THE NET CLOSES

Dick Pountain/ Idealog298/ 3rd May 2019 14:21:19

To say that the shine has worn off Social Media would be something of an understatement: in fact we appear to be on the verge of what sociologist Stan Cohen memorably labelled a ‘moral panic’ that might end up severely curtailing the freedom of web communication in some countries (though probably not this one). I’ve mentioned before that I review books for another, rather dustier, journal than PC Pro, and I’ve just completed a blockbuster on three that describe the darker side of the internet: Martin Moore’s ‘Democracy Hacked’, Susan Landau’s ‘Listening In’ and Matthew Hindman’s ‘The Internet Trap’. I still feel slightly sick and keep looking over my shoulder more than is healthy. Moore’s book in particular is an eye-opener, and one that I heartily recommend.

One of his central chapters traces the history of online culture all the way from the hippy ideals of the Whole Earth Catalog, through Perry Barlow, Stallman, ‘information wants to be free’ and Open Source, right up through its discovery by libertarian billionaires Koch brothers, Peter Thiel and Richard Mercer, to Cambridge Analytica, Trump and Brexit. The irony is of course that we got the internet we wished for, free and unfettered, but that didn’t make it a force for good (or even for middling).

In the bad old days our information was controlled by large corporations, from News International to the BBC, who imposed their own values via the professional journalists they employed to write, speak and film it. In short they policed the information stream for ‘our own good’. Nowadays we’re free as birds to communicate anything we want to whoever we want thanks to the marvellous WWW. On YouTube I can indulge my cravings, as confessed last month, for Japanese street-food and rusty old tools, and can post my own avant-garde computer-generated music for no-one to listen to. I can swap pithy witticisms with my hundreds of ‘friends’ on Facebook, listen to almost any music in the world instantly on Spotify, and buy all my electronic bits on Amazon instead of schlepping all the way to Maplins (who they put out of business). Of course YouTube happens to be owned by Google, a bigger and more profitable corporation than any of those old ones, and unlike them neither it nor Facebook polices anything very much, enabling all the world’s most dangerous nutjobs to get heard on the same terms as sensible folk.

Matthew Hindman’s book is more wonkish than Moore’s, and hence may possibly interest readers of this column more. He performs experiments on large web traffic datasets, like the results of the Netflix Prize Competition, which reinforce the idea that though the internet may open up production and dissemination of information to everyone, it inexorably siphons all the revenue into a handful of new monopolies every bit as powerful as the old. This is due not only to ‘network effects’, which he believes have been overemphasised, but mostly to ‘stickiness’ – the tendency of users to become loyal to one website thanks to the mental cost of switching. His experiments quantify just how hard and expensive stickiness is to achieve, so that only very large companies, which admittedly got that big through network effects, can afford it through better design and faster response than competitors. Their server farms are every bit as huge and expensive as the factories of previous industrial revolutions.

A monopoly on stickiness inevitably leads to attention-based business models, where user information is harvested to target programmatic adverts. Everything we buy, read or watch provides information that is sold to advertisers, and Google and Facebook between them collect 70% of this colossal revenue. Hindman worries about the effect on news gathering and dissemination: local papers could once attract sufficient ad revenue, thanks to their targeted readerships, but the Net lets digital giants grab practically all of it and push the locals out of business. Digital news sites that are replacing them, like BuzzFeed and Vice are financed by investors and major brand advertisers – lacking a tradition of separation between editorial and business, their tiny in-house staffs generate ‘native’ ads that look like editorial (and often go viral), while deleting or redacting anything that might offend advertisers.

Susan Landau’s book is an equally excellent overview of hacking, encryption and surveillance issues that I won’t need to explain in such detail to readers of Davey Winder’s Pro column (she was an expert witness for Apple over the FBI’s request to decrypt those terrorists’ iPhone). Guy Debord once remarked that “Formerly one only conspired against an established order. Today, conspiring in its favor is a new and flourishing profession.” These authors agree, and urge us to curb the power of the corporations while the choice is still ours to make.

[If Dick Pountain had a penny for every penny he’d made from online content, he wouldn’t have a penny]

PORN FREE?

Dick Pountain/ Idealog297/ 4th April 2019 10:42:59

Amid all the hoohah over our attempted Brexit you might be forgiven for not having noticed that, in addition to taking on the EU our valiant government has also decided to fight the internet. To be exact they’ve decided to regulate the consumption of pornography, which as everyone knows is what keeps that internet going. To be even more exact they’ve decided to announce a date for announcing a date for the introduction of a porn pass, without which porn sites nationwide will become inaccessible to you. This pass, which you’ll either buy online or else from your local newsagent for a fiver, proves that you’re over 18 years of age. It also presumably adds you to a database of dirty dogs who in some future post-Brexit theocracy may be summoned to a clinic for chemical castration.

Now I don’t intend to pursue here the obvious problems of implementing such a scheme - if the Chinese Communist Party can’t effectively censor the internet what chance does this clueless shower stand? Nor am I particularly worried for myself because the government’s definition of porn is far, far narrower than my own. They’re only attempting to ban sex porn, and I’m not much bothered with that as I get quite enough at home. The various porns that I do consume will not require such a pass: for example guitar porn (and its harder core variants guitar-pedal porn and guitar-build-and-repair porn), Japanese-street-food porn, chemical-engineering-animated-safety-video porn, restoring-rusty-old-tools porn, damascus-steel-blacksmithing porn, and a few like Czech-semi-automatic-weapon or dangerous-chemical porn of which I am slightly ashamed. You’ll gather that I’ve updated the definition of pornography for the age of consumerism, to mean any representation of some activity, in whatever medium, that makes a person want to perform that activity themselves. And of course the internet has revolutionised the production, distribution and consumption of this sort of porn.

All varieties of porn share certain aesthetic traits. Works are fairly short (5 to 20 minutes) to match attention spans. They have no plot beyond the preparation, beginning and completion of the activity they depict. Most lack dialogue and have irritating tinkly computer-generated music instead, but where there’s any talking it tends to be clipped, inane or purely functional. Mis-en-scene is often an interior, shot in a single continuous take on video with simple direct lighting. Occasionally there are ill-advised attempts to insert illustration or animation.

For me a perfect example of the form is ‘Japanese Street Food - RED BEAKFISH Sushi Fried Seafood Soup Okinawa Japan’ (1,704,738 views), one of a seemingly endless and hypnotically fascinating series. In all of them an unseen, anonymous fish-artist skillfully dissects an exotic and unfamiliar fish using a gorgeous-but-weatherbeaten Japanese chef knife. The various bits and pieces are then cooked (or not) in several different ways and presented to an equally anonymous and unseen diner who appears only as a hand and a pair of chopsticks, which grasp a piece and hold it close to the lens, slowly rotating it so the light catches its glistening fibres, and I’m unable to avoid some involuntary salivation. I won’t recommend them as I don’t want to corrupt you.

This is, of course, the freedom that the internet has always promised isn’t it? Freedom from the greasy clutches of the music business and Hollywood studios, in short from Big Entertainment, so that any weirdo can, for very little expense, share weird pleasures, unfettered and celebrated by fellow weirdos wherever we may be in the world.

Well, er, actually no. The hold of large monopolistic corporations on our entertainment has in fact increased, only the corporations are different. The various porns I consume are presented to me by YouTube, owned by Google, and just about everything else comes via Amazon, Facebook/Instagram or Netflix. In an important book called ‘The Internet Trap’, US media professor Martin Hindman explains how the internet doesn’t encourage competition but inexorably leads toward monopoly. Using experiments on data sets almost as huge as Cambridge Analytica’s, Hindman demonstrates how we crave variety but won’t search too long for it, which makes ‘stickiness’ the dominant factor driving internet traffic. And stickiness grants exponentially increasing advantages to size. All the advertising - which is what pays for all this free porn - will rapidly gravitate to the handful of huge corporations who host it. The always-charming Peter Thiel has summed it up pithily thus: ‘Competition Is For Losers’.

I do hope the government’s Porn Czar will read Hindman, and would venture to suggest a far more radical reform. Why not introduce an ID card that doubles as a Porn Pass and also confers entitlement to a Universal Basic Income? That covers all the bases and should render our streets empty and safe again in short order.

[Dick Pountain is working on a script where a young, bored housewife rings for a moustachioed Python programmer to help her with list comprehensions]

IT’S COMPLICATED

Dick Pountain/ Idealog 296/ 4th March 2019 13:41:22

I’ve often professed here my liking for simplicity, particularly in the design of software, but more generally in the design of objects. I’m just a Bauhaus sort of guy. That doesn’t mean that I hate, or fear, complexity. On the contrary, I know the universe is complex and I consider complexity theory an important area of mathematical philosophy, though one neither widely nor well understood.

It’s important for us in the IT business because, used properly, it can save us wasting effort trying to solve some problem with an algorithm that doesn’t stand a chance. But it’s also philosophically important because it places bounds on what it’s possible to know, and can rule out certain kinds of nonsense a priori. The thing is, complexity theory is quite hard both to grasp and to explain, involving as it does the concepts of true randomness and infinity. I know this because I’ve recently tried to explain it, and found it really hard work.

One of my simple pleasures is walking on Hampstead Heath, occasionally accompanied by an old friend, a semi-retired professor in a social science. We typically end up in deep analytical chats, over pints, about the state of the world, and recently he asked out of the blue for an explanation of complexity theory. His colleagues and students had begun using ‘complexity’ as a buzzword in their publications, in much the way chaos theory was thrown around a few decades ago, and he suspected this might be poorly-digested bullshit.

I recommended a couple of books, but back home I looked and found the first hopelessly out-of-date, while the other I barely understood myself, though I thought I did 30 years ago. So I set about trying afresh. One mathematical kind of complexity, studied as algorithmic information theory, is about the resources required for the execution of algorithms. This was pioneered in the 1960s in crucial papers by Andrey Kolmogorov and Gregory Chaitin, and at its heart is the definition of randomness. You can’t predict exactly the next character in a random string like “asdwebqwgastytinfdebfbwwvefwramk”, so there’s no description shorter than quoting the whole string. On the other hand a string like “okokokokokokokokokokokokokokok” has a shorter definition, namely “repeat ‘ok’ 15 times”. Such shorter definitions are algorithms, but this isn’t really what my friend was looking for.

A less abstract approach to complexity might be physical, via cause and effect. If I let go of this glass vase it will fall on the hard kitchen floor and shatter, thanks to gravity, a fairly simple cause. I like the vase though, so a second causal chain might start in the neural circuits that make up my brain, forming the intention “I’m going to repair it”. This sends messages to my limbs to sweep up the bits and deposit them on the kitchen table. Lots of them, small, more-or-less triangular shards. Can I in principle fit them all back together like a jigsaw and super-glue them? I don’t know the answer, and it might in fact be unknowable, because the number of comparisons that need to be made, and the time they would consume, grows exponentially with the number of shards.

Or here’s another stab. You’re given a string of bits and told to guess whether the next bit will be a 0 or a 1. Let’s distinguish three different scenarios:

a) The string might consist of all 0s, so that after a few hundred you suspect the next will be 0 too. This scenario might arise because some electronic device generating the bits is broken or turned offb) The string may be truly random, generated by repeated tosses of a fair coin, so however many bits you examine the chances of guessing the next correctly remain exactly 50:50.

c) The string might represent something, for example the letter “A” in this digital font. The distribution of 1s is no longer random: long stretches of all 1s correspond to the black parts, stretches of all 0s correspond to white space between adjacent characters.

One hundred bits of each string contain the same amount of Shannon information, but for everyday purposes a) and b) are less informative than c). String a) typifies nothingness, brokenness, non-existence. String b) typifies dissolution or decomposition. You could see both as different ways to represent formlessness or death. The most interesting things in the universe, living beings, can be represented and reproduced by type c) strings, stretches of repetition that convey form put there by the expenditure of energy to temporarily and locally lower their entropy. Complexity arises when a living creature, a bundle of proteins, nucleotides, carbohydrates, uses its sensory organs to sample the outside world and try to figure out what to do next.

[Dick Pountain actually refuses to super-glue broken crockery in more than four pieces]

DIGITAL WHIMPER

Dick Pountain/ Idealog 295/ 8th February 2019 12:08:45

‘This is the way the world ends

Not with a bang but a whimper’

T.S.Eliot’s famous last line depends on an auditory metaphor, the opposite ends of a spectrum of disquieting sounds. He wrote The Hollow Men well before WWII and the atom bomb, and when interviewed in 1958 said he’d not use it now that ‘bang’ had new force. He didn’t live to see the internet, which might have done the same for ‘whimper’.

An equally well-known dichotomy is that between ‘cock-up’ and ‘conspiracy’. We’re supposed to consider them opposites too, though personally I believe that it’s possible to have both simultaneously, in the shape of an incompetently executed conspiracy, or a well-executed one that has unintended consequences. And it’s starting to look as if AI may turn out to be the latter.

What prompts this line of thought is a series of trivial online incidents I’ve witnessed in the last few weeks. Two of them were Facebook posts from friends. The first was an unretouched photo of a foggy night sky in the Ukraine, where a Windows 8 error message was clearly visible projected onto the fog by a malfunctioning digital billboard. (https://www.facebook.com/Dracothedeatheatingcupcake/photos/a.404155702971779/971136009607076/). Eliot might have liked that one. Another was a friend-of-a-friend who’s a photographer whose post got banned as hate speech because he mentioned that he’d just been out ‘shooting trannies’, by which he actually meant he’d been taking colour pictures on film transparencies. Ooops.

The third incident involved me directly. I started to receive Critical Security Alert emails from Google, claiming they’d just refused login to someone who was using my password, which I needed to change immediately. On checking up I soon determined that the malevolent agent was actually myself, in the form of my Windows laptop. I don’t use this PC nearly as often as I used to, but it remains connected to the internet and periodically backs itself up to Google Drive and OneDrive: some new super-smart AI security bulldog at Google had interpreted this behaviour pattern as that of a spotty teenage identity thief.

Problem was, Google then put a block on my Gmail account from that machine, and I immediately feared that this might spread to my Chromebook, phone and tablet and lock me out altogether. This proved far from irrational, because when I did as told and changed my password, I found that my Chromebook rejected the new password as wrong. After a shot of whisky, a few aspirins and a cold compress, I discovered that they at least had the decency to keep the old password active, so I could get back in and unchange it. There followed a pantomime where I tried to contact some human to explain what was happening but failed completely, until by fluke I was whimpering on my Gmail account page when a chat window opened. Eventually I got it all sorted with the help (several hours) of an obliging Google engineer based in - the Phillipines.

STRINGING ALONG

Dick Pountain/ Idealog294/ 6th January 2019 16:47:19

I do love strings. I don’t mean balls of string, or G-strings, or particle physics String Theory, or puppet strings. I mean that plain, simple old data structure, a load of old ASCII arranged in a row, the second type we all learn after numbers. “Hello World!” is a string, strings are the way that computers talk to us. OK, nowadays they all contain a chip that can turn strings into sounds, but that’s just to humour us - inside they talk strings, all the words I’m typing here are strings.

The first computer language I learned was Basic, on a Commodore 4K PET back in 1979, before the advent of bitmapped screens. Being a wordy sort of person, and having no graphics available, it was the string functions that grabbed my imagination. One of the first programs I wrote was a nonsense poetry generator, which created seriously mad lines like:

Should a truffle smoothly stink?

Can its pickled stomach think?

The pepper capers over your floor.

Yes, well. Soon I got a better, CP/M, computer and learned Forth, Lisp and Pascal, but none of these were really much better for mangling strings: they all had short limits on length, and similar numeric, array-oriented functions to find stuff. Then I discovered SNOBOL. Never widely popular and now almost forgotten, this language was entirely dedicated to string processing (the name stands for StriNg Oriented and symBOlic Language). It uses patterns that look very like Backus-Naur expressions, rather than numeric indices, for complex substring searches – it’s perhaps still unsurpassed for this purpose, but the rise of Unix and Perl made regular expressions the more popular solution.

I couldn’t see myself using SNOBOL for everything - it’s not great for numeric work - so I decided to write my own string functions that faintly mimicked the way it works. I called them before() and after() and they do what it says on the tin, so before(“pterodactyl”,”rod”) returns “pte”, whereas after(“pterodactyl”,”rod”) returns “actyl”’. I found these so useful that in every new language I learn, they’re the first things I implement. I’ve done them in Basic, Forth, Pascal, Lisp, POP-11, Ruby, Python and more. I published Turbo Pascal versions in a Byte column, and was gratified to find other programmers using them a few years later. Maybe they’re what will be on my blue plaque (just joking). Python of course provides a string method split() to do this – "pterodactyl".split("rod")[1] returns ”actyl”, but I’m now so attached to my before and after that I still prefer them.

Sometime around 1990 I encountered NIFE, the Non Interactive File Editor, from a small Bristol software house called Cadspa (now defunct). This was a DOS command-line program that took any number of text files, plus a file of NIFE commands, and wrote the results back to files. It was scorchingly fast and handled files of almost unlimited size. It employed a Prolog-like, declarative syntax, a sequence of ‘IF...THEN’ statements that could access all parts of each word, text line and all character types. Over the next decade I performed herculean feats with it, updating huge databases when the London phone numbers changed, helping a friend add Ventura Publisher tags to a book in 365 volumes, and alongside my own Turbo Pascal word-sort program to extract a keyword list from 18-years-worth of Byte issues, when I was writing The Penguin Dictionary of Computing. I reckon it saved me more than a year’s work there. Much missed because, like Turbo Pascal, it no longer runs after Windows 8.

In several previous columns I’ve mentioned my computer music composition system and – surprise, surprise – that works entirely on strings. When I started designing many years ago I had to choose a data structure to represent musical notes, and strings seemed, to me at least, an ideal solution. I could have settled for conventional musical notation and represented tunes as strings of the letters A,B,C,D,E,F and G. But the output of my system is MIDI, not musical notation, so instead I employ all the ASCII characters to represent the 127 pitches that MIDI can play. What’s more pitch, duration, volume and start-time get stored as separate strings so they can be manipulated independently. Python is just brilliant for handling this: sometimes tuples (pitch, time, duration, volume) are what’s needed, other times I might want to mangle pitch, or another of the streams, alone.

Computers stopped being ‘all about 0s and 1s’ for me when I quit writing 8088 assembler, and they’re only really about numbers once a year when I do my accounts. The rest of the time they’re all about strings, or ‘words’ if you must...

PHONEY VALUES

Dick Pountain/ Idealog293/ 6th December 2018 11:37:08

For all that I grouse about it, Facebook can sometimes be fun. Last week I posted about a small tech victory. My dear old HTC Desire phone had been playing up – go-slows, total freezes – and no amount of purging apps would fix it. I started eyeing up various Motos on Amazon, but just before committing decided to try one last fix: a full Factory Reset. All my data and most of my apps came back automatically from Google within 15 minutes, the phone is now rock-solid and faster than when if first got it full of EE crap. But the response on Facebook should have been predictable: an avalanche of advice from friends recommending replacements costing up to £1000.

I protested that I don’t care about phones: I use mine mostly as a Spotify and Citymapper platform while out walking, and for occasional texts. Shininess, Gorilla Glass, metal cases (I prefer plastic, which bounces instead of denting or scratching), curved screens or the dreaded notch mean nothing. If they ever give phones away in cornflake packets, I might start eating cornflakes. This admission caused great consternation, even concern for my immortal soul.

It’s not that I lack the aesthetic impulse, or the strong compulsions it can create. When, rarely, I see some object, new or old, that really appeals – a guitar, a vase, a chair, a hat – I’ll buy it with little concern for price. What I don’t do is buy things just because they’re new, or because they’re expensive. This may put me at the periphery of mainstream consumer society, but it doesn’t make me any better than others like some ascetic monk. Actually it might make me rather worse: all that matters is that a thing please me, rather than the effect that owning it will have on others.

Way back in 1899, in ‘The Theory Of The Leisure Class’, American economist Thorstein Veblen described the significance of luxury goods that defy the normal rules of pricing by becoming more desirable the more expensive they are – because possession of them is recognised as a sign of high social status. Economists still use the term ‘Veblen Goods’, for Lamborghinis, Beluga caviar, emerald tiaras and the like which have this effect. Now I’m not saying that a £1000 mobile phone is a Veblen Good: the latest flagship models do have superb abilities that go a long way toward justifying that price (just not abilities that I need or want). When you make the cases of gold, encrusted with diamonds, then they become Veblen Goods.

Theories of value have come a long way since 1899 though. In 2014 French sociologists Luc Boltanski and Arnaud Esquerre published a paper called ‘The Economic Life Of Things’ which advances a novel theory of how stuff gets priced. They separate the universe of things onto three planes that they call Standard, Collection and Asset, each plane having its own different criteria of value. Standard is the everyday world of mass-produced things, purchased new and which steadily depreciate with use. Collection is the world of old things that become collectable and so gain value again as they age. Asset is the world of jewels, buildings, fine art, purchased not merely for use but as a store of value, a hedge against inflation, even an alternative currency for the super-rich. Here price is what the market will bear, without upper limit (think Picassos and Van Goghs).

The originality of Boltanski and Esquerre’s approach is seen best through diagrams: for each plane they construct a different 2-dimensional chart space onto which you could plot real objects. The Standard space has a horizontal axis from Disposable to Durable, while the vertical axis runs from Distinctive to Generic. Smartphones lie somewhere in the distinctive/disposable quadrant while Mercedes cars are in distinctive/durable. Ballpoint pens are generic/disposable while stainless steel mixing bowls are generic/durable, geddit? In the Collection space the axes are Memento to Memorabilia and Singular to Multiple: your grandfather’s wristwatch is memento whereas Winston Churchill’s watch is memorabilia, and both could be slightly multiple. A painting by an unknown artist is memento/singular whereas one by a famous artist, or a 1950s Hermes handbag, is memorabilia/singular. Your collection of Marvel Comics is memento/very-multiple-indeed.

For Assets the axes are Unpredictable Price to Predictable Price and Liquidity to Immobility. Stocks and shares are liquid/unpredictable, Old Masters and rare stamps liquid/predictable, Tuscan villas are immobile/unpredictable whereas national treasures and monuments immobile/predictable (sale often regulated by treaty). Now imagine an app that scrapes Amazon, eBay, Christies and Sothebys catalogues, using this system to calculate the price (if not the value) of everything: could be the next Google...

HIT THE PANIC BUTTON?

Dick Pountain/ Idealog292/ 2nd November 2018 13:38:17

According to a recent Microsoft press release, their research indicates that almost half of British companies think that their current business models will cease to exist in the next five years thanks to AI, but 51% of them don’t have an AI strategy. While I could describe that as panic-mongering, I won’t. It’s more like straightforward marketing: since Microsoft is currently heavily promoting its AI Academy, AI development platforms and training courses, it’s merely AI bread-and-butter. But the idea of subtly encouraging panic for economic ends is of course as old as civilisation itself.

In his fascinating book ‘On Deep History and the Brain’, US historian Daniel Lord Smail described the way that all social animals - from ants to wolves to bonobos to humans - organise into societies by deliberately manipulating the brain chemistry of themselves and their fellows. This they do by a huge variety of means: pheromones; ingesting drugs; performing dances and rituals; inflicting violence; and for us humans, telling stories (including stories on Facebook about AI). It’s recently been discovered that bees and ants create the division of labour that characterises their societies - queens lay eggs, drones fertilise them, workers and soldiers do everything else - by a remarkably simple mechanism.The queen emits pheromones that alter insulin levels in her ‘subordinates’ (though it’s arguable that she’s actually their prisoner) which changes their feeding habits and body type.

And stories do indeed modify the brain chemistry of human listeners, because everything we think and say is ultimately a matter of brain chemistry: that’s what brains are, electro-chemical computers for processing experience of the world. The chemical part of this processing is what we call ‘emotion’, and the most advanced research in cognitive psychology is revealing more and more about the way that emotion and thought are intertwined and inseparably linked. Which is why AI, despite all the hype and panic, remains so ultimately dumb.

All animals (and plants too) have perceptual systems that sample information from their immediate environment. But animals also have emotions, which are like co-processors that inspect this perceived information to detect threats and opportunities. They attach value to the perceived information - is it edible, or sexy, or dangerous, or funny - which is something that cannot easily inferred from a mere bitmap. The leading Affective Neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp discovered seven emotional subsystems in the mammalian brain, each mediated by its own system of neuropeptide hormones: he called them SEEKING (dopamine), RAGE and FEAR (adrenaline and cortisol), LUST and PLAY (sex hormones), CARE and PANIC (oxytocin, opioids and more). Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio further proposes that memories get labelled with the chemical emotional state prevailing when they were laid down, so that when recalled they bring with them values: good, bad, sad, funny and so on.

AI systems could be, probably will be, eventually enabled to fake some kinds of emotional response, but in order to really feel they’d need to have something at stake. Our brains store a continually updated model of the outside world, another of our own body and its current internal state, and continually process the intersection of these two models to see what is threatening or beckoning to us. Meanwhile our memory stores a more or less complete record of our lives to-date along with the values of the things that have happened to us. All our decisions result from integrating these data sources. To provide anything equivalent for an AI system will be staggeringly costly in memory and CPU: the most sophisticated self-driving vehicle is less than a toy by comparison.

Which is not to say that AI is useless, far from it. Just as simpler computers excel at arithmetic or graphics, AI systems can excel at kinds of reasoning in which we are slow or error-prone, precisely due to the emotional content of our own reason. Once we stop pretending that they’re intelligent in the same way as us (or ever can be), and acknowledge that they can be given skills that complement our own, then AIs become tools as essential as spreadsheets are now. The very name Artificial Intelligence positively invites this confusion, so we’d perhaps better call it Artificial Reasoning or something like that.

And we need to stop pressing the panic button before we can acknowledge these limits of AI. If you design an AI that fires people in order to increase profits, it will. If you design it to kill people, it will. But the same is true of human accountants and soldiers. Lacking emotions, an AI can never have its own interests or ambitions, so it can never be as good or as bad as we can. And if we fail to fit it with a fail-safe off switch then it’s our own stupid fault.