The Boy In The Bubble
'These are the days of miracle And wonder …' *
I live in The Bubble. What’s worse is that I used to work in it too.
And tedious as it often is to start with a definition, on this occasion it’s worth maybe just reminding ourselves that a bubble is, yes, by definition, something that is artificially inflated and may either gradually deflate or else suddenly burst.
A bubble is something that is fragile, precarious.
The Bubble, that is to say those who work and live in and around the institutions that comprise the European Union, along with their many and various camp followers, is neither.
Whatever its ups and downs, it will not gradually deflate, far less suddenly burst. Though its inhabitants do certainly display an artificially inflated sense of their own self worth.
Here in Brussels they are often accused of keeping their distance from the rest of us.
For my own part I recall once presenting a text which contained the words ‘our family, our friends, and our neighbours’ for the approval of a senior official at the European Parliament. It was returned to me for redrafting with the reference to ‘neighbours’ deleted and the explanation that my boss did not know who his neighbours were and had no wish to.
But the accusation is no longer entirely true. These days, many of the younger members of The Bubble are increasingly to be found frequenting the neighbourhood cafes of my own neck of the woods, Saint Boniface in The European Quarter, The Athenee and The Consul among them.
For the most part they are interns or post graduate students with precarious jobs and fragile incomes. They are Swedes and Germans and French and Greeks and Italians and Spaniards and Poles and Lithuanians.
Their lingua franca is English. And for the most part I find that the spontaneity and openness of their informal Corps Diplomatique makes a pleasant contribution to the gaiety of life on a spring evening au terrace. In fact I have rather grown to enjoy our conversations.
Most are ‘in communications’. They are ‘communications professionals’ or ‘communications strategists’ or ‘social media strategists’ All, of course, are ‘digital natives’
But before we get to that let’s get what lawyers like to call ‘Full Disclosure’ out of the way first.
For all of my adult life I have made my living by writing. And for much of it, it was a good living.
I know that I was fortunate indeed to be able to have done so when the ability to arrange twelve characters on a page was sufficient to earn a six figure salary. Provided, of course, that you were able to exercise the ability regularly and on demand.
At that time my work and the work of others like me: copywriters, art directors, photographers, typographers, illustrators, producers, directors, cinematographers, musicians, and actors was, towards the top end at least, mostly highly regarded and usually well rewarded.
But that was not to last.
‘These are the days of lasers in the jungle … ’*
In the closing years of the last century rapid advances in the speed, cost, and therefore the availability, of computing brought the ability for us to do previously unimagined things.
CGI, for example, allowed my then partner Fraser and I to make pigs fly for an insurance company and the late great David Abbott to bring Disraeli and Gladstone back to life for a newspaper. And, of course, it gave us ‘Gladiator’.
It’s fair to say that the flying pigs was not one of my finest moments. But we did at least get to work with the CGI supervisor who had recently worked on ‘Gladiator’ and who liked to quip ‘Rome wasn’t built in a day’.
Family snaps no longer required film and processing. Kodak went out of business. Then came the internet. And travel agents disappeared.
Four years later I find myself in Dubai. My eldest daughter, then an undergraduate at The LSE, is visiting, and I find that that I am having trouble getting her to leave the apartment. This is completely out of character, she’s a teenager, on holiday, in Dubai, and Dad’s paying.
The reason was something called Facebook, at that time available only to those with a .ac email address and there being no smartphones, let alone apps yet, only on their laptops.
The age of Social Media had dawned. A business model, and a spectacularly successful one at that, born of the same technology that had let me make pigs fly, and brought Disraeli and Gladstone back to life.
The same technology that had done for Kodak and travel agents.
But that was not to last either. No, this is still all twenty years ago, there was plenty more still to come yet. And yes, I’m afraid there’s plenty more sill to come now.
I’ve written plenty elsewhere about social media, as have countless others, so i’m not going to give it anymore airtime here. Suffice to say that if its business model was pickpocketing, then AI, or the bit of it that is large language learning models at least, is armed robbery.
From where I sit prompting a machine to ‘create’ something ‘in the style of’ Nick Cave or Picasso is not only utterly pointless, it’s downright theft.
The idea that a book that I’ve written has been ‘scraped’ without my knowledge or consent in order to teach a programme to write makes me angry, very angry.
Last week I attended a webinar presented by ‘communications professionals’ on ‘AI in The Bubble’. The panel were not my newfound friends from The Consul but their elders and betters. I don’t really know why I was there, I knew it would annoy me, but it was on Zoom so it was easy to multitask, and you didn’t see their clown shoes.
The issue of Copyright and the unresolved litigation around it didn’t come up, nor did the question of the ownership of data, save for one passing reference to the importance of GDPR compliance.
Not that GDPR compliance is a matter of any pressing interest to those busy at work creating apps that enable the creation of deep fake porn video. But I thought it polite not to mention them, nor the Sikh SS Officers, for which at least th AI bit of Google (‘Don’t Be Evil’) recently apologised.
The origination of deep fake porn videos, by the way, is not a criminal offence in many jurisdictions, though its distribution is usually more likely to be. So far as I am aware there have been few, if any, prosecutions for it in Europe or The US to date.
I did ask a question about the fact that even at current levels of growth the AI industry is predicted to be going to require at least the same total energy supply as The Netherlands to power it within the next twelve months.
I asked also about economist’s concerns that the spectacular returns to be made from investment in AI mean that it attracts a disproportionate share of capital that might be more usefully invested in, say, climate tech.
I was told that these were all questions ‘for another time’. Hmm, like after you’ve rendered the planet uninhabitable for my childern?
But please don’t get me wrong, as with the distinction between The Internet as a technology and social media as a business model, there is also a marked difference between AI and, for example and business such as ChatGPT and Gemini.
‘A loose affiliation of millionaires and billionaires … ‘*
It seems already to be clear that the latter’s most notable achievement to date, apart from making a very small number of very rich people even richer, is that they have make it a great deal easier for us to lie and a great deal harder for our lies to be detected.
The answer that they provided to your prompt will always seems plausible, but that doesn’t mean that it will always be correct.
The job was done, but you didn’t do it. The machine learning machine learned something, but you did not.
Without wishing to sound self righteous, remember that for many years I earned a good living writing advertising, I know from experience that although advertisers routinely exaggerate and embellish, they rarely deliberately set out to tell us out and out lies.
Perhaps that’s because they know that it doesn’t really work, or at least that there are consequences to being found out. Perhaps it’s because, unlike social media platforms, they’re governed to some extent by regulations which tend to be fairly easily enforced.
Or perhaps it’s just that they’ve just not caught up with the available technology yet.
Back in The Bubble meanwhile it’s also worth remembering that being ‘in communications’ is more often than not a polite way to say that you’re a lobbyist. And if you’re a lobbyist, well, regulation per se tends to be your enemy.
When you’re a hammer everything looks like a nail.
lobbying is also a job where you are likely to be disproportionately dependent on social media platforms to distribute your ‘creative content’. And a job which, if you want to keep it, or better still move on up to a better one, needs you to keep that content coming.
In a world where you can never generate too much content and the closer its cost is to zero the better, social media and AI are a marriage made in heaven.
It’s a lesson already learned by The Institutions at the, I hesitate to use the word, ’heart’ of the bubble.
Despite the fact that Ticktok, for example, is both an essential communications channel for them and also the subject of an enquiry into its alleged enabling of child abuse.
Whatever the outcome of that turns out to be, and I wouldn’t hold your breath, it’s also worth remembering that Ticktok’s ultimate owner, the Chinese Government, has a long term proven history of cyber attacks on US and UK Government institutions.
A perfect example of the unique ability of The Bubble to hold two entirely opposing thoughts in its mind at one and the same time.
And conclusive proof, I’d say, of the truth that the difference between transparency and integrity is that while the former is spending time and money telling people that you never ever do bad things, the latter is never ever doing bad things in the first place.
But maybe if we were all to spend a little less time on Artificial Intelligence and a little more effort on genuine humanity we’d know that. And act on it.