It’s a very small thing these days and that in itself says a lot but, this week, I had to book our car in for its first service. Dreading it (we had begun to get emailed reminders from the garage where we bought it), I telephoned to find – in amazement – I was, almost at once, speaking to a woman. The temptation to ask ‘are you real, or AI generated?’ was quickly put aside by her clear-cut human responses to my questions.
The interaction took about five minutes (working out dates and times, trivial stuff) but I ended the call with an ever-so-slight lift in my heart. There has been a good deal in the papers recently about the catastrophic fall in satisfaction to so-called customer services, pretty much all caused by automated responses, on the phone, in emails or texts. Rather than the ‘customer is always right’ attitude of the recent past, it’s now a slightly aggressive tone of ‘why are you bothering us?’, conveyed by the contempt in the endless ‘options’ provided on the phone to ‘direct’ your call (almost never to a person). They’re designed to put you off, make no mistake.
The disconnect between people frequently created by the introduction of machines and associated software is a real threat to our species. We’re a social animal, currently in the process of deconstructing our social lives. Please don’t think, for one moment, that anti-social media are a counter to that: they reinforce isolation, evidenced by teenage suicide and depression, at a record high and reinforced by, not created out of, the pandemic.
Things – that is our daily lives – are being made steadily worse by our lazy reliance on machines. Recently, I came across a case of a new ‘clocking in’ system within (where else?) a healthcare provider, those exquisite examples of organisations who cares so much for their staff. The ‘improved’ system allegedly won’t allow staff to clock on until seven minutes before a shift, so if you turn up well on time and are engaged with organising your day you have to remember this: to drop everything and try to log on. Otherwise you risk losing pay for being deemed to be late.
Oh, and if you are, for example, doing different things, paid at different rates, it can’t deal with that, so the manager has to make a stab at fairness by amalgamating pay rates to hover somewhere in the middle, to balance the books. Note that: a human has to make that decision; the software can’t cope.
Fast backwards, to an earlier era: remember the notorious remark by that shining light of neo-liberalist thought, one Margaret Thatcher that ‘there is no such thing as society’? She later rowed back on that, claiming she’d been misunderstood. Hmm, to that. Always careful with her words, she floated out to the sea of humanity what she really thought. We’re alone in a hostile world, having to make of it what we can. Don’t expect a fellow human to help; ever.
Not long before she made that remark, I was working on a Ph.D which, in essence (the details, trust me, are complex, rather like human society) was to try to uncover what underlying system had consciously fuelled British (and many other) societies for most of the 20th century: consensus. I was, on occasion, asked to explain what this meant and, desperate to find a vernacular for the academic arcana in which I delved, I came up with this.
‘Consensus theories explore why it is that the vast majority of us stick to “the rules”, that is, why we don’t all go around, for example, stealing things.’ There are surprisingly many times when you or I could – and get away with it. The latest opportunities lay in nicking the many interesting looking parcels left on doorsteps by over-worked, badly paid, and frighteningly closely monitored (by algorithms), delivery men and women.
Of course, I hear you say, ‘but you live in a civilised, prosperous, middle-class, neighbourhood’, and that’s true. However, anyone may walk our streets, seeking out opportunities for theft but, manifestly, they don’t. Once, not so long ago, disturbed at the wrong moment, I forgot to lock my car in a remote mountain region in Spain. In the boot was a wallet containing €1000, left with other valuables. I remembered what I had failed to do when five miles away, up high and able to look back down at the car park where the car was.
Believe me, I sweated for the next few hours but, on our group’s return, there was the car, untouched, all the items in the boot (and the body of the car) untouched. Why should that not be so? Consensus tells us why; it’s a collective understanding of right and wrong; actually, at the very heart of human existence.
Aberrant behaviour, theft, violence, including murder, comes from many sources, of which poverty is a key indicator (for example, the recent huge rise in shoplifting); gross inequality is another. Given a level playing field, we’re able to rub along in a mutual acceptance of each other, in all our myriad small divergences, our differences all put aside by our inbuilt collective recognition of each other as members of the same species. And, it has to be said that, in extremis, consensus can fracture, at a global level (a rules-based order) or, more locally, when societies strain to breaking point, for example when inequality is seen to be intolerable and governments do little or nothing about it.
Machines, perhaps especially those falsely dubbed ‘intelligent’ don’t have the basic empathy to perceive, let alone understand, consensus. In religious terms, perhaps appropriate here, they lack soul, the innate sense that we are in this together. That’s best seen when we also acknowledge that we share this blue planet with millions of other species, that we are part of a delicate balance, evolved over hundreds of millions of years, a balance in which we are a very recent addition and which we have, thus far, squandered disgracefully.
I have just finished reading Rachel Clarke’s Dear Life, I freely admit in a highly charged emotional state (I cried a lot). It is a masterpiece (this from a fellow writer) and at its heart is her work as a palliative care doctor, working in a hospice. Her compelling and unassailable message is that only when you know (within a defined limit) when you are going to die can you fully appreciate life.
Here’s what she says, toward the end of a book everyone ought to read. For its
key message is that only love counts. (Or, as Nat King Cole sang: ‘the greatest thing you’ll ever learn, just to love, and be loved in return.’)
‘A fusion of awfulness and sweetness: how, in the end, could living be otherwise? For nature is entirely unambiguous in the message she sends us. From the briefest flash of a mayfly in summer to the slow grind of a glacier etching valleys from rock, everything that lives will die, everything is doomed to disappear. No matter how beautiful, no matter how loved, nothing stands still, nothing endures. Impermanence is our only constant.
‘But against these stark absolutes of lived existence stands something both elastic and enduring: our defining human capacity for choice. Our power – one that nothing and no one can take from us – to decide for ourselves how to respond to this fate or being mortal. To rage, to deny, to accept, to embrace. The choice is ours alone.
‘It takes courage to choose to love the things of this world when all of them, without fail, are fleeting, fading, no more than a spark against the darkness of deep time. The safest thing, without a doubt, is to shut down, build walls, creep behind barricades – the sensible, sage, irreproachable choice of protecting ones’ heart, not investing it. Yet…in a hospice, amid the barrage of endings, it is perfectly evident that nothing, in the end, counts but love: how much heart we risk investing in each other. When everything you have been and done and meant to the world is being prised from your grasp, human connections are the vital medicine. It is other people who make the difference.
‘What I witness, over and over, in the hospice– in this digitised age in which wi-fi, data and connectivity reign supreme –is that there is nothing more powerful than another human presence, old-fashioned, instinctive, composed of ancient flesh and blood, reaching out with love and tenderness toward one of our own.
‘I work in a world that thrums with life. My patients teach me all I need to know about living.’
This week: Tim watched Breathtaking on ITVX, a mini-series derived from another of Rachel Clarke’s books, this one about the early days of the pandemic. It took us – my wife and I – back to the ghastly days of spring, 2020. She was, like my son, in the thick of it. I was, thankfully, merely a horrified observer, someone who at least was able to provide her with a chance to off-load the vivid lived nightmares of an ITU where death was a daily occurrence. Like Mr Bates vs The Post Office, it offers us a chance to change our future. We should take note and act.