Blog – Page 2 – Lights In The Sky

Having your mind made up for you

By C Stevens | 26th February 2021 | Comments 0 Comment

I don’t normally blog twice in any one month, but this time my hand has been forced. Reading the Guardian online yesterday I noticed that a novelist I have read (and have a certain regard for) Kazuo Ishiguro, has a new book out. All well and good, but the problem lies in the title, as his new book is called Klara and the Sun. I read the article and noted that, sure enough, Klara is some kind of robot!

Now at this point I need to point out that my Klara is a character originally introduced in my fourth Lights in the sky novel, The leftover girl, which makes her roughly five years old. While it’s entirely possible that Mr Ishiguro was already writing his recently-published novel five years ago, the chances are that I got there first. I originally took the name ‘Klara’ from another science fiction novel, Gateway, by the late Fred Pohl. In this novel Klara is the protagonist’s dead lover, and (if my memory serves me correctly) serves a similar narrative function to Kris Kelvin’s dead wife in Stanislaw Lem’s best known work, Solaris.

However, I’m unknown and unpublished, Kazuo Ishiguro is internationally famous, so I’m going to have to change the title of the eighth Lights in the sky novel. This is fine as Klara was only a placeholder until something better came along. So, I’ve decided that the novel will now be called Finding your place. Needless to say, this title is also currently provisional. What I won’t change is the name of my character.

The chances of this coincidence ever coming to Mr Ishiguro’s attention are remote, but if they do, I’m quite ready to defend myself against any charges of plagiarism. I would point out that I have been writing about self-aware vaguely-humanoid robots in the Lights in the sky series for roughly eight years now (I submitted the short story that kicked off the series to Analog SF magazine in April 2013, in fact).

It would also be a source of amusement to me that anyone would ever compare us as novelists, as we couldn’t be more different. I have read one of Ishiguro’s novels (The Remains of the Day, which I enjoyed), I started Never let me go but got bored halfway through. Mr Ishiguro comes across to me as a miniaturist, with the action of his books seeming to take place mainly in airless rooms, while mine range through time and space. We both may have postmodern elements in our work, but make use of vastly-different source materials for very different purposes.

Nevertheless, I have the man to thank for finally forcing me to make a decision…

The Author February 2021

A different kind of story

By C Stevens | 15th February 2021 | Comments 0 Comment

Recent entries have rather strayed from the original intention of this blog, which was to serve as a commentary on the various novels within the Lights in the sky series and a journal about the process of writing them.

Instead, I’ve tended increasingly to comment on recent political events and social and cultural trends. While this is worth doing in itself, and my need to do so a function of the desperate straits we find ourselves in, I have decided to focus on the novel I’m actually writing for this month’s entry.

Klara (still a working title until something more elegant and descriptive suggests itself), is the eighth entry in the series. There was no grand design behind its writing, I was merely telling the story of a character who has been important to the stories of other characters, but who I felt deserved a book to herself. As I said previously, there was no predetermined plot when I started the book. I don’t do this kind of tight plotting, regarding it as a strait jacket which crushes invention. Instead, I have some kind of end point which I need my character to eventually reach, but what happens in between is essentially improvised.

This approach to writing suits picaresques, a form I’ve used at least once before in this octology, but in the process of creating another of these, I have found myself writing a different kind of novel. The other function of Klara is to tell the story of the Camposetta movement from an alternative perspective. Hitherto, the Camposettas have been the villains of the piece, a point of view that naturally reflects the prejudices of the Alpha Mission and the characters associated with it. The character of Ester Almeida functions as villainess-in-chief in this world view.

However it struck me that the Camposettas would not regard themselves as villainous, and secondly, the ending of The Leftover Girl clearly signals that a rapprochement has been reached between former enemies, who have both taken refuge in as Comunidades Livres in the far west of the country.

So I find myself writing a novel about a revolutionary movement waging a guerilla war against (to them) an oppressive government. I looked to previous writing to act as source material for this new kind of novel, starting with my own bookshelves. My eyes fell immediately upon George Orwell’s famous memoir of his involvement on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War, Homage to Catalonia. Another influence which can discerned, if you know where to look, is provided by Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy which (in its later volumes) is set in the Partisan struggle against Nazi Occupation in the old Yugoslavia during World War Two. It also occurs to me that the passage telling the story of the gunboat on Laguna Caceres and its sinking by the Camposettas owes something to my reading of historical accounts of the First World War Battle of Lake Tanganyika, later dramatised by CS Forester in his novel The African Queen.

This milieu has given me the opportunity to try all sorts of (to me) new things in the context of a novel and the adventure continues.

The Author February 2021

Modern unicorns part two: Nuclear Fusion

By C Stevens | 14th January 2021 | Comments 0 Comment

It’s a truism that nearly all the news about real life is bad these days. As if to compensate, the media seem to be turning in desperation to increasingly speculative subject matter, presumably in an attempt to boost morale and have something positive to talk about.

In my last post I referenced the stream of stories about Martian colonisation plans which currently infest the popular media. In this post I will cover the other ‘positive science news story’ that virtually every periodical (or at least, all the ones that feature in Google News) is now pushing, namely nuclear fusion.

The line that perennially introduces the subject of fusion power is that it is ‘thirty years away’, in fact it has been thirty years away for the whole of my adult life. It has also been the subject of constant reinterpretation and misinformation, a prime example being the fallacies perpetrated by the advocates of so-called cold fusion in the late 1980’s. Fusion has a tendency to lie low for decades, but like Dracula rising from his grave, will always return when least expected, or wanted.

One of those times is now…

The current attempts to develop nuclear fusion as a ‘reliable power source’, are characterised by the following; on the one hand, vast amounts of money spent by Governments who really ought to know better, building huge white elephant projects that suck in huge amounts of energy (as well as cash), without giving anything back. On the other, lone ‘geniuses’ working small-scale projects in obscure research institutions, making the same sort of extravagant claims as the proponents of cold fusion. The result is always the same; at best, fusion that lasts for nanoseconds and no prospect of anything approaching commercially-viable electricity generation.

One side side of me (the Romantic side) hopes that I’m wrong and one these lone geniuses will get it right, the rational side knows this a chimera, and the lone geniuses are in fact the modern equivalent of Medieval alchemists, doomed to spend their lives trying to transmute their base metal into gold.

The fact that any of this gets house room, let alone endless column inches promoting highly-speculative claims, tells us rather more about our current society than the credibility of the fusion lobby.

It tells us we have an obsession with the notion of genius, and of genius (sic) solutions. These are often promoted as hacks (or tricks), i.e. shortcuts that will enable us to solve difficult and intractable problems. As such, they appeal strongly to generations with limited patience and rather short attention spans.

Even a cursory reading of history tells us that these sorts of attitudes have prevailed in the past, usually in times of rapid technological change (the 1880’s and 90’s spring to mind), when even the highly-educated begin to lose track of the giddying pace of change and start to see science as a source of magical solutions. This particular zeitgeist is, of course, ripe for exploitation by charlatans.

There are however, underlying all of this, some even more fundamental notions:

1, that more tech is the solution to everything

2, that technology is always the solution to existing problems, never the cause of fresh ones

3, that endless economic growth is both possible and desirable

Recent history gives the lie to the first two; one only has to look at the intractable problem of storing the by-products of nuclear fission, waste that will remain deadly for thousands of years; at the non-biodegradable plastics filling our oceans; and to the dangerous climate change being unleashed by releasing millions of years of stored carbon through the burning of oil and gas.

The fallacies inherent in the last statement are nicely illustrated by the recent claim that ‘a population of trillions can be supported off-world by exploiting the resources of the Asteroid Belt!’

When it comes down to it, this guff is ideological and quasi-religious; advocated by people who propose spreading the Abrahamic notions of the Old Testament (‘…thou shalt have dominion over the Earth’, etc) throughout our Solar System and beyond.

As, like a plague of technological locusts, we seek to consume and destroy everything within our reach.

The Author January 2021

Modern unicorns part one: Martian Colonisation

By C Stevens | 5th January 2021 | Comments 0 Comment

Have you noticed how the Tech Billionaires (aka the Robber Barons de nos jours) have adopted some of the presentational strategies of the New Right Populists? Specifically, they overpromise, an example being SpaceX’s recent assertion that they will have a Martian colony (or at least the groundwork for such a thing) in place by 2024!

Further examination of other less hi-profile pronouncements reveals that the true timetable is sometime in the 2030’s, but the high-profile announcement has done its job by creating a buzz around the whole endeavour, attracting the attention of tabloid and social media, and making said Tech Billionaire look potent and sexy.

We may well be closer to having the technical capability for sending this kind of probe to Mars, however I did read that the sheer mass of the thing means that getting into orbit, and off to the Red Planet with the necessary velocity, is currently not possible.

Furthermore, the real problems come later: achieving re-entry for such a large vehicle (even though we’re only talking about a lander) through the virtually non-existent Martian atmosphere will be Hellishly-difficult. Remember, at least half of Martian landings of unmanned vehicles have been unsuccessful, we only recall the successes. Splattering a probe across the Martian landscape may be unfortunate if it’s unmanned, but if it contains 4-6 brave astro/cosmonauts, the fallout will be much more serious.

But the first challenging issue will be getting those 4-6 brave astronauts there alive and in any fit condition to do useful work. It takes (with current technology) six months to get to Mars, that’s six months in microgravity which is really harmful to human physiology, six months confined in a space no bigger than a long-wheelbase Ford Transit van, exposed to potentially deadly radiation (not just solar flares which are a low probability risk, but cosmic rays which are ever present!).

It’s estimated that the astronauts will receive 70% of their safe lifetime dosage just getting to Mars, not to mention all the other health problems they will arrive in Martian orbit with, and then they’ve got re-entry to face!

I recently read this online article with an accompanying promotional video about an award-winning design for a Martian city, cunningly cut into the walls of a suitable cliff, so that the human (and animal) inhabitants, and the various trees and shrubs, have access to Martian daylight, while being protected by the rock above them from all that nasty U/V radiation and pesky cosmic rays.

The settlement looked very swish, but the article glossed-over the whole issue of who’s going to construct it. Now in my SF saga, Lights in the sky, the Alpha Probe has all those convenient self-aware humanoid robots to do the heavy lifting, and Alpha 5 is a considerably less hostile analogue of the Red Planet. But building this putative Martian city will require the early colonists to leave the sanctuary of the subarean caverns and be out on the Martian surface. Now the Martian surface is a very hostile environment; the atmosphere is tenuous at best, contains no oxygen (and virtually no water vapour), the place is cold, and the thin atmosphere and lack of a magnetic field means anything (or anybody) out there is bombarded by harmful radiation. So human operators, directing and operating the digging and construction equipment, will be at considerable risk and only able to work for short periods of time.

As I read through the article, I clocked some of the small print. The people living in this city of the future would be obliged to pay 300,000 Euros for a one-way ticket to Mars, and would then need to give 60-80% of their time (during their waking hours, presumably) working for the colony.

I thought about it and I realised there’s a word for this, and a colonial precedent; it’s called indentured servitude, and it was used by the British in Jamaica and Virginia to recruit a workforce for their sugar and tobacco plantations. It worked like this; get a load of destitute people from England, Ireland, Scotland or Wales (not hard to find in seventeenth century Britain) and pack them off to the West Indies or to Virginia on twenty year contracts. Historical sidebar: this practice is the reason there are Welsh-speaking people in Jamaica to this day.

But this model, while initially effective, only really worked in the short term. Two things did for it:

much of the enormous profit made from sugar and tobacco was reinvested back in Britain, and the resultant industrial revolution provided enough work for the landless and destitute former peasants, who no longer had to risk twenty years in a mosquito-ridden Hellhole to avoid starvation.
word had got back from the New World about how bad conditions actually were, and how surviving five years was good going, while seeing out all twenty of your indenture highly unlikely.

The next was entirely predictable in its awfulness; replace the reluctant indentured servant with African slaves who had no choice. I wonder who the Tech Billionaires will turn to when their supply of willing colonists dries up?

The Author January 2021

Happy Xmas (Hope is Over)

By C Stevens | 21st December 2020 | Comments 0 Comment

The end of the worst year I can remember (both personally and in general) fast approaches. The end of the old year is traditionally a time for reflection, for the learning of lessons and for resolutions to do better in the future. Resolution one is surely never ever to put our trust in the reassuring falsehoods of any politician described as a populist. The election of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris is a step in the right direction but many traps, both those deliberately left and some that are entirely incidental, await the new administration, and then there’s the rest of the psychopathic crew…

The other really good thing about the past year has been the emergence (and my discovery) of the wonderful Phoebe Bridgers, a singer/songwriter who is absolutely plugged into the zeitgeist and somehow manages to confront the approach of the apocalypse with her winning Cheshire cat grin firmly in place. So resolution two is surely to cherish all the creative arts, rather than taking them (and the artists that produce them) for granted. Lockdown has given us a scary glimpse at what life could be like without them.

Set against the above, is the stubborn and suicidal course of action being pursued by the present UK Government, a ship of fools commanded by that ultimate in lazy, self-indulgent, indecisive and ignorant populists. You all know who I’m talking about! The ship of state is about to hit the rocks (judging by recent headlines this has already happened), as events unfold with the appalling inevitability of a slow-motion car crash.

In past blogs I have referenced the rise of unreason in contemporary life, harmless in most contexts but not so much when it begins to compromise public health or dictate voting intentions. The apparent loyalty shown by the majority of the Republican legislators to the current incumbent is a case in point. Partly this is out of fear of the electoral consequences of angering his fan base, but it’s also a conscious decision to exploit irrational beliefs for political advantage. As a recent article in one of the UK broadsheets pointed out, when the rational start to make use of irrationality in their political arguments alarm bells should start ringing; and it’s not just American politicians who are guilty of this, as it is (naturally) the stock in trade of the Brexit lobby in domestic politics.

This is another example of a djinn that once out of the bottle may prove next to impossible to get back in. The Brexiteers and the GOP legislators probably regard themselves (in some sense) as being revolutionaries (draining the swamp, or freeing Albion from the clutches of the European superstate etc etc), but it’s a truism that revolutions have a tendency to eat their children, and once irrationality takes hold it can become self-sustaining.

In the light of the above it seems almost irrelevant to announce that I have finally completed the seventh volume of Lights in the sky, which goes by the catchy title of …when you wish upon a star, but in dark times all creativity and any means of escape from grim realities is to be treasured.

In 1971 John Lennon was optimistic enough to wish for an end to war itself; we are not so hopeful (or possibly no longer so naive), but in the current climate within perfidious Albion it can sometimes appear that we have brought an end to hope…

The Author December 2020

Art overtaken by events

By C. E. Stevens | 5th November 2020 | Comments 0 Comment

Apologies for not blogging at all during the month of October, hopefully this entry will make up for that.
I’m imagining a conversation with the taciturn proprietor or sales assistant at the nearby corner shop (I can never work out which he is), not that we have conversations, as such. He’s asking me what I think of lockdown/life nowadays/the US Election (delete as appropriate), and I say that I don’t think things will ever go back to what we regarded as normal before the pandemic. I go on to offer the following opinion,
“…in a funny way, it’s actually a privilege to be living in such an epoch-making period in human history, but you’ve always got to bear in mind that the Chinese had an old (and possibly apocryphal!) curse, ‘…may you live in interesting times!’”
The shop assistant or proprietor doesn’t react to this, but outside the four walls of his rather down-at-heel emporium those ‘interesting times’ grind on relentlessly…
I’ve recently been re-reading In other Worlds by the redoubtable Margaret Atwood and I was struck by how prescient her views on the future direction of civilisation were. Taken from the point of view of 2011, Ms Atwood seems to have predicted 2020 with a scary degree of accuracy.
In my fictional universe, we are coming to the end of the seventh novel in the Lights in the sky series. I’m actually writing the last chapter (chapter twenty four in this particular book!), but as with all last chapters there is a lot to do, character arcs to complete, loose ends to tie up etc etc, so it’s taking a time to finish.
There are other reasons for this dilatoriness; it’s always horrible to let go of a particular story, and I know that before the end of …when you wish upon a star, I will need to do beastly things to characters I’ve grown to love. But that’s the nature of fiction writing.
And it’s not the end of the series; volume eight is already under way, and there will be at least one more short story after that…
I recently came across an x and y axis representation of literary genres, whereby the x axis moves between naturalism at the top and expressionism below, and the y axis between the mimetic on the left, over to the fantastic. This results in four classification quadrants, labelled as follows: top left Realist, top right Speculative, bottom left Stylized, bottom right Fabulist.
The compiler had helpfully produced two versions of the diagram, locating various literary subgenres in each quadrant in the first, and various authors in the second, and I amused myself by locating my own writing within this design, based on my influences and my artistic and ideological leanings. Following these, I would place myself close to the intersection of the x and y axes, within the Fabulist quadrant; this quadrant also contains magical realism, fairy tales and postmodernism, and even a cursory reading of the novels within Lights in the sky demonstrates the debt I owe to all of these. My attachment to the gothic takes me close to the x axis, and the near future, SF and high fantasy elements ensure my work’s proximity to the y axis and the Speculative quadrant.
All of which goes to demonstrate that I steer well clear of Realism as defined by nineteenth century writers and critics. This was always going to be the case given my attachment to Romanticism and my use of speculative and fantastic elements, but does not mean my writing lacks realism.
In recent years, the cultural analysis inherent in nineteenth century notions of ‘realism’ has been rather overtaken by events, as what was previously seen as ‘speculative’, ‘fantastic’, and ‘belonging to the realm of science fiction’ has remorselessly forced its way into our lives and become the mainstream.
So, welcome to your own personal disaster movie/gothic fantasy/near future SF miniseries (delete as appropriate) and despite what the man in the corner shop may think, the times are definitely ‘interesting’ and we have no choice but to live through them.
The Author November 2020

Escaping unpleasant realities

By C. E. Stevens | 4th September 2020 | Comments 0 Comment

This strangest of years continues its tortured course, and we all remain in limbo, asking ourselves when the grownups in the room are going to step up and start running things again…
And this question is getting quite pressing; I personally don’t think the United States will survive another four years of the current administration without serious political violence, and the only parties who will benefit from this are China and Russia.
Europe will survive our departure, but I don’t think we’ll be so lucky; mass unemployment and national bankruptcy are looking likely, the break-up of the United Kingdom and the collapse of our political institutions are both outside possibilities.
And the pandemic looms over everything, putting all of our futures on hold…
Unsurprisingly, I spend as much time as possible in my fictional world, the real world being so unutterably bleak.
In the world of Lights in the sky, Marta, with the help of her allies João Azevedo and Globo Television and the support of her agent cum manager, Salvador Perez, has been able to take control of her life and continue her process of self-actualisation.
By buying her estate in Minas Gerais, she is also able for the first time to build a life separate from São Paulo, the Show and the Alpha Mission. She also accepts Salvador as her new lover.
At the same time, she fulfills her long-term ambition of becoming the anchor of the Alpha Mission Hour and effectively becoming the Earthly representative of the Children on Alpha. Ironically, it is an unintended consequence of the death of her friend and companion, Sophie Valente, that facilitates this.
All this comes at a price as she becomes distanced from those who formerly were her friends.
The Author September 2020

Not the end, then?

By C. E. Stevens | 5th August 2020 | Comments 0 Comment

Sometimes you convince yourself that you’ve reached the end of something only to find you haven’t. This has happened several times with Lights in the sky, which started life as a short story, submitted (unsuccessfully) to Analog magazine, became a novel, grew into a trilogy and over the past few years has become a septet…
Well, it’s happened again…
I was always conscious that I needed to tell the story of various minor (and not so minor) characters introduced at various points during the series arc, and have found many ingenious ways of doing this. The story of Klara, the original self-aware automaton, and thus the prototype for all the nursemaids on Alpha 5, was to have been accommodated as a parallel narrative within …when you wish upon a star, which otherwise concerns itself with the story of the original Marta on Earth.
I’d written five ‘interludes’, telling Klara’s story from inception in the Alpha Mission laboratory of Dr Helen Choi, right through to her demise at the hands of a marauding band of Camposetta irregulars, more than half a century later. But when it came to it, this felt unsatisfactory, an unnecessarily perfunctory end for a much-loved character, however shocking in its brutal suddenness it might have been.
The solution was obvious; Klara will get her own book and so her future existence, beyond the confines of …when you wish upon a star, can be fully explored.
As usual the source material for the character’s future arc is to be found in the character’s thoughts, beliefs and actions. Without wishing to give anything away about a work in progress, it will become clear that her subsequent actions are entirely consistent with what we already know about her in the four chapters that currently exist.
The provisional title of the eighth book in the series is Klara, but this may change, and work on it will commence in earnest once the current novel is completed
Back in the increasingly surrealistic ‘real world’, it is clear neither Brexit nor the Pandemic will be resolved soon. We exist in the same curious but fevered state, swinging between fearing the worst, while seizing on the smallest crumb of comfort in the media that reassures us that things might not be quite as bad as anticipated.
As ever, COVID-19 is the great unknown; we just don’t know nearly enough about the virus that causes it to predict its long-term effects on our society, economy and personal well-being. We don’t even know for sure how many people have been infected, as the vast majority of cases appear to be asymptomatic, which makes a reliable estimate of the death rate from Coronavirus extremely difficult. We have no idea when (or if) it will mutate and whether this will make it more or less dangerous, though evidence from previous pandemics would appear to suggest that the ‘second wave’ will be worse than the first. Whether being asymptomatic the first time round will protect people from future infection, is again unknown, as is whether any of the dozens of potential vaccines currently being developed around the world will even be partially-effective.
This uncertainty is corrosive of our institutions whether they be commercial, political, artistic or sporting, and the long term implications of all of this can only emerge over time.
Brexit, by contrast, is more straightforward, as it becomes clearer by the day how damaging, short-sighted, irrational and essentially masochistic this whole enterprise is. I note that highly skilled and qualified people are already voting with their feet and choosing to relocate to countries within the Eurozone. They will presumably be followed by the flight of capital, as the wealthy (who are, of course, in possession of more than one passport) begin to remove themselves and their wealth from poor old Blighty, once the shit really begins to hit the fan. Ironically, the Brexit-supporting amongst them may be forced by deteriorating conditions in the United States, to relocate to Europe, of all places, where they will presumably continue to either, assure the rest of us that everything is going swimmingly, or blame us for the fact that it’s not. To quote an anonymous ballad sung by British soldiers in the Great War,

It’s the same the whole world over.
It’s the poor wot get’s the blame,
It’s the rich wot get’s the gravy,
Ain’t it all a bleeding shame?

The transformation of Kent into one huge lorry park, the end of most foreign travel, and shortages of food and essential medicines in the New Year are likely to be only the start…
But, of course, things may all turn out for the better…

The Author August 2020

Standing on the brink

By C. E. Stevens | 2nd July 2020 | Comments 0 Comment

We find ourselves at a curious point in our history…
For the last four months all our lives have effectively been on hold in the deep freeze of lockdown. This will change on July 4th, and the mood is best described as impatience mixed with apprehension.
On the one hand, we yearn to break free of the cage we’ve been imprisoned in; to see friends and family properly, to get a haircut, to be able to walk round our local town or city centre, go on holiday or visit a tourist destination, have a meal in a restaurant or a drink in a pub.

On the other hand, we fear that the true consequences of the pandemic and the response to it will now be revealed. These range from the prosaic; merely walking down the nearest high street and noticing how many businesses have closed, never to re-open; to the intensely personal, when one finds one’s job has disappeared and furlough payments are about to end; to a general realisation of how much of the life we knew has now gone, possibly forever.
In the UK, this encompasses a virtual cessation of all live arts performance, with theatres, dance performances, concerts and gigs all now only available remotely, or through recorded performances, combined with the indefinite suspension of public participation in most team sports and indoor recreation opportunities. This is just a sample of things we have lost, new things occur to me constantly, but it’s impossible to keep it all in your mind.

However, the general conclusions are bleak:

* Arts, culture and learning will be disproportionately affected, as populist governments concentrate on mainstream activities to the detriment of anything highbrow, intellectual, radical or alternative
* Life will move decisively online with virtual experience being privileged over physical interaction, and that this will persist, even when the pandemic ends

For understandable reasons, my own ‘virtual world’, the Lights in the sky series provides a welcome and much needed escape. There are now only three more chapters (plus two more ‘interludes’) to be written before the series is complete…

I wonder what I will do then?

The Author July 2020

Letting the Jinn out of the bottle

By C. E. Stevens | 3rd June 2020 | Comments 0 Comment

Something blindingly-obvious occurred to me this morning, something that had never occurred to me previously, but once thought of, could not be subsequently unthought. My insight was that tech, and by this I mean the goods and services purveyed by the billionaires in Silicon Valley, is our culture’s equivalent of the Jinn in Arabian folklore.
The Jinn is capable of great benevolence and possesses miraculous powers, as befits a supernatural entity. But its benevolence comes with a price tag attached. Our relationship with modern ICT would seem a perfect analogue to the wonders formerly promised by the Jinn once released from its bottle, with the difference that your smart device actually delivers to anyone with a phone contract or a broadband connexion. With none of that inconvenient rooting around in dark and dusty caves looking for magical oil lamps.
The wonders performed by modern ICT would (and did) appear wondrous to my parents’ generation, who lived in a world where news came from printed media, two television channels and three radio networks, the banks closed at three (so if you ran out of cash, tough!), telecommunications were strictly voice-only from fixed locations, and researching almost anything usually required a visit to the local library (which also tended to close early!).
I was born and grew to adulthood in this world, and things didn’t really begin to change significantly in practical terms until the beginning of the nineties (although cash machines/ATMs had become available from the mid-seventies, and video gaming had become popular), with the notion of cyberspace confined to science fiction novels. Then, the personal computer, the mobile phone, and the internet all came along in short order, to revolutionise the way we do almost everything.
I find it difficult to think back to a world where you can’t answer almost any question in seconds, where you don’t have instantaneous electronic communication with all your friends, where you can’t remotely map and view almost any location on Earth, or listen to virtually any piece of music at any hour of the day or night.
However, I do remember how frustrating, how slow, and how boring it all was. So I am grateful for Google Documents, email, SMS, Wikipedia, YouTube, Google Maps and all the million and one applications that make life today so much easier.
But nothing ever comes for free…
In exchange for the convenience of all these lovely (and apparently free!) tools and applications, we give (unless we are very savvy) the tech giants unlimited access to our personal data, which they obviously want to exploit commercially by targeting appropriate advertising based on what they (or their algorithms) know about us. There is nothing intrinsically wrong in this, if it means that we are alerted to products and services which we are likely to want to buy, although these algorithms would seem somewhat unsophisticated in their predictions, if personal experience is anything to go by, but hey! Maybe I’m just contrary.
However, If this data falls into the wrong hands, it can be used by criminal enterprises half a world away, adding a whole new level of anxiety, as cyber crime can potentially strike us from anywhere on the globe.
However the most insidious consequences of letting the Jinn of artificial intelligence out of the bottle are less obvious, but actually pose the most serious threats to our society. I refer, of course, to the impact of social media.
People who have been following this blog will know what’s coming next…
The unintended consequences of the spread of social media have included; the destabilising of conventional media and the undermining of journalistic ethics and good practice; the creation of ‘echo chambers’ whereby large numbers of people rely entirely on partial media for their news and current affairs, and are never exposed to any content that challenges their prejudices and preconceptions; the wholesale spreading of falsehoods and insane conspiracy theories; and finally, the creation of forums that enable and facilitate people with dangerous and anti-social views to meet and act in concert.
Did I leave anything out?
The overall effect has been the promotion of extreme views and the destabilising of democracy, which, for all its faults, remains the fairest, most humane and most efficient form of government yet devised.
But it’s not just random nutters we have to contend with…
Much more worrying is the clear evidence that the fabulously rich and privileged elite who run the tech giants have actively been promoting an agenda of ‘disruption’ designed to bring about a series of economic, social and political changes that they believe will benefit themselves and their corporations, to the detriment of virtually everybody else. I was recently both intrigued by the BBC series Secrets of Silicon Valley, which documented this, and appalled by the sanctimony and arrogance of many of the people leading these companies, who appeared to have bought into their own PR, and had adopted the view that their selfish actions are somehow morally justified.
Do no harm, anyone?
In the short term, the upshot of all of the above has been to put us all at the mercy of the various dangerous populists who have come to power in key countries around the world.
Returning to my opening analogy, my inevitable conclusion is that getting the Jinn back in the bottle is a lot harder than freeing it in the first place, and the consequences of summoning this spirit and making use of its miraculous powers, may now have become unstoppable.
The Author June 2020

M	T	W	T	F	S	S
« Mar
						1
2	3	4	5	6	7	8
9	10	11	12	13	14	15
16	17	18	19	20	21	22
23	24	25	26	27	28	29
30	31

Categories

Recent Posts