Spanish life is not always likeable but it is compellingly loveable.
Christopher Howse: A Pilgrim in Spain
Note: A few of the items below have been borrowed from Lenox Napier's Business Over Tapas of yesterday.
Spain
- Returning to the issue of countries' brand status . . . Here's a Spanish comment on Spain's: Spaniards’ own vision of the country is worse than its outside perception. And is is something that only happened in five of the 20 or so countries that were analyzed: Spain, Japan, Italy, South Africa and Brazil. It's because what’s very important to us, such as corruption or the Catalan issue, is experienced with great intensity and drama at home, while it gets very limited attention outside our borders. Yes, it's true that my visitors never put Spain in the same corruption box as, say, Italy or Greece. Revelation is always a shock to them.
- It's no surprise that speeding accounts for most of the fines collected by the police here but can it be true that alcohol and mobile-use only account for 2% of the total fines? I ask this in the context of the many drivers I see on their phones and the comment I made years ago that I could earn the state millions, if it gave me a head camera.
- Spain still 'boasts' 459,876 unsold new homes, just 4% down on last year. This, of course, is the hangover from the ridiculous construction boom of 2002-7, sparked by the introduction of the euro and very low interest rates.
- The right-wing parties - PP and Ciudadanos - have got into bed with the far-right Vox party in order to get control of some cities. Needless to say, they're already beginning to find this a menage a trois a tad uncomfortable.
- One such city is Madrid, where the trio had said they'll reverse the traffic control measures introduced by the last mayor. This has naturally led to a storm of protest and I doubt they'll carry through their threat. See The Local on this here and here.
- Classic Spanish tapas dishes - from The Local, of course.
- Are you one of the more than 360,000 applicants who'll have several years to wait until you get Spanish nationality, por si acaso? I haven't bothered yet but, if really necessary, will go the quicker and cheaper Irish route. It's all down to IT problems, apparently.
UK Politics
- John Kampfner, an author, broadcaster and commentator: Boris Johnson would be in good company as prime minister. A number of governments are currently led by clowns or wannabees. Europe’s premier grown-up, Angela Merkel, will soon depart the stage. Eventually, Britain will rediscover its desire for sensible politics. We’ll only do that once we have got infantilism out of our system,
The EU
The Way of the World
- Here's an interesting/fascinating article from The Economist on the rise of 'cosmeticians'. Of which Fart is said to be one. The article ends with a disaster scenario . . . Fart improvs his way to a second term.
- The future of AI? I’m already sick of intelligent machines: See the article below.
Spanish
- Word of the Day: Postizo.
- HT to Lenox for: El País in English brings us:‘How to use English to sound more Spanish. What may have started as a tongue-in-cheek joke among Spaniards has now infected the language. Anglicisms are everywhere. ¡Me da el feeling que va a ser todo muy crazy, bro!’.
Finally . . .
- The greenfinches in my garden has been joined by even more exotic interlopers, which I think are either yellowhammers or cirl(sic) buntings. The poor sparrows get even less of a look-in now.
- It says something that the most comments on any issue I've had in 18 years is about the rude email from Linda . . .
- Which reminds me . . . If reader James Atkinson sees this post . . . You need to check your email hasn't been hacked, James.
THE ARTICLE
The future of AI? I’m already sick of intelligent machines: Judith Woods, Daily Telegraph.
In this week’s final episode of the BBC’s spectacularly watchable futuristic drama Years and Years, an indomitable Anne Reid launched into a scathing rant about the parlous state of the nation.
Her bitter conclusion? That much of the blame for Britain’s authoritarian dystopia lay in the dehumanising rise of automatisation, she declared. And it all began with the grumbling, grudging, yet ultimately supine acceptance of self-service checkouts. Everyone hated them – but where was the boycott, the letters of complaint?
I’m sure I wasn’t the only one looking askance at my husband on the other side of the sofa. I hated them. I still do. I swore I’d never use one when they were first introduced.
Nowadays, I don’t think twice, even though it means I invariably stand about helplessly waiting for a member of staff to bale me out.
Is that an unintended downside, or a stealthy upside? Is the march of progress predicated on our mass infantilisation?
I know it sounds a bit sci-fi, but then it was announced this week that an American billionaire and adviser to Donald Trump has given Oxford University its largest single donation “since the Renaissance” to investigate the ethics of artificial intelligence.
The £150m gift from Stephen A Schwarzman, chief executive and co-founder of US investment and private equity firm Blackstone, is record-breaking.
I hope that, despite carrying his name, the centre will be independent. I also hope they invite me along just to kick things off with a few trenchant observations about some of the more alienating aspects of modern life.
In no particular order, I feel aggrieved that I need a mobile phone to buy a parking ticket, a digital key to access my bank account and, now that memorable passwords have been ditched in favour of entirely unmemorable ones – including numbers, special symbols, at least one capital and a Cyrillic proverb – I am in grave danger of becoming a non-person.
I’m often reminded of a Sandra Bullock film called The Net, in which she plays a hapless systems analyst who gets involved with a bad lot who wipe her existence online. Imagine it! And that was only 1995, when smartphones hadn’t turned our memories and map-reading to mush.
I had an updated The Net-style misadventure earlier this year, when I left my phone on a plane en route to East Africa. I had no idea how to log on to my email remotely on another device. Did I know my husband’s mobile number? Not a chance.
I could take no photographs, send no messages or reassure my children I was still alive; no point calling home as nobody ever picks up landlines these days.
At first, it was beyond stressful. Then it subtly altered my days, my anxiety levels, my perceptions.
I borrowed a laptop and got in touch with home. Just the once. The rest of the time, I paid attention – really paid attention – to the oft-overlooked bright yellow weaver birds, the tiny striped mice climbing the grass stems, absurdly colourful pigmy kingfishers.
But once I got back home and my insurance company dispatched my new phone, I was hooked (and hooked-up) to technology again. Convenient? Yes. Life-enhancing? I suppose, up to a point.
I got back into the rhythm of official correspondence, bank statements and applications for just about everything online. My closest friends, anxious about my radio silence, WhatsApped rather than called me, which is a perverse relief because, if they had, I wouldn’t have answered.
When Oxford embarks on research into artificial intelligent ethics, I wonder if it will examine the effect of Facebook friends on young people and how social media has supplanted face-to-face intimacy?
I don’t feel it’s in the least bit ethical that platforms are designed to draw us in and turn us into addicts, that Siri eavesdrops my conversation, or those cookies embedded in every site lead companies to pursue us with creepy “targeted” adverts.
Netflix suggests movies we might like. Spotify knows our musical taste better than we do. It’s all quite dehumanising; our free will is gradually being manipulated, directed and controlled, whether we are aware of it or not.
Artificial intelligence may be efficient – but it’s also objective, unswerving, free of emotion. All the things human beings are not.
In recent days, we’ve had paintings created by Ai-Da, a robot artist, which have been sold for £1 million. AI machines are being used to compose music and to write novels in a bid to discover whether they can effectively mimic human ingenuity and creativity.
Machines once designed to alleviate the drudgery of repetitive manual tasks have evolved into machines that seek to free us from “repetitive” intellectual tasks.
It’s the logical, if nightmarish, end point of the current continuum where even the most brief and pleasant human interactions are being rendered redundant.
In my local area, there’s already a cashless bakery, a cashless pub and a cashless cafe, making it easy (way too easy) to overspend. I’m still reeling from that £2.50 croissant to take away.
It’s handy, of course, unless you happen to be old or poor or without a bank account, all of whom are presumably unwelcome. Social engineering on the sly.
The rise of the self-service checkout: who's fault is it? Credit: Simon Dawson/Bloomberg
The upshot is a seismic shift away from personal contact towards contactless payments and contactless people. The effect on our collective mental health can only be guessed at.
For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world at his fingertips and thereby lose the login to his own soul?
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