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.