Technology

The girl wound down her window, stuck her mobile phone out into midair, and started to take pictures of the sun. I was behind her Mini on the southbound slip road off the A3 to the Cobham roundabout. On the left was the backed-up turn for Hersham down the Seven Hills Road which is always busy in the morning. I was queueing in the less busy right hand lane to go around the roundabout to Cobham to do the horses. It should not have taken me long, even at 8 a.m. But the woman in the cream Mini in front of me was busy with her phone pointed up into the sky at a sun so blazing it was impossible to look anywhere near it. What she captured I have no idea. It’s hard to think of anything more pointless than trying to photograph a blinding heat haze.

When Nadine Dorries was named Culture Secretary last year, it proved to be the most controversial appointment of Boris Johnson’s reshuffle. Her critics weren’t afraid to point to what they saw as her flaws. She was a Scouser and former nurse put in charge of the cultural crown jewels. The only explanation they could come up with: she was intended to embody a two-finger flick, on behalf of the PM, to the BBC, Channel 4 and the arts world in general. The furore, she says, didn’t come as a surprise. ‘There are some men who do have a problem with a woman from my background achieving,’ she says. It also pointed to something else: a fear that she might do what her predecessors had not done. ‘I think they obviously knew that I was going to deliver.

Take a look at the four paintings on this page. If you are acquainted with modern art, you will probably assume, at a quick glance, that it shows four works by the Russian artist Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944). However, whatever your knowledge of modern art, I suggest you look again, because not all of these works are by that great pioneer of abstract painting. More than one of them is an original image created by a computer model, which was asked to do a digital artwork in the style of Kandinsky. Which are the fakes? I’ll give you the answer at the end of the article. Before we get there, you need to know how a computer can make such startlingly echoic images, and what it might mean for art.

To evade algorithms that hunt down forbidden words, users of platforms like TikTok employ cryptic synonyms. So dead becomes unalive, and the pandemic becomes panini or Panda Express. A technology journalist in her mid-thirties, Taylor Lorenz, drew attention to the trend last week in the Washington Post, calling the vocabulary ‘algospeak’. But why should anyone be banned for using the word dead? Because young people in chatrooms online discuss suicide, and since this is thought to encourage it, online proprietors try to weed out messages with giveaway words. Their algorithms penetrate chatrooms like those metal jellyfish in the Matrix films attacking the spaceship. (My husband, rather worryingly, knows that they are called Sentinels.

The man who invented gifs, Stephen Wilhite, has died, aged 74. Controversy survives him – over how to pronounce the thing. A gif was a format that, from 1987, allowed graphics to be shared by otherwise incompatible computers. The name came from the initials of Graphics Interchange Format. That was not decisive, for the word could be pronounced as jif if it followed common words like gin, or as gif like gig. There’s no way of telling the pronunciation of an unfamiliar word beginning gi-. There are, it is true, six or seven words gig, all pronounced with a hard g.

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.

Here’s a useful tip. Go to the Royal Mail website and you can ask your postman to collect letters or parcels from your home at a cost of 60p per item. You pay for postage online, print a label and book a collection for the following day. Granted, it’s an extravagant way to merely avoid a walk to the postbox, but for special delivery items or parcels it’s a godsend. If you don’t have a printer at home, you can even get your postie to bring a label. Given that Royal Mail was founded in 1516, I’m not quite sure why it took 500 years to come up with this particular wheeze, but better late than never. In the US, where they have mailboxes rather than slots in the door, postmen have always collected mail.

Google once believed it could use algorithms to track pandemics. People with flu would search for flu-related information, it reasoned, giving the tech giant instant knowledge of the disease’s prevalence. Google Flu Trends (GFT) would merge this information with flu tracking data to create algorithms that could predict the disease’s trajectory weeks before governments’ own estimates. But after running the project for seven years, Google quietly abandoned it in 2015. It had failed spectacularly. In 2013, for instance, it miscalculated the peak of the flu season by 140 per cent. According to the German psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer, this is a good example of the limitations of using algorithms to surveil and study society.

After launching an investigation into my missing phone, Vodafone informed me it could not deal with me any further until I went through a series of checks to prove that I was who I said I was. I then became locked in an Orwellian battle with an automated system that sent email after email demanding, for example, that I confirm my email, until I gave up on my lost phone, because no amount of confirming seemed to work. Maybe it was naive to try to tell Vodafone that one of their stores had sold me a Nokia that did not hold a charge, refused to refund or exchange it, then sent the phone away into the ether to be mended, where it apparently disappeared.

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.

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.