Machine Politics

You may have noticed that the political parties (although they are all behaving more like children’s parties; expect jelly and balloons) have launched their manifestos and lo and behold, bribes. Back us and we will spend your children’s future taxes. No, back us and we will mortgage your grandchildren. Ah, but WE will spend so much it will make historians wince. It’s not ‘spending’, as such, it’s ‘investing’. What’s the use of money when there is no planet left to buy? And so on and so forth; it’s going to go for a few weeks.

Education, education and policing and justice and social justice and rights and righting wrongs; it’s the economy, stupid. Oh and Brexit; we will deal with it once and for all. Promise. Trust us; we will deliver. It always amuses me how every party promises to deliver on promises they made before and failed to make good on, often multiple times. The Tories have failed to control immigration, establish order and build a mighty economy. Labour has similarly failed – every time it has tried – to conjure up a land of milk and honey.

I forget quite what the LimpDems stand for, other than not what the country voted for. The Greens just seem to hate humanity in its entirety and if they are brutally honest they would probably start with a cull. (And if I’m honest I think they are onto something there) But in reality, if they can’t slaughter half the population they can at least promise to make all of us thoroughly miserable. Despite all of them we still have just six days to save the NHS, a situation which seems to have endured throughout my sentient life.

Northern Powerhouse, HS2, Bobbies on the beat, a free owl for every child… the cacophony of false hope echoes around the land and probably less than 5% of the electorate even hear it, let alone give a toss. The net result of the steady post-war decline in standards, expectations and trust in power is that nobody with the gift of independent thought believes a single word of what any politician says. They may as well set up stalls and tout for business selling miracle cures. Snake oil salesmen, the lot of them and some of them don’t even realise it, so much like brainwashed automatons have party apparatchiks become.

We need to face up to a simple, inescapable truth, which is that politics as we knew it is a busted flush. The people we vote for are powerless to effect change against the whims of the party machine and if the party abandons the very policies on which they were elected it renders the notion of a free vote equally invalid. If I vote for one party because of their stance on a particular pressing issue, but then that party chooses not to pursue the agenda which got them into power what is the point of democracy? A recurring Soviet joke about the stagnant state was that “they pretend to pay us and we pretend to work”.

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When it comes to it, we are just voting machines for equally robotic vote machines which obey the directions of higher authorities. The decisions are not made from the ground up. We pretend to vote and they pretend to represent us. As a result more and more members of the population are detached from the levers of power and rely instead on their real friends and allies – the little people who live in their phones. So why don’t we cut out the middle men, the pointless mounds of quivering flesh who pose as politicians. They say we are entering the age of machines; I say bring on the robots!

Cowardly New World?

So, I just got home. No biggie, I hopped in a taxi, got on a plane, took a bus to the car park and drove my own wheels back to my little gaff, my sanctuary, the place where I keep all my stuff; the accumulated detritus of a life lived, if not well, at least  lived frenetically. It’s really time I slowed down a little. Maybe it’s time we all slowed down?

While I was waiting for the airport parking transfer bus I began to think – it’s a thing I do without bidding. I’d like to believe it’s something we all do, but I’m not convinced. The bus eventually showed up and the bored driver grunted a practised and insincere greeting as he grudgingly allowed us to board and remain bored while we regained the sanctity of our cars. The experience - like shopping - may have been made better without involving human beings at all.

From the earliest days mankind has been busy devising ways of saving labour. Airports in the future will not need drivers to take us from planes to automobiles; the planes are mostly capable of flying themselves, driverless trains already operate in some parts of the world and there is much excited chatter at the moment about driverless cars. What will the world’s stock of imperfect taxi drivers do once that technology is perfected?

We already have robot warehouses and where once a harvest took a whole village it’s now within the remit of one man and his combine harvester. Vending machines, cashpoints, online banking, Amazon, pay and display… the whole internet revolution. Everywhere you look, man is replaced by machine. This should be a good thing, were human evolution actually up to the job. For every creation of human ingenuity that increase individual productivity, the actual productivity of an enormous sector of the world population goes down, in some cases to zero.

Feed the world? Easy. Give it something worthwhile to do though, now there’s the rub. As more and more machines do the donkey work, humans should be freed to be creative, to enjoy their leisure, to be all that they can be. But what of the vast majority of freed humans, the ones who are only really capable of being donkeys? Here’s your problem, world leaders, it’s not employment that is needed; the real question is what DO we do with unproductive humanity? (And how do you stop the buggers breeding?)

While the bread and circuses approach was good enough for the Romans two thousand years ago, human ingenuity has yet to come up with an effective way of containing not just a city, but a world population surplus to requirements. Recently, the solution was to give them money, let them be consumers and pretend that they actually contribute to prosperity but as more and more useful humans leave work and retire that particular illusion is going to be harder and harder to pull off.

What do we do when the tax receipts fall but the Epsilons continue to reproduce? When the genuinely productive step off the hamster wheel? Will the work of machines alone provide enough wealth for an eventual – and not so far off - majority who are only getting better at being idle? We’ve already automated consumption and entitlement. How long before we finally twig that it’s the automation that’s moving forward and the humans who are the obstacles to progress? What leader is going to be brave enough to admit that?