Machines Like Me

At the Royal Free Hospital in London a seventy-four-year-old retired coal miner was cured of severe arthritis when a culture of his stem cells was injected just below his kneecaps. Six months later he ran a mile in under eight minutes. A teenage girl had her sight restored by similar means. It was the golden age of the life sciences, of robotics – of course, and of cosmology, climatology, mathematics and space exploration. There was a renaissance in British film and television, in poetry, athletics, gastronomy, numismatics, stand-up comedy, ballroom dancing, and wine-making. It was the golden age of organised crime, domestic slavery, forgery and prostitution. Various forms of crises blossomed like tropical flowers: in childhood poverty, in children’s teeth, in obesity, house and hospital building, police numbers, in teacher recruitment, in the sexual abuse of children. The best British universities were among the most prestigious in the world. A group of neuroscientists at Queen’s Square, London, claimed to understand the neural correlates of consciousness. In the Olympic Games, a record number of gold medals. Natural woodland, heaths and wetlands were vanishing. Scores of species of birds, insects and mammals were close to extinction. Our seas teemed with plastic bags and bottles but the rivers and beaches were cleaner. Within two years, six Nobel Prizes were won in science and literature by British citizens. More people than ever joined choirs, more people gardened, more people wanted to cook interestingly. If there ever was a spirit of the times, the railways caught it best. The prime minister was fanatical about public transport. From London Euston to Glasgow Central, the trains tore along at half the speed of a passenger jet. And yet: the carriages were packed, the seats too close together, the windows opaque with grime, the stained upholstery smelled foul. And yet: the non-stop journey took seventy-five minutes.

Global temperatures rose. As the air in the cities became cleaner, the temperature rose faster. Everything was rising – hopes and despair, misery, boredom and opportunity. There was more of everything. It was a time of plenty.

I calculated that my earnings from online trading were just below the national average wage. I should have been content. I had my freedom. No office, no boss, no daily commute. No hierarchies to climb. But inflation was at seventeen per cent. I was at one with an embittered workforce. We were all getting poorer by the week. Before Adam’s arrival I had been on marches, an imposter as I followed behind proud trade union banners up Whitehall to speeches in Trafalgar Square. I wasn’t a worker. I made or invented or serviced nothing and gave nothing to the common good. Moving figures around on my screen, looking for quick gains, I contributed as much as the chain-smoking fellows outside the betting shop on the corner of my street.

On one march, a crude robot made of dustbins and tin cans was hanged from a gibbet by Nelson’s Column. Benn, the keynote speaker, gestured at it from the platform and condemned the conception as Luddite. In an age of advanced mechanisation and artificial intelligence, he told the crowd, jobs could no longer be protected. Not in a dynamic, inventive, globalised economy. Jobs-for-life was old hat. There were boos and slow hand-clapping. Many in the crowd missed what came next. Flexibility at work had to be combined with security – for all. It wasn’t jobs we had to protect, it was the well-being of workers. Infrastructure investment, training, higher education and a universal wage. Robots would soon be generating great wealth in the economy. They must be taxed. Workers must own an equity share in the machines that were disrupting or annihilating their jobs. In a crowd that spilled across the square, right up the steps to the doors of the National Gallery there was a baffled near-silence, with scattered applause as well as catcalls. Some thought that the prime minister herself had said much the same thing, minus the universal credit. Had the new Leader of the Opposition been turned by his membership of the Privy Council, by a visit to the White House, by tea with the Queen? The rally broke up in a mood of confusion and despondency. What most people remembered, what made the headlines, was that Tony Benn had told his supporters that he didn’t care about their jobs.

An enlightened Transport and General Workers Union would not have been tempted by shares in Adam. He produced even less than me. I at least paid tax on my meagre profit. He idled about the house, staring into the middle distance, ‘thinking’.

‘What are you doing?’

‘I’m pursuing certain thoughts. But if there’s something I can help with—’

‘What thoughts?’

‘Difficult to put into words.’

I confronted him at last, two days after Mark’s visit. ‘So, the other night. You made love to Miranda.’

I’ll say this for his programmers. He looked startled. But he said nothing. I hadn’t asked a question.