Technology

Once upon a time, post was delivered by a postman or postwoman. Over the past two centuries, this quaint initiative augmented a sense of community and invested early mornings with at least fleeting human contact. These days, decades after the slow demise of letter writing, a postman is now a rather recherché figure and, thanks to Royal Mail price hikes, a symbol of luxury, despite the downgrading of his once resplendent red and blue woollen frockcoat for a synthetic combo including all-weather shorts. More and more, post – which we’re now encouraged to call ‘mail’ on the principle that all Americanisms are good – means the harvest of our online

In search of coffee on my way to work the other day, I stopped short mid-way into a branch of a popular coffee shop when I noticed the digital ordering screens. Nothing will lose my business faster than being asked to queue twice and do the work of someone else for something simple. But these ordering screens seem to be becoming ubiquitous in our towns and cities, forcing those of us who have actually come into the office, likely to sit in front of a screen, to spend our lunchtimes also staring at a screen scrolling through options, when there is an actual human being standing behind a counter a

From emails to ‘breaking news’ alerts to texts, our phones come under a bombardment of notifications these days. But there’s one kind that always brightens my day – the one that tells me that a friend has sent me a voice note. This, however, seems to make me unusual. ‘I don’t want to hear your mini-podcast,’ complains Emma Brockes in the Guardian; voice notes are ‘self-indulgent’, sniffs Anniki Sommerville in the i Paper; and the Independent’s Lucie Tobin denounces them as ‘rude’ and ‘invasive’. In the latest issue of The Spectator, Mary Killen advises a correspondent who’s had enough of them to update their WhatsApp profile ‘to clarify their tastes… “please do not leave

In Isaac Asimov’s 1956 short story ‘The Last Question’, characters ask a series of questions to the supercomputer Multivac about whether entropy – the universe’s tendency towards disorder, and the second law of thermodynamics – can be reversed. Multivac repeatedly responds ‘INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR MEANINGFUL ANSWER’, until the ending, which I won’t spoil here. If I were to put the same question into ChatGPT, it would be a very different story. I’d likely get some fawning pleasantries, some ooh-ing and aah-ing about how deep and wise my enquiry is, before a long, neatly bulleted summary, rounded off by a request for further engagement (‘Let me know if you want to

I’ve been having trouble with my phone recently. I noticed it particularly while in France a few weeks ago. I’d flop on the sunbed with a book and then spend half an hour scrolling through ridiculous videos online. But then I do it at home, too – go to bed early thinking ‘Ooh good, nice early night with my book’. And then I see a video of a dog jumping into a swimming pool, or a chef cooking a Japanese omelette, or someone removing blackheads from their nose, or a clip of something that might be a cake but also might be a shoe, or someone else offering an improbable

Everyone’s seen stories about the creep of AI into art of all kinds. Recently the people behind the music-fabrication website Suno have been making outrageous statements to the effect that people don’t enjoy learning musical instruments and writing their own songs, so why not let AI do it for them? This is very new, very disturbing and very consequential. I could talk about graphic art and video and film-making, but you’ll know what’s been going on there. I’ll just cut to the chase and get to how AI tools are impacting and will continue to impact the writing of fiction.  I anticipate a future in which human authorship will need to be proven. A

It was a line on Poker Face (the excellent US detective drama currently streaming on Now TV) that piqued my interest. Hunched over a laptop, Natasha Lyonne’s heroine, Charlie Cale, claimed to be working as a ‘Captcha technician’ – someone who solves those fiddly, occasionally infuriating internet puzzles for money. You know – the ones that ask you to ‘Select all the squares with traffic lights’, ‘Select all the squares with bridges’ or simply tick a box to say you’re human before you can log into a website. Given the series has satirised everything from New York City rent controls to multi-level marketing schemes, I originally assumed it must be a joke.

Ordering things online can be a lottery. You can’t touch, smell or taste the product you’re buying, so it’s hard to know whether you’ll actually want it when it arrives. But we keep clicking anyway because it’s more convenient than trudging to the shops and things are often cheaper. For me, another reason to order online is the dash of childlike joy it brings to my to life when I click ‘buy’ and instantly set up a future treat. In fact, it’s even better than childhood because now I can have a parcel to open any day I want, not just on birthdays and Christmas. But most of all, I