Here are pieces of flotsam found in the stagnant pool of my mind.

You can’t move nowadays without tripping over two vowels yoked together in the name of progress. No prizes for guessing those letters.

Great things are being promised in the name of artificial intelligence (AI). Putting a search in Google brought up the following:

“Artificial intelligence refers to the ability of computer systems to perform tasks that typically require human intelligence. According to a BBC article, these tasks include learning, reasoning, problem-solving, perception, and decision-making…”

That was how artificial intelligence explained artificial intelligence to me – a sort of tech version of mansplaining. Tech-splaining, perhaps.

In a sense I don’t know enough to be writing this, but such a deficiency doesn’t bother others, including our government which is setting great store by AI. Something we don’t fully understand is going to perform miracles of efficiency, apparently.

Perhaps it will; perhaps it won’t.

I worry we are being oversold something that isn’t finished yet. And fret that many of those doing the selling are US tech bros, a cold clan who already seduced us with social media, upending the world and in the process hoarding all the available money; or much of it, at least.

Are we willing to trust them all over again – and what are they going to take as their reward this time?

My other doubts lie in the admittedly small matter of my first novel, which was among those appropriated by Meta without permission or reward. An investigation by The Atlantic magazine in March revealed that Meta “may have accessed millions of pirated books and research papers through LibGen – Library Genesis – to train its generative AI (Gen-AI) system, Llama,” according to the BBC.

I typed in my title, and there it was, nicked.

Our own government seems dangerously relaxed about American tech companies conducting a smash-and-grab raid on the creative vaults, all to train their AI systems.

The word processing system I type this on also interrupts me all the time, asking if I’d like help writing. No thanks – I know how to write, and even if I don’t, those are my mistakes to make, my own stumble towards something complete and human made.

Then again, on the BBC news just now was a breathless report about switching on the UK’s most powerful supercomputer. It’s called the Isambard-AI machine and apparently hails a new age of artificial intelligence. A surgeon interviewed praised the medical work of AI, adding that his job might not exist in the same way in the future.

Incidentally, I am rereading my three Rounder Brothers novels as I am trying to find a way to bring them back. They were written long enough ago for me to have half-forgotten the plot, as it were. Some parts seem good; others leave me wondering why did I write that? No artificial intelligence was used in writing those novels, just the rusty old-fashioned sort.

 

KEIR Starmer was foolish to suspend seven of his more left-wing MPs last year; and now he’s banished four more, again for ideological insubordination.

He’d do better to keep MPs who disagree with him onside; and to admit that perhaps sometimes they might have a point. But no, it’s the naughty step for them.

It’s one problem with what some describe as Labour’s ‘loveless majority’. Last year’s general election saw a whopping win for Labour, yet no-one much seems to like them. As it happens, I mostly think they’re doing an OK job compared to what went before.

But having so many MPs does allow Starmer to make an example of those who step out of line; a small majority would make such bullying behaviour unwise.

York Central MP Rachael Maskell is one of the recently expunged MPs; her ‘sin’ was to have led a rebellion against disability benefit cuts.

I don’t know Rachael, but she is my MP, and we have met on the doorstep. She seems to be serious-minded and not someone you would recklessly call light-hearted. Yet she is hard-working, principled, willing to stick to her beliefs, and a good local MP.

She knocked on our door while electioneering last year. She had time for a chat, was pleasant, listened, and spoke like a normal person, not a party robot.

Making this hardworking Labour MP sit as an independent seems shameful and a little stupid. If an election were called tomorrow, Rachael would probably keep her seat, and Labour would be down another one.

 

Here I am, cycling to the university for a game of squash (result foretold, as usual). On the iron girder bridge in Holgate, a woman whizzes past as I am about to signal right. Oh, she’s on one of those cheating electric bicycles, I think. But no – turns out she is using those cheating young legs, the ones that don’t get tired. I follow her for a while but soon she is a bobbing speck on the horizon, rushing to wherever it is that young women on bicycles go in such a hurry. There is a metaphor in here somewhere, one that I will leave unturned.

Even younger legs now in a small family story. That same morning the alarm went off at 6.20am at our daughter’s house. She asked her own daughter, heading for three, if she’d go to work for her instead. The little one got out of bed so that she could stand to her full height and deliver her indignant rely: “Just look at the size of my legs. They’re teeny.”