Tech

What is happening in Gaza now provides a glimpse of how all wars may be fought in the future — with artificial intelligence. In The Spectator last November, I wrote about an Israeli airstrike that brought down a six-story building in Gaza City, reportedly killing more than forty civilians. One of the residents, a man named Mahmoud Ashour, dug through the rubble with his bare hands, trying to find his daughter and her four children, a girl aged eight and three boys of six, two and six months — all killed. The Israeli military would not tell me why the building was hit, beyond saying that Gaza’s armed groups put their military infrastructure amid civilians, but Amnesty International said there had been a single member of Hamas living there.

Western governments seem ill-prepared to grapple with rapidly advancing technology. Watch any congressional hearing where a crusty congressman tries to keep pace with Silicon Valley’s top “autists” if you need further evidence — and read Spencer A. Klavan’s analysis of the high-skill but low-status rejects uniting into a formidable social class. The Silent Generation and boomers simply cannot keep up. The Space Race is back on — and tycoons are eager to cash in on the final frontier. Shane Cashman dives into the new wild west of explorers and entrepreneurs commercializing the great unknown. Lionel Shriver brings us back to earth with a look at the electrical grid and our government’s push for green energy and electric vehicles.

Four years in the making, the Online Safety Bill has now been sent to senior ministers for review — a process that allows them to protest, to shout if anything obvious that has been missed. In this case, the process is invaluable because something huge has been missed. The Bill, if passed, would empower the Silicon Valley firms it’s designed to suborn. It would formalise and usher in a new era of censorship of UK news — run from San Francisco. This Bill would backfire in a way that its Tory advocates have so far proven unable to understand let alone address. That’s why it needs to be halted, and a rethink ordered. The original aim is to make Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and others liable for any genuine filth promoted online.

A few years ago, the software company Owlchemy Labs released a computer game called Job Simulator. Its premise was simple. Players find themselves in a future world, roughly 30 years from now, in which super-efficient robots have snaffled up all the jobs. No longer needed for work, humans entertain themselves instead by donning virtual reality headsets and reenacting 'the glory days' — simulating what it was once like to be an office clerk, chef, or shopkeeper. The gameplay, therefore, consists entirely of, well, yeah… carrying out endless mundane tasks: virtual photocopying, virtual cooking, virtual newspaper sales. Job Simulator is pretty tongue-in-cheek, crammed full of dry, self-referential jokes.

‘During that time it seemed no easy thing to see any man on the streets of Byzantium, but all who had the good fortune to be in health were sitting in their houses, either attending the sick or mourning the dead… and work of every description ceased, and all the trades were abandoned by the artisans, and all other work as well, such as each had in hand.’ That’s a passage from Procopius’s History of the Wars, describing the way the bubonic plague ravaged Byzantium in 541 AD. If you want to feel historical time collapse, and the distance of centuries evaporate, it is worth reading the whole account.

Video conferences are like all business meetings — 95 percent pointless and usually arranged and dominated by some self-important twerp. Still, humans attach strange importance to management habits and, now that we are living in the age of the coronavirus, many of us will have to do a lot more video conferences for work. Ever the public servant, Cockburn has compiled the following guide to video conference etiquette. 1) Dress Cockburn prefers formal attire, yet in times of isolation, the rules can be relaxed. Nudity is too much, no matter how matter impressive one's physique. Pajamas are a no-no, too. Sporting a kaftan on the call may make you feel like a charismatic tech billionaire dialing in from Mustique. But everybody knows you aren’t — so put a shirt on.