Technology rules brave new world ahead of humans
BELIEVERS praise God for many things. But I haven’t come across a prayer to thank Him for allowing us to die before life becomes incomprehensible.
It seems to me, though, that we should be grateful that closing time comes before the wine runs dry, as Leonard Cohen almost put it.
Dear reader, don’t misunderstand me; I would not invite the reaper to tea right now, but it is becoming clear that I am now an analogue in a digital world.
When Loughborough University announces that holograms of great thinkers seem ‘more real’ to students than lecturers, I hear the clock ticking.
Another case in point: today I bought tickets for an outing and enjoined our twenty-somethings to bring their railcards on the day.
“They’re on your phone now,” one of them retorted, mockingly. Well, not mine, son.
I recall my parents giving me tickets with all the reverence of priests conferring wafers and it’s my turn now.
So, like it or not, they are going to have to deal with a physical ticket, albeit one they will scan rather than hand to someone wearing a uniform and peaked cap. Alas!
Robertson Davies once wrote that living in the past can be expensive.
He wasn’t just referring to money, great novelist that he was, but as long as I can purchase physical tickets, or put a stylus on a gramophone record (I know I am laying it on thick) or write my own column rather than asking Chat GPT to do something with ‘God, Ageing, and Anecdotes’, then I will continue to do so.
And while we are on the subject, Zoom was once a noise you made when playing with toy aeroplanes, and I still have some of them too.
Cue birthday cards urging me to lie about my age, but for many the response to ageing isn’t about lying but about emulation, middle-aged managers becoming ‘disrupters’, 60 being the new 40, ‘golden age’ dating apps and all the rest.
My arguments are to a different conclusion: once upon a time there was a concept of growing old gracefully and inasmuch as I can do anything gracefully, I will do that instead.
The grace involved, thankfully for me, is not that of the trapeze artiste but rather that which enables acceptance. So not for me the ways of botox, or hair dye, or jogging in suburbia to delay the inevitable.
Age isn’t creeping up on me; it has overtaken, rounded the corner and is almost out of sight.
All I can see left of it are my assumptions falling by the wayside as they find fewer and fewer points of application.
But we who now find ourselves old have the advantage of having seen things differently. Perhaps what many call wisdom is not developed over time but is simply the perspective afforded by memory.
This does not deny the value of everything new, but resists equating novelty with excellence. So I do understand my offspring trusting mobiles with common-or-garden resources such as rail passes (phrases such as ‘common-or-garden’ indicating my graceful decline), but I know that concentrating resources in one place or one system makes us vulnerable. We should resist this today as individuals for the same reasons that we resisted concentrating fighter production during the Second World War.
But when nobody is surprised that today’s Ministry of Defence has been hacked, it strikes me that we are converts to a new faith: that our cyber-security is cleverer than any hacker, fraudster or enemy state.
Everything from our confidence in air traffic control to the security of nuclear power rests on such faith, and I use the term deliberately.
But as Post Office leaders have learned too late, faith in our technology partners can pervert judgment, damage ethics, cause us to harm the innocent.
Little Britain’s writers were on to something with: ‘Computer says no’.
But where else might this false God lead us? I once heard the Newcastle-based philosopher Mary Midgley, then in her nineties, argue that we should not want to live forever.
If the doyens of Silicon Valley achieve their cryogenic fantasy, whatever emerges afterwards would not be what humans should take ourselves to be.
Those driving this brave new world are dreamers indeed, but theirs are electric dreams.
I will stick with Mary Midgley, with the human, and with a prayer for acceptance.
Professor Ron Beadle is 58.