31 Australians have died since 1996 by watering a Christmas
tree when the lights were plugged on.
Ref: Australian Bureau of Statistics

So…

Not much going on today. I should be traveling to Italy, but after the chaos last year I thought that wise men might stay at home. Given that it’s just started to snow this may yet prove to be a good move.

Two things in the newspapers caught my eye today. First is a comment from Pedro Nuno Santos, VP of the Socialist Party in Portugal. He says that Portuguese debt could be used as a weapon against the rest of Europe, Germany and France in particular. Portugal could simply refuse to pay, thereby created a ‘nuclear’ default and financial meltdown.

As someone once said, I forget who, if I owe someone $100 I have a problem. If I owe someone $1 billion, they have a problem. So the large amount of US debt held by China is China’s problem?

Not quite sure how this links, but I would not be at all surprised if we have a military government in at least one European country (Greece?) by the end of next year. Actually, I think the link is debt to austerity to rage to physical actions to crackdowns to supposed stability.

The second thing was much milder. An obituary for George Whitman, who ran Shakespeare and Co, the Parisian bookshop. I loved the comment about his bookshop from Sylia Beach that the shop was a : “Rag -and-bone- shop of the heart.”

I seem to remember reading once that the band Talking Heads took their name from a movie, a book or perhaps a US government scenario where a highly secret group got together and those individuals that couldn’t make it in person were ‘represented’ by animated heads (i.e. a person’s voice was replicated via a 3-D machine in the form of a human head).

I’ve tried to find a reference to this but I have failed.

Does this ring a bell with anyone? David Byrne – are you out there?

😉

Apple’s iPhone 4S offers a tantalising glimpse of the future in the form of SIRI, which allows users to use normal conversation to send messages or ask questions.

But this is a very basic technology.

In a decade or so, probably less, you will be able to have a personal digital or avatar-based assistant available in a variety of forms (human, aliens, animals, fantasy characters, Jeremy Clarkson?) that are animated and have personalities. We will use them as secretaries, assistants, playthings and occasionally partners to help us navigate the world and get things done. Basic versions of this technology might also be called synthetic personalities, digital humans or digital ‘bots and some forms of this technology already exist in customer services roles or on websites, usually to save money or to deal with frequency asked questions or boring tasks.

In the future they will also be used in as assistants in education, especially younger years schooling where they will teach repetitive rules based tasks such as language or mathematics. They will also appear in aged care, reminding elderly people to take their medicine or simply acting as digital companions. It is also likely that they will form the interface – or just the face – between humans and robots in the future.

Avatars assistants will also be highly personalisable in the sense regional accents could be chosen or personality flaws and moods added. There may even be the option of getting the personality of an avatar assistant to mirror that of its ‘owner’ or an owner starting to adapt their own personality in line with that of their avatar – something referred to as the Proteus effect.

And don’t forget that they will be connected to the internet, which will itself be connected to virtually everything else. Therefore you will, be able to ask you avatar assistant to turn the oven on, run a bath, dim the lights or play computer games with you.

Click here to watch Dave Evans, Chief Futurist, Digital Assistants, from Cisco talk about some aspects of this.

Moore’s Law says computers double their processing ability every 18-24 months, but imagine if this sped up exponentially to every two hours. That is one potential consequence of machines with AGI (Artificial General Intelligence). If computers continue to advance at their current rate, this could be a mere 20-30 years away.

Intel is already reinventing the transistor by harnessing photons and quantum properties to increase processing power. Whether it happens suddenly, or over time, it appears that machines will become increasingly sophisticated and able to do the work of humans.

Any true AGI would need at least four capabilities to be like us: to recognise objects, handle complex dialogue, be manually dextrous, and understand social situations from someone else’s point of view. Children come to learn each of these slowly until the age of eight, when all are present. There is no reason why robots could not be made to deal with whatever tasks they are required to do, whether it is to put groceries away or to babysit a child. But will they be able to fall in love or mourn someone’s death?

Some say that the agricultural and industrial revolutions were parallels, because of the rapid pace of change compared to what had gone before. Over the past 7,000 years, output doubled every 900 years. Now output doubles about every 15 years, about 60 times as fast as in the previous seven millennia.

The next radical jump will come from two shortages in our economy: human time and human attention. If robots are able to take over what people do (and two-thirds of a nation’s income is paid directly for wages), then there will be a massive jump in output, freeing humans to do other things. But what?

It is cheaper to build robots than it is to pay someone over a lifetime. But perhaps the value of human work would rise, with some people (perhaps robots?) paying to be served by humans rather than robots.

Robots that do solely cognitive work may live in virtual environments, or even be tiny, while others will exist in human environments and be more lifelike. Whatever the outcome, it seems certain that on on level that there will be a merger of biological and non-biological intelligence.

So here’s the thing. A while ago I had a big birthday bash at a fancy restaurant, one which I had been to and thoroughly enjoyed a few years earlier. The first problem was jeans. I thought I should check to see whether I could wear jeans along with a white shirt and dark blue jacket. After, all this is England, not laid back Australia.. “No” came the response. Fair enough I thought, so I dressed up like Mr Toad.

Arrival was fine, although I am always somewhat suspicious of a hotel/restaurant with electric gates.

Inside my suspicions were confirmed. Gone was the smokey and rather eccentric entrance hall and in its place was what can only be described as a Travel Lodge Luxe aesthetic.

No matter.

So we went into the bar, looked at the women wearing jeans (!) and then devoured the menu (too much dead stuff, nothing I really wanted). Then the wine list.

“Have you got anything really old?” I asked.

“Oh no sir, all our wine is new”

At this point I knew we were in serious trouble.

I was right.

In the main room, the waiters were all wearing white gloves. Oh please. Most of them also spoke like the art gallery assistant in Beverly Hills Cop.

“We avvv sisss, or you can avvve theeese” “Vitch voood you prefffer siiiiir”

But that was just for starters. The best was yet to come.

The main courses didn’t arrive on plates. It arrived on flat bits of black slate (i.e. floor tiles). Maybe they’d had a run on plates? As a result the sauce went all over the table. “Set me cleeenzzzz sis up for yooou siiiiir.”

The cheese was good and Michael, the man behind the cheese, was a laugh in the nicest possible sense. Diamond geezer. All in all though, pretentious nonsense with everything drenched in buttock clenching service.

And £600 for five people. Ouch!

So what to do?

If this (“siiisss”) has been a great meal I would have thought to myself, that this was a great meal. I wouldn’t have blogged or gone anywhere near Trip Advisor. But it was bad. Really bad (did I mention that my dad got food poisoning from a prawn that had tried unsuccessfully to walk overland back to Asia but was caught somewhere in Eastern Europe?).

So, yes, I went straight on to trip Advisor and said pretty much what I’ve told you here. Now what’s interesting to me here is two things. First, I wouldn’t have posted comments if the experience was a good one. So does this mean that sites like these are naturally biased towards poor experiences and negative feelings?

Two (“tahwoo”), I wouldn’t have posted a comment in my own name. Anonymity created a feeling of cyber courage that warps relations between people.

Fortunately, when I was posting my comments it was very late at night and I managed to use an incorrect email address, so none of this actually made it onto the site.

“Di yow avve an exccccccelent naught siiiiir?”

“Yeeeseeeessss. It vaz veeeeeery enjoyabbbbbbbble except fooor sa fowd powsioingggg?”.

The sociologist Frank Furedi says that: ‘It is not hope that excites and shapes the cultural imagination in the early twenty-first century; it is fear’.

Since the millennium bug we’ve seen dramatic warnings about everything from obesity and eco-doom to global economic collapse and there is a general sense that the world is becoming more uncertain and unsafe. There has certainly been a heightened religious and cultural focus on fear and apocalyptic scenarios, with a disproportionate amount of media attention and public funding being given over to address these fears. Moreover, politicians have becoming adept at using the prism of fear to appeal to our irrational herd instincts. But are people really worried?

A global survey by the World Social Summit (WSS) has found that the vast majority of people (90.2%) admit that they have day-to-day worries (largely individual and local) but only 42.4% claim to have any serious anxieties. Meanwhile, 11.9% claim that are ‘overwhelmed’ by fear whereas 55.3% say that they have a positive attitude towards life and 24.3% say they are optimistic (and yes I know these figures don’t add up to 100%). These survey results are interesting, especially within the context of a recent gathering at the Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford.

Here a gaggle of physicists, sociologists, microbiologists and philosophers met to discuss ‘mega-catastrophes’ that could wipe out millions of people or produce the total collapse of civilisation (ie, things to really worry about). The conclusions are fascinating. Basically, we shouldn’t panic because most risks are covered and in the grand scheme of things we’ve never been safer. For instance, bioterrorism is becoming more unlikely because the industry is consolidating and anyone trying to do something stupid or ‘unusual’ will almost certainly trigger alarm.

Equally, the threat of nuclear war is less than it has been for 15 years, due to a reduction of nuclear arsenals. Similarly, the threat of nuclear terrorism has also fallen due to the removal of vulnerable material together with stronger security surrounding smuggling (did you know, for instance, that some cities have alarms that instantly warn the authorities if something sinister passes over a bridge or through a tunnel?)

How about cosmic threats? Well the threat of rogue asteroids is a non-starter. Scientists have mapped all the ‘rogue rocks’ that are out there so we are unlikely to go the way of the dinosaurs anytime soon. Similarly, the H5N1 strain of influenza virus is out there and an outbreak is possible, not least because of the stacked nature of urban populations and the connectivity afforded by air travel and migration. But worst-case scenario planning covers even this threat.

So are there any threats left? Yes, two. The first is nanotechnology. It is just too early to quantify the threats represented by tinkering with atoms. Equally, artificial intelligence is too far away in any meaningful sense to assess. As for things to look forward to, a by-product of the racial soup created by migration and interbreeding is that the gene pool is getting more diverse and evolution is accelerating faster than would usually happen. Thus it is entirely possible that an individual will arise within the global population that has unprecedented insight or empathy and he or she will use this vision to form a new scientific or political paradigm.

Apologies. I’m frantic this morning. Everything seems to be happening at once, so no time whatsoever to write anything serious. Instead a quote from Ogden Nash that a few people aged 40+ might find rings true (geddit?)

“Middle age:  When you’re sitting at home on Saturday night and the telephone rings and you hope it isn’t for you. “

A few choice comments from people last week. First an invented word from the poet Matt Harvey whom I met on Thursday. Dystopiary.

Second, a comment about a comment made by Eric Pickles about the money that could be saved by the public sector if more people worked from home.

“Working from home is like being under house arrest”

BTW, I’ve figured out what the Wall Street and St Paul’s protests might be about. Unfocused dismay.