Saviour Machine

Each day as I sit down to write, a song usually manages to worm its way into my brain, where it remains warm and protected, for the rest of the day.  It is usually connected in some tenuous way or another to the subject in hand and, in its own small way, influences what I subsequently have to say.  This year, as part of my ‘challenge to self’ ethos I decided to incorporate the song itself into each little segue of psyche as I go along.  Simple: the song is always there and always linked to what I am writing.  Except that as soon as I start looking for it, it disappears.  I have started to think about the song – what it should be, how it should be linked – before I sit down to write and it occupies such a large portion of my poor, enfeebled brain, that the rest of it cannot settle down to the job at hand, preferring instead to twiddle its thumbs and dream of wires.

Of course, if my brain actually contained wires – if it was actually Artificial Intelligence (abbreviated to AI and thus saving me from having to use inverted commas on the word ‘intelligence’ when referencing the contents of my head) – it would all be much easier.  It would cope with two things at once.  It would be able to systematically cross-reference all known songs in order to alight on the perfect bedfellow to the (logically inputted) illogicality of my outpourings.  It would also do much better with the grammar.

Now what I know about AI would, I fear, struggle to distract an electrical brain for nano-seconds: its function, let alone its use, is a complete mystery to me.  I presume that programming a set of electrical circuits to write in the same way as I do would be the work of seconds for a computer programmer (just give him a hammer and he can knock some cogs out) but surely it is in the nature of solid state that however illogically it decides to compute it must do it logically: it must make a rational decision to do it.  There are not too many alternatives when all you’ve got to play with are zeroes and ones.  Every decision is yes or no, left or right, up or down; there is no diagonal, there is no ‘maybe’.  These things can think many times more quickly than we can, they can think more accurately, they can focus… but surely they cannot think quite like us.  They cannot decide what to cook for tea whilst balancing the fact that the baby has just shit on the carpet and the cat has brought a live mouse into the house.  They cannot say ‘F*ck it, we’ll eat out.’  They cannot make emotionally irrational decisions… can they?

Like everybody else, when I think of AI I think of Arnie.  I think that a machine can only be as rational as the brain that programmed it, and then I realise that, pretty soon – if it is not already the case – AI will be programmed by AI.  It will have no affiliation to the human race at all.  It will control the machines that make it.  It will control the machines that make weapons, it will control the machines that make medicines.  It won’t take it long to figure out a way of stopping us from pulling the plug…

…And then I realise that the theme tune circulating in my brain has changed from the deeply morose to the frankly terrifying.  Saviour Machine was written by Bowie back in 1970 and as usual he saw it coming.  I don’t think AI can do that…

They called it the Prayer, its answer was law
Its logic stopped war, gave them food
How they adored till it cried in its boredom

“Please don’t believe in me, please disagree with me
Life is too easy, a plague seems quite feasible now
Or maybe a war, or I may kill you all”… Saviour Machine – David Bowie

So I press ‘C’ for ‘comfort’.
I dream of wires, the old days.
New ways, new ways.
I dream of wires…  I Dream of Wires – Gary Numan

There’s more to this than anything that you or I can see
The world is mine the world is yours and here’s the cause
Zeroes and ones will take us there…  Zeroes and Ones – Jesus Jones (Edwards)