Don’t ‘rush to regulate’. Rush to self-annihilation instead
If only you could see the terror in yourself, Madame Le Ay Eye
Madonna should be careful how she uses her smartphone.
The Vogue and Material Girl singer would do well to take note of scare stories that infected the desperate so-called ‘science’ pages of the lay press the other week, in which a “phone safety expert” with the unlikely name of Atlas Johnson warned that we risk suffering brain damage from our handsets.
His theory is that right-handed people – 90% of the population – lift their mobile phones to their right ear to make and receive calls. Electromagnetic radiation is then absorbed more directly by the brain’s right hemisphere, gradually heating up that side of our heads and leading to “underlying neurotoxic effects” such as decreased attention span, loss of memory and, you know, some other stuff, I guess, whatever.
Why especially Madonna? Well, I guess that demands a proper explanation. It dates back to my student days…
… student days…
… student days…
[insert: wobbly visual effect to indicate a flashback]
~ ~ ~ ~
I am sitting in a student bar with a number of badly dressed wannabe intellectuals who, like me, failed to get in to their university of choice and ended up here in Dossville instead through Clearing. We are all blokes with bumfluff beards and we are all carefully sipping half-pints of Strongbow because that’s all we can afford.
It is the mid 1980s. I am wearing unfashionable aviator style spectacles. I have a full head of hair.
Madonna’s Like a Virgin is playing from the jukebox for the 20th time that evening even though everybody swears they pressed the button for The Clash’s London Calling. A discussion arises concerning Madonna’s lyrics. The implication, offered up one of my fellow students, is that she is evidently not a virgin and yet the wholesome true love of her new boyfriend makes her feel as if she was pure and virginal all over again.
Oh no, I realise, it’s going to be one of those contrived navel-gazing adolescent discussions about song lyrics again. How I wish someone had put on the Sex Pistols’ Frigging In the Rigging instead. Because there’s fuck all else to do.
The subject, regrettably, is picked up by several more of my spotty and earnest study fellows. “Is this talented young woman playing a dumb act on purpose?” pipes up one of them – ironically, because he is trying to smoke a pipe while he says this. “Or is it a sarcastic rebuttal of the Latin macho norms of her traditional upbringing?” posits another. Someone suggests: “Maybe it’s a cry for help?” Another even goes so far as to propose: “Maybe Madonna is a virgin?”
My mate from back home in Leeds, visiting me for the weekend, grunts in his thick Yorkshire accent: “Aye, in ’er left ear.”
~ ~ ~ ~
[flashback fades to the present…]
So, as I said, and assuming she is right-handed, Madonna (65) should really take utmost care to avoid letting her smartphone damage whatever functional hearing remains.
But while she has always maintained the posture of a modern health-conscious celebrity – albeit going through an ill patch at the moment – Madonna is not modern enough to be popular with environmentalists. It’s down to her carbon footprint.
You’d think she could cut back on all those flights by private jet by staying home and getting an AI to perform on her behalf. It’s sort of done by mirrors, I think. Because AI can do everything, right?
Everything apart from be environmentally aware, that is. In a recent study published in the journal Joule, a boffin at a university in Amsterdam estimated that AI server farms could soon end up consuming 85 to 134 terawatt-hours every year – the same as the whole of the Netherlands. I think I read somewhere a response from one of the big generative AI businesses along the lines of “We are currently working to improve efficiencies”, which of course is standard IT industry-speak for “Fuck off and let us get rich before anyone else finds out.”
It does rather make me wonder why I bother. Here I am, so intensely aware of my impact on the environment that I restrict my out-breaths in order to keep CO2 out of the atmosphere, while elsewhere in the world everyone is ripping up the skies in private jets and blowing each other to shit.
I mean, the least they could do is use eco-fuel in those rockstar planes and prime ministerial helicopters. Talking of the latter, a company called Firefly Green Fuels has even inadvertently developed a means to bring politics and aviation together by manufacturing sustainable aircraft fuel from sewage. The ultimate in self-sustaining partnerships, in fact.
Improbably, the first customer for Firefly’s sewage eco-fuel is an airline called Wizz Air… which rather sounds like a reference to the exhaust fumes it might produce.
Honestly, all this is true. They’re not taking the piss.
OK, OK, I suppose they are taking the piss, strictly speaking, but I mean to say they are dedicated ecologists, taking no shit from anyone.
OK, I suppose they are taking shit, too – and indeed, from anyone. Jeez, you guys are such pedants.
And yet, while murderous rockets are in full flight over the Middle East, back in the safe houses of western Millennial ingenuity, there is an emerging fad for non-combustible fireworks. Given that an average firework display might release about 150kg of CO2, the US could end up belching out 60,000 tons of the stuff over this Christmas alone. So environmentally friendlier alternatives are being promoted, such as synchronised LED drone light shows and some lasers wiggling about.
How thrilling.
Or better still, there are ‘virtual reality’ fireworks that nobody but the headset-wearer can see, and ‘soundless’ fireworks that nobody, at all, can hear. I even read that someone had come up with a way to present a zero-emissions light show by blowing bioluminescent organisms into the air.
This is fantastic stuff. I look forward to celebrating Guy Fawkes Day this year by standing with hundreds of others in a cold field in order to not see or hear any fireworks while radioactive maggots drop from the sky and land in my overpriced hot dog. Bonfires are out of fashion too: the crowd will keep warm by huddling around an iPhone 15.
Unfortunately, nobody thought to ask how AI might solve this desperate looming firework display crisis when various nobs hung out at Bletchley Park this week to emit 60,000 more tons of hot air on the topic of ‘frontier AI’. The term ‘frontier’ is reminiscent of ‘cowboys’ – which is quite apt for IT industry leaders, don’t you think?
Pah! AI, what’s the big deal, eh? AI’s like any other machine. It’s either a benefit or a hazard. If it’s a benefit, it’s not my problem.
Two epic moments stood out for me at the Bletchley Park AI summit.
One was watching British prime minister Rishi Sunak sucking up to Elon Musk for a potential job, given that he won’t have one a year from now. I can’t blame Rishi for trying: after all, another summit attendee was Nick Clegg, currently chief apologist at Meta but previously deputy prime minister to one of Rishi’s posho predecessors.
British business organisation CBI was already congratulating the prime minister earlier in the week for his commitment “not to rush to regulate”. Good for you, Rishi! Let’s give AI more time to steal more souls and slurp more content first! Then start regulating AI just in time for it to put us all out of a job and make us pay for it to read out our own data back to us!
Now just imagine Rishi Sunak in charge of something like X, the “everything app” that takes over your finances. Rishi is the man, remember, who is so clued up with financial technology that he told the Royal Mint this year to start creating NFTs because they were going to be the next big thing. Ask Rishi about crypto and he’ll probably recommend storing it on FTX. “That nice Mr Fried-Bankjob. Such a safe pair of hands.”
What makes this funny is that Elon might just hire him.
The other stand-out moment at the event was when the aforementioned Nick Clegg swung into me-speek-bolok mode in order to earn his Meta bonus. This is the man who once promised students he would bring back free higher education in Britain, then after the election immediately increased their fees. You’d do well to listen to whatever he says: it’s indicator that the complete opposite is true.
Various newspapers reported Nick as complaining that people were too negative about generative AI and we should just leave Britney… er, I mean AI… alone!
“I remember the 80s,” he said, tragically failing to recall any sexist jokes to prove it. “There was this moral panic about video games. There were moral panics about radio, the bicycle, the internet.”
Hang on, you’re saying there were moral panics about… radio? The bicycle?
Sure there were, Nick. Why not mention the moral panics about the hairbrush while you’re at it? The shoe horn? The portable barbecue? Innovations in cutlery? Come on, I can’t be the only person here to remember the Great Spork Riots.
If Nick Clegg, Rishi Sunak and the CBI could just look a little further than their own mirrors and remuneration packages, they’d see what the rest of us see: that AI is both a benefit and a hazard – but not in equal measure. Revolutions can bring good things and bad, and it depends on who you are as to how much of each you will get. For most of us, the AI revolution will be hazardous.
And just as the guillotine of the French Revolution was assigned a feminine monicker, I fear there is much, much worse to come from an unregulated Madame La Ay Eye. She is going to bring a Terror that will leave us all getting it in the neck.
Alistair Dabbs is a freelance technology tart, juggling IT journalism, editorial training and digital publishing. For God’s sake, someone cheer him up.
Huh, AI like the cloud is someone else's computer and as the old, old timers said GIGO Garbage in, Garbage out..
Eh? Aye?!
…have you been talking to your mate from Leeds again!