Author: mjcintheuk

Our towns, cities and communities have been under the spotlight over the last week or so. Images of violence, hatred and anger have seeped into our living rooms as the nation appeared to be descending into an anarchic meltdown.

Forget the stats, it doesn’t matter that the numbers were in the high hundreds / low thousands among a population of 67 million.

This was a representative slice of the British public who were out on the streets for a variety of reasons, which ranged from absurd ignorance to deeply felt, genuine concern.  

Freedom of thought, speech and protest means that you will have to endure the sights and sounds of people you profoundly disagree with. That’s the point of liberal democracy. If you only want to hear the words of folks that you agree with, you’re no democrat.

Drawing the lines has been the unenviable task of politicians, publishers, police and the justice system since god was a boy. British society has flexed from rigid conformism to outright ‘anything goes’ throughout our history.

We have enjoyed times of great national unity (Blitz spirit of the early 1940s, the beautiful summer of love in 1967 and the equally beautiful Olympic summer of 2012).

We have also known times of splintered disunity (we’ll leave the civil war of the 1640s out of this, but the rioting season of 1981 and the Brexit traumas are recent enough for reference).

Immigration is the hottest political potato of the last 30 years. The main parties have steered clear of discussion, as both Labour and Conservative been active in swelling the numbers whilst claiming to be in favour of reduction. Campaign with firmness, govern with open doors.

The impact of mass population growth (as cited by Nigel Farage et al) is true. Housing, health, transport and all public services are put under intolerable strain as the investment in them does not match the increased demand.

Whose fault is that? Not the immigrant. Whatever spin you may like to put on it. The culpable governing class, with rich friends, international investors to keep sweet and shackling low wages to maintain have created this lowest common denominator economy.

So if you can’t get a place to rent or buy, can’t see a dentist, lose out on the 8.00 doctor’s surgery lottery every day – don’t blame the immigrants. They are – by and large – the ones who come to make a better life for themselves, want to work hard, get a stake in their adopted country and build a better life for their children to inherit.

Are there bad ones? Oh yes. There are people coming into our country who mean us harm, do not ascribe to our values and will take advantage of our liberal laws to exploit what they see as our weaknesses and get away with it. They are violent, full of hatred and have no place in our society, making the lives of others miserable through modern slavery, medieval beliefs and spit the poison of extremist bile.

But even these acknowledged truths do not give us the full picture. We cannot view the experience on our own country (and indeed France, Germany, Italy and other stretched European nations) in isolation.

I was a teenage supporter of Band Aid/ Live Aid. We changed the world – a little bit. By advocating love and support in an age of apparent self-centred greed (oh the 80s!) we stood up and were counted in our millions.

How little we knew in our innocence that the conspiracy of European tariffs would continue decades beyond, to keep Africa on its knees and dependent on handouts, rather than enabling her to trade her way out of poverty.

Having worked happily with dictators in the Middle East for decades, we took umbrage firstly with Saddam Hussein, then the Taliban, then Mubarak in Egypt and Gaddafi in Libya. The million-dollar military hardware we sold them for years couldn’t compete with billion dollar hardware we dropped on them. Absolute, glorious chaos across the region.

And now we condemn the refugees and asylum seekers that come from those countries which we destroyed, for having the cheek to ask for a chance to rebuild their lives here. A simplified version I grant you, but you get the point.

So who gets hurt in this brave new world? The ordinary folks, of course. The Brits who can’t get a decent paying job, a foot on the housing ladder, public services of any kind. The immigrants, who want to get ahead but face suspicion, hostility and blame for things they have no control over.

Who gets ahead? The same ruling class who pits us against each other. And they continue to make it happen. The riots, the violence, the orchestrated division and hatred that ensure that there is no collective realisation of where the fault lies. The ignorant foot soldiers stir the pot on their behalf and the decent-minded folk turn out in opposition. Divide and rule in the oldest fashion of humanity.

Who do I blame? Those ones who get rich on the minimum wage earning masses, who simultaneously avoid paying their taxes that could substantially fund the creaking public services. Those who remotely stoke the fires of conflict to divert attention from the obscene inequalities in our nation.

The protests will fade. We’ll get back to football, bingo, and of course Strictly starts soon. All will calm down. And hopefully in calmer waters, those threads that bind us together will strengthen again.

We will never achieve equality. I’m sorry if that sounds pessimistic, but the nature of a capitalist society means that there will always be winners and losers, haves and have-nots.

But we can hope that most British of values – fairness – will have a resonant renaissance, as we look to heal the wounds of this summer of discontent.

Your servant

MC

We all have those friends, family members, colleagues. The ones who say “You know you can always talk to me”. Some of them follow this up with the bonus information that they are “a really good listener”.

And so you give it a try. You take them up on their offer – and what happens? You barely get to the end of your first sentence and they jump in immediately with their thoughts, views, opinions, their perceptions of what’s wrong, what you should do, say, think and feel. They are so anxious to provide you with the solution to all your problems that they become another one of them.

They are in fact, not the best listeners. If by chance you do manage to get a few lines out, they are sitting poised, coiled like the proverbial spring, willing you to stop talking so they can launch themselves at you. In this state they have actually ceased listening long ago and are merely waiting impatiently for you to complete your lines so they can fill the air again.

The worst offenders are the ones who use the smallest detail from your tale as a trigger to offload their own issues. And their problems are always bigger than yours, so don’t even try to get things back on track. Just excuse yourself as politely as you can and quickly as you can.

A word to the unwise – stop talking. That’s the very least you can do. People that need to talk very often don’t always express themselves well. The running commentary in someone’s head that they have played over and over will habitually come out blurted, in a clumsy fashion and be as much of a shock to the person as anyone listening. But – it loses its power when said out loud.  Encouraging looks amid silence help to relax them into the sensation of talking out loud. Some call it active listening.

By getting used to actually giving voice to the things that have been bothering them, those tensions can be seen for what they are. A downward dialogue that deals despondency, but which shrinks – and with a bit of luck – evaporates on the outside. Maybe not first time; walls of sufferance are built over time and will not always be blown away instantly.

Very often too, the first statement is testing the water. Most people will not dive in with the biggest and baddest millstone they are carrying. A tentative opening line that is crushed by the oncoming juggernaut of a non-listener will guarantee the end of that discourse. Learning to listen well involves patience and self-restraint. If you really care about the person, that’s something you will rise to.

Listening requires you to stop processing incoming information with a view to responding. You don’t need to solve the problem for them. You don’t need to answer straight away. You often don’t need to answer at all. Therapies involving animals (dogs and cats typically) where people offload and what they get back is unrivalled attention a lick and waggy tail – do wonders. I don’t recommend people do this unless you know the other person very well…

I was on a train on the way back from London recently and overheard a valiant attempt at a pep talk. (I don’t habitually listen in to other people’s conversations, but when they are conducted loud enough for the whole carriage to hear, they’re fair game).

The lady on the receiving end of the pep talk was on the retreat almost from the get-go. She was reduced to ‘Yeah…yeah…uh-huh…oh yeah’ by the torrent of life changing observations from her companion. Eventually, her well-meaning friend was surprised she was getting off before their usual stop. The hastily concocted reason was grocery shopping. As she stepped off the friend said “Call me – call me – you promise?” It was an order, not a request.

I’m pretty sure that most times, the rubbish listeners are good people with good intentions. And they’d probably be affronted by any suggestion they were doing anything but trying to help. But they’re not helping. They really. Are. Not.

So if your pal is a bad listener, I guess you have three choices:

1. Find a better listener to be your listening pal
2. Tell your erstwhile pal to give you a good listening to for a change
3. Do (1) but keep some minor titbits for your bad listening pal to chew over. After all, you don’t want to lose a friend completely, do you?

This blog was written in beautiful isolation. Now back to the maddening crowd…

Artificial Intelligence (AI), like every discovery or invention since we stood on our hind legs has the capacity to do great things and not-so-great things.

And like fire, the wheel, nuclear energy and the internet before it, the uses for AI are on the way to becoming so ubiquitous they’ll soon barely register, or be seen as remarkable.

AI offers plenty of wonderful opportunities. Of course, like any system if you put crap in, you get crap out. So when we are loading up the virtual doctors for appointments to ease the pressure on their real-life counterparts, we’d better make sure all possible diagnosis are loaded. And the failsafe for when the real doctors need to take over.

Removing emotional elements has its benefits. Where there are absolute truths or strictly binary options, logic will drive outcomes. Where we don’t need or want a chat, the bots can give us all the information and answers without any fluff.

It’s a while since the most exciting thing we could do was to book a hotel, flight or pub lunch online. The banking Apps have made our finances more fluid than ever, without setting foot inside a bank or getting our hands grubby with cash.

2023 has also see the tantalising prospect of early cancer detection appearing on the horizon too, The Royal Marsden, together with Institute of Cancer Research and Imperial College London have produced evidence of algorithm-driven results that exceed all that has been possible to date. That’s the kind of thing that really would make us embrace the Doc Bots.

The passage from manual to automation has always been a fractious one. Ever since the Industrial Revolution, the threats of redundancy and people being replaced out of their jobs have been a constant fear. Bank closures and High Street stalwarts collapsing due to online retail have been the latest version of “the world’s going to hell in a handcart”.

Bemoaning the loss of the old ways used to be the sad refrain from pensioners, resentful of a world accelerating beyond their comfort. Now the Boomers are joined by Gen X and even Gen Y are seeing their waking certainties falling by the wayside, as progress marches relentlessly on.

Some of the smartest decisions made across the generations have been those that chose to learn the trades of electrician, plumber, plasterer et al. In constant demand and making a good living, as the general population loses the practical life skills one by one. Water coming through your ceiling? There’s definitely not an App for that…

Overall, there’s little point trying to resist the onward march. And we need to remember we asked for this. This version of the world has been created with our complicit approval and encouragement. We wanted everything 24/7. We wanted to shop from our phones for everything, anytime. I’ve spoken about the negative impact on decent customer service before, here.

The aspect of AI that presents a real challenge is the scary brilliance of media files. And yes, of course there’s an Orwell quote from Nineteen Eighty-Four to fit:

“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”

When Arnie’s face was transposed onto another combatant in Running Man, when Forrest Gump shook hands with JFK, we saw the fledgling fantasy fakes blurring and blending facts with fiction. They seem so primitive now.

In Wag the Dog, Dustin Hoffman created an artificial war for Robert de Niro’s presidential right-hand man. Just long enough to get the president re-elected. Fake prime time new stories, fake video imagery, Willie Nelson commissioned to write a new ‘old classic’ song taken up by the nation.

The public were shown as buying into it. Surely that couldn’t happen, right?

The deep fake videos circulating online still have some jarring elements, but they are nearing the point where they’ll soon be flawless. It’s not an issue when these can be called out on the same day. But as the distance between the witness and the event grows – and the witnesses are no longer reliable or even still around – those clips may acquire credibility. Particularly within secret services or subversive agents who play the long game.

Imagine an exceptionally gifted software genius – assisted by AI – reworking an historic video. Taking library pictures of a public figure and adding ‘previously unavailable audio remarks’. That scene with Forrest Gump saying he needed a pee and JFK repeating it with perfect timing could be the crude blueprint of what’s to come.

Vladimir Putin has been rather shaky on recent media appearances. Shades of Brezhnev in his zombie years, when he was wheeled out to wave and then wheeled back in again.

In a place like Russia where traditional as well as social media has been throttled by the state, deep fake videos, perfected with AI nuances – Vladimir need ever appear again. Speeches by Vlad the Vid could be made to order, for years. A well-paid lookalike to make distanced appearances in public (wouldn’t be the first time) could see him ‘ruling’ Russia beyond his capacity to do so.

As the world has descended into a dangerously fractious time, any kind of agreement on the rules of the game for AI seem fanciful. The US, EU, UK and other allies can legislate. But when countries withdraw from non-proliferation of nuclear weapons treaties, you can’t see them uniting against a potentially very useful propaganda tool.

Artificial Intelligence is here to stay. There are profits to be made. And yes, there are some very useful functions that can bring benefits to humanity. And the thought that ABBA could appear on the ‘Welcome to 2100’ show is quite something.

For we, the masses – we’d all like to think we wouldn’t be fooled. We’d all like to think that ultimately, we would see though a fake story. But as the technology improves and our capacity & appetite for critical thinking diminishes, we may end up complicit in this too – and just be kidding ourselves.

Your servant,

MC