Algorithms: they're not all bad
This week, my smartphone took a welcome leap forward and got me thinking again about what's truly important
I was somewhat taken aback this morning when during my pre-breakfast scroll through the online world I found myself immersed in a “reel” that my wife assures me was constructed from an AI algorithm directly related to my most recent internet experience.
I am not entirely naive in these matters. The other day, I took a brief look at a video featuring a robot lawnmower and have since found my reading of the online Times, New York Times and FT punctuated by advertisements for a computerised herbivore.
But this was different. It was as if I was talking to myself or interrogating my unconscious mind. Almost everything I have taken an interest in in recent days, outside of the personal, was there.
Prominently featured were interviews with Professor Brian Cox on quantum mechanics (about which I understand nothing beyond the fact that it is is, er, fundamentally important). But there were also a number of videos by Jonny Thomson, an earnest, in-your-face philosopher; clips of dogs, lions and elephants; Irish traditional music; Chris Hitchens on religion; advice for “seniors” on how to remain upright without falling over; clips of classical music, including, inevitably, Nessun Dorma and Spanish acoustic guitar; assessments of art and artists; the life and deaths of Henry VIII; and aerial shots of eagles and hawks either hovering effortlessly or diving to catch fish.
And outside of going to the pub, eating dinner and cutting grass, that’s me, or at least me during these recent hot summer months. Was there anything missing? Well, the news, of course, curated for me by Alastair Campbell, Rory Stewart, Bill Maher and Jon Stewart. But world events are by their nature public property. Nor was AI interested in the fact that my wife and I hosted a successful party last week or the fact that on Sunday we motored up the cost to Binic to have lunch with two friends from Paris. It seems that AI, busily monitoring my screen-bound life, remains, for the moment, uninterested in what I get up to when I am not hunched over my computer. This will change. It’s probably changing as I write, but the accuracy with which it it gauges my inner life, based on my online choices, is already impressive.
So … I am 76 (77 next month). I was a journalist for 50 years and have written several books, fiction and non-fiction. These days, I spend more time than I should scrolling the internet, leaving a clear trace behind me, a bit like a snail.
I don’t search out Brian Cox, though he does pop up on my screen from time to time, like his America counterpart, Neil deGrasse Tyson. And I have never watched Jonny Thomson’s Mini Philosophy talks (I’m not sure I’d even heard of them). But AI, it turns out, knows me better than I know myself, which is more than a little disconcerting.
First, Cox, Though a serious scientist, the Mancunian egghead is best known these days as an explainer of the mysteries of time and space – the David Attenborough of the Cosmos. He talks, plausibly and lucidly, about such arcane matters as quantum mechanics and the fact that protons hundred of light-years apart can respond to each other as if they were twins answering questions on The Chase. His lectures almost always allude to the fact that there are 400 billion stars in the Milky Way and that ours is only one of billions of galaxies in the known universe. Even if we could somehow exceed the speed of light, he says, we could never hope to reach the end of the universe because there is no end. It is infinite and getting bigger every day, travelling faster than an 18-year-old who has just passed his driving test. Heavy stuff, not easy to take in, but administered with a light touch. Irresistibly, I was reminded of Eric Idle’s Galaxy Song, for which, barring the constraints of space and time, Cox could have been the source. I looked it up on YouTube just to check, no doubt triggering a doom loop in which I am bound to get lost for at least the next two weeks.
Jonny Thomson (a lovely little thinker but a bugger when he’s pissed) used to teach philosophy at Oxford but now, I learn, retails the meaning of life on Big Think – “the leading source of expert-driven, actionable, educational content”. It was Thomson on my proferred reel, who unwittingly joined together several of the themes that have been exercising me in recent weeks. The first of these concerns the contradictions inherent in what we think of as time and permanence. Time, Cox assures me, is a human construct that in the cosmos is essentially meaningless. So is my life – over in the blink of an eye – also without meaning, which I have to say is what I had rather assumed. If I understand the good professor corrcctly, every possibility that could happen has happened, is happening and will happen again, all at the same time, forever. To me, this suggests that I was born yesterday (hmm!), am being born now and will be born again (hopefully not as an evangelical Christian) tomorrow afternoon and – by way of illustration – in both April 1066 and September 3057. The reason I won’t be forgotten, it turns out, is that I will never actually cease to be, though the chronologies of my infinite variants will take me in all sorts of directions.
This being so, we should learn to appreciate the transience of life, which is happiness mixed with pathos, or, as Cox puts it, to rejoice in the fact that it is we, as individuals and as possibly the only intelligent life-form in the universe, who lend meaning to the cosmos.
Am I convinced by this? I don’t know. Ask me again yesterday.
According to Thomson, we shouldn’t waste our time regretting our mortality. Instead, we should embrace the Japanese concept of Mono no aware – “the moment when you know a good thing will end”. Has he talked this over with Cox? Probably not, not this time round at least. But that doesn’t mean – a bit like those protons that respond in identical ways at the same moment despite being light years apart – that they haven’t reached the same conclusion. “It may be that we can never fully understand quantum mechanics,” says Jonny. “But that doesn’t mean that there isn’t an answer out there.”
Without my internet prompt– a prayer-wheel for the Godless – a lot of the dots that sprang up at me this week might have gone unconnected. I would not have given thought to the life-enhancing bonds between dogs and their owners. I wouldn’t have learned how to improve my sense of balance so that I don’t have to watch out all the time in case I go flying. I wouldn’t have known that lions can make good fathers or that Chris Hitchens, while admirably brave on the subject of religion, was more compelling on the rare occasions in his last years when he gave God a rest. Not least, I might never have heard Nessun Dorma sung by the German tenor, Jonas Kaufmann.
I know, I know … AI and its humble servant, the algorithm, are encouraging human life in new directions and it is vital that we display the utmost caution in our dealings with them in the years ahead. But there is no doubting the brilliance, even the genius, that they represent. My week this week was significantly enhanced by what I found on my smartphone. It got me thinking again, drawing me back to what is truly important amid the vicissitudes of twenty-first century life. And I have to say that I am glad.