Greetings from the Leap-ocalypse bunker. Did I miss anything?
Is human evolution still on permanent stall?
Apologies for going dark last Friday. On the day before – Thursday 29 February, if you remember – I was cowering under my tin (foil) hat in my cellar, or my ’prepper bunker’ if you like, until the Leap Year Bug had passed over. Just me, basic provisions and one or two racks of local wine to see me though the apocalypse. Oh and cups of tea brought down by Mme D and occasional visits by the cat wondering what was going on.
Not that I was truly taken in by the scare stories about IT stuff slovenly programmed to go wrong on 29 February but there’s no harm in taking a few minor precautions. For me, these involved hiding under my house in a hermetically sealed cave – well, I pulled the door to – and not budging an inch, except for nipping upstairs when I needed the toilet. And to shower. And watch a bit of TV.
As soon as I realised the Leap-ocalyse would not lay waste to civilisation and provoke a de-evolutionary shift this quadrennial, I emerged into the fresh air on the Friday afternoon with a lightness of heart, a quickness of step and an emptiness of wine bottles, a crate of which I was hauling up the cellar steps for recycling.
There was just enough time for another cup of tea before darting out to the nearest cinema complex to see Dune 2. It was projected in what they call ‘VOST’, which is a French acronym that stands for “English Audio With Extremely Verbose French Subtitles…” – which, given it was an IMAX theatre, were taller than me and in the centre of the screen – “…While A Fly Trapped Inside The Projector Box Whose Shadow Is Cast Onto The IMAX Screen The Size Of A Horse Scuttles Around The Picture For The Entire Second Half Of The Movie, Dodging Explosions And Angry Worms As Paul Muad’dib Retakes Arrakis And Gives Christopher Walken The Finger”.
Younger readers might be interested to learn that Shaddam IV used to shake his thang.
Ah, technology breakdown scares, bless ’em. It takes me back. I should admit that Mme D and I were among those who purchased a little gas camping stove towards the end of 1999. And we do not enjoy camping. I know everyone laughs in hindsight at the non-event that was the Y2K Bug but we only came out of that one by a small number of programmers working their fucking arses off to make sure it didn’t happen. The kids have no idea. We came that close.
Anyway, you’d think that, after all the intense urethra-tightening panic that IT companies put their coding staff through leading up to Millennium Day a little over 24 years ago, the industry would have learnt its lesson. Absolutely not so, hence my brief sub-street-level sojourn with Bacchus last week. No evolution here: never changing, lost in time.
If IT companies were thorough and diligent, technology might have progressed more slowly but more effectively than it has done. But sensible and careful evolution is boring and doesn’t turn owners into billionaires. Move quickly and break things? Ker-ching! Our lives are just disposable beta tests as far as they’re concerned. The IT business is like an AV: we’re passengers with no-one at the wheel.
Talking of vehicles and failing to learn from old lessons… One of the first things I read after settling back to Post-Leap existence was that a business called Alex Aeronautics had generated nearly 3,000 pre-orders for its Model A flying car. It does not exist – of course. To date there has been no actual demonstration of its actual vehicle in the actual air. The 3D generated images are nice, though. And the CEO looks like a man we can trust when he says: “Safety is not exactly synonymous with the regulations in our field.”
If I had that kind of money to fritter on frivolous tech, I’d choose to spend it on an award-winning “AI-powered” coffee bean sorter. Let’s face it, there’s nothing worse than getting your coffee beans mixed up! Thank goodness AI has reached such heights of scientific endeavour that it can sort the little buggers out for me at last. As a side-benefit, it will never occur to Skynet to eliminate humankind if it’s too busy arranging my coffee beans, that’s for sure.
But back to impossible cars. Before hunkering down in my cellar, I saw the industry news feeds were gloating that Apple had ditched its long-rumoured plans to create an electric car. Apparently the company decided it was too expensive and complicated.
Well of course it is. In the real world where the protection of human life is a legal obligation mandated by responsible governments, designing and building cars is a tricky business. If an app crashes, who cares? When a car crashes, suddenly a lot of very stern-looking people carrying handcuffs care very much indeed.
It must be a shock for IT companies when they’re faced with the physical world for a change. Industry in the physical world is difficult. The unregulated world of commercial IT where nobody gives a toss whether you live or die as long as your money and data are channelled into offshore billions while the planet burns, by comparison, is a piece of piss. No wonder they get so rich so easily. If a self-aggrandising simpleton such as Elon Musk can do it, any moron can.
This is because the successful IT business is built less on innovation and diligence than guesswork and winging it. And it’s about to get worse, if Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has his way. He was berated and celebrated in equally appalled measure last week for saying that children should no longer bother learning to code because by the time they are old enough to seek employment, AI will be doing all the programming.
And this is from the company currently worth $2,000bn yet could not find a single employee – not one – who could write a simple driver update for the Nvidia video card on my old MacBook. I can only assume this is because because none of the lazy bastards knows how to code any more, since they’ve bet on AI doing it all soon enough. I’d have better luck asking a kid still at school to do it for me. Still, I do wonder whether those investing their futures in Nvidia AI chips are adequately informed about the company’s penchant for abandoning support for its own kit when it can no longer be arsed.
For all the downbeat news this week, I was charmed to find one spark of hope.
It’s the Apple rumour mill again: people are saying that the company is rushing to revive its patents for a smart signet ring. This follows the favourable reception to Samsung’s announcement that it would soon be launching its Galaxy Ring to meet the growing demand (who knew?) for Digital Fingerbobs. Apparently, the Galaxy Ring is set to “expand the smart ring market”.
I can’t wait to see what Apple will squeeze though this expanded ring.
Alistair Dabbs is a freelance technology tart, juggling IT journalism, editorial training and digital publishing. Years ago he agreed to housesit a pet rabbit and, in a freak litter-emptying accident, managed to tip its droppings into a sack of roasted coffee beans that his host kept under the sink. How he wished he’d had an award-winning AI powered coffee bean sorter that day.
Coffee and rabbit droppings, any difference?
AI programming, is going quite well, currently working for an established electronic engineering company (who make things) doing important new work and maintenance.
Not saying any more as it would ID both him and me.