Technology

‘I can’t put it off any longer. She’s dying and I don’t think I can ignore the inevitable. We’ve got to let her go. I’m scared. Will you come? Please? I really need you.’ I sent the text and waited. After a few minutes, the man I depend on more than any other texted back. Usually he drops everything and comes. This time, his reply would shatter my world. We had been planning to go together to Currys, my tech guy and I, when the old Acer finally gave up the ghost. But I had been dreading it so much I had nursed her along even when the keys started malfunctioning. Being a writer with a laptop with a T that doesn’t work is a challenge.

A few nights ago on Twitter, I quipped that I was planning to launch a trade union for remote workers. With dues of £10 a year, but membership of 200 million worldwide, I planned to become the Jimmy Hoffa of Zoom (my colleague Jamie McClellan, clearly a Microsoft fan, suggested we call ourselves the Teamsters). If our demands for swivel chairs were not met, we would threaten to homework-to-rule — sitting with our backs to brightly lit windows, perhaps, or running vacuum cleaners in mid-presentation. But in a way, a million or so Londoners are already doing something similar by refusing to travel to work. This is a white-collar strike — or more accurately a strike by people who normally wear collars demanding the right to work dressed like Dominic Cummings.

People often tell me I have a strange way of looking at the world. Obviously, it doesn’t seem strange to me. But I do tend to see the world backwards. For instance, most people think the principal obstacles to economic and technological growth are all about supply. To me, it’s all in the demand. I have met one Italian economist, Mario Fabbri, who agrees. But apart from him, me and maybe Matt Ridley, there’s nobody else. Now, how crazy is this idea? What if the biggest constraint to progress really is a question of psychology, not economics? Certainly, if it is true, it should not surprise us that economists and policy--makers are reluctant to believe it. The knowledge and influence they possess would be instantly devalued.

The phone rang at 9 a.m. on Monday, with an old friend from Italy saying: ‘Of course I’ll do you a favour, my dear, but you don’t say what it is.’ I thought he’d finally lost his marbles (always a possibility with friends my age) but he said I’d just sent him an email asking if he would do me a favour. I hadn’t sent any emails that morning so I was mystified. As soon as I put the phone down, another friend rang saying of course he would help, but he was on Hampstead Heath and it would have to wait till he got home. But what had to wait? ‘Sending the gift token you wanted.

This week’s Wiki Man may read a bit oddly. You see, I haven’t ‘written’ it at all; I’ve dictated it into a kind of dictaphone (an Olympus LS-P4, at £130, needlessly expensive for the purpose, but that’s how I roll) and then uploaded the audio file to an online transcription service called otter.ai. The reason I’m doing this is to find out how long it takes to write a Spectator article when you dictate it and get it transcribed online, compared with writing it on a keyboard like it’s 1940 or something. I’ll let you know the result at the end of this article. But I’m doing this because I don’t know the answer. It’s a worthwhile experiment — in an area where very little experimentation takes place.

The Tesla Model 3 is an astounding achievement, but one thing baffles me: why do electric cars lack even the most basic tea-making equipment? I can’t be the only Briton to wonder why you would travel around on top of a 75kwh, 360v lithium-ion battery without having the facility to plug in a kettle. Or indeed power an off-the-grid shack for a few days. I have become oddly obsessed with questions like this because of the many lockdown hours I have spent watching bizarre YouTube videos. One remarkable series concerns the tiny house movement, where people seek to simplify and declutter their lives by moving into little wooden huts.

My research assistant, John Steele, is also a songwriter. A friend emailed him with the lyrics of a Fleetwood Mac number. These days Google often appends emails with a shortcut to save you typing your own answer by suggesting one or two likely responses. In the Fleetwood Mac lyric a former lover wonders whether her ex can see her reflection in the snow-covered hills. Google’s suggestion was ‘No’. Musicians have pondered some of life’s most profound questions, so John and I tried posing a few in emails, to see Google’s suggested response. Some were hilarious. If only David Bowie were here to know that ‘Yes!’, there is life on Mars. To Freddie Mercury’s ‘Is this the real life?’ the suggested answer is ‘Yes’.

Compared with every other household chore, progress in bum-wiping has been glacially slow. It’s only in living memory that schools and institutions stopped using something called Izal, a box of medicated toilet wipes similar in texture to greaseproof paper, and thus spectacularly ill-suited to its purpose. It was characteristic of the Britain of my childhood, where things were made gratuitously unpleasant on purpose, since to do anything nice was seen as effeminate. The Muslim world is far ahead of us here. In most Islamic countries a toilet cubicle comes with a bum gun — a kind of handheld spray. Yet in the supposedly enlightened Anglophone world we think dry paper is fine.

Next time there is a highly deserved round of public applause for NHS workers, do add one additional clap for the tele-communications industry for — so far — keeping the show on the road. High-speed broadband, for those lucky enough to have it, has made self-isolation more tolerable, and may have significantly reduced the impact of the disease in Britain. I say this because, for several weeks before it became mandatory to stay indoors, a large number of people did so voluntarily. That includes me. Ever since my grandfather contracted jaundice and so avoided landing at Suvla Bay in Gallipoli, there has been a proud family tradition of calling in sick at the first sign of a sniffle.

For the past 12 years, Roger Alton and I have shared this half page like Box and Cox: he writes fortnightly about sport and I write fortnightly about technology. Normally it would be Roger’s turn this week to cover sport. Unfortunately there isn’t any. So we’ve reached an agreement. For now, while there’s no longer any sport, I may write a little more frequently about technology. Then, in six months’ time, if there’s no longer any technology, Roger can write more frequently about the newly popular sports: bare-knuckle pugilism, dog-fighting and Mad Max-style steel-cage jousting. He could even throw in some nostalgic pieces recalling the golden age of football, when fans could still afford to throw toilet rolls on to the pitch.

‘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.

In the recent debate over Britain’s 5G infrastructure, one dog didn’t bark in the night. At no point did anyone dare suggest that, regardless of the supplier, upgrading our mobile networks to 5G might be premature. In saner parts of the economy, an investment requires something called a ‘use case’ or a cost-benefit analysis. In other words, you need to provide some immediate benefits which will arise as a result of your investment. Anything that can be dressed up as next-generation technology is somehow spared that tedious level of scrutiny. All it takes is for the techno-consulting complex to claim that ‘without this we risk being left behind’ and next thing you know there’s a blank cheque.

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.

Let nobody tell you that the second decade of the 21st century has been a bad time. We are living through the greatest improvement in human living standards in history. Extreme poverty has fallen below 10 per cent of the world’s population for the first time. It was 60 per cent when I was born. Global inequality has been plunging as Africa and Asia experience faster economic growth than Europe and North America; child mortality has fallen to record low levels; famine virtually went extinct; malaria, polio and heart disease are all in decline. Little of this made the news, because good news is no news. But I’ve been watching it all closely.