Technology

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.

‘Suppose you bought a case of claret a few years ago for £20 a bottle. It now sells at auction for about £75. You have decided to drink a bottle. Which of the following best captures your feeling of the cost to you of drinking the bottle?   1. £0. I already paid for it. 2. £20 — what I paid for it. 3. £20 plus interest. 4. £75, what I could get if I sold the bottle. 5. -£55. I get to drink a bottle that is worth £75 that I only paid £20 for, so I save money by drinking it.’   This question (with prices in dollars) was given to readers of Liquid Assets, an annual newsletter on wine auction pricing. It was posed by Richard Thaler, later to win the Nobel Prize in Economics.

In the summer of 1999 I did something radical. Spurred on by my husband’s universal loathing of television I took our TV set to the landfill and I haven’t owned one since. Twenty unrepentant years without the demon box, and alive to tell the tale. My family long ago accepted this stubborn eccentricity. They’ve grown used to the silence, the missing screen, the brutal fact that they won’t be able to watch the final of Strictly round at my place. A few friends have taken a different line, still hoping to sell me the benefits of owning a TV, particularly since my husband moved to a nursing home and I live alone. ‘It must get lonely,’ they say. ‘Get a cat, get a goldfish, get a telly.

 Montego Bay, Jamaica When the Kennedy clan were children, JFK and his siblings would tear off their clothes before leaping from the pier at Hyannis Port, Massachusetts — safe in the knowledge their servants would pick up their discarded clothes. That used to strike me as the ultimate in entitlement before I ended up here in a hotel in Jamaica. I’m being waited on hand and foot in a way that wouldn’t have disgraced the Kennedys — or a 19th--century duke. Someone’s just rung to ask when would be a good time to fill my fridge with beer. A driver is waiting to take me on a tour of Montego Bay. When a friend, also staying here, forgot her diary, her butler brought it from her room to our breakfast table.

David Niven’s younger son Jamie, now an old man and a bit overweight, approached my table and announced that he had seen a video of me lunching elsewhere with two friends. He said this in front of the two ladies I was with, one of whom has in the past had issues with my behaviour — namely, the wife. Luckily the video showed me with the designer Carolina Herrera and her husband, who are social friends, so after a pregnant pause Jamie Niven said goodbye and left. It was the end of the story and for once I was doing something innocent, like having lunch. Thinking back, however, I am outraged. Someone I don’t know, and most likely have never heard of, points a smartphone and shoots away, monitoring my every move for strangers’ eyes.

Every ten to 15 years there is a technology breakthrough that really changes what it means to be human. The internet, mobile phones, social media and, most recently, AI voice assistance: all of these amplify the human experience. And with each technological game-changer we go through much of the same series of questions and anxieties. We worry both that it’s all too much, and too little. With the recent advances in artificial intelligence we leap ahead to the existential dangers, and at the same time wonder whether there aren’t more pressing issues to discuss: healthcare, climate change, education, the economy. Well, they are pressing issues — but AI has an impact on all of them.

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.

I’d like to propose a new scientific institution: the IUT, or Institute of Underrated Technology. Rather than trying to invent yet more bloody things, it will instead be devoted to helping us derive greater value from things we can do already using technology which already exists. Innovation is a two-stage process. First you discover something; then over time people discover how best to use it. Many ideas fall at the second hurdle: the Chinese invented gunpowder but used it only for fireworks; early Mesoamericans invented the wheel, but attached it only to children’s toys. In recent times, the internet seems to have delivered a lot more in entertainment value than in productivity. What we need is not more technology, but better uses for it.

It’s been almost two decades since the UK Government first introduced the right to request flexible working for parents and carers. Since then, a lot has changed within our working environments; from the introduction of innovative technologies right through to our daily routine. All employees now have the legal right to request flexible working arrangements, yet since 2010 the percentage of the UK workforce adopting smarter ways of working has not risen above 27 per cent. Research has proved that flexible working arrangements contribute to a more balanced and fulfilled life and are a fantastic way to attract and motivate the best talent for employers.

My first night back in Blighty, I sat all evening at the kitchen table drinking wine with a charming, courteous English gentleman stricken in years. (I’ll call him Bertie. He enjoys the column and wrote inviting me to visit him at his pile on Exmoor.) I’m partial to old-fashioned English gentlemen, relishing above all their many rare qualities their disinterestedness. Before dinner we had slowly and deliberately drunk a bottle of red wine, and another one after that. He did most of the talking. His body was a calamity, but his mind was completely lucid. The vocabulary with which he expressed his mind was about ten times as large as mine and he wielded it with precision and virtuosity.

I recently saw a series of photographs depicting a rural home in China. Pride of place in a grimly furnished main room was given to a gargantuan new flat-screen television, while the sole toilet was a hole in the ground in an outside shed. What strange priorities, I thought. On reflection, though, under the same circumstances, I suspect quite a few of us would do the same thing. In Britain, for a hundred years or so, we never faced such a choice: you could install a decent indoor toilet, but not a Samsung 75in 4K LED TV, because the latter hadn’t been invented yet. So in Britain we almost all installed plumbing before we bought televisions — because that is the order in which they became available.