One of the great curses of the virtual, digital world we are increasingly obliged to inhabit, is that we have all been rendered liable, and vulnerable, to the Scam. With monotonous regularity, for example, I receive emails that just don’t look right. Some of them are rather amateurish. I am told, for example, that my television licence is about to expire and I must pay the fee ASAP to avoid prosecution. Well, I happen to know my TV licence is current. So I delete the email. Sometimes I delete emails with dodgy subject headings without even bothering to open them. Then there are the telephone calls preceded by a silence, followed by an automated voice, often with an overseas accent, telling me that my banking details have been compromised and I urgently need to do such and such. I hang up. Mostly I hang up during the initial silence. If it isn’t going to be a scam, it’s going to be an unsolicited cold call.
Some scams are more sophisticated. I got a letter from my bank the other day congratulating me on renewing my insurance (for something unspecified), and offering me a £20 reward which I could reclaim by visiting a certain website. It all might have been quite bona fide. But there was no postal address given. And it just didn’t look right. I binned it.
I dare say at some point I have been scammed without even subsequently realising it. The problem here is that, nowadays, there is no firm demarcation line between a scam which is blatantly illegal, and a business practice which comes within the letter of the law, but which might be described as “sharp”. This occurred to me: is it possible that we are all of us currently embroiled in an Enormous Scam?
It would be a hideous notion, would it not, if all our most cherished institutions were conjured, designed, and maintained, with the sole purpose of ripping us all off? There is an article in today’s Sunday Herald entitled Learning made easy PC? Why Edinburgh Uni is blazing a trail harnessing ‘life-changing’ power of AI. Above the headline is a picture of a robot typing on a laptop. Beside the robot is a young student looking utterly dejected. He probably senses he’s being sold a pig in a poke. Who’d be a young person nowadays? Education is a cyber nightmare; he can’t get on the housing ladder; and now, apparently, he is going to be conscripted. Despite the “levelling up agenda”, both at home and abroad, the gap between rich and poor is widening. The rich and powerful, the great and the good, are running the show. Who are these people? They may be politicians, or captains of industry, or entrepreneurs. Are they peddling a scam? Are they selling us something they only persuade us that we need?
I put forward seven postulates, currently bankrolling the world, which are, in essence, a swindle.
- Entrepreneurs “create” wealth.
This notion is often espoused by political parties to the right of centre, who believe in low taxation. Rather than dividing up “the pie” more equably, you increase the size of “the pie”. You do this by creating wealth. As “the pie” gets bigger, so do the sectors that are sliced off for the poor and needy. Some people call this the “trickle-down effect”.
It’s a scam. You can’t “create” wealth. You might find a means of accessing, and of distributing, the wealth that is already there, but you cannot conjure it out of thin air. That would be a violation of the First Law of Thermodynamics.
- You can create a perpetual motion machine.
You can’t. That would be a violation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. And yet, this is what the managers of many institutions strive to do. They strive to automate their systems, and make their employees redundant. When you try to interact with these institutions, you are faced with lengthy delays on the telephone, culminating, if you’re lucky, in a conversation with a robot who cannot understand your accent, and in any case cannot cope with the unique nuance of your problem. Consequently we are all tearing our hair out. The managers have not constructed this “provider-client interface” for our benefit. They have tried to construct a magic money tree that does not need to be tended, cultivated, and nurtured.
- In order to recruit the “best” people, you need to pay top dollar.
This is a scam. How often have the “best” people, faced with an unexpected crisis, proved to be woefully inadequate? The system, whatever it may be, recruits the person who is most likely to perpetuate the system.
The next three swindles are closely related to one another.
- We are machines.
There is a widespread assumption that there is no qualitative difference between a computer and a human being. This harks back to the work of Alan Turing at Bletchley Park and “the imitation game”, made famous by the film of the same name. Turing posited that, if you were playing a game, like chess, against a computer, and you could not tell, from the moves of the computer, whether or not your opponent was an intelligent being, then to all intents and purposes your opponent was an intelligent being. (In my student days I used to play chess against a computer, the size of a warehouse, located in East Kilbride. I once beat it, and, when it found itself to be in checkmate, it passed a self-deprecatory remark. For a moment, but only for a moment, I thought I was interacting with a sentient being.) I have a notion that Turing’s statement may have been widely misinterpreted, but it so happens that it forms the basis of our concept and understanding of “artificial intelligence” (AI). If a computer can resemble, indeed be, a human being, then a human being can be a computer. One of the reasons why AI is so feared, is that these machines may become so sophisticated as to supplant us. They will be superior to us.
I have never bought into this notion. We are not machines. We do not solve a problem in the way that a computer solves a problem. I don’t believe we have the first idea as to what intelligence, or consciousness, or self-awareness, or experience, or identity are.
- Because we are machines, we think algorithmically.
No we don’t. And yet, we have algorithms thrust upon us. Many institutions would have employees function algorithmically because their behaviours will leave an audit trail that can be subsequently evaluated. During the pandemic, our senior school pupils were subjected to an algorithm which modified their exam results sometimes with devastating consequences. I can tell you that medical students are often taught by algorithm. If this, do that. Algorithms appear as a tree of options with a series of binary bifurcations. But medical consultants don’t remotely think like that.
- Artificial intelligence can do what we do, only better.
There is no doubt that some automated systems perform tasks, often of a laborious and repetitive nature, better than we do. But this can hardly be described as “intelligent”. My own feeling is that the term “artificial intelligence” should be scrapped. It’s a con. Call it number-crunching.
- It’s coming. No point in playing King Cnut to an unstoppable tidal wave.
This notion that the little person can do nothing to stop “the inevitable”, the quantification of human souls, is the most scurrilous scam of them all. We’ve all been subjected to it. So the High Street is finished. Live with it. Go online. Politicians are all in it for themselves. What did you expect? Individually you can’t do anything about climate change. So why bother? War is inevitable. Why bother being a peacemaker?
Because the fate of the world is dependent upon the grand integral of the thoughts and actions of every individual, the man, or woman, in the street.
When I was putting all these scams together, and noticed they added up to seven, I couldn’t help but think of As you like it, so, with apologies to the Bard, I give this précis in sonnet form:
The Seven Dodges of Man
All the world’s a scam,
Its movers and its shakers merely fraudsters
Whose smoke and mirrors hide their obfuscations,
Their propaganda being seven dodges:
Wealth’s energy is conjured from thin air,
Thence grown upon a magic money-tree,
Atop this Ponzi scheme the filthy rich,
(You need to pay “top dollar” for “the best”);
The rest, below, are binary machines
Too wee, to poor, too stupid to discern
Their shackles, cast by algorithmic laws,
By artificial intellect construed.
Thus the elite, gonged, ermined, Upper-Housed…
And us, sans house, cash, health, sans everything.
jamescalumcampbell 