Technology

The pandemic is not quite over, but we are getting used to its inconveniences. What disaster will be next? An antibiotic-resistant strain of the bubonic plague? Climate collapse? Coronal mass ejection? Will the next catastrophe be natural — perhaps a massive volcanic eruption, the likes of which we have not seen for more than two centuries, since Tambora in 1815? Or will it be a manmade calamity — nuclear war or a cyberattack? And might we inadvertently descend into a new form of AI-enabled totalitarianism in our efforts to ward off such calamities? To all these potential disasters it is impossible to attach more than made-up probabilities. So what can we do about them? The best answer would be that we should strive to imagine them.

Education at my Jewish private school was chock-full of religious instruction. Precisely half of our lessons were dedicated to Jewish studies. We had Bible classes (Chumash, we called it) every single day. As a child, I wasn’t particularly excited about most of the miracles. Sure, the staff turning into a snake was cool, but it felt like a parlor trick. The sea splitting felt too huge to even contemplate. The one miracle that seemed to get everyone in class thoroughly enamored with God’s power was the concept of manna from Heaven. The idea that you could just dream up what you wanted to eat — and for eight-year-old me that was infinite donuts, pizza and Dunkaroos — and it would just fall from the sky? Well, that was truly miraculous.

Human beings are wanderers who roam the world in search of adventure. And this love of adventure creates a need for home: homecoming makes wandering worthwhile. Hence human beings have devised instruments that help them to navigate, so as to guide them to their destination and — most importantly — to guide them back again, to the place where they are at home. The sextant was one of the most beautiful examples of this: an instrument for steering by the stars, which you held to your eye, and which reminded you of the vastness of the space across which you peered and the littleness of your own ambitions. Our ancestors who steered by the sextant never doubted the fixed background to human life, the unchanging heavens by which they navigated.

Take my hand, darling, and off we go into the metaverse. It's a whole new world...or at least it's a new world...maybe a brave new world? Enter Mark Zuckerberg, that Titanic captain of industry, who last week released a video introducing his latest plan to leave his Nike shoeprint upon reality. It's called the metaverse, and while even the savviest tech writers are grasping to explain what it is, it appears to be the fusion of our world with the virtual. Big Zuck wants what's on our screens to spill over into real life. We lived on farms, then we lived in cities, now we will live in "home spaces" with digitally rendered pterodactyls flying just outside the windows.

Really, the Facebook outage should not have been as entertaining as it was. As Jon Stokes, the founder of Ars Technica, observes, if Facebook, with its hyper-sophisticated software and security practices, is vulnerable to sudden collapse, what does that say about energy infrastructure run on 'old Windows installs'? The potential for far greater carnage is tremendous. But it was entertaining, and I think what it made so was the fact that the damage was so comprehensive that security systems in the Facebook offices crashed and its employees could not enter the building to fix the problem. Here were some of the smartest people in the world and they could not get through a door. You can imagine the coffee cooling in their paper cups.

‘Stay Alive Joe Biden’, implored contributing writer Alex Wagner in the Atlantic yesterday, setting perhaps the lowest ever bar for a presidential candidate. She posits that Biden ‘exists primarily as an idea, rather than an actual candidate’ and describes how coming off the campaign trail to pitch his premiership from quarantine has been a boon to the former VP: 'His appearances these days have an almost parallel-universe quality to them: Biden’s audience-less remarks from his home in Delaware have the suggestion of an Oval Office address, and their content seems intended to offer a glimpse into the twilight zone where someone else, someone more empathetic and capable, is president.

Ransomware, the locking up of large networks through hacking until payment is made, is exploding. Recent attacks have crippled more than 200 city and local government networks in Baltimore, Albany and Atlanta, while specific hacking tools have been successfully used against mortgage companies, universities, hospitals, banks and consulting firms. A report this month from the cybersecurity firm, Emsisoft, reveals that the cost of ransomware in the US last year was over $7.5 billion, involving 113 state and local governments, 764 health care providers and 1,233 schools. In 2018, the FBI received reports of 1,500 ransomware attacks (the latest available FBI figures) which does not include hundreds of attacks that were never reported with ransoms secretly paid.

There is an epic moment in the latest Gerard Butler movie Angel Has Fallen where he gets to save the life of the US president (again). The bad guys launch a swarm of dozens of micro drones able to detect and kill dozens of Secret Service agents, destroying anything and anyone that might get in the way of their mission to kill the president.It’s a chilling moment in the movie that clearly demonstrates just how powerless mere mortals will be in the face of superior technology that can operate independently of any direct human control.As with so much in Hollywood these days, movie truth is remarkably close to a reality that has been prefaced since 1984 when the first Terminator movie appeared and suggested the idea of autonomous robots as terrifying killing machines.

This article is in The Spectator’s November 2019 US edition. Subscribe here. The floor is slippery. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, I’m taking a tour of Abyss Creations, the factory where the ‘Ferraris of love dolls’, RealDoll and Realbotix, are made. A thin layer of silicone coats almost every surface. A (real) woman in her late twenties, the PR coordinator, Catherine, shows me round. She has the attitude of a hostess at a theme-park restaurant: bored or stoned or maybe both. I’m sure she’s given hundreds of these tours, heard the same dumb jokes a million times and watched us all slap the ass of a doll reluctantly yet instinctively.

Given the immense power that it wields, ‘Big Tech’ has ridden a gentle wave of goodwill. Steve Jobs was beloved, Elon Musk is admired and Mark Zuckerberg is generally seen as a well-meaning oddball. A 2018 study found that Amazon is the second most trusted institution in the US, behind only the military. How much that trust is based on knowledge of its procedures and how much on the relatively swift arrival of its packages is another question. That goodwill is fast dissipating. Across, the political spectrum people are beginning to resent the internet giants. This week, a leftist campaign in New York managed to stop Amazon from building a second headquarters in Long Island, Queens.