The A to Z Challenge or the April month of madness as I usually think of it, has been a little less mad for me this year – I had about 12 posts ready ahead of time and managed to stay ahead until the letter X when I pantsed it but also wrote Y and Z ahead of the last days – a sprint to the finish!
I wrote about 16,600 words up to today, not including comments both replying to those who kindly visited, and I try never to leave any comment un-replied to! But then there are the visits back which sometimes elicited quite long comments on my part – because I hate just visiting back as an excuse to leave my blog post link – and in any case there were some very interesting posts that richly deserved a fulsome comment!
But what really marks my experience of each and every year of my four years of participating in the challenge, is the friends that either re-connect or, in the case of this year, the entirely new group of friends that have returned regularly throughout the month. Perhaps the nature of my theme attracts different people, perhaps the posts by those visiting, elicited more visits from me. The WordPress App was replaced by Jetpack and I soon found myself subscribed to a list of bloggers who participate in multiple challenges simultaneously and so, as well as the A to Z posts, I found my notifications full of poems, photographs and excitingly, some AI generated images. There is so much talk at present about AI that I have decided to try and keep the momentum of blog posting going, with a personal evaluative exploration of AI for both text and image creation at the end of which I hope to be able to express an informed opinion about whether we are likely to be under the thumb of AI or released from tedious labours…
I will be reviewing some of the wonderful bloggers I have met this year in my Roadtrip reviews so I hope you will stop by for that – I don’t know about you, but there is nobody whose every post I managed to visit and definitely some I want to fill in the gaps with!
As to my own writing experience, the posts certainly developed a life of their own, demanding much more research and crafting than I imagined as I built a list of possible phrases. But that work seemed to have pleased judging by the latter day comments which makes it worthwhile. There were only two posts that received no comments and one of those “X” manages to illustrate a Roman pagan festival with a pop video from Meghan Traynor of which I am quite proud, so if you missed it… Admittedly, by X and Y, I think everyone is suffering a little blog-fatigue! There was also the great article from Wikipedia on Cant Languages from which all about four letters were furnished with languages…
Did I have a favourite – well I could only narrow it down to four – M, N, Q and R…
Back in “J” for jiggered, we encountered modifying a word slightly to make it more socially acceptable and today with Zounds! We have an expression that may have changed through running the words together rather than deliberately disguising them Zounds is short for “God’s wounds” and similarly Blimey or Cor Blimey is for “God Blind Me” both of which are taking the Lord’s name in vain – not even recognised in current usage as swear words let alone as having a religious significance! Even Lordy is taking the Lord’s name in vain… Bloody – a very common swear word is short for the blood of Christ and is compounded in one of my mother’s favourite expressions of frustration “Hells Bells and Buckets of Blood!” which after our trip to Australia in 1968, where they use bloody with gay abandon, became “Hells Bells and Buckets of Bloody Blood!”
The Wikipedia article on Cant Languages became a feature of this year’s A to Z theme ever since writing about Cockney rhyming slang and I hope you have clicked through to a few. There is one language listed for Z but there is no article on it…
So there you have it, another year of A to Z letters completed – but there will be a Reflections post and I will start the Road trip by reviewing this year’s frequent flyers in my comment sections for which I thank you all and I hope you enjoyed it!
Today we get 2fer (two for one) or even a bogof (buy one get one free) because a Yard of Tripe – Cockney rhyming slang for Pipe, is accompanied by the similar Yard of Clay – which is a reference to the very long clay pipes smoked in past centuries – presumably the long pipe stem allowed the smoke to cool down before entering the mouth… The Yard of Tripe is more fun because it not only references the length of the pipe, but tripe is in itself a pipe – part of the stomach offal – clever Cockneys!
I may be wrong, and American advertising has moved on from the “This is the product – buy me for $x at such and such shop!” but on this side of the pond we have long since had a different, dare I say more sophisticated approach to advertising. If anything, a little American clarity would sometimes not go amiss! British ads can sometimes leave you guessing until the very end, what the heck they are selling and sometimes you are still not the wiser! However, certain catch-phrases coming from ads, have made it into popular usage eg. (Ronseal Garden Paint) “Does what it says on the tin!”(L’Oreal cosmetics) “Because you are worth it…” (Nike) “Just do it!” (Burger King) “Have it your way…” and wherever there’s a Burger King – McDonald’s must surely follow “I’m Lovin’ It” (Apple) “Think Different” The great thing about all these slogans is that they are catchy and adaptable to all sorts of situations in life and thus the catch-phrases give greater longevity to the ad and the brand.
The same thing happens with some plays or poems (from House of Cards – Francis Urquhart’s catchphrase) “You may think that but I couldn’t possibly comment!”
And then there are all those Shakespeare phrases I discussed in the “H” post…
There are no Cant Languages beginning with Y today – from the Wikipedia article…
The A to X Challenge is a form of Abercadarium and it is a testament to the imagination of the many bloggers who participate, that they manage to find twenty-six words each year, with which to furnish their blogs. Yet every year, depending on the theme, each blogger will struggle to fulfil certain letters but if there is one letter of the alphabet which almost always challenges – it is X… So I shall not be surprised to see a bit of cheating nor feel guilty to use the silent E in EX to resolve this dilemma for myself – after all, I am not just searching for a word, but for a whole phrase – and one that we know the meaning of but have forgotten the origin of!
But first, with no cheating, The Xmas Tree, whilst not quite a phrase, is something whose origins have certainly been forgotten – perhaps for good reason… Christmas, Xmas, and Yule-tide is the second most important festival in the Christian calendar – the birth of Christ coming second after the Easter festival which “celebrates” his death. The death of Christ and the symbolic meaning of it, is arguably the reason why the spread of Christianity has been so successful – God first gave, then sacrificed His only son for the sake of sinful mankind – it’s a powerful story but equally important in the acceptance of Christianity, has been its strategy of incorporating local, existing festivals wherever it has gone, and one of the first examples of this is Rome and the Romans who adopted Christianity under Emperor Constantine in an “if you can’t beat them join them” way. One of the Roman festivals which came near enough he date (somewhat arbitrarily fixed) on which Christians celebrated the birth of Christ, was the carrying of a Pine log through the streets to the Temple of Magna Mater ( Big Momma?) in memory of the goddess’ consort Attis. In the same way that Christianity subsumed other religious traditions, the worship of Magna Mater came to Rome from Greece and in turn, probably, from Phrygia.
The Goddess Cybele, is said to have found the infant Attis, in a basket in a reed bed (similar to the discovery of Moses) and raised him like a mother, to be her consort and priest for which he made a vow of chastity, to look at no other female than Cybele. He broke this vow with a nymph making Cybele so angry that she cast Attis out and mortified, he committed suicide by castration, bleeding out under a pine tree and being transformed into one himself. Cybele now relented her anger and brought Attis back to life and, having learned his lesson, Attis remained in faithful service to her (and who wouldn’t!).
A cult of Galli, meaning half-men, grew up around Attis in which priests ritually, and ecstatically castrated themselves and there is some suggestion that this was a trans-gender cult. This did not go down well with the Romans for whom castration, rather sensibly, was illegal. The logs carried through the streets by the Romans were adorned with an image of Attis dressed in women’s clothes – could this be the origin of the “fairy” atop the later Christmas tree? The Arbor Festival of which the Pine Log carrying was part, took place in March and is part of the coming of spring since Cybele was seen as the goddess of fertility and rebirth (and Attis’s resurrection) but may have been subsumed by Christianity as part of the turn of the year timing of Christmas.
Almost from the beginning of Christianity, the celebration of Christmas was criticised for its materialism and the more austere the variant of Christianity, the more it was criticised although it is said that Martin Luther, the reforming founder of Protestantism, was the first to bring a Christmas tree indoors and adorn it with candles after walking at night under a starry studded sky – certainly the tradition of the Xmas tree grew until its Victorian apogee with candles, baubles, tinsel and presents stashed beneath it…
Extras – here are a couple of phrases that I thought of too late for the date of posting their letter! Booting up (your computer) goes back to the 19th-century book “The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen” by Rudolf Erich Raspe based loosely on a real explorer renowned for his telling of tall tales (hence Munchausen Syndrome). In one story he claimed to have climbed to the moon by pulling first on one boot bootstrap, raising his foot, and then on the other. Computers use a tiny operating system called the BIOS to start the underlying machine code operating system DOS, which finally starts your main operating system, say Windows or Linux – hence bootstrapping – now abbreviated to booting up!
Giving free rein to something – obvious when you think about it but most people are so far removed from the age of horses as a means of transport, that we may have forgotten that the reins are the steering wheel of a horse and so when you give a horse free reign, you are allowing it to find and pick it’s own way – perhaps because the ground is difficult and the horse knows best where to place its feet…
EXpelliarmus is the “Disarming Spell” from Harry Potter and whilst it is necessary to invent some Latin-sounding names for spells in such a book, some authors go as far as to invent whole languages for their books – I am thinking of J R Tolkien in particular where such languages reside in Appendices to his books. Of course, Tolkien was a Professor of Middle English at Oxford so he certainly had the skill to make such inventions but did they add anything to the books? Well, there are phrases spoken by say the Elves followed, mercifully, by the translation, but was it necessary to invent the whole language? I think not and I always skipped over those appendices. And what about those authors who put foreign language phrases and don’t follow them with the translation – how elitist is that!!! Of course, there are a few nerds who have fleshed out and talk Klingon (StarTrek) to each other at nerd fests and who knows – maybe there are would-be Elves whispering sibilantly to each other in Tolkien’s elvish tongue. But I think of the dwarves, elves, hobbits and orcs as archetypes of human nature rather than literal races who require a language inventing for them. Lots of science fiction and other fiction manage to put contemporary language into the mouths of their characters to perfectly good effect for the reason that the books are addressing a modern audience. Anyway, that’s my little rant over…
The Cant languages we have been showcasing from the Wikipedia article on that subject, are, on the other hand, perfectly justified because they are to defend one group from the eavesdropping of another and today we have just one:
Wednesday, Friday etc. are linguistic reminders of Britains many waves of invaders leading to the mongrel people and mongrel language of which we are so proud (whilst still using the dog-whistle of Immigration to try and rouse the right to support the current government).
Wednesday come from Wotan’s Day (Head Honcho of the Norse Gods who was brought to us by the Vikings), Thursday – Thor’s Day and Friday (now reduced or is it elevated to a celluloid Superhero), Friday is for the Goddess Freia. Saturday is for the Roman god Saturn ( they too invaded Britain!). Sunday is for the Sun and Monday for the Moon which are fairly obvious, but Tuesday is supposed to be referencing the Roman God and planet Mars and the derivation of Tuesday from Mars is less obvious…
To “Walk the Chalk” means to behave according to the rules and comes from the sobriety test whereby a policeman requires someone suspected of being drunk, to walk a straight line.
Officer Rueben Morales, Universal City Police Department helps Mark Tharp walk a straight line while wearing fatal vision goggles June 4, 2014 during the Critical Days of Summer event at Joint Base San Antonio-Randolph. These goggles give the individual a view of how things are seen after alcohol consumption. (U.S. Air Force photo by Joel Martinez)
Winging it – this is the expression I always used used to use for “making it up as you go along” UNTIL my first A to Z Challenge in 2023 when I picked up an alternative – Pantsing It! I have used it ever since! This year I have managed to stay ahead of the game – so far… But the origin of the expression “Winging it”, comes from the Wing-walkers – those derring-do entertainers who performed stunts on the top wing of biplanes in the 1920s and 30s – imagine the Risk Assessments if you tried to do that today…
www.rarehistoricalphotos.com
A Whistlestop Tour is an American expression where many small towns were connected by rail before even road – may even have come into being because of the building of the railways. They were however, too small to have a scheduled halt and only stopped if they were requested to by a signal and they blew their whistle to announce their impending arrival and let potential passengers to get to the station – hence Whistlestop. Campaigning Politicians in America, often travelled around by train and at tiny whistlestop towns, would not even alight from the train but instead, make their speech from the balcony which train carriages had in those days – a Whistlestop Tour…
By Unknown author or not provided – U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=16532272
There is no Cant language beginning with W from the Wikipedia article…
Always a difficult letter “V” plus at this stage in the A to Z I am only 2 posts away from “pantsing it” so forgive me if this post is a little briefer than normal…
Winston Churchill giving his Victory V sign
English singer-songwriter and entertainer Robbie Williams does the reversed V sign at a paparazzo photographer in London in 2000
Winston Churchill’s iconic V-sign – meaning V for Victory, is a sanitised version of the V-sign going back to the Battle of Agincourt and the days of the great English Long Bow-men. So effective were these bowmen both in terms of accuracy and power – being able to rain down armour-piercing arrows on the enemy – so the French threatened that if they caught the English bowmen, they would cut off their first two fingers – the ones used to draw their bow and so, as two lines of soldiers faced each other across no-mans-land, the English bowmen would wave their first and second fingers in a V-sign to show that they were still armed (or fingered) and dangerous. The true V-sign is delivered by raising your forearm smartly to the vertical, fingers spread, brandishing a V whereas Winston Churchill held up his Victory V palm forward in a respectable but recognizable reference to the classic gesture.
Under the weather – yet another sailor’s term! You have to remember that in the days of wooden sailing ships, the crew were mostly barefoot (which is why the deck had to be sanded free of splinters every day) and except in voyages to regions of extreme cold, or during storms when they had some kind of waterproof outfit, they were not very well dressed either. On the plus side, once they had left the land, they were free of infectious diseases like colds and flu – what they picked up whilst in port is another matter. However, sailors did get sick and they usually got sent to recuperate below deck – literally, under the weather…
Upper case / Lower case – I began a career in graphics (among other things) at school where I joined the printing society – who printed the programmes for plays and concerts as well as posters using the large woodblock type that is now mostly seen in antique shops. It has been a strand in my career ever since and I have just made my first foray into AI – an evaluative exploration which I will be continuing once the madness of April A to Z is over. We printed with lead type which was kept in those compartmented drawers which are also beloved of antique shops and turned into glass-fronted showcases for knick-knacks. The capital letters were kept in one drawer marked Upper Case whilst the Lower Case letters were in the drawer beneath – simples!
Lest you think I have made a spelling mistake and missed off the “H” or am affecting a Cockney accent and dropping the “H”, Umble pie, is a pie made from Umbles which include very cheap cuts of meat and in particular – offal – heart, liver, kidneys, tripe, sweetmeats, lungs and thoroughly washed intestines. Such a pie is the food is, of course, the food of the poor who may well also be humble. The word humble comes from the Latin humilis meaning lowly, close to the earth. The two words – humble, and umble – are conflated in the expression “He was made to eat (h)umble pie.” He was humbled and forced to admit the error of his ways. I blame the confusion between humble and umble fairly and squarely on that obsequious creation of Charles Dickens in David Copperfield – “Uriah Heep” – an inveterate dropper of “h’s” whose catchphrase was “I’m ever so umble…”
Another sailing term, but this time to do with small boat sailing (although big sailing ships might well have sailed tenders). The sheets mean the ropes which are attached to the sails, so in a sailing dinghy that means two ropes, one each port and starboard and the same for the mainsail. Now you want to coil up the sheets which are not actually in use at any moment so that they don’t get tangled up with anything and are ready for the next time you change course and swap the sails from one side to the other. So if you are “Three Sheets to the Wind”, then you are hardly in control of your sailing craft – sheets blowing free bar one only a drunken sailor would be so sloppy – so three sheets to the wind means drunk, out of control…
Truffle Out refers to the way truffles – the underground fruiting bodies of the truffle fungus – are located by either a Truffle Hound or perhaps a Truffle Pig – animals which are trained to locate these expensive delicacies – of course, they are rewarded with a small portion of their finds to keep them keen… In current usage, it reflects a slightly gentle, indulgent form of searching for something, not the logic of Sherlock Holmes or the sharp no-nonsense of Philip Marlowe but possibly Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot…
Tarnation is the outlier of a group of religious swear words that we shall return to in “Z” but here we have, according to the Online Etymological Dictionary, “1784, American English alteration of darnation (itself a euphemism for damnation), influenced by tarnal (1790), a mild profanity, clipped from the phrase by the Eternal (God)” Etymology is a fancy word for what this blog has been attempting to do this year – to truffle out the meaning and origin of words and phrases…
“Tits up!” is a delightful phrase which my partner and I grew to love from binge-watching “The Marvellous Mrs Maisel” a fictional, Jewish, New York, wise-cracking comedienne. She might have been fictional but several of the characters in the drama were real – Lenny Bruce for one and Miriam Maisel’s agent Susie Myerson, who specialised in female clients and always sent Miriam onstage with a robust admonition of “Tits up!” This is used as an expression for things going wrong and taps into the superstitious world of the stage in which “Break a leg!” serves the same purpose – the ritual wishing of the worst that might happen to someone wards off the possibility of it actually happening. There was me thinking for years that if you slipped backwards on a banana skin – a Pratfall – you would land tits up…
On Tenterhooks refers to the hooks that line the sides of a tenter, or frame for stretching fabric. Wet fabric is stretched on the tenter and secured by the hooks with even tension and hopefully, all wrinkles will be stretched flat as the fabric dries. Of course, that means waiting to see whether you have pulled the fabric taut enough to get rid of the wrinkles, else you have to start again and that is how it has come to mean waiting on some desired outcome with trepidation. I always thought the expression was referring to the meat hooks on which gangsters like to hang those from whom they are trying to extract information (surely a perilous position in which to wonder about the outcome) – turns out those are just meat hooks…
When I was a child and asked my father where he was going, often, and I think it was more out of mischief, than to truly keep us in ignorance, he would say “To see a man about a dog!” As so often in this exploration of the origin of phrases that we know the usage of but have forgotten the origin of, we find multiple claims… This site lists some of the earliest recorded appearances in print (1865) and also includes the 1930’s cartoon below.
What is certain, is that the phrase became synonymous with signalling that you are going somewhere but you don’t want to specify where – anything from going to the toilet, going to an (illegal) speakeasy bar (America in the 1920s) and perhaps the original source of the expression – going to place a bet on a greyhound race.
With Spill the Beans, we are back with the ancient Greeks – the originators of Democracy. Voting in their parliament took place by choosing either a white or a black bean from a dish and placing it into a container and once everyone had voted, the beans would be spilt out and then counted – nothing to do with Heinz 57 Varieties!
Strike while the Iron is Hot has nothing to do with ironing a shirt and everything to do with Blacksmiths working their metal while it is still hot enough to be malleable, glowing red hot, because it takes longer to heat the piece up than the time it remains workable so you must work quickly and strike while the iron is hot…
Steal Someone’s Thunder comes from the failed Enlightenment playwright (and critic) John Dennis – whose first play was a failure, but one thing that appeared in it for the first time in the history of theatre was the thunder sheet – a large sheet of thin metal which when shaken, creates a realistic thunder sound. Later, the technique was used in a production of Shakespeare’s Macbeth so Dennis responded by saying “Damn them! They will not let my play run, but they steal my thunder!”
Swinging the lead – the Leadsman heaves the lead whilst standing on the fore-channel from “Sailing Round Cape Horn” by Gunther T. Schultz – an artist’s record of the last days of commercial sailing ships. 1954 – London – Hodder & Stoughton
Swinging the Lead takes us back to sailors and their expressions – as a ship moves through shallow water, the “leadsman” stands near the bow of the ship and throws a lead weight on the end of a line with knots marking the length of line which the leadsman counts up and calls out to the helmsman as he goes. The weight also has tallow on its base so that bits of the seabed may get picked up – sand, small shingle or if it is rocky, perhaps nothing – hence “Two fathoms by the head, sandy bottom!”. Swinging the lead was considered to be an easy job compared to those manning the sheets (ropes) or climbing up the rigging to haul in the sails. Physically easy it might be, but the speed and accuracy of the leadsman is vital to the safety of the ship. The picture above shows the original meaning of swinging the lead but the picture below shows what it came to mean – trying to have an easy day or night by pulling a sickie…
The skipper looks a bit ‘crossways’ at the sick sailor. He is not sure whether the man is malingering and working for a few nights unbroken sleep. At any rate, he prescribes a nice little glassful of castor-oil .from “Sailing Round Cape Horn” by Gunther T. Schultz – an artist’s record of the last days of commercial sailing ships. 1954 – London – Hodder & Stoughton
Shake a Leg is an earlier naval seaman’s term from the days of wooden warships. The regime and the enforcement of rules seem to have been very variable in the British Navy – at the discretion of the Captain and via his Officers then in some ships, especially on home leave at Portsmouth, the naval headquarters, WAGS (wives and “girlfriends”) were allowed not only to visit on board, but to sleep over with their sailor companions in their hammocks, a few ships even allowed such women to accompany voyages and may have had some other duties cooking or doing the washing, perhaps looking after the squeakers (young boys might start in the navy as young as eleven). However, even in port, duties abound and so the men in charge would move between the rows of hammocks calling the sailors to “wake up and shake a leg!” If a clearly feminine form was shaken over the edge of the hammock, then the owner of the leg was allowed to remain aslumber…
We have a good few Cant languages from the Wikipedia article today:
The origin of the word Robot, is the Czech word robota, meaning “forced labour”, from a Slavic root – rab, meaning “slave”. Herein lies much of our fear and angst when we consider the future of robots because Slave implies a Master and so slaves are capable of revolt – of turning against their masters…
The pursuit of developing robots, is that they might assist humans in doing jobs which are too difficult, dangerous or just too plain boring for humans – things which in the past, and even today – (think wage-slaves, modern slavery) – have been done by human slaves and so these fears have a foundation in fact – there have been many slave revolts!
The problem of creating robots is twofold – body, and mind. On the body side, we have long had Automatons – they range from say a music box which can play a tune, to the most sophisticated machines that are now being tested for their ability to play football. On the mind side, we have the quest for AI – Artificial Intelligence which is the subject of hot debate at present for reasons varying from “Will AI take our jobs away?” to “Will AI outgrow and destroy human beings?” which brings us back to the man who first coined the word robot in his play “R.U.R.” (which stands for “Rossum’s Universal Robots”) premiered in Prague in 1921, Karel Čapek. Like many of his generation, just out of the horrors of the First World War, Čapek was sceptical of the utopian benefits of science and technology – or rather the uses which human beings put those things. You can read a more detailed account of his play here. But what “R.U.R.” illustrates is that science fiction is the way we explore the possibilities and problems of what may be achieved in the development of robots and our relationship to them.
Starting with the body problem, long before the amazingly intricate creations of the 18th century with watchmaker ingenuity inside, the ancient Egyptians imbued statues with souls and the Greeks envisaged artificial men such as Talos But those later amazing mechanical figures who might play a tune on an inbuilt musical box, are only built to perform one task, albeit a potentially complex task and in this respect, modern technology has created many robots which assist us today without posing any threat except to the workers they superseded. Car plants use many robot arms to manufacture cars with greater strength, dexterity (programmed), speed and accuracy than the human beings who used to do the jobs. Still, without reprogramming, these robot arms do one thing only and their “intelligence” is limited to a programmable computer.
Turning to the issue of robotic minds – Artificial Intelligence is progressing in leaps and bounds, to use an anthropocentric metaphor – several people doing this year’s A to Z Challenge have experimented with AI including Misky who has used the AI graphic app Midjourney to create amazing illustrations for the poems she has posted – check out her site! She has talked about how many times she has to try and prompt the app in order to get these illustrations the way she wants them, tweaking the style and content descriptors and this shows that although the Midjourney app is incredibly powerful, it is still soft AI. The limitations of soft AI are best illustrated by Alexa the Amazon speaker app – instruct it thus “Alexa – tell me a joke!” and she will indeed tell you a joke, but then say “Alexa – tell me another…” and Alexa doesn’t know what you mean unless you specify “another joke”. Hard AI would be the kind which was truly capable of independently sentient thought, and we are some way off from that if Alexa is anything to go by. Alan Turing, imagining (stupendously) the future possibilities of AI devised the Turing Test in which an evaluator would hold two remote conversations, with a human being and with an AI and if they could not distinguish which was the AI, then it might be said to have truly intelligent behaviour. We may be approaching this watershed moment but I like to think that, writing this blog, for example, an AI would not be drawing out the ideas that I have – at least not without close supervision – anyway, I am going to do my own evaluative exploration of AI right here once the A to Z is finished, so watch this space…
The problem for designing robots which are indistinguishable from human beings, is how to cram an AI sizes computer into the body of a robot – Chat GPT can generate text which only another special app can discern to have been written by an AI, but the computers necessary to run ChatGPT are enormous and the miracle which is the human brain is most notable for its compact size – given it’s power. Nevertheless, there are many who are afraid that AI alone, without human-looking robots, can outmatch the human race and destroy it. Of course, we have many science fiction thought experiments to thank for that particular trope from Čapek’s “R.U.R.”, Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis”, through Asimov’s “I Robot”, My own favourite, “Bladerunner” and looming large in these debates about the dangers of rampant AI – the “Terminator” series of films.
(From left) Alfred Abel, Brigitte Helm, and Rudolf Klein-Rogge in Metropolis, directed by Fritz Lang, 1927. From a private collection.
In all these fictional considerations of the relationship between men and machines, different solutions are proposed to keeping the “robota -slaves” in check. Asimov came up with The Three Laws of Robotics –
First Law: A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
Second Law: A robot must obey orders given it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
Third Law: A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
These laws would be encoded into the AI controlling all robots at their inception and would be sacrosanct. This idea escaped the creators of the Terminator series robots whilst in Bladerunner, the manufacturers of the “replicants” had to build in auto-destruction of their products after a small number of years lest their self-learning robots get too big for their boots and turn on their creators – sensibly too, replicants were not allowed on Earth but only sent to do the typical jobs of slaves, out in space as miners, soldiers, builders – dirty, dangerous jobs. Ultimately, the Replicants in Philip K. Dick’s story, show us something about what it is to be human ( as all good science fiction does, if only because it is written by humans), at the end of the story, (spoiler alert) the human Bladerunner, charged with tracking down and destroying renegade Replicants who have made it to Earth in pursuit of getting their lifespans extended, is being dangled over the edge of a roof by the leader of the group of Replicants. Rutger Hauer, the actor who plays The Replicant Roy Batty, whilst dangling the Bladerunner, makes a speech which has become known as the ”Tears in the Rain monologue” as follows:
“I’ve seen things… seen things you little people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion bright as magnesium… I rode on the back decks of a blinker and watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments… they’ll be gone.”
Moments later he lifts the Bladerunner to safety just before his brain self-destructs – talk about saved by the bell! But of course, the Bladerunner -played by Harrison Ford, was saved by the robot/ replicant, perhaps out of mercy (a very human trait which the replicant might have developed) but perhaps in the hope that the Bladerunner might respond by trying to change things for Replicant To me this gets to the crux of being human – just when we are getting the hang of life, out time is up…
Incidentally, Rutger Hauer, not liking the lines that had been written for him, and with only a few minutes of shooting time left, famously improvised the “Tears in the Rain” monologue – kudos!
In our fears over the development of robots and AI, are we perhaps projecting our fears about our own human traits onto them, we aspired to create them to be our helpers, such as AI interpreting MRI scans more effectively than human beings, so why would we think that AI would want to destroy or enslave human beings (The Matrix)? Perhaps it’s because we human beings, given the chance, have all too often enslaved other human beings, abused, exploited and been ready to lynch them at the first sign of independence, let alone revolt. Do we need to take heed of the results of science fiction’s thought experiment warnings – of course we do! We should no more allow the unregulated development of AI any more than we would allow our children to play with loaded guns, but those regulations would be to keep in check the humans who would use AI, or rather misuse it. We should watch out for governments who want to create AI-powered weapons or control their people with ever more efficient propaganda – even before AI we are struggling to know what is true in the news. We have plenty to worry about in the humans – let alone AI and Robots. However, between regulation, commonsense, and perhaps most of all. the fact that AI might have learned lessons from the human mistakes that are messing up the planet, might we be pleasantly surprised to find that AIs assist us as they were intended to do, solving problems of the environment, working out how to operate an economy not based on permanent growth and war – might we be headed for Iain Banks’ “Culture” series rather than “Terminator”…
So one final sci-fi thought experiment from the great Marge Piercy – “He, She and It”, which goes to the question of what would happen if we could achieve hard AI and make it small enough to fit into an android-style (human shaped) robot. In an environmentally post-apocalyptic world, a woman is given the task of socialising just such an android, because Marge Piercy imagines that true sentience, as opposed to a glorified search engine, would require teaching and guiding as to what sense to make of the world – rather like a child. If she is right, then the great leap forward to hard AI, true sentience, would not be a runaway Terminator scenario, but a chance to imbueAI with the best qualities of human beings rather than the worst. Running through the book is the story of The Golem – a man made from mud and brought to”life” by Cabbalistic magic in order to protect the ghetto and in this story is that familiar warning of the dangers inherent in creating powerful androids which has echoed through speculative fiction ever since Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein”… “He, She and It” is such an amazing book that I am surprised that it has not been made into a movie…
So what do you believe will be the future of AI and Robots -slave, nemesis of the human race or willing and able helper?
And so lastly, to – as pernicious a law as humans could devise, The Rule of Thumb – another phrase that has disputed meanings. Some people imagine the Rule of Thumb to describe a readily available way of measuring things – an Inch is approximately equivalent to the breadth of the top joint of an adult thumb, but a ruling by Judge Francis Buller in 1782, allows that a man could legally beat his wife, as long as he used a stick that was no thicker than his thumb – see here. I suspect that those who favour the measuring theory and disparage the beating one, are men…
This Gillray cartoon of Judge Buller from 1782 shows ‘Judge Thumb’ selling sticks for wife-beating Bridgeman
The Cant languages from the Wikipedia article for the letter “R” are:
