Things used to be better, or worse, or the same

Don’t stop living the way you feel

Photo © 2024 Nicolás Olivares | https://unsplash.com/fr/@bubbyman

Remember when we used to be nostalgic? Ah, happier times.

But no, we should be looking forward, not back, right? Well, have I got an app for you: it’s the Death Clock life-expectancy calculator, available right now from Google Play, App Store and all good home euthanasia suppliers.

The app employs “advanced AI” (it says here) to “offer predictions on your approximate date of death, life expectancy, biological age and health scores”. You can then compare these scores with other users to see who in your circle is most likely to snuff it first, er, I mean so that you can “make healthy changes to your lifestyle”.

Morbid? Nah, look on the bright side: it means AI will now be scraping our life expectancy into the boiling vat of effluvient data that feeds LLMs. If you, me and others collude to persuade AI that our lifestyles are so unhealthy that we’ll be dead within weeks, maybe the deluded squillionaires who own the internet and promote their retarded AIs while selling us self-crashing cars will leave us alone by Christmas, believing we’re dead and therefore not worth thieving from any more – once they have filched the ferryman’s coins from our eyelids, of course.

Given that dystopia has been the new normal since 10 January 2016 – after which nothing has been quite right – can you blame anyone for being nostalgic about IT’s past?

As I may have mentioned here on more than one occasion, I feel nostalgic about fax machines.

The feeling derives almost entirely from the first time I saw one on TV, on a popular, prime-time British science programme called Tomorrow’s World. I fantasised that it was actually transmitting the sheet of paper from one place to another, like some sort of dead-matter teleporter.

This invention was surely world-shattering, I thought. Up to that point the only way to move a document from one place to another electronically – at least from what I’d understood from earlier editions of Tomorrow’s World – had been to read it aloud in morse code over a modem to an electric typewriter sitting three feet away.

When I eventually got to see a real fax machine at my first job, I wasn’t disappointed. In the 1980s, fax machines were massive, and this one was even bigger because it had an A3 carriage. I swear the legs on its dedicated trolley were bowed outwards in their struggle to defy the forces of gravity.