by Richard Farr
From our Men’s Modern Living correspondent:
I know, I know. You’re thinking: “Don’t even start. I saw two dozen spittle-flecked jeremiads on this topic last week alone, including that 17,000-word essay by Randomdude in one of those illustrated monthly magazines they have at my club. Substack? It was called something like Apocalypse Now: Why You Should Be Running Around Shrieking With Your Hands In The Air. To be honest, I was forced to abandon it after a few paragraphs when I started to have painful attacks of ennui, déjà vu, and prèt-à-manger.”
No shame there! In this brave new world of moving fast and breaking the bleeding edge off things, not every writer can be hypnotically persuasive, even when the very fate of Mankind is at stake. But you need to pay attention now, because what the world’s most august technical gentlebros are saying about these latest developments is NOT HYSTERIA.
On the contrary, the new “automated calculating engines” are going to change everything, either in ways that we can’t possibly predict, but should be terrified out of our wits by, or else in ways we can predict and already have predicted in excruciating detail, and should be terrified out of our wits by. I mean it, and I’m not exaggerating: when these machines go mainstream, ka-poufff. Literally. In less time that it takes for you to say to your housekeeper “Alexa, order me three of them and then send two back because what was I thinking?” the whole world will have become unrecognizable, the way toast does when you put mashed avocado on top.
Nowadays, in this modern age that’s distinguished from all past ages by the future having already arrived, this is especially true for “computers,” who have become such an essential part of more and more industries. With their long skirts, sharp pencils, and air of charmingly subdued respectability, they can be found turning large numbers of small numbers into smaller numbers of larger numbers in every bank and counting house. (And they perform this essential drudge-work for less than half what it would be necessary to pay men!) Indeed, when properly chaperoned, computers have even been employed successfully to do tedious calculations in academia; for instance they have freed up actual astronomers to focus on the real business of drinking brandy, smoking cheroots and thinking up maddeningly obscure classical names for some newly discovered moon the size of an armchair.
The percentage of the fairer sex doing this work might surprise you — and there lies one of the key problems faced by chaps like us in our attempt to steer the ship of society down the right path across the trackless waste dividing Scylla from the Cyclops. Thousands of these ladies are gainfully employed, hunched over columns of figures by the light of a gas lamp, buoyed only by the thought that at any time they may go to the drinking fountain and chance upon some fellow in a Stanford T-shirt with limited social skills but generous third-round funding. Now, however, in a situation that may be unique in the annals of human development, a dastardly-clever contraption is set fair to wrest all calculation from human hands. And this will entail technological and social disruption on a scale not seen since the Vikings invented assemble-it-yourself furniture.
Your correspondent has visited several enterprises involved in the Calculating Engine Revolution. Their prototype arithmetic oracles resemble somewhat a mahogany wardrobe, but with rows of keys, usually of walrus ivory, set into the front. Inside there is (we are told) a complicated mechanism consisting of metal rods lubricated with whale oil. When you use the keys to enter a calculation, a bell rings and a slip of linen bond paper comes out of the side with the correct answer written on it in the finest copperplate.
Or should I say ‘supposedly the correct answer’? For the truth, admitted sotto voce at these startups even by some of their invariably stooped, unhealthy-looking brassware engineers, is that no one can explain how these machines work! That’s right: if you set an arithmetical test for an actual computer, she will give you the right answers, and if you ask how she did it she will adjust her bonnet, smile winsomely, and say “Because I take great pride and care in my work, Sir.” But what if you give the same test to one of these new-fangled inventions — one of which, by the way, leaked whale oil onto my best tweed knickerbockers? Oh, they give the right answers. Or they do so for any calculation simple enough for Man to check, thus lulling one into a dangerous complacency. But they remain mute, silent, entirely aloof in fact, when you ask them for any sort of explanation. As for the brassware engineers, they only look sheepish, and fiddle with their bone-handled pocket protectors, and mumble that it’s “deuced complicated.”
Which raises a question or two, I’d say. Can we trust them? (Not the brassware engineers. Capital personages every one, even if more sunshine would be a boon. I mean the products themselves.) What are they really up to? Do they have minds and purposes of their own? Might they achieve consciousness, even? Luckily, as several expert metaphysicians have noted, we will be able to ascertain this in a jiffy, when the time comes, simply by asking them tricky questions about premarital etiquette. But what if they achieve this state before we have thought to check? Might they then be watching us with their beady little eyes, and feeding us strategically incorrect answers whenever they can tell we are distracted? Besides — to come back to my original point — what right do they have, these eerily ineffable machines, to snatch away the real, trustworthy, yeoman work of our dear computers?
The serious futurologist must confess that the prognosis is grim. Our computers will never be able to engage in any other profession of course, due to their inability to wear trousers. (Try to imagine lawyers, doctors, or professors of philosophy without trousers; you immediately see my point!) So they will have no imaginable occupation after the machines take over, or none except drinking Turing’s Universal Nerve Tonic and inundating the marriage market. In desperation, they might even try to take up writing opinion pieces on the future of technology, and then where will we be?
For now, luckily, the field of opinion on the growing mechanical menace is dominated by Men of Reason. Men such as This Guy, who dropped out of MIT to create the world-conquering card game Disconsolate Shrimp. Or That Guy, who bent his prodigious intellectual talent to the crowd-based spectator sport where people watch other people absent-mindedly scratching themselves, Itch. Or The Other Guy, who fled school at 16 on discovering that he couldn’t hack a unit on the Romantic Poets and, after three years in his parents’ basement living off Manga and Twinkies, founded a think-tank in Palo Alto that gives free donuts to anyone with a computer science degree – and went on to invent the kleptocurrency that so many small to medium countries now depend on, Lucre.
These are the kind of A-list Thought Leaders whose commentary has led to my own current state of Enlightenment. If you want to join me there, you should give up whatever you were previously doing with your life, which is now pointless anyway, and do as I do: follow them full time in the pages of TikFace, or YouRube, or through the messaging organization formerly known as Latrine. All of them have essentially the same thing to say, in a nutshell – and I quote from their recent manifesto Why You’re Gonna Have to Trust Our Judgment Like 110% On This One Whether You Like it or Not:
“As individuals who represent all that is best in humanity (leaving aside the greed, shallowness, misogyny, narrow education, cultural myopia, self-absorption without self-awareness, and almost bovine lack of humor), we recognize our duty to rescue the species from the oily menace of the automated calculating engine — which we ourselves created, oopsie! — before it’s too late. This must be done through a secret committee consisting of us (plus a couple of token government types) that wields absolute power. And we’ll get down to work just as soon as we’ve persuaded Gobble to pay us two or three billion for the tech specs.”
Remember this: I have focussed here on computers, but they may prove to be the canary in the data mine. Bad enough if their lives are suddenly drained of all meaning and purpose, but our children could be next. Imagine, if you will, schoolboys getting their hands on these baneful mechanical incubi. They might get the wrong answers to their sums and never suspect it. In the end, they could lose the art of arithmetic altogether, and go slack-jawed with lassitude while discovering a taste for the most frightful imaginable music. In this new dystopia, the nation’s very hope, hale youth who might otherwise have risen to be pillars of technological progress (each married to one of those pretty computers, perchance) will become nothing better than a horde of neurasthenic white-trousered bachelors dabbling in lawn tennis.
After that, harder though this is to credit, even the traditional work of men may be at risk. We could discover that we have unleashed among us a machine capable not only of adding and subtracting but even of undermining the economy by, say, amassing absurd sums of money from trivial inventions that do diddly to help anyone with their real problems. In a more distant future, they might even work out how to write – and publish in the most prestigious journals, such as this one – articles that appear superficially to be the result of thinking.
What we are talking about is nothing less than the emergence of artificial intelligence. But we are reasonable men, so my advice is to take a deep breath, spend some more time with YouRube, and only then run around shrieking with your hands in the air.