Comings and Goings

I bought a T shirt the other day. It has a cosily nostalgic image on the front of what looks like a weathered '57 Chevy driving toward the viewer along a dead straight Californian highway. The inevitable caption reads 'Every Summer Has Its Own Story'. Being summer, and Sandytown in the middle of Ramadan is inhospitable beyond endurance to the infidel, some friends came to stay en passant for a few days, adding their own twists and turns to the otherwise linear nature of our existence. It’s become common for expat travellers to stop by here on their way to somewhere else and we were pleased to welcome them. It’s instructive and indeed inevitable however to make comparisons about the way we were and the way we are now. The iconic 1971 film “Summer of ‘42” about sexual awakening, tragedy and loss had a line which has always stayed with me. ‘Life is full of small comings and goings. What is important is how well you arrive at your destination’. We all seek to make the journey joyful, valuable and meaningful. A different context brings a different social and emotional perspective – which we tend to mostly shrug off. I found myself wondering how those I knew well years ago might now find me, and I them. With that in mind, as I thought about our guests and ourselves, it seemed as if subtle changes had taken place in all of us. Superficially, all was as it had always been. One of us, through sheer, choleric discipline, had lost almost half their body weight and was running almost 5km a day, which made them edgier, sharper and if possible, more determined. Another's lifestyle change meant that they were no longer subject to the tyranny of timetables and rules, instead has found other, different avenues of interest, which, of course, was me. At first, I thought that this might simply be a function of getting older, but it wasn't. I saw it more in terms of heightened observation - an increased ability to perceive the details, as if on a country walk, a particular rock formation, passed a thousand times, is noticed almost for the first time, hence takes on a new meaning. I too was traveling; at this particular moment, not in a geographical sense, more as if a different conveyance was taking me where I needed to go; one which had a more panoramic view of the landscape. I read somewhere recently about a church which closed for the whole of July, just because it seemed a good idea. When I feel like it - however one might choose to read between the lines - I go into Paris and attend ACP. Mostly, I'm quite glad I did, but it's not a compulsion, a necessity, socially or spiritually, for me to drag myself out of bed on a Sunday morning, clamber in the car and head for the station. Perhaps for certain personality types, the thought of not attending is as appalling as my own apparent lack of motivation, but, that's OK.

Lost in Cyberspace

To many young people, the Web increasingly seems like a good-natured auditorium filled with people just like themselves wanting to be amused. People write, share and network on social media sites with a candour which in some cases is nothing short of appalling. The information they post is mined, filtered and archived ostensibly to make search engine algorithms smarter. Software uses fuzzily nice, inoffensive language – people are invited to ‘connect’ with ‘friends’ or ‘followers’ – where’s the harm?  The older people get, however, the more concerned they are about protecting their online privacy. There is direct correlation between users’ ages and their willingness to use PayPal, for example, supposing that a sweaty little adolescent dwarf in a back bedroom somewhere is busily siphoning their money into an offshore bank account. But, what about all the data that you thought was private, but actually isn't? 

The media has been in overflow about the Edward Snowden affair which has raised all kinds of nasty speculation about what information is actually recorded, sifted, analysed and archived by governments and their shadowy apocalyptic horsemen whose motivation, allegedly, is to uncover terrorist activity, but the reality is, finding out everything about everybody might just be quite useful one day. Everyone is asking whether he is some kind of Assange clone – a hero for opening what looks to be a particularly gnarly can of worms, or a treasonous hound who has, in some as yet unspecified fashion, made some of his country’s best-kept secret methods available to a foreign and generally not very benevolent power. As the story unfolds, it seems more probable that the latter will turn out to be closer to the truth. Speculation is feverish as to why he abandoned – or fled - his Hawaii apartment, citing a need for medical treatment abroad, then surfacing in Hong Kong – go figure - his data would be a gold mine to Chinese intelligence services and the Chinese are one of the few people on the planet prepared to stand up to the Americans. The Americans are looking increasingly desperate to get their hands on him and the country hopping he has already done suggests that it has been carefully orchestrated by people with considerably more political savvy than he has. Today, he is pathetically marooned, shuffling around inside the transit zone at Sheremetyevo airport and considering at least three asylum options. In theory, he could stay there for years and where he ends up is anyone’s guess, but I can’t help wondering if some tragic accident might befall him en route. His condition is a metaphor for his own actions - he is as lost in real space as his data is in cyberspace.

Among other consequences of this rather grubby little story, we might like to bear in mind that Snowden’s revelations will clarify something that we do seem to have trouble grasping: the Internet is not just a playground where we can exercise our freedoms as we wish and be friendly with everybody.

Apocalypse Soon

Botticelli's map

It’s true. I really think that I must have been living under a rock for the last twenty years. Without giving too much away, I’ve just finished reading Dan Brown’s latest scamper into improbability, based around the symbology of Florentine Dante Aligheri and his graphic depictions of Hell. I’m not going to offer a book review, others will pull it apart more savagely than I, but in brief, a brilliant but sociopathic scientist unleashes a virus with an infection rate of 100% on an unsuspecting world with a view, in Scrooge’s words to ‘decreasing the surplus population’. We are given glimpses of genetic engineering and its possibilities, which is really what caught my attention. Why do I think I have been blissfully oblivious for two decades? Perhaps because I was unaware that there exists a worldwide movement, apparently gathering in momentum, comprising thinkers and intellectuals known collectively as Transhumanists – the ‘trans’ referring to transcendence - whose eventual goal is to use technology to fundamentally transform the human condition through accelerated genetic manipulation, effectively taking control of human evolution. They believe that there is a perfectionist ethical imperative to strive for progress and improvement in the human condition. It may, for example, be possible to eradicate disease, increase intelligence – not just by a little, but by several orders of magnitude, and overcome current human limitations such as ageing and finite lifespan, generally transforming the human condition so radically that ‘homo sapiens’ becomes little more than a Neanderthal rump. We who are left will have been superseded and overtaken by a longer-living, smarter and faster posthuman species. What nonsense, I thought, nervously peering into the abyss. But, apparently not. Many have begun wrestling with the ethics and feasibility of such radical leaps forward since the philosopher Max More began to articulate a futurist perspective back in 1990. Some believe that the emergence of a rapidly changing technological landscape will inevitably lead to the notion of a ‘singularity’ a phrase of John von Neumann, meaning ‘ever accelerating progress of technology and changes in the mode of human life, which gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue’  - where computer-enhanced superintelligences redesign successive generations of themselves spectacularly quickly. People are assigning real timeframes based on current technological achievement and a little creative extrapolation; best median could be as short as a quarter century from now.

Attitudes to transcendence aren’t new. Some have proposed that the Epic of Gilgamesh – a reworking or perhaps an archetype of Noah’s Flood – is an early example of transcendent thinking. A remnant survive an apocalypse in order to rebuild and reshape a newer, braver world. Others, myself included, believe that most of these ideas are self-indulgent power trips, filled with illusion, dreams and thinly clad scientific flights of fancy. When God is reduced to nothing more than an ethically irritating abstraction such Promethean hubris is not only dangerous but also inevitable.

I’ve lived in some of the largest population centres on the planet, from Istanbul to Karachi and the experience left me with mild, manageable claustrophobic tendencies and a belief that mankind was almost certainly not constructed to exist sharing each square kilometer with ten thousand others. I recently visited Shanghai – the third largest city in Asia, whose population density was less than either but it was so vast that hours of travel in choking pollution was required to get from one side to the other of its gigantic urban sprawl. When I left it, I fleetingly wondered for how much longer the planet could tolerate exponential population growth without triggering an extinction scenario of Biblical proportions. Which is going to get us first, global warming or overpopulation?

I found myself wondering; if superintelligence ever became a reality, how long it would take these newly minted superbeings to figure out that the most pragmatic way to ensure their survival would be to extinguish a frighteningly large number of we lesser mortals – in other words, ordinary people, making the Holocaust look like a road accident and doubtless equipping their own with whatever their technology could devise by way of an ark. If current thinking is anywhere near the truth, I might even be around to see it.

Bee Wars

As the pool guys sculpt the edges of our new baptistry, an afterword on the bees. You'll remember that choking them with foam seemed to enrage them and gentle persuasion met with the apian equivalent of the finger. A combination of additional strategies has resulted in, if not a truce, then at least a stand-off. The bees from the ground floor have departed, thanks to a number of complementary approaches, not least being the provision of the equivalent of a 50mm cannon in the shape of a 'firemen only' spray so powerful that it actually had a perceptible recoil. A jet of airborne chemical ordnance dropped a thousand at a time from a distance of nearly six metres and any stragglers seemed to have run out of fight.
They, and the remains of their homes, were unceremoniously evicted, shovelled out in a vast, sticky black and gold mass, each hexagon containing new larvae. The pile was large enough to fill two household buckets and the detailed construction was admirable. Expandable foam inside the walls deterred any would-be architects from adding to the tower inside, also preventing curious rodents from investigating. The large hole at the base - originally a drain hole for the pump - opened by the firemen, has been cemented closed and any unfortunates left inside will experience the same fate as the Nun of Monza. 

It was not long, however, before a new squadron of Republican Guard had formed a skirmish line at a much higher altitude, much like an addiction seeks a new disguise in the psyche of a vulnerable personality. They find their way in through the smallest of emotional apertures. Likewise, a bee can enter an orifice less than 3mm in diameter, thus preventing all access would require the whole house to be hermetically sealed like a submarine. I'll be interested to see what my psych friends make of the analogy. It remains to be seen if the scouting party has given the thumbs up to a newly crowned queen, although industrious buzzing behind the upper walls is not encouraging. At some future date, the demolition squad will no doubt be called upon again. But, for now, order is restored and the way cleared for the next tranche of workmen to clear the ground, fill the trenches and start laying the decking. Huzza.