IS THERE ANYBODY THERE?

 Machines were mice and men were lions once upon a time; but now that it’s the opposite, it’s twice upon a time. – Moondog.

It is a natural and vital human activity to invest human qualities and ‘personalities’ in the things with which we are surrounded.

We endow objects and creatures with characteristics and motives wholly of our own making. We give boats, steam engines and cars human names like Betsy or Hortense and, like Basil Fawlty, attempt to debate and reason with them, man to machine.

Discussing the meaning of life with a three piece suite or a lawnmower might win you a ticket to Happy Acres. But nobody is surprised if you assign humanoid motives to them for not fitting through a door or for cutting through their own power cable.

In fact, we are so desirous of human interaction that anything that shows the slightest sign of being self-animated or self-directing is sure to acquire a synthetic personality not independently present.

With the coming of the home computer, new scientific rationality has taken away the cosy teddy-bear tendency to call the thing Aloysius, but the personification itself rises to new heights: ‘It’s being a real pain…’, ‘It won’t let me…’, ‘It’s decided…’, ‘It tells me…’.

Complex and impenetrable as its functions might appear, it’s a bloody machine, no more capable of thought or independent action than a clothes peg. It has been equipped by humans to sort through a large number of options, programmed into it by humans, and try to find a match for the thing you have asked of it.

It becomes ever more sophisticated and efficient at this, but that is still all it is doing. It has few or many options from which to select by Boolean algebra or fuzzy logic one that approximates the desired result. These options are supplied by humans, just as they would be in a ready-reckoner or some other printed book. The processor cannot ‘think’. It has no capacity that vaguely resembles intellect.

Those who programme it can exponentially increase its inherent choices, or they can limit them as in surveys or the burgeoning art of customer disservice.

Our satnav – Flossie – is often very helpful, and just as often wrong. ‘She’ neither knows or cares either way. Pre-programmed recordings are shuffled to synthesise speech. We endow her with a slightly ratty personality, and dignify that ‘personality’ by telling ‘her’ to shut up, or not be silly.  Her catchphrase is ‘Turn around when possible’, which, though usually ignored, is at least useful advice.

Through the miracle of ‘predictive text’, if I type ‘shrivel’ into my tablet, it will substitute the word ‘survive’. It has no notion of the meaning of either – even that they are words, never mind that they are supposed to express opposing ideas.

Your credibility, career or the balance of power could depend on it, but it is merely a substitution based on a shabby and doomed attempt to parody intelligence with mechanics.

So-called ‘voice recognition’ has made matters ten times worse, the synthesis of jolly humanoid voices further increasing the illusion of intelligence while also further exacerbating the stress that comes from the failure to satisfy natural human expectations.

If you are fortunate enough to speak to a real person, even if they greet you with the perennially annoying, ‘How are you today?’, you can tell them, ‘Not too good; my dog died’, and expect some change in tone. The machine is blind and deaf to all perception and continues its manic grotesquery unperturbed.

Being greeted by a mechanically gleeful travesty of a human being – ‘Thank you for calling the Cooperative Bank’ – immediately sets your blood pressure on the rise. Don’t get excited; simply put the phone down and change banks.

Where we live, we have had the same telephone number for fifteen years. Lately we have received a series of nuisance calls from something called ‘SRJ’, in which an electronic voice simulator instructs the reluctant listener to ask someone we have never heard of to phone one of those extortionate ‘premium’ numbers. The device is, of course, too stupid to know anything, least of all that it is supplying that individual’s personal information to strangers.

On another recent occasion, I nearly made the error of changing my telephone service to BT. When my supplier for the last ten years (One Bill) found out, they offered me a vastly improved deal to stay with them (they have a human with the capacity to think – at time of writing), so the BT set-up was cancelled, both by myself and One Bill.

A few days later, in the same post, I received ‘letters’ from computers at One Bill, one welcoming me to the new service, the other screaming that I owed them ‘at least £299.00 for leaving them – although the above-instanced actual person had acknowledged that my previous contract had expired and this was not the case.

As part of the package, he had offered a free router, which arrived at the same time as the confirmation from BT that my order with them had been cancelled.

The following day the computer at One Bill sent me a bill for forty quid for the free router. Once again the indispensable human assured me this should not have happened.

Another day and an email from BT to tell me to expect a delivery of the cancelled equipment. That’s when I rediscovered that, as a telecommunication company, BT takes the lead in preventing communication. It is not possible to reply to the email, but you can go to the BT website and choose from a range of useless and inappropriate ‘options’. If you chance to come upon anything remotely similar to the subject you are searching for, an electronic voice synthesiser tells you even more things you don’t want to know.

By now having difficulty remaining my usual good-humoured self, I finally reached a recording that wanted to know my actual problem. Would I state it in as few words as possible?

I shouted various possibilities, such as ‘wrong delivery’ and ‘cancellation’.

‘I’m getting “wiring difficulties”,’ said the machine, ‘Is this correct?’

I tried shouting ‘equipment’, and this was recognised. The machine assured me the items I wasn’t waiting for were on their way. Something in my anguished scream brought me through the barrier to a lurking person.

Fortunately, in this case, apart from the lucky escape from signing up for more of this from BT, the idiocy was merely frustrating. In another time and place, attempting to shout ‘Petersfield’ to such a contraption could bring someone to the front door with a Kevlar suit and an offer to rearrange your molecules.

Smart phones are not smart and, despite claims or apparencies, computers are not, and never will be, intelligent. They can manage enough of a mockery of it to fool some of the people some of the time, and their usefulness in preventing direct communication has led to their proliferation in the customer disservice field.

Our credulity is what has allowed it to happen and, unless we call a halt soon, we will be inflicted with self-driving cars that don’t know where they are or what is going on around them – won’t even know they are cars – and a whole panoply of other idiocies – maybe self-watching televisions – while banks, utility companies and other corporations complete their already well-advanced disconnection from us.

In the meantime, the myth that what these glorified tombola bins do is analogous to intelligence allows those without our best interests at heart to perpetuate and expand their reduction of humanity to doltish mechanics

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When George III shared his thoughts with a tree, he was declared mad, but a tree can be shown to be aware of and responsive to its environment; to be that thing dreaded of totalitarianism: conscious.

How brainwashed and off the rails must we be to consider it normal to converse with a tin box?

From BLINDED WITH SCIENCE available from The Book Depository

REALMS OF THE PEER

One of the fundamental principles of science as we believe we know it is that it should boldly go where no man has gone before; that it is fearless and imaginative and unhampered by old ideas and beliefs.

The reality today is the complete reverse. Systems, institutions, faculties and self-interest conspire to prevent and resist any advancement, any discovery that doesn’t accord with the interests of the scientific establishment and its paymasters.

Actors come on as GPs in TV dramas to advise the viewing punter not to stray outside the church: ‘Alternative treatments may sometimes be useful, but always consult your medical practitioner.’

Although, despite its monopoly and enormous numbers of dedicated followers, pharmaceutical medicine is no more a science than palm reading it keeps up the illusion, and its entrenched position, by adopting the trappings of the central scientific religion.

First among these is ‘peer review’ – a sort of college of cardinals who protect the faith and formulate the dogma.

Thirty years ago, I ‘put my back out’ in an industrial accident. Thereafter, even in dry weather, I could only hobble about like Richard III – ‘Now is the winter of our discontent…’

And so it was. Every winter for four years I was laid up and off work.

The quack told me he could find nothing wrong and prescribed something called Ponstan – pills that were designed to make you too stupid to feel the pain, but which actually spread it all over your body.

At about this time, my mother fell down an unprotected manhole, so was in a worse state than me.

Fortunately, a friend of hers (not a doctor) suggested a chiropractor in Newton Abbot. After a couple of treatments, mother recommended him to me.

By then, I had been invalided out of my gardening job and was having to do lighter work.

Mr Sykes (the chiro) was the first to X-ray my back. He called me in to see the result a couple of days later and anyone, ‘qualified’ or not, could immediately have seen what was wrong. My entire pelvic girdle had been pushed up on one side and remained jammed there for the four years following the initial trauma.

By judicious positioning of my body and exerting the precise amount of pressure, Mr S resolved the situation at once. Had he done so four years earlier, that would have been more or less that, but because the problem had been permitted to persist all those years, it had acquired a tendency to maintain the faulty position.

As a result, it took about two years of weekly treatments to convince the thing to go back into place and stay put.

Thirty years on, instead of hobbling about with a stick, or trundling about on an electric scooter, I can still do everything I could do before the accident, including furniture shifting and digging.

I meet people on a regular basis who are holding on to back, neck and other bodily pains and difficulties in the touching belief that the doctor is doing all that can be done – mainly drugs and tiresome physiotherapy exercises.

They don’t get, or don’t want to get, that the doctor is not there to make you well by any means available. He is duty bound to push pharmaceutical drugs and do his bit for the maintenance of the monopoly.

He is not really to blame for this. A combination of relentless propaganda and an unsurprising public hunger for the ‘magic bullet’ cures for all ills that pharma’s charlatan ancestors have been promising since the days of Buffalo Bill keep the gullible doing what the gullible do – swallowing things, both metaphorically and in fact.

There is nothing, by any reasonable criteria, ‘unscientific’ about chiropractic. The body’s skeleton will clearly work best in its intended arrangement, and signals to and from its control centre need to travel up and down the spine with as little interruption as possible.

But, if you look it – and any number of other ‘alternative’ treatments – up in reference books or online, you will read that they are ‘unscientific’ or do not accord with medical opinion.

This sounds in some way damning, but what does it mean? Is it any different from saying: ‘Giving a back-sufferer indifferently effective drugs and telling him to go away and lie down is unchiropractic?’

Chiropractors, osteopaths, kinesiologists and the like (and unlike) do not control the media. They have no power to invoke the anti-trust or monopoly laws that protect people in other, generally less worthy, endeavours.

No one other than conventional medicos is even allowed to say they have cured anyone, or that they might be able to, even when those medicos have admitted failure by declaring conditions ‘chronic’ or ‘incurable’.

When a bronze implement was first submitted to a Neolithic panel for ‘peer review’ it was probably declared a hoax. Scientific ‘peers’ long held the consensus view that the Earth was flat. Anyone who dared suggest otherwise was vilified and shunned.

BBC astronomy programmes have been pronouncing upon the unscientific naïvety of believing there is life elsewhere in the universe since I was a child.

Now there is growing evidence that smugness and authoritative pronouncements do not make it so.

No one employed in the scientific juggernaut wants to see its shibboleths, its myths and its foundations questioned or undermined. The ferocity with which the medical establishment has attacked homeopathy underlines the absurd lengths to which such protectionism can go with spokespeople branding it as ‘dangerous’. If it is anything other than effective, it is harmless. Coming from representatives of a business that is the third greatest cause of death in the US, such name-calling is all the more idiotic.

It’s an understandable human reaction to want to hold on to what you’ve got, but it does not serve to advance us toward knowledge or understanding. The old pals don’t want to let each other down, but ‘peer review’ necessarily keeps it in the family and ensures that no radically new ideas, processes or thinkers upset the apple cart.

From BLINDED WITH SCIENCE available from The Book Depository

DON’T COUNT ON IT

As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality – Albert Einstein.

Mathematics is extremely useful and endlessly fascinating. In the right hands, it can predict and explain almost everything in the universe, and is the foundation of engineering, architecture, science and technology. It can even be used to dissect musical harmonies and to lend ‘scientific’ credibility to spurious statistics and correlations.

Speaking as someone who failed his maths O-level twice (or was it three times?), I came into this world as ripe for bamboozling as anyone, and bamboozled I was – we all were – from the moment we were taught to recite the one-times table (I kid you not) at Foxhole infants’ school:

‘One times one is one.’

With you so far.

‘Two times one is two.’

Ah, here is where we run into trouble. We’re back to the old problem of applied blanket nomenclature that undermines taxonomy.

We look out at the car park and see two cars. Two ones are two. But is the second car an exact duplicate of the first?

‘No. One car is blue and the other black.’

One is also a Citroën and the other a SEAT.

‘To me, a car is a car.’

Then you have a future as a statistician, or a conductor of bogus studies, but don’t go alone into a car showroom or the witness box.

‘A chair is still a chair,’ says legendary lyricist Hal David, ‘even when there’s no one sitting there.’ And, lexicographically, he is correct. Both the chair’s persistence and the metamorphosis of his house into a home occur without major structural alteration.

But the chair is not any chair or every chair. It is only a chair at all because ‘chair’ is the convenient English code for communicating its general use and characteristics to others. In reality, it is billions of tiny particles and impulses moving in an area restricted by an imposed form. None of these impulses or particles is present in another chair, and no two of them are identical in the present one.

What’s worse is that the chair that was once one is no longer the one it was, because its constituent atoms, molecules and little spinning and sparking things are never static, even in the apparent equilibrium of chairdom.

Ergo, not only is once two not really two, but once one is no longer one. You could chant, ‘Once one was one,’ but both the incantation and its uses would be limited.

So what are we left with?

‘Nothing.’

Not exactly. The old alma mater didn’t dwell on the zero end of things. ‘One times nothing is nothing.’ ‘Two times nothing is still nothing.’

‘There’s nothing in the paper; nothing on the telly.’ But the paper is never blank and the TV never silent, so these are specialised forms of nothing – the absence of something specific.

An absolute zero cannot exist as part of the material universe. If it did, guess what – schlonk, no universe!

One day, in our remedial maths class at Torquay Grammar, the harassed master was explaining a method of solving what I think were quadratic equations (I’ve never since found much call for them).

‘So we call this one zero,’ quoth he. ‘Yes, Randle?’

‘Why, sir?’

‘Why?’

‘Yes, sir.’

He pondered for a while, searching the musty corners of the magisterial cranium for inspiration, and at length resolved to let me know on Monday.

I still feel slightly guilty at the thought of him spending an entire weekend poring over mathematical tomes and scratching algebraic formulæ on the walls of his cave, but, true to his word, he came back to me at the start of the next school week, chalk spattered, an even more faraway look in his good eye, brandishing a sheaf of inscrutable foolscap, to deliver his findings.

‘We’ve always done it that way,’ he announced.

Although it hardly kept me awake at night, this conundrum continued to puzzle me for an improper fraction of my life, until it dawned on me that it’s not really zero in any absolute sense that we’re looking at – not nothing – but an absence of mathematical value – the arbitrary baseline where the positive value ceases, or runs out. You could call it ‘not-one’.

Rather than making one of the equations equal zero, you are reducing it to its starting point and, by so doing, you are able to solve the x or y of the other (if you happen to know what you’re doing).

Absolute zero is not approached. Instead we have a theoretical zero of mathematics, something of which I would be very much in favour.

From BLINDED WITH SCIENCE available from The Book Depository