Category Archives: Writing

Marvellous then is the blindness of the intellect which does not consider that which is its primary object and without which it can know nothing. But just as the eye intent upon the various differences of the colours does not see the light by which it sees the other things and, if it sees it, does not notice it, so the mind’s eye, intent upon particular and universal beings, does not notice Being itself, which is beyond all genera, though that comes first before the mind and through it all other things. Wherefore it seems very true that just as the bat’s eye behaves in the light, so the eye of the mind behaves before the most obvious things of nature. Because accustomed to the shadows of beings and the phantasms of the sensible world, when it looks upon the light of the highest Being, it seems to see nothing, not understanding that darkness itself is the fullest illumination of the mind, just as when the eye sees pure light it seems to itself to be seeing nothing.

— St Bonaventure, The Mind’s Road to God (tr. Boas)

And thus I saw God enioyeth that he is our fader, God enioyeth that he is our moder, and God enioyeth that he is our very spouse, and our soule is his lovid wife. And Criste enioyeth that he is our broder, and Iesus enioyeth that he is our savior. Ther am v hey ioyes, as I vnderstond, in which he wil that we enioyen, hym praysyng, him thankyng, him loveing, him endlesly blissand. Al that shal be savid, for the tyme of this life, we have in us a mervelous medlur bothen of wele and wo. We have in us our lord Iesus uprysen; we have in us the wretchidnes of the mischefe of Adams fallyng, deyand. Be Criste we are stedfastly kept, and be his grace touchyng we are reysid into sekir troste of salvation. And be Adams fallyng we am so broken in our felyng on divers manner, be synes and be sondry peynes, in which we am made derke and so blinde that onethys we can taken ony comfort. But in our menyng we abiden God and faithfully trosten to have mercy and grace; and this is owen werkyng in us. And of his godeness he opynyth the eye of our vnderstondyng be which we have syte, sumtyme more and sumtyme less, after that God gevyth abilite to takyn. And now we am reysid into that on, and now we are suffrid to fallen into that other. And thus is this medle so mervelous in us that onethys we knowen of our selfe or of our evyn Cristen in what way we stonden, for the merveloushede of this sundry felyng; but that ilke holy assent that we assenten to God whan we felyn hyrn, truly willand to be with him with al our herte with al our soule and with all our myte; and than we haten and dispisen our evil sterings and all that myte be occasion of synne gostly and bodily. And yet nevertheles whan this sweteness is hidde, we falyn ageyn into blindhede, and so into wo and tribulation on divers manner. But than is this our comfort, that we knowen in our feith that be the vertue of Criste, which is our keper, we assenten never therto, but we grutchin theragen, and duryin in peyne and wo, prayand into that tyme that he shewith him agen to us. And thus we stonden in this medlur all the dayes of our life.

— Julian of Norwich, A Revelation of Love (ed. Glasscoe)

Q: You’re seen as the Godfather of this industry. Do you have any concern about what you’ve wrought?

A: I do a bit. On the other hand, I think whatever going to happen is pretty much inevitable. One person stopping doing this research wouldn’t stop it happening. If my impact is to make it happen a month earlier, that’s about the limit of one person can do.

Q: We haven’t touched on job displacement. Is this going to eat up job after job?

A: I think it’s going to make jobs different. People are going to be doing more of the creative end and less of the routine end.

Q: This is the biggest technological advancement since… is this another industrial revolution, or how should people think of it?

A: I think it’s comparable in scale to the industrial revolution or electricity, or maybe the wheel.

Q: And sentience? I think you have complaints about how you even define that?

A: When it comes to sentience, I’m amazed that people can confidently pronounce that these things are not sentient, and when you ask them what they mean by sentient, they say they don’t really know. So how can you be confident about sentient if you don’t know what sentient means?

Q: So maybe they are already?

A: Who knows. I think whether they’re sentient or not depends on what you mean by sentient. So you better define what you mean by sentient before you answer the question of whether they’re sentient.

Q: Does it matter what we think, or does it only matter whether it effectively acts as if it is sentient?

A: That’s a very good question.

Q: And what’s your answer?

A: I don’t have one.

Q: Because if it’s not sentient, but it decides for whatever reason that it believes it is and that it needs to achieve some goal that’s contrary to our interests but it believes is in its interest, does it really matter in terms of any human reflection?

A: I think a good context to think about this thing is an autonomous lethal weapon. It’s all very well saying it’s not sentient, but when it’s hunting you down to shoot you, you’re going to start thinking it’s sentient.

Q: Or not really caring, not an important standard any more.

A: The kind of intelligence we’re developing is very different from our intelligence. It’s an idiot-savant kind of intelligence. It’s quite possible that if it is at all sentient, it’s sentient in a somewhat different way from us.

Why do I love the Bot? Because it frees me up. It appeals to the laziest parts of my mind. It does my work for me. It will wipe out my doubts. It will think and decide for me. It will kill who I thought I was, which I always secretly wanted.

Anyone who pretends to write should resist the urge to write about events while they’re living them: that’s a devilish urge. Often what makes you write is something unexpected that sticks in your craw after the event. That said, sometimes life gets urgent and you have to write something down to sort your thoughts out. It’s hardly literature.

It was my father’s funeral today. As the Son, one is on display: everyone looks at you. I shook hands with old diplomats I recognised from when I was a child in various countries, and who didn’t recognise me, middle-aged and bald as I am.

Afterwards in the restaurant I ended up sat opposite his brother, who’s even better at pinpointing your shortcomings than my father was. Did he seek me out, in my vulnerable state? I knew he’d find me in any case and go for my throat: there’s something soft in me that he wants to kill. My hands were shaking when I walked to the church.

Despite myself I ended up laughing and getting swept up in his words. I’m used to sarcastic banter, but it’s something else with people like that. I’m a grownup now, I’ve been around, as much as him, but I still wasn’t strong enough to resist. They are too powerful, people like them, they have an answer for everything and make you feel like a child.

The funeral was nothing to him: this was a chance to assert himself like any other social gathering. He wasted no time telling us about the boards he sits on, about his villa and his Maserati, and how puny my work is. No one could get a word in edgeways, and if they did, he found their weak points straight away.

I often saw him and my father do that to normal people, saw their reactions and thought, Get away while you can. Sometimes I was almost proud of them: they could make people do anything.

Three men and two women around a niche pub game. The game of kings! In the White Lion, the centre of my world. I’ve defected from the team I joined when I moved back and helped form a new team. I’m known as Judas on the old team. So be it. Nate-Dawg and I wanted to get together a team in the old style, revive the spirit of bar billiards. We scrambled to get people together before the AGM.

We’re practising for the new season, getting to know each other between shots. We’ll get all the rubbish shots out of the way now, we agree. Four pints in and we start to play well. A thousand plus scores, holes in the red off the back cushion. Good angles. Everything’s flowing, including the banter: a mix of praise and insults, as is the way. We’re coming for the old-timers in division one, we agree. New blood! The team spirit grows. This is a new bar billiards era, we agree. It’s almost a spiritual thing. It’s a community thing.

There are six pubs with billiards tables, and each pub has two or three teams with more or less amusing names. Each team has a captain. The competition is fierce. The team constellations change as players retire and new enthusiasts join. There are people of all ages, from all walks of life: tradesmen, businesspeople, academics, brewers, foreign students, council officers, tree surgeons, driving instructors, me…

At the AGM arcane rules are discussed, hands are raised, new teams are announced and schedules are set. The winning team in division one sets the agenda and leads the meeting. The laymen drinkers at the bar look over and wonder what’s happening.

What’s happening is democracy in action! This is Athens reborn, the Pnyx in the Rose! A dynamic, self-organising community. And pints, lots of pints! Nate-Dawg, captain of the White Lion Manes, gets highfalutin when he announces our new team: we’re all the custodians of this game, he says, and we want to keep it alive. A few nods, general agreement. I’m proud of him, our skipper.

My father died today. I was in the Subway in Anglia Square when my mother rang and told me. I was eating at the window. Pop music was playing. Buses rumbled by. A drunk was sitting across the street next to Poundland waving his hands. I’d finished my work and done my errands. I was feeling free.

At first it’s just information. You hear some words and answer them; I was still thinking about where to find a lampshade for the living room. I got up and walked down the street. My limbs felt weak. To passers-by I must have looked angry. I was self-conscious. I thought, we’re so busy judging each other but you never truly know what’s in the other’s head. Miserable thought. I ended up walking through various alleys I used to take as shortcuts to pubs, then down Marriott’s Way, along the path the tree surgeons have cleared by the river, across the footbridge, down the dirt path behind Aldi, across the carpark, up the hill and down through the streets to my house. A long, roundabout walk.

I’ve tried to prepare myself for this for a long time: the day he’d be gone at last. I was never naïve enough to think it would be a relief, but how do you prepare for something that’s never happened to you before? How often didn’t I tell myself he was a bad man? How often didn’t I wish him dead? So what was I trying to steady myself for? That his death wouldn’t make a difference to me, that he was in my head either way.

This is an odd kind of grief. My mother says his face was white and his mouth was open; if they don’t get there in time, they can’t close it. If they offer to open the coffin at the funeral, she says, don’t do it. I won’t mind that, I say, that would be the least of it. And you know they do all sorts of things at the morgue to make them look normal.

Without language we’d be dumb animals, everyone knows that. We form and deform ourselves in our words. This blog is an example of it. There’s a dignity in being able to speak, to write. Something happens when words come out of people’s mouths. The simplest phrase can make things happen and all of a sudden history has a new score, as the poet said. But words can just as easily obscure everything, cover things over. We’re violent in our nature – we wouldn’t have wiped out all our humanoid rivals and come to dominate the planet otherwise – and our language, our habitual ways of speaking reflects it. So how to trust our own words when they’re by nature self-serving?