auto-complete to tick the "I am not a robot" box when I'm filling in a form.
By the way, did you see that drama the other night? The one everybody’s talking about?
If only real life was that realistic.
Dreaming Spires 2.0. Two shallow-water drilling rigs and a Navy ship. Elsewhere in the harbour, to the right of this picture, a cruise liner called The World has come for a two-day stay.
Instead of a Universal Basic Income, because we all get in such a tizz about money, why don’t companies gift to their employees the robots that are going to take their jobs? If I get a universal hundred quid a week, say, I could splurge it all on wine (other beverages are available), persons (please specify gender) and song (high volume can cause permanent hearing loss; do you wish to continue, Y/N?) and still need benefits by the end of the weekend. There’d be tax forms to complete, allowances and deductions to take seriously, and if the current benefits system is anything to go by, rigorous annual interviews aimed at finding an excuse to give me a pay cut.
Because I’m not above cheap one-liners, I’d say that receiving a UBI could become a full-time job. Because I’m usually wrong about most things, I have just gone online and found various accounts of UBIs being trialled around the world - and giving vulnerable people stability - so I take it all back. Most of it. My argument isn’t with the notion of a UBI - in prehistorically agrarian days, when we were all aspiring to be subsistence farmers, there was a UBI in the form of whatever crops grew that year - but with the administration. See above re forms, etc., and excuse me while I mutter under my breath about the bureaucratic mindset that would want to look busy by getting between me and my UBI.
He’s really benched the bold-type side-heads, hasn’t he? I know it’s just me, and no doubt there’s some remote childhood trauma that explains it, but I don’t like having to thank an intermediary for something that is mine by right. Heck, I even get twitchy when I complete an online form and the last button to click says “Submit”. I want it to say “Issue a direct order” or “I want it now”, but no. I have to “Submit”, even if it’s my money that I’m handing over. It’s no wonder that whenever I get angry, I turn into a huge scaly fire-breathing monster and rampage through the nearby forest until I calm down again. And then have to find something to wear for the walk home.
Yeah. Because...
...and we might as well resign ourselves to this digression...
...that’s always a problem. There’s an old adage that if Our Hero is going to save himself by pulling out a gun, he has to have been seen to have put a gun in his pocket in an earlier chapter. Boy, that was wordy: if he’s holding a gun now, he has to have picked up a gun then. Basic physics. One of the reasons why I’ve never written a fantasy novel about shapeshifters, in the sense of werewolves or whatever, is because my early chapters would get so boring: Our Hero wanders around the forest concealing biodegradable-but-waterproof bags of lightweight clothing for afterwards. Women are better at this, in my experience*.
Yes, I think he thought we were getting a bit distracting. I mean, a word or two to break up the flow of text is okay, but we were starting to develop our own - oh! Sorry! Fantasy novels always have a map at the front; mine has a map with a lot of crosses on it, plus tiny notations that if it’s cold, he should go to that cross for the warm top. His favourite boxer shorts are behind that tree, and for shoes, he’ll have to climb that tree and evict those two squirrels. The plot would all be about finding biodegradable storage bags, then suitable lightweight clothing, good hiding places - and the real plot would start in about chapter seven, on the day that he came down from an angry [Can I say “an angry”? Like “a high”? My hero, call him Greg, would, so that’s okay.] to find that all his concealed clothes were missing.
Either they’ve all been stolen by somebody who wants to delay his return home - no, wait, I know: they haven’t been stolen, not disappeared at all, but now there’s some kind of tracking device concealed in the lining of - yes, and the bad guys have got footage of the fire-breathing monster and - yes, that’s it, and now they’re hunting him because, let’s see - no, wait, let’s not see yet, because there’s a fire in the forest - and…
...I’m sorry about all the environmental devastation this blog post is causing, by the way…
...and maybe that girlfriend back home, who doesn’t know his secret (scribbling madly here) but does wonder why she never sees the clothes in his laundry basket go back into his cupboards - he does his own laundry, but y’know, she looks around - yes, that's it, and then in about chapter ten (can't keep up with these ideas) I’d take him out shopping again for replacement gear. Without her. Chapter nine would be all about her thinking he's seeing somebody else, and him wanting to buy a trolley-load of undergarments...
...Online shopping hasn't arrived in fantasy fiction yet, has it?...
...fire-proof this time, two sets, one for the cupboards. She loves him really, but she doesn’t admit it to herself because he’s kinda dangerous and she has a secret of her own. If (yes!) he ever finds out that she’s, um, thingummy, he’ll never love her, she believes, although right at the end she saves him, necessarily revealing what she is, and he loves her anyway, and…
...and the incidental characters all work in clothing stores, like the one in Boston where I bought that T-shirt with ‘Innocent Bystander’ written on the front. They actually know something about clothes, which gets that audience...
Hmm. Maybe we should sit this one out. Sorry. Big digression there.
The risk with a UBI would be that it became an administrative nightmare. Governments never do anything simply; bureaucracies sustain themselves through complication. But if I was employed doing something that could easily be done by a machine, the “robots taking our jobs” problem would go away if I could send my own robot to do my old job. Instead of the proverbial gold watch at retirement, or whatever is the modern equivalent, let’s imagine that the team had a whip-round in the usual way, for the cake, and then at the end of the evening, in a hugely ironic and post-modern gesture, what came bursting out of the cake was - my robot.
Everybody on the team would meet - let’s call it Greg too - and its … his appearance would be roughly modelled on me, complete with flat cap and pipe. Every Monday morning from then on, Greg would set off for work, and every Friday evening, without fail, without stopping at the pub on the way, Greg would bring home his/my pay packet. We’d spend the weekend playing golf - I don't play golf, no hand-eye co-ordination, but I’d never lose - and on Sunday evening, he’d cook me and mine a huge roast (late) lunch. Then, let’s imagine, he’d plug himself into the screen in the corner, and show us all a drama of his own devising.
Flat cap and pipe? Sorry - I’ll shut up. Or something like that. There would have to be a UBI, of course, because companies don’t gift anything and I’d need the money to lease Greg. So I’d be paying for him to go do my job and bring me money, and Greg would have to be a taxpayer, and I’m thinking small here, because I could have two Gregs, one at work and one at home, with a single consciousness (sic) between them that goes there during the week, at the flick of a switch, and back here at the weekend, and then of course there’s the issue that if my partner and I decided to move in together, she’d come with, er, Leonie, and let’s just imagine that there was a software incompatibility between Greg and Leonie, or they started to compete because they were made by different manufacturers…
...and then one Sunday there was fighting in the kitchen over whether it was Greg’s turn to cook…
...and then serious difficulty over whether or not we complimented Leonie’s Softbank Robotics roast potatoes with as much sincerity as we gave to Greg’s IBM parsnips…
...or vice-versa, of course, and then another row because my partner and I got so hungry waiting that we secretly ordered take-out, but the delivery robot had once known Greg, who can scent him/her/it over the wifi...
...and I think maybe there’s a lot to be said for a UBI. But let’s also go to work, eh, instead of designing machines to operate our machines?
*My experience of reading fantasy novels about shapeshifters, I mean. Faith Hunter’s Jane Yellowrock, for example, always carries something to wear. She has unembarrassable neighbours and the men in her life wouldn't mind, I imagine, but let's add the believable detail, right? A principle of fiction, I think, is to confront the difficulty rather than write a way round it.
Because I’m not above cheap one-liners, I’d say that receiving a UBI could become a full-time job. Because I’m usually wrong about most things, I have just gone online and found various accounts of UBIs being trialled around the world - and giving vulnerable people stability - so I take it all back. Most of it. My argument isn’t with the notion of a UBI - in prehistorically agrarian days, when we were all aspiring to be subsistence farmers, there was a UBI in the form of whatever crops grew that year - but with the administration. See above re forms, etc., and excuse me while I mutter under my breath about the bureaucratic mindset that would want to look busy by getting between me and my UBI.
He’s really benched the bold-type side-heads, hasn’t he? I know it’s just me, and no doubt there’s some remote childhood trauma that explains it, but I don’t like having to thank an intermediary for something that is mine by right. Heck, I even get twitchy when I complete an online form and the last button to click says “Submit”. I want it to say “Issue a direct order” or “I want it now”, but no. I have to “Submit”, even if it’s my money that I’m handing over. It’s no wonder that whenever I get angry, I turn into a huge scaly fire-breathing monster and rampage through the nearby forest until I calm down again. And then have to find something to wear for the walk home.
Yeah. Because...
...and we might as well resign ourselves to this digression...
...that’s always a problem. There’s an old adage that if Our Hero is going to save himself by pulling out a gun, he has to have been seen to have put a gun in his pocket in an earlier chapter. Boy, that was wordy: if he’s holding a gun now, he has to have picked up a gun then. Basic physics. One of the reasons why I’ve never written a fantasy novel about shapeshifters, in the sense of werewolves or whatever, is because my early chapters would get so boring: Our Hero wanders around the forest concealing biodegradable-but-waterproof bags of lightweight clothing for afterwards. Women are better at this, in my experience*.
Yes, I think he thought we were getting a bit distracting. I mean, a word or two to break up the flow of text is okay, but we were starting to develop our own - oh! Sorry! Fantasy novels always have a map at the front; mine has a map with a lot of crosses on it, plus tiny notations that if it’s cold, he should go to that cross for the warm top. His favourite boxer shorts are behind that tree, and for shoes, he’ll have to climb that tree and evict those two squirrels. The plot would all be about finding biodegradable storage bags, then suitable lightweight clothing, good hiding places - and the real plot would start in about chapter seven, on the day that he came down from an angry [Can I say “an angry”? Like “a high”? My hero, call him Greg, would, so that’s okay.] to find that all his concealed clothes were missing.
Either they’ve all been stolen by somebody who wants to delay his return home - no, wait, I know: they haven’t been stolen, not disappeared at all, but now there’s some kind of tracking device concealed in the lining of - yes, and the bad guys have got footage of the fire-breathing monster and - yes, that’s it, and now they’re hunting him because, let’s see - no, wait, let’s not see yet, because there’s a fire in the forest - and…
...I’m sorry about all the environmental devastation this blog post is causing, by the way…
...and maybe that girlfriend back home, who doesn’t know his secret (scribbling madly here) but does wonder why she never sees the clothes in his laundry basket go back into his cupboards - he does his own laundry, but y’know, she looks around - yes, that's it, and then in about chapter ten (can't keep up with these ideas) I’d take him out shopping again for replacement gear. Without her. Chapter nine would be all about her thinking he's seeing somebody else, and him wanting to buy a trolley-load of undergarments...
...Online shopping hasn't arrived in fantasy fiction yet, has it?...
...fire-proof this time, two sets, one for the cupboards. She loves him really, but she doesn’t admit it to herself because he’s kinda dangerous and she has a secret of her own. If (yes!) he ever finds out that she’s, um, thingummy, he’ll never love her, she believes, although right at the end she saves him, necessarily revealing what she is, and he loves her anyway, and…
...and the incidental characters all work in clothing stores, like the one in Boston where I bought that T-shirt with ‘Innocent Bystander’ written on the front. They actually know something about clothes, which gets that audience...
Hmm. Maybe we should sit this one out. Sorry. Big digression there.
The risk with a UBI would be that it became an administrative nightmare. Governments never do anything simply; bureaucracies sustain themselves through complication. But if I was employed doing something that could easily be done by a machine, the “robots taking our jobs” problem would go away if I could send my own robot to do my old job. Instead of the proverbial gold watch at retirement, or whatever is the modern equivalent, let’s imagine that the team had a whip-round in the usual way, for the cake, and then at the end of the evening, in a hugely ironic and post-modern gesture, what came bursting out of the cake was - my robot.
Everybody on the team would meet - let’s call it Greg too - and its … his appearance would be roughly modelled on me, complete with flat cap and pipe. Every Monday morning from then on, Greg would set off for work, and every Friday evening, without fail, without stopping at the pub on the way, Greg would bring home his/my pay packet. We’d spend the weekend playing golf - I don't play golf, no hand-eye co-ordination, but I’d never lose - and on Sunday evening, he’d cook me and mine a huge roast (late) lunch. Then, let’s imagine, he’d plug himself into the screen in the corner, and show us all a drama of his own devising.
Flat cap and pipe? Sorry - I’ll shut up. Or something like that. There would have to be a UBI, of course, because companies don’t gift anything and I’d need the money to lease Greg. So I’d be paying for him to go do my job and bring me money, and Greg would have to be a taxpayer, and I’m thinking small here, because I could have two Gregs, one at work and one at home, with a single consciousness (sic) between them that goes there during the week, at the flick of a switch, and back here at the weekend, and then of course there’s the issue that if my partner and I decided to move in together, she’d come with, er, Leonie, and let’s just imagine that there was a software incompatibility between Greg and Leonie, or they started to compete because they were made by different manufacturers…
...and then one Sunday there was fighting in the kitchen over whether it was Greg’s turn to cook…
...and then serious difficulty over whether or not we complimented Leonie’s Softbank Robotics roast potatoes with as much sincerity as we gave to Greg’s IBM parsnips…
...or vice-versa, of course, and then another row because my partner and I got so hungry waiting that we secretly ordered take-out, but the delivery robot had once known Greg, who can scent him/her/it over the wifi...
...and I think maybe there’s a lot to be said for a UBI. But let’s also go to work, eh, instead of designing machines to operate our machines?
*My experience of reading fantasy novels about shapeshifters, I mean. Faith Hunter’s Jane Yellowrock, for example, always carries something to wear. She has unembarrassable neighbours and the men in her life wouldn't mind, I imagine, but let's add the believable detail, right? A principle of fiction, I think, is to confront the difficulty rather than write a way round it.