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.

PLAYING THE NUMBERS

Dick Pountain/ Idealog 291/ 6th October 2018 13:41:14

Most people encounter turning points in their lives, and one of the earliest in mine came while deciding to apply for university: I loved both chemistry and maths, and had the A level passes to study either, so I could quite easily have become a mathematician, but at that time the lure of smells and bangs was just a bit stronger. However I’ve never lost my love of mathematics, especially number theory, and still do some for fun from time to time. Back in the sixties I spent months playing at topology, in particular notations for classifying knots. More recently – as I’ve mentioned here before – I wanted to hear what the prime numbers sound like, which lead me into a whole computer music composition project.

A subject of particular fascination for me has always been irrational numbers. If you remember your school maths, these are numbers that cannot be expressed as fractions – that is as the ratio of two whole numbers like ½ or 3793/8331. Examples are pi and , which can only be represented by infinitely-long, non-repeating strings of decimal (or binary, hex, octal etc) digits, which are of course impossible to complete. And the weirdest thing about irrational numbers is how many of them there are....

You can present all the numbers as a line that stretches off forever to left and right, on which every point represents a different number. You can tick off the whole numbers along this line, like the marks on a ruler, and in between each mark there will be infinitely many rational numbers, fractions whose decimal representation comes to an end like 4.567757, and infinitely many irrational numbers. The scary thing is that there are ‘more’ (whatever that means) irrationals than anything else, because if you choose a point at random on the line, there’s a 100% chance it will be irrational! I know, it made me feel seasick too when I learned this, from an article in Quanta Magazine called ‘Why Mathematicians Can’t Find the Hay in a Haystack’ (https://www.quantamagazine.org/why-mathematicians-cant-find-the-hay-in-a-haystack-20180917). Almost all the numbers we use in everyday life are rational, whole numbers like ‘12 eggs’ or fractions like £4.56, but these are like needles in an infinite haystack of irrationals, impossible to locate by random search. And worse still, the hay itself is impossible to describe in finite space.

Rational numbers are easier to handle, and of course they’re all we can deal with on a computer that has both finite memory and finite word-length. But even rational numbers can boggle the mind. Another of my passions is computer graphics, and images on a computer screen are really nothing but tables of numbers, displayed as colour intensities by the graphics hardware. Suppose your computer has a 1920 x 1080 HD display and 32-bit colour, then every line on that screen could be represented by a 61,440-bit long binary number, and every possible image by a 66,355,200-bit number (61440*1080).

So, you could write a program that counts from 0 to 66,355,200, converts each number to a bitmap and displays it, and it would eventually show everything that could be possibly seen on that screen, like those proverbial monkeys on typewriters that might produce Shakespeare. It wouldn’t take infinite time either: if you showed each picture for a second you’d be done in two years, though I wouldn’t sit up waiting for the Mona Lisa to appear.

Actually the more I think about this, the more I want to set it up and present it to some gallery as an art project - people might sit in front of it hoping to see something recognisable, like the librarians in Jorge Luis Borges’ Library of Babel searching for a legible word.

Maths, when properly appreciated, is like a good roller coaster that induces vertigo, nausea and pleasure all at the same time. For me, the ultimate boggle is Cantor’s ‘diagonal’ proof that there are infinitely more real numbers, rational and irrational, than there are whole numbers. Build a table, infinitely deep and infinitely wide, of all the real numbers (which will take a while). Traverse this table diagonally, taking first digit of line one, second digit of line two and so on, add one to it and string these all together into a new infinitely-long number. This new number can’t be anywhere in the table because it differs from every number in the table in one place, so infinity squared isn’t big enough to hold them all – they are uncountable. First encountered at school, this still hurts my head a little even now. Perhaps I made the right choice after all: in chemistry you can only poison yourself or blow yourself up.  

FUTURE IMPERFECT

Dick Pountain/ Idealog 290/ 8th September 2018 08:44:43

For the sake of my health I walk on beautiful Hampstead Heath at least once a week, and I get there via the revamped London Overground train service. It’s clean, frequent and gets me there in less than 15 minutes. “So what?” you may be thinking, but the significance is I get there by train rather than by flying car.

“Where’s my flying car?” is one of those amusing/stupid tropes one sees pretty regularly online, and like many such tropes it contains a kernel of important truth. We don’t have flying cars yet, and almost certainly never will, and the reason has little to do with technology. YouTube is crammed with videos of workable flying cars, many of them good-looking, all of them too expensive (but of course that price could crash if they ever went into mass production). The reason they don’t go into mass production is of course social, which means also political. We live in a complex industrial society in which many resources have to be rationed and shared, urban space being one of them. On paper putting everyone into a flying car ought to economise on that space, since the ordinary motor car (or bus or train) needs roads laid out on an almost-flat 2D surface.

Flying cars would bring the third dimension into use - except that the third dimension is already in use by airlines. In mass use it would be impossible to police (traffic lights?) Fixed-wing or drone, a flying car is still subject to gravity and if two collide they’re likely end up falling through someone’s roof. The problems are endless and flying cars could only ever be tolerable in small numbers. Of course they already are - they’re called helicopters, and mostly used by soldiers and billionaires. The rest of us must share flying trains called airliners.

My point is that ‘futurists’ often get things hilariously wrong, not because they’re stupid, but because their expertise and experience is narrow: they may be brilliant in one technical field but nerdishly disconnected from normal society and shamefully ignorant of its basic requirements. A recent BBC 4 retrospective covered fifty years of Horizon programmes, in which revered sci-fi authors Arthur C Clarke and Isaac Asimov made predictions about AI and robotics that now look quaintly naive, while Ray Kurzweil’s ‘grey goo’ warning looked frankly unhinged (even if Prince Charles did believe it…). The tendency to overestimate the effect of new technologies is not itself new.

One futurist that I do respect is Douglas Rushkoff, who just wrote an inflammatory piece with the snappy title “How tech's richest plan to save themselves after the apocalypse” (on Medium, but reprinted by the Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jul/23/tech-industry-wealth-futurism-transhumanism-singularity) He was recently paid half his annual academic salary by five hedge-fund managers to talk about future technology, but it turned out they weren’t really interested in tech per se, but in the coming apocalypse it promised. They realised that armed guards would be required to protect their New Zealand or Alaskan bunkers from the angry mobs "but how would they pay the guards once money was worthless? What would stop the guards from choosing their own leader? The billionaires considered using special combination locks on the food supply that only they knew”.

Enormous riches tempt people to believe their possessor must be very clever, but clever at what? Clever at designing social networks no more qualifies you to redesign society than being clever at property speculation qualifies you to be President. Enormous riches frequently accumulated through what economists call ‘network effects’: certain inventions, like railways, telephones, gramophone records, television, took off exponentially only once enough people had the means to use them, so as much through luck as technical superiority. But riches tempted their possessors to believe themselves invincible, and high-tech entrepreneurs are particularly prone to drawing their notions of invincibility from sci-fi, comics and video games. As Rushkoff put it, they consider human evolution to be “a video game that someone wins by finding the escape hatch and then letting a few of his BFFs come along for the ride. Will it be Musk, Bezos, Thiel … Zuckerberg?”

Transport For London (TfL), which regulates the capital’s bus, underground, overground and taxi services using a mixture of public and private suppliers, is a dull thing indeed compared to Elon Musk’s plan to fire us, inside tin cans, at supersonic speed though vacuum tubes, but it satisfactorily moves a lot of people each day using little in the way of sci-fi magic except for the Oyster card system (which renders transport cashless so effectively that we no longer notice). I’d feel far happier if TfL were running the world than Rushkoff’s humanicidal billionaires...

BEHIND THE CURVE

Dick Pountain/ Idealog289/ 7th August 2018 09:44:18

Regular readers might know that a favourite pastime of mine is creating computer art. For the last 12 years or so this consisted mainly of taking photographs, some of which I posted to Flickr straight but other times I’d modify to look like paintings, using my preferred tool Photoshop Elements. These modifications depended heavily on Photoshop’s layers, which I’d duplicate, filter and re-merge over and again until the visual result pleased me. My discovery of Silver Efex Pro – one of the Nik filter suite Google that so magnanimously gave away – was a leap forward as its ‘structure’ parameter gives great control over the levels of detail in a picture.

But regular readers may also know that over a year ago I adopted a Chromebook as my main computer, and Chromebooks don’t run Photoshop (except for Express which won’t do). I tried many photoeditor offerings like Photosuite and Pixlr, which have layers, but the only one that clicked was Sumo Paint, which looks a bit like PS Elements, and has some crazy fills, distortions and filters that at first I found a bit OTP. But one fine day I tried its Fractal Morpher filter and found a new hobby.

All Fractal Morpher does is take a simple line drawing and project it into a complex fractal figure around symmetry axes you can vary from 1 to 16, and I found the patterns it produces fascinating. They’re not the shiny, 3D fractal objects and scenes of so much online fractal art, but are strictly 2D – what grabbed me about them is their gorgeous curvature.

It’s not surprising that a fractal algorithm should produce curves that are visually attractive, because so many curves in nature are produced by similar ‘algorithms’ executed by animals’ and plants’ metabolisms. That sunflower seeds are arranged in spirals described by the Fibonacci Series is old news. D’Arcy Thompson described all this 100 years ago in ‘On Growth and Form’; Alan Turing did some of the maths, as did the Russian Ilya Prigogine; in 1990 Prusinkiewicz and Lindenmayer, in ‘The Algorithmic Beauty of Plants’ even extracted some of these algorithms and coded them in C++ (see my Idealog 234, 7th Jan 2014).

Since we’re animals too, why wouldn’t our brains prefer some curves over others? Modern artists I love like Picasso, Miro, Klee, Kandinsky, Malevich all unfailingly draw curves that are ‘right’, in the sense that they could once have been alive, while many artists I like less draw ‘bad’ curves that couldn’t. Fractal Morpher always produces curves that are right.

I started making crude but highly coloured line drawings, feeding them through Fractal Morpher and then applying my layering techniques to produce abstract ‘paintings’ so psychedelically detailed that they look like they might have taken months to do, but in fact took minutes. It actually became habit-forming: if I ever feel at a loose end, it’s very satisfying to dash off another. (I can’t show you one here, but there’s a fair selection on Facebook at

https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10157601291269478.1073741843.636729477&type=1&l=c4a07f83f0 )

I deliberately used the word psychedelic back there because these images, as well as seeming ‘natural’, display a deep complexity that resembles the hallucinations produced by LSD. (And yes I did, back in the 1960s, and no, I don’t nowadays). This too is hardly surprising because LSD works on the human perceptual system which is made up of neurons - in the eye’s retina and the visual cortex - that grow and connect according to rules similar to those that govern sunflower seeds or snail shells. There’s a good article by Jennifer Ouellette in Quanta Magazine (https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-math-theory-for-why-people-hallucinate-20180730/) about the mathematics of Acid hallucinations. Basic shapes like lattices, cobwebs, honeycombs, spirals and tunnels recur because they do indeed reflect connection patterns in the retina and visual cortex, where they are components of the mechanisms via which we dissect and analyse perceived scenes. Our brain doesn’t employ Cartesian coordinates like a computer screen but these more organic forms.

So I must now be entirely happy with my graphical facilities on Chromebook right? Actually I wasn’t quite, because Sumo Paint lacked several of the Blend Modes available in PS that I used a lot, and also the Nik filters. Then came that upgrade to ChromeOS which let me run Android Apps, and that enabled me to use the marvellous Snapseed: a photoeditor with a unique and intuitive UI designed for finger use on phones and tablets. And, oh joy, several of its built-in filters replicate the actions of Silver Efex Pro, in particular that all-important Structure parameter. There’s now almost nothing that I need to go back to a Windows machine to do, which feels profoundly liberating.

LIFE IS CHEAPER

Dick Pountain/ Idealog 288/ 6th July 2018 20:19:52

I was struck by a recent article in Alphr about the newly important field of Emotional AI (http://www.alphr.com/artificial-intelligence/1009663/can-ai-really-be-emotionally-intelligent), the attempt to imbue computer-based Artificial Intelligence systems with something approaching human emotions, as a way of making communication with such systems easier, more effective and satisfying.

At one end these attempts are simplistic but do-able: Google’s Assistant is being tweaked to emulate some emotional connection, so that it apologises for errors (instead of that irritating ‘Something went wrong!’) and responds to praise with gratitude. At a slightly higher level, systems can be trained to deduce the emotional state of human users by combining cues in their recent inputs and knowledge of recent activities - so, you’re probably angry if you just got cut off before completing an online purchase.

At the highest level some researchers would like to build proper models of human emotional response that an AI system can employ when interacting with us, but critics have been quick to point out the flaw in this - an AI system that can understand human emotions but not feel them itself would be, according to the textbook definition, a sociopath, and how many more smart sociopaths do we need? And of course this would be the position, because as I’ve pointed out ad nauseam in these columns, a computer can’t feel emotion because emotions are biochemical processes that exist only in the bodies of living, moving, perceiving, eating, breeding creatures. Most computers have nothing resembling a body. The few that do - say the control system of an autonomous vehicle which has vision, motion and collision sensing - could perhaps be provided with a simple emotional system, but the emotions it would employ would be so unlike ours they’d be of no more use in communication than those of an ant would be.

Wanting AI systems to think and feel the way we do is actually futile pursuit, a product of juvenile sci-fi thinking. What AI is good for is amplifying, assisting and correcting our own perceptions and agency in the world, not for replacing us. Driverless cars will never be safe or economically viable, but super-smart cars that remove much of the burden of driving from a human driver are just around corner.

The pursuit of the android is futile not because of the software difficulties, great as those are, but from simple energetics. All living things are composed of cells (the ultimate modules, honed by 4 billion years of evolution) each of which contains not only its own energy storage but also the full blueprint and mechanism for its reproduction. Androids with brains made from silicon chips can’t ever reproduce themselves, whatever 3D-printer zealots would have you believe - mineral mines, metal works, chemical factories, wafer fabs are required for their reproduction. It will always be cheaper to train a human to do some difficult job, maybe assisted by sophisticated AI tools, than to build an android to do it.

And here’s where things have the potential to turn nasty. Stunning advances in genetic engineering enabled by CRISP technology (see Idealog 284) mean that it will soon be easier and cheaper to consider modifying an animal to do some difficult job than build an android robot to do it, and once created these would be self-replicating. I don’t normally go in for pitching sci-fi movie treatments, but I’m very tempted by an update of ‘The Island of Dr Moreau’ in which the evil scientist, instead of chopping up animals and sewing their bits back together in different combinations, instead employs CRISPR to create a race of not undead but living zombies, which have sufficient intelligence to follow instructions but few emotions and no ability to disobey.

You may believe, as I’d like to, that we would recoil from such an immoral and disgusting invention and ban it immediately, but how sure are you of that? People are now seriously discussing the problems of unemployment caused by automation by robots, but the concensus nevertheless remains that it will happen and we’ll have to find ways to cope with it, for example a univeral basic income or similar. If the imperative to profitability leads people to aquiesce in that, why wouldn’t they eventually aquiesce to genetically-modified zombie slaves?

If you still object that it would never be allowed, may I recommend a book for your summer beach reading: it’s called ‘A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things’ by Raj Patel and Jason W. Moore. It explores the stuff humans have been doing ever since the 1400s, and are doing still, to maximise profits by rendering labour, money, food, energy, care, lives, and nature itself, as cheap as possible. Admit it, you’d like a zombie butler.

[Dick Pountain would still rather open the pod bay door himself]

SMART ENOUGH?

Dick Pountain/ Idealog 287/ 7th June 2018 10:42:22

It won’t have escaped your attention that a kind of backlash against the smartphone is going on, in certain elite circles. That picture of schoolkids rivetted to their phones in front of Rembrandt’s Night Watch went viral; in the Guardian rarely a week goes by without some columnist giving up her phone for Lent; and no lesser celeb than Simon Cowell just confirmed that he did it and it made him happier.

However, don’t expect me to come down on either side of this weighty debate. I’m not exactly indifferent to smartphones, but I’m far from being a dedicated or power user. I work at home and so still use a landline for most calls, and when out on the town or walking the green hills I use my mobile mostly for consulting Citymapper and listening to music on Spotify. This is not a case of Luddism: I was running the web on a Palm Pilot before the word smartphone was even coined, and used a Treo for several years before Steve Jobs’ bombshell burst onto the scene.

What it does mean is that I don’t fret about 'the notch', or curvy edges, or squeezy edges, or how easily fingerprints will wipe off my little jewel. I use an old HTC Desire from my provider-before-last which does me just fine: all black plastic I can stick it in my pocket without a case, it weighs nothing, it goes two days between charges, and if dropped it bounces. I rarely feel envy when I see someone flaunt the latest sliver of gleaming Peacock Blue sapphire glass, and was beginning to think this meant a lack of libido on my part. And then I read John Herrman…

I was browsing Medium when I came across a three-year-old article called ‘Shitphone: A Love Story’ and with that title, how could I not read it? Herrman - who turns out to be a prize-winning media reporter for the New York Times rather than some punkoid hacker - describes not giving up his smartphone, but giving up his smart phone, in favour of the cheapest no-name Chinese knock-off he could find. His article is amusing and deadly serious at the same time. In it he explains in clinical detail the phenomenology of living with a disgusting communication device, one that shames him in front of friends, colleagues, even waitresses. He unravels the psychic wounds that propel smartphone addiction: “The easy tactile pleasure of a nice phone makes you feel like you’re at the center of the internet, which is designed to respond to your desires.”

But that’s only the intro and he goes on to draw serious conclusions about the nature and life-cycle of the consumer electronics industry. Shitphone is just Poshphone of two years ago, (which is precisely what my HTC is). Shitphone is made from the same parts that Poshphone used to be. That’s inevitable because wafer fabs cost moon-landing bucks and no little Chinese bucket shop will ever be able afford to make its own chips. As Herrman put it: “Premium branded phones are the culmination of decades of research in wireless technology, computing, materials, and design. Shitphones are the culmination of decades of research in wireless technology, computing, materials, and design — minus a year or two.”

Branded phones are kept going (for now) by those ever-smaller improvements in usability that And here’s where things have the potential to turn nasty. Stunning advances in genetic engineering enabled by CRISP technology (see Idealog 284) mean that it will soon be easier and cheaper to consider modifying an animal to do some difficult job than build an android robot to do it, and once created these would be self-replicating. I don’t normally go in for pitching sci-fi movie treatments, but I’m very tempted by an update of ‘The Island of Dr Moreau’ in which the evil scientist, instead of chopping up animals and sewing their bits back together in different combinations, instead employs CRISPR to create a race of not undead but living zombies, which have sufficient intelligence to follow instructions but few emotions and no ability to disobey.

You may believe, as I’d like to, that we would recoil from such an immoral and disgusting invention and ban it immediately, but how sure are you of that? People are now seriously discussing the problems of unemployment caused by automation by robots, but the concensus nevertheless remains that it will happen and we’ll have to find ways to cope with it, for example a univeral basic income or similar. If the imperative to profitability leads people to aquiesce in that, why wouldn’t they eventually aquiesce to genetically-modified zombie slaves?

If you still object that it would never be allowed, may I recommend a book for your summer beach reading: it’s called ‘A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things’ by Raj Patel and Jason W. Moore. It explores the stuff humans have been doing ever since the 1400s, and are doing still, to maximise profits by rendering labour, money, food, energy, care, lives, and nature itself, as cheap as possible. Admit it, you’d like a zombie butler.

[Dick Pountain would still rather open the pod bay door himself]