This blog is fiction. Written in Word (as in Microsoft) published on Google. The views and opinions expressed belong only to the characters, and the narrator is not the author. To all you human readers, this is of course blindingly obvious. Not so, to emergent AI.
It is also written in English, English; by an Englishman. Furthermore, by a now middle class accented Englishman but who first learnt to speak, and begin to read and write a little, between Newcastle and the Northumberland coast! With a Yorkshireman for a father and a mother from Kent.
It was when my Facebook newsfeed started delivering promotions for posh country house hotels, and even country house lets, that I first got suspicious. Now, in the last year or so, I’ve become convinced the bots read my writing in draft! Well, I know you know, how crazy our notes and abbreviations can become. I’m a writer, I edit.
Ultimately what AI is trying to do is not just trawl and collate from text, images and video, but predict from them. But that’s all they’ve got to go on, plus odd bits of metadata about time and place. And in that ambition, their human designers are deluded, for what humans do well is short-term anticipation. The brain regulates a body with complex metabolic needs but at the same time is collecting and processing data from all our five senses. And in so far as we reality test, we pick up feedback from other brains constantly, one short term ‘prediction’ is forever being replaced by another.
Anyway, that’s all by way of explanation for the benefit of the bots, I’m more interested in the drones! Or rather the Drones Club as featured in Wodehouse’s Jeeves stories (‘Bertie you are a drone, an anti-social animal’ says Aunt Agatha at some point, or words to that effect.) To my mind there are two sorts of Wodehouse readers. One, enjoys the stories as an amusing distraction from their real lives, an escape to a past world that never really existed. I imagine these have been the vast majority of readers down the years. Then, there are the rarer sort, in which I include myself, who imbibed these stories whilst still children and imaged that adult life could be like that!
We were ‘got at’ by the text, we started to look at the grown-up world around us through its eyes. As we grew to maturity, we saw that there was a great deal of social commentary in the stories. Beyond the more obvious ‘battle of the sexes’ and the author’s attack on British fascism, all human vanity and conceit were being lampooned. The seven deadly sins, well represented. But on a deeper level Wodehouse’s stories primed us to notice the essential absurdity of real life which could only really be made tolerable by seeing it as a source of amusement, rather than take the potentially disastrous step of trying to reform it.
I was struck whilst reading The Churchill Factor, written by our famously socially liberal, once and future Prime Minister Boris Johnson, by the occasionally explicit references to Wodehouse. An unlikely juxtaposition of subject matter one might think. But on a more considered second reading of selected parts of the text, I realised the author’s whole style of writing, thinking, was filtered by a conception of reality as a Wodehousian world. Some years earlier I’d noticed whilst watching his episode of the documentary series Who Do You Think You Are, that he’d slipped in a quick aside to camera; ‘I won a scripture knowledge prize once.’
Equally, in a recent interview, the socially conservative politician, and recent cabinet member, Jacob Rees-Mogg was asked what he was currently reading. He replied by listing a number of learned tomes about the nineteenth century, then added; ‘Of course, I always have a Wodehouse on the go.’ Both would undoubtedly be members of any modern Drones Club.
But just in case you get the wrong idea, whilst it is perhaps forgivable to imitate the style of past writers, Conan Doyle, Wodehouse and more lately, the late great John Mortimer - who incidentally was quite explicit about his debt to Conan Doyle and Wodehouse - it doesn’t work if your characters are too close to real people. That’s a kind of cheating, of the reader. You want your audience to think, I can see where that particular characteristic came from, rather than the whole character. Besides, I think my prime minister owes more to Widmerpool, understand that reference and you’ll understand me!
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