Of Technology To-day.

OURS is an era of compilation. Archiving is venerable when the archives' contents are venerable, as at the Victoria and Albert Museum or the National Gallery, but it proves otherwise a process of rubbish heaping. I am glad these days to have unprecedented and lossless access to most of the music of the last seventy years, although it is certainly the case that a great deal of work presented as physical media is daily being lost. People tend to think that everything which was on C.D., D.V.D., or V.H.S., has survived the age of streaming, but they are mistaken. However it is true that much now survives which would probably have otherwise perished, and this is largely the work of Archive.org and YouTube, the former more than the latter, and therefore it is telling that the existence of the former is threatened.

   This general tendency towards assimilation and distribution is reaching its zenith with the Artificial Intelligence movement. I object to the very designation of that movement, for there is no intelligence involved in its computer programmes. Why people think these several Chinese Rooms will somehow displace the work of real artists and workmen I cannot comprehend, unless the standards of consumption are now so low that people genuinely cannot detect the difference. I have attempted to stress ChatGPT for example in philosophical dialogues, and it is clear that it is programmed simply to rephrase articles in ways that give the impression of a variating conversation. It struggles when it is pressed however, and falls upon reiteration. Can anyone really believe that this exercise in plagiarism presents a genuine threat to human intelligence? Its art is woeful, its writing a standardised blandness. Ask it to write a poem and it will write verse, for it makes of poetry 'a mere mechanic art', and yet what is read is not even verse but binary code disguised. The same tendency has seemed to creep into most other late developments of the technology monoliths. The Metaverse will succeed about as well as Second Life. To think that billions of pounds are being spent on these things! The money would confer more benefit on society at large if it were spent on ornamenting every slab in Washington with carvings of oak leaves (by no means a bad idea but a pretty one). We learn of plans for a Las Vegas Sphere in London. Is it not realised that a single match flame in darkness is more compelling than the widest of cinema screens?

   Truly the prescience of Eric Arthur Blair has been further and further evinced each passing day of this century. Many mention newspeak, thoughtcrime, and doublethink, all of which have come fully and utterly to pass, but not so many breathe mention of the telescreen and its sinister existence. For once in this example reality exceedeth art. In 1984 Winston Smith (named after the saviour of the twentieth century) thought he could hide from the telescreen installed in his lodging as in every other, by retreating to the corner where he feverishly wrote in his old forbidden notepad: DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER. But not even Orwell foresaw the existence of the smart mobile telephone, carried in everyone's pockets, always on (especially when off), always listening, always relaying its location. Thank God at least it was the Allies who won the war, for they misuse this technology enough, but only imagine what the Axis Powers would have done with it. You do not have to, Orwell already did, and at the end of that monumental work, written by a dying man, he left the most shattering Parthian shot: 'He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.' The victory of totalitarianism is the death of individuality, and lately it has been the tactic of this very same totalitarianism of the psyche to present itself as liberal.

   Huxley thought pleasure would be preferred to freedom, but I think him the lesser of the two dystopian prophets. Pleasure and freedom are entwined entities, and Rasselas was miserable in the Happy Valley. The interview of Huxley by an American where his face is for some reason green is extraordinary however, the green adds to its surreal nature.

   I do not mean to rail against Sir Timothy Berners-Lee when I disapprove of all these things enabled by the internet, the World Wide Web is almost equal to the printing press in its influence and contribution to knowledge. Yet I hold that there is a marked difference between knowledge and learning; knowledge I equate to fact-harvesting, learning is the measure of wisdom. The ability to properly process and use knowledge is something no computer programme will ever develop, for it is the work of human hands, and we are the work of God. Sir Roger Penrose is right in this as in most things. Though the internet is now facilitating vast amounts of folly, though it is cramping the human spirit and warping society, I would not have it destroyed. As in book publishing, it is all in all to the general good that we should have it, though it produce much which is unlovely and much which is erroneous. In its typical H.T.M.L. form the World Wide Web is an excellent propagator of knowledge, but it is being misused by very clever though unwise businessmen, who know how to exploit human thought processes and habits. We are being toyed with as by zookeepers. Soma is real and we are all chronically and acutely addicted to it, but it is not an antidepressant nor any other narcotic, it is computing and the internet.