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Shove in 3D

In The Sunday Times I interview John Gerrard about the fascism of efficiency - I'm very much in sympathy - and discuss the replacement of Nudge by Shove for Obama and Cameron.

Aliens

In The Sunday Times I meet the people looking for aliens in Silicon Valley - SETI.

Connected

In The Sunday Times I talk about shrinking penises, obesity and networks. The book is Connected by Christakis and Fowler.

The Old Will Win

In The Sunday Times I discuss the wrinkly revolution - demographic and cultural.

Peter Carey

In The Sunday Times I interview Peter Carey in New York.

God, I Love America

Bolinas, California.

From where, I discover, Bill Berkson originated. He was the, at least, partial inspiration of a great poem - Frank O'Hara's For the Chinese New Year and for Bill Berkson.

Achebe

Hello from San Francisco. In The Sunday Times I interview - or, rather, sit at the feet of - Chinua Achebe. Link later. Here it is.

Jaron Lanier

Hello from New York. Tomorrow in The Sunday Times I interview Jaron Lanier. Link later. Here it is.

On Games

In The Sunday Times I review Tom Chatfield's book on computer games Fun Inc.. My conclusion is that Jason's Rohrer's Passage is the greatest game of all. Do not, however, get involved with Rohrer's Primrose. Your conscious life will end.

Destruction, the Past and the Future

In The Sunday Times I wrote about the world in the noughties, compulsively destructive artist Michael Landy and science and technology in the next decade.

On a Donkey

You waste your time wondering what it's all about until, one day, it rides past you on a donkey and you don't notice. Luv 'n' peece, guys.

Snow

Norfolk roads have been made beautiful and unfamiliar by the snow. No, that should be 'beautiful but unfamiliar'. The beauty of Norfolk lies in being Norfolk. But snow neutralises. I drive down lanes overhung with branches bending under the white weight that could be in Russia or Scandinavia. It's thrilling but wrong. One of the most perfect poems I know was written about this strange nothingness of snow. Here it is.

The Snow Man

by Wallace Stevens

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

The Copenhagen Triumph

I am, frankly, baffled or, indeed, frankly baffled about the generally negative response to the Copenhagen global warming thing. Here in Norfolk it is apparent that it was a raging success. It demonstrated the power positive thinking. They issue a statement along the lines of 'we don't like you, global warming, go away' and, bingo, just like that it went away. And, yes, that is Denis the Menace, explicably, on the side of that shed.

All About the Love

I just downloaded Killing in the Name by Rage Against the Machine. I hope you will too. It's not my normal sort of listening but anything to help pause the Simon Cowell juggernaut. Apparently he said the campaign to knock his latest accessory, Joe McElderry, off the top of the Christmas charts was 'cynical'. 'Yeah, right,' said Ironic Daughter, 'like X-Factor's all about the love.'

Seb and Kirsty Miss the Joke

Just now I caught a moment of Sebastian Coe on Desert Island Discs. He was remembering walking to the hall where the host city for the 2012 Olympics was to be announced. His mobile rang, it was the Prime Minister - Blair, but it could just as well have been Brown. Blair asked who had won. Coe said the announcement hadn't been made. Blair said, 'Yes, but who's won?' Neither Coe nor Kirsty Young found this funny, I burst out laughing. Blair's natural assumption was that the whole thing was rigged, that an elite knew something the poor proles didn't. Amazing business, politics, it never does what it says on the tin.

BA and Union History

It seems to be quite a high life working for British Airways. The management has put all the evidence out there in the Daily Mail. This changes the image of the dispute. Now it looks as though BA staff are more like the printers in the good old days of Fleet Street.

A tear springs to my eye when I remember how they used to pour oil on the web (paper) so that it broke and halted production. Or how a printer violently smacked my hand when I accidentally brushed some lead type. Or how a rather pathetic machine printing out City prices - I was once a financial journalist - was examined by union bosses who feared it might jeopardise their second keystroke monopoly. Or how we'd slave all day to put the paper together only to see it all lost in some petty power play. Or how people named Mickey Mouse could pick up pay packets. Or how 'Old Spanish Practices' could keep whole families in non-jobs. Or how journalists got threatened and beaten up when Murdoch moved to Wapping. Or how a whole industry and culture existed in a state of permanent blackmail. Good times.

Then there was Jack Jones, once thought to be the most powerful man in Britain, who was passing Labour Party documents to the Soviets. There was Arthur 'combover' Scargill saying the miners won just because they had a strike. There was Tony Benn, condemning violence but only away from the picket line. I could go on for pages and pages.

I hope nice Mr Woodley of Unite remembers those times as clearly as I do. I am not entirely convinced that he does.

The Higgs Omen

Oh the Higgs Boson could be found by the Fermi Satellite and not the LHC. This seems to be yet another omen of the end of Europe.

You, Robot

'The hard question, of course, is how we could tell that a robot really was conscious, and not just designed to mimic consciousness. Understanding how the robot had been programmed would provide a clue - did the designers write the code to provide only the appearance of consciousness? If so, we would have no reason to believe that the robot was conscious.'

Peter Singer and Agata Sagan.

Hmmm. How do I know you are really conscious? Tentatively, by introspection - I am conscious and you are like me therefore you are conscious. More persuasively, by extrapolating that phrase 'like me' - we are empathetically joined at a fundamental level, I know me by knowing you, not the other, introspective, way round. Neither of these would work with a robot. Assuming we knew it was a robot, we would be aware it was not like us at all so neither introspection nor empathy would work. This would not be helped by examining the software. What would software designed to mimic consciousness look like? We have no idea and the programmer's earnest assurance that his work was designed to produce consciousness would be meaningless. Anyway, what is it about consciousness that provides moral status? This is the gist of the Singer/Sagan article. Very little of what I do is conscious, does that mean that everything else has no moral status?

None of which, for the moment, matters. The development of artificial intelligence remains hopelessly stalled.

'For example, the failure of artificial intelligence to produce successful simulations of routine common sense cognitive competences is notorious, not to say scandalous.'

Jerry Fodor.

The British Love of Petty Authority

I've noted before some disturbing anti-freedom trends in Norwich, one of my favourite cities. Now there is this. Little people - employed by the unelected and unaccountable company EventGuard - dressed in a little authority will be able to stop, question and harass me and even have access to police files. At least some policepeople have seen the light. People should not get questioned for photographing Westminster Abbey. Glory be. By why are the British so appallingly keen on having their freedoms restricted? We seem to welcome every misery-mad prodnose and epauletted fool. 'Security' is the key. But what is that and where does it end?