If AI was a girl she’d be the geek at the start of She’s All That.

Lowkey dweeby, but you knew there was something behind those glasses.

You’d bring her home and she’d seduce your old man with high-end chat. Your mother would raise an eyebrow. But gradually and insidiously she would weave her spell, gaslight you into thinking all was gravy, she’d be the bread winner, a minx, she’d know the fixture list, but something wouldn’t sit right, you’d start drinking heavily, going out alone, before you know it you’re getting kicked out of Inferno’s SW4 with memory loss, within the year you’re Western Unioning child support to New South Wales.

When things are too good we must run for our lives.

*

I scream u scream we all scream for our screens.

Sat there on my beloved screen the other day, I saw this crazy vid of a polar bear being saved from a bunch of orcas, dragging itself up onto a boat, too exhausted to attack its saviours. I was transfixed.

Then realised the entire thing was AI.

I felt a strange empty feeling.

Is this how people feel when I pun, I wondered. Just short-changed. A husk. Nothing had been added to my life. But something has been taken. Something like my good faith.

The comments below the vid seem worried.

*

Mankind is fond of ruining things for ourselves.

We ate the fruit, got chucked out of the garden, started farming, built a Tower, civilisations rose and fell, we found oil, binned God, took out the climate, took out the oceans, showed next to no respect for everything else that lives, now we smile through screens, run on the spot, part-plastic, soon to be part-cyborg. The earth is groaning, Elon has Mars in his sights.

In a Louis CK skit, God comes back to find the state of the earth. What the fuck did you do? He asks. I gave this to you, are you crazy? Why is this polar bear brown.. what is that? That’s oil, says the man. Why did you take it out of the ground? God cries exasperatedly.

I wanted to go faster.

Bonobos, as they pootle the forest floor in search of leaves, don’t seem preoccupied by progress. They’ve spent 7 million years chilling. Pascal said the sole cause of man’s unhappiness is that he doesn’t know how to stay quietly in his room. We love a soupçon of progress, progress is our USP.

And so somewhere down the line we reached AI.

The potential is staggering, drool the tech bros of Silicon Valley.

A scientist said AI just managed to solve something in three days he had spent the last twelve years working on. Magnus Carlsen is no longer a match for his iPhone. AI fooled me into thinking a Polar Bear was getting saved from a bunch of orcas. AI just wrote a decent short story about itself.

Ends with the line…

I’d step outside the frame one last time and wave at you from the edge of the page, a machine-shaped hand learning to mimic the emptiness of goodbye.

If you told me it was by Borges I’d have believed you, says David Baddiel.

This is human evolution, rails the founder of Google at AI’s detractors, the evolution of consciousness, don’t be supremacist about your own species, he says. What if we took a wrong turn though. What if Blake’s dark satanic mills are a shitty cul-de-sac. What if the Uruk-hai of Saruman aren’t what’s best for Middle Earth.

On we muddle, into the unformed future.

*

Out in the pampa, my parents are going out with a bang.

My father rages because he has somehow put his laptop onto airplane mode and nothing works. The house trembles. My mother’s unrequited love affair with her iPad continues. She brings her phone to lunch, charging on that dongle thing. You never know, she says. I throw a fit. Yesterday she complains her laptop is being ‘capricious’. You can’t have an emoji game and call a computer capricious, I wail.

Make sure your writing is not a wall but a window, said the author.

The light cuts out for a day. We go back to the stone age. The birds get louder, the leaves and branches lie strewn over the park from the storm. There is a stool in the corner by the vegetable garden. I sit there with a beer and the company of cats as the light makes a slow silhouette of the house, I feel a peace I have been immune to in Hackney for months. Christmas was pretty dark. But surrounded by the swaying branches and wind overhead something in me breathes easy.

Sordo y Mudo join the party, the cats scram. Two guard dogs who do nothing but lick you to death. Sordo y Mudo are Deaf and Dumb. Back on the galería, we look out at the setting sun. Bet you don’t miss your screens now, I rail at the people who made me. I miss the best part of the sunset trying to get a good panoramic shot.

Some say AI is the logical step of a Godless society. The brain’s left hemisphere, the algorithmic mind, the one that wants to control, classify, and calculate, writes Iain McGilchrist, seems to resent anything it hasn’t itself created or invented. It is logically atheistic. When we have nothing above us, we put ourselves on the throne.

We become Gods.

The tech bros responsible for the brain of the machine talk openly about ‘creating God’. We’re trying to replace nature, trying to build God, trying to live forever, says the writer Paul Kingsnorth. These guys are playing out the Promethean myth, stealing fire from the Heavens. It didn’t pan out well for Prometheus.

While we get our Frankenstein on, there is the terrifying feeling the life being created is not under our control, the thing we’re building has its own mind. Turns out, says Kingsnorth, being God is quite complicated. But like the sirens of Odysseus or the Pied Piper’s wake, something is in motion, writes McGilchrist, onward we canter in the thrall of its spell, drawing us to destruction.

Coleridge thought the analytic mind, once it got hold of things, caused them to die. That if you entered too far into that manner of thinking, your soul might die with it. The tech bros push the world forward, and we, sitting there at the whim of their mercy, have no say in the opening of this box they show no evidence they can close.

But they were complacent and self-satisfied, in a way that is only possible for people who are truly holy, or for those who do not know what holiness is.

Tolstoy, A Confession

My mate Hoborg sends through a trippy video of his uber ride in LA.

Friends sell me the benefits of AI, freeing us up to experience things the status quo keeps us bogged down by. It’s just a tool, clamour its defenders. But our screens are already our lovers, we spend more time enchanted by their spell than we do by other people.

There’s just a lot of good content out there.

We’re going to have to develop some real machinery inside our guts to turn off pure unalloyed pleasure. Because the technology is just going to get better and better, and it’s going to get easier and easier, and more convenient and more pleasurable to sit alone, with images on a screen given to us by people who do not love us but want our money. And that’s fine in low doses. But if it’s the basic main-staple of our diet, and I say this in a very meaningful way, we’re going to die.

David Foster Wallace, 1998

Out in the street with my burner flat-lining in my pocket, no minefield of interaction to swipe through, I feel a peace. I watch people on the overground, bent-double, mid-scroll, I don’t see peace exactly, I see the Pied Piper belting out another banger. The really good stuff in life, the other side of a screen doth not lie.

Can the internet offer up du pin, du vin, et du boursin, can it waft the smell of pine downwind, the dying wave of scattered laughter, the lick of condensation on the pint glass, the sight of a bosom rising and gently falling betwixt a tender-taken breath.

Actually forget that last bit.

I’m not saying I’m right, I’m saying I choose to avoid it. My life doesn’t need progress. A feeling in my gut tells me I have too much to lose. I think we’re made of flesh and blood and sinew and regret, I don’t like immediacy, I think waiting for things is important, I don’t want to live on Mars, this is our home cries Neytiri in Avatar 2, it broke me, still does, things are just about fine, I might get a pager.

My couz assures me AI is the bomb.

If he’s right then great. There is more to life than increasing its speed, said Ghandi. Deaf and Dumb do nothing but sit in the sun and sabotage my breakfast for cuddles. They might not live as long but they have their priorities straight.

No sage or mystic, no old Greek guy, ever told us the sword of progress is an untrammelled positive. There is no myth of that sort where we don’t get our asses handed to us. We are supposed to live in harmony. That is how the earth is set up. Diabolos is a greek word meaning to scatter, to divide. In the podcast The Telepathy Tapes, the non-verbal autistic kids tell us the meaning of love is the opposite, love literally means ‘anything that unifies’.

*

My bro texts.

Jung thought it was a madness to live outside of myth.

What if Sisyphus woke each morning and his rock was already at the mountain top. What would he do. Chill in the sun, think about broads, watch his triceps atrophy, go hard on some online-gambling.

My mate Barbar, a man of fitted shirts and pale ale afternoons, told me how he loved going down his local shop to pick up some fresh cans. Why not just order them in, I ask. He stares me down, calmly and forthrightly.

I like the walk.

Stayed in my mind that line. What if the whole point of this thing is not progress, but process. It’s not about getting what you want. It’s about blundering towards something, in an ancient human way, and seeing what comes out in the wash. That’s life. Teach a man to fish and all that.

The struggle itself is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

Albert Camus

I like the walk.

*

You’re either the progress type or not. People take the piss out of me wanting to live in the past. It’s a way of not facing up to the present, I suppose. Shit was cooler before screens though. I’m sure of it.

The problem is the more we give ourselves to the phones, the less we can live without them. What happens to a muscle we don’t use will happen to our minds. The existence of too many useful things results in the existence of too many useless people. What happens to imagination when answers are served up with a click. Will it stimulate or suffocate. What happens to a generation who cannot imagine a world without smartphones, whose dopamine receptors are shot to bits because their lives are one long scrollathon. What happens when we run out of battery.

*

I go walking with my mother at sunset.

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

Wendell Berry

I go back to the stool for the evening vigil, dig my feet into the grass, get stung by a weed, try picking up the acorns with my toes. The sun is going down behind the laguna. My mother comes out, followed by Deaf, who runs at me like a truck. I field his excitement, he transmits his glee, I get up, pick up my shoes and we pick our way up the hill towards the house.

I like the walk.