Technology

Move over vinyl: the cassette tape is back. According to the British Phonographic Industry, sales of this retro piece of technology last year came close to a two-decade peak. Having been the top-selling format for albums in the UK from 1985 to 1992 and then seemingly disappearing (selling only 4,000 units in 2012), last year saw more than 195,000 cassette tapes shifted. HMV, which recently announced that it will reopen its flagship store on Oxford Street after a four-year closure, plans to bring out cassettes for ‘specific new releases’ and has credited its return to profit with a growing interest in ‘collectable’ music from an analogue era.

Decades are happening in weeks in the world of artificial intelligence. A fortnight ago, OpenAI released GPT-4, the latest model of its chatbot. It passed the bar exam in the 90th percentile, whereas the previous model only managed the tenth. Last week, Google introduced its own chatbot, Bard. Now, the British government is announcing plans to regulate AI for the first time, as well as to introduce it into hospitals and schools. Even some of the biggest technophobes are having to grasp this brave new world. We’re familiar with some of the technology by now, but we know little about the humans in the world of AI.

The last manual typewriter, after 150 years of commercial production, was manufactured in the UK in 2012. Yet like all design classics, it refuses to lie down and die. There is a roaring trade in old models on eBay, and dealers such as the Typewriter Man in the UK and Mytypewriter.com in the US sell them to hipsters and steampunks, among whom they are cult objects. The latter store, awash with Hermes, Remingtons and Underwoods, even has a list of famous writers and the machines they used – from John Ashbery to P.G. Wodehouse – so that you can buy a model to match your literary tastes.  They’re also, in various institutions, still in use.

With the recent news that Kindle and other e-readers are automatically updating Roald Dahl’s books to sanitised versions, an entire era has come to an end for readers like me. Who in future will feel safe buying an electronic copy of anything? Publishers’ plans here may be modest, but the point about the puritan is that their work is never done. Martin Amis, Evelyn Waugh, Nancy Mitford, George Orwell, Charles Dickens – any one of them feels vulnerable now. If in copyright, the author and their estate can be strong-armed by the publishers; if out of copyright, laying your hands on the right edition will be a minefield. Nor does it seem clear that publishers’ revisions are being done by skilled writers.

As a rule, ‘I told you so’ is an unattractive sentiment – simultaneously egotistic, narcissistic and triumphalist. Nonetheless, on this occasion: I told you so. Specifically, I told you so on 10 December last year, when I predicted in Spectator Life that 2023 might see humanity encounter its first non-human intellect, in the form of true artificial intelligence – or something so close to it that any caveats will appear quite trivial.

Unless you’ve been living under a snowdrift – with no mobile signal – for the past six months, you’ll have heard of the kerfuffle surrounding the new generations of artificial intelligence. Especially a voluble, dutiful, inexhaustible chatbot called ChatGPT, which has gone from zero users to several million in the two wild weeks since its inception. Speculation about ChatGPT ranges from the curious, to the gloomy, to the seriously angry. Some have said it is the death of Google, because it is so good at providing answers to queries – from instant recipes comprising all the ingredients you have in your fridge right now (this is brilliant) to the definition of quantum physics in French (or Latin, or Armenian, or Punjabi, or – one memorable day for me – Sumerian).

Ping! My phone vibrates with a message from a new friend. A mild spike of dopamine dissipates on seeing she’s left me a WhatsApp voice note. However, it’s short and, hopefully, it’s a one-off.  I reply with a text message, hoping she’ll register the switch in communications. Ping! Oh no. She’s a voice-noter. She’s a bloody voice-noter. And this one is well over two minutes long and I don’t know her very well, so I’m going to have to listen to the whole thing without speeding it up. It’s an invitation to dinner, but this does nothing to quell my mounting frustration and irrational thoughts of disengaging myself from this nascent friendship.  ‘Yes great thanks,’ I reply by text, without – pointedly – an ‘X’.

From the moment Elon Musk suggested buying Twitter, users began threatening to leave – and the Tesla kingpin's erratic behaviour since he took over hasn't exactly helped his case, with thousands of workers laid off and hundreds more resigning. The MIT Technology Review estimates that more than a million Twitter users have jumped ship since Musk took the reins. Today the social network is launching a revamped version of Twitter Blue, its paid-for verification system, after a previous attempt last month was marred by a flood of imposters and fake accounts. So for those who decide not to stick around to see how this one turns out, what alternatives are out there – and are any of them any good?

If you had to choose an obvious place to look for clues about what will happen in the coming year, it probably wouldn’t be the lush, green, watery tropic wilderness of Mount Borradaile, West Arnhemland, in the Northern Territory, Australia, hard by the sizzling blue reaches of the Arafura Sea. For a start, this lost, ancient chunk of Oz is almost empty – there are far more saltwater crocs than cars, and far more rare and exquisite wading birds than people. How can this lovely place speak of modernity? Of the future? And yet if I am right, the clues hidden in this Edenic wilderness suggest that we are about to see our lives entirely overturned – in a way that once happened in Arnhemland. The rocks may even illuminate our ultimate fate.

What difference does the internet make? Critics blame it for a range of ills, from social collapse and child abuse to obesity. So shouldn’t we greet with some caution and even sadness the recent announcement that Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite broadband is to reach tiny Pitcairn Island in the Pacific Ocean, home to the handful of descendants from the 1789 mutiny on the Bounty? Will the advent of Zoom calls and the ability to stream The Crown turn this idyllic tribe into socially fractured, screen-obsessed time-wasters? Is high-speed connectivity the beginning of the end for this Pacific paradise? I think not. Because this 38-strong community collapsed long before Musk was crowned the richest man in the world. It doesn’t take Starlink for paradise to turn sour.

First comes disbelief that I have done something so extreme, followed by denial as I pick up my phone repeatedly to check it’s not just a bad dream. But no – it's really happening. Panic segues into frustration; then, finally, I arrive at acceptance. For the next three hours I will not be able to log on to social media or my favourite websites, and there is nothing I can do about it. In a last-ditch attempt to stop myself compulsively scrolling, I have spent £70 on a lifetime membership of the internet blocking software Freedom. When activated, it prevents access to specified sites across my devices until a set amount of time has elapsed.