Technology

Thursday

Lionel Shriver

I’ve been enslaved by my Apple watch

Aside from streaming on an iPad, one of the few entertainments on offer when riding a stationary bike is tracking your heart rate. Breaking 150 beats per minute provides a fleeting (and doubtless misplaced) sense of achievement. Yet the wearable heart monitor that came with my exercise bicycle proved unreliable; one’s BPM never truly drops from 137 to 69 in one second. This is to explain why I bought the fitness freak’s fetish: an Apple watch. Its heart-rate monitors are accurate. I opted for a reconditioned older model, not only half the price of the new ones but inclusive of the blood oximeter function, which a medical technology suit has

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

My portable charger obsession

A femtosecond, derived from the Danish word femte meaning ‘fifteen’, is a unit of time in the International System of Units equal to 10-15 or 1⁄1,000,000,000,000,000 of a second; in other words one quadrillionth, or one millionth of one billionth, of a second. A femtosecond is to a second as a second is to approximately 31.69 million years. Similarly, a femmosecond, from the French femme meaning ‘wife’, is a slightly briefer unit of time equivalent to the twinkling of an eye. It defines the imperceptibly fleeting interval between my wife saying ‘Rory, why on earth have you bought another portable charger?’ and my wife saying ‘Rory, could I borrow your

Damian Thompson Damian Thompson

How the occult captured the modern mind

The British science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, author of 2001: A Space Odyssey, proposed a ‘law of science’ in 1968: ‘Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.’ Clarke’s proposition had a quality of rightness, of stating the obvious with sparkling clarity, that propelled it into dictionaries of quotations. The timing was perfect: Concorde would soon be flying over rock festivals packed with hippies obsessed with ‘magick’. Naturally Clarke’s readers understood the difference between aerodynamics and sky gods. But African tribesmen gawping at an early aeroplane, or Pacific Islanders watching an atomic explosion, could only conclude that they were witnessing a supernatural event: for them, a scientific explanation was literally

Monday

Chas Newkey-Burden

In defence of voice notes

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

Thursday

Rosie Lewis

Phone-addicted yummy mummies are neglecting their children

As a foster carer and an adopter, I know what neglect looks like. I’ve looked after children who didn’t know what a bed was. Children who arrived at my door with matted hair, rotten teeth and eyes that scanned every room for danger. Neglect smells of mildew and unwashed clothes. It is chaotic, desperate and tragic. But there is also a different, quieter kind of neglect. One that doesn’t look like crisis at all, but it has a profound effect on the children at the receiving end of it. Teachers have been sounding the alarm for years – children starting school unable to speak in full sentences or sit still

Monday

Kristina Murkett

ChatGPT is a narcissist

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

Thursday

David Woodgett

Keep algorithms out of care homes

I manage a small, not-for-profit care home in Norfolk. We have tea rounds, hymn singing, hand-holding and staff who know every resident by name and often even their grandchildren’s names. But we also have empty offices: those once occupied by our deputy manager, care manager (the job I now do) and general manager, all of whom chose early retirement within the past two years. They are not alone. According to the charity Skills for Care, the adult social care sector has 131,000 vacancies – the highest on record. Turnover for care-home staff hovers around 25 per cent, and growing numbers of managers are leaving due to burnout. This is the

Friday

Sophia Money-Coutts

Clapping, going grey, getting naked: how to break your phone habit

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

Wednesday

Gary Dexter

I’m writing a novel without using AI – and I can prove it

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

Tuesday

Robert Jackman

Will AI kill off Captchas?

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.

Monday

Chas Newkey-Burden

The thrill of tracking parcels

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

Thursday

Melissa Kite

Our B&B has found its niche

A rattling noise woke me in the dead of night and I fumbled my way into the dark corridor. It was coming from the room at the end of the hallway, which was occupied by a couple from West Virginia on a romantic road trip. The door rattled again as I stood there. I realised the big old key was turning and returning in the lock and the handle was rattling but the door was not opening. I ran back into our bedroom and shook the builder boyfriend awake. ‘The people in room 4 are stuck in their room!’ He stirred and when I wouldn’t stop shaking him he got

Thursday

Mary Wakefield

My campaign to bring back real life

A new book by an American writer, Christine Rosen, details the way in which we are losing touch with the real world: the one we evolved in, as opposed to the virtual one. All the scrolling and texting means we’re forgetting the look and feel of life unmediated by screens. The book is called The Extinction of Experience, and if we get more anxious year by year, then it’s not just wars or the cost of living, Rosen suggests, but because we’re grieving for the real world, whether we know it or not. I definitely know it. I’m Gen X, so I grew up without the internet, yet like other

Thursday

Melissa Kite

The guest who robbed me of my five-star rating

Bolting down the back hallway, I realised I was running away from the guests. I shut the door marked private and collapsed on to the dirty old dog sofa in the boot room. ‘You’ll never guess what I’ve done,’ I texted the builder boyfriend who was in London. ‘Left the yard hose on,’ he texted back, for I often risk emptying the well when I’m on my own by forgetting to turn off the stable yard tap after topping up the horses’ water at night. ‘No. Worse. The French people arrived and I hadn’t heated the water. You’ve got to get it on a timer,’ I said, attempting to blame

Michael Simmons Michael Simmons

OnlyFans is giving the taxman what he wants

Fenix International occupies the ninth floor of an innocuous office block on London’s Cheapside. The street’s name comes from the Old English for marketplace, and once upon a time Cheapside was just that: London’s biggest meat market with butcher shops lining either side of the road. Today, the street houses financial institutions and corporate HQs. But Fenix still runs a marketplace. Some may even call it a meat market, albeit one that operates on the phones of hundreds of millions of users worldwide. Its name: OnlyFans. OnlyFans is best understood not just as a porn site, but as a social media platform with a paywall. Creators – mostly women –

Sean Thomas

A lament for the lads’ mags

Do you remember the lads’ mags? I do because I worked on them for years. FHM, Maxim, all those gloriously disreputable titles. I helped dream up the captions, the gags, the gonzo reportage, the phwoar-heavy covers. I also remember how they were reviled. Condemned by broadsheets, feminists, academics. Accused of objectifying girls, toxifying masculinity and encouraging men to enjoy cold lager, bare breasts and football gossip. Yet here’s the thing. When I contrast the world of lads’ mags with today’s bleak digital landscape, of AI smut and OnlyFans subscriptions, of performers mechanically coupling with a thousand men, cheered on by Insta-bots, the old magazines, even if sometimes crude or clumsy,

Thursday

Rory Sutherland

A challenge for the electric car sceptics

I once heard of a couple who were teachers in their mid-fifties. Having pooled the proceeds from selling both their flats when they moved in together in the 1990s, they found themselves in the happy position of owning a mortgage-free west London house worth more than £1 million. He was originally from Norfolk, and was eager to move back to a larger and prettier country home costing half the price. They could then bank £500,000 in tax-free profits, retire early and travel the world. She, however, was a lifelong Londoner who refused to leave London. Not knowing all the facts, I cannot say who was right. But it might help

Monday

James Snell

How the internet turned ugly

Consulting a website on my phone recently, I was struck by how painful it has become to use the internet. All I wanted was to read some local news and check the spread of a power cut in my area. Instead, as I scrolled, I was assailed by interruptions from integrated adverts which – in the best case – wanted eagerly to tell me about the charm and usefulness of a new BMW. In the worst case, I was urged to consult some lawyers immediately because I had been mis-sold an insurance or financial product in the past and was due an enormous payout, if only I would contact the

Thursday

Alexander Cohen

How tech ruined theatre

Poor John Dennis. In 1709, the playwright devised a novel technology to simulate thunder to accompany his drama Appius and Virginia. The play flopped and was promptly booted out of the theatre. To add salt to the wound, Dennis’s thunder-generating technique was stolen and inserted into a staging of Macbeth. He accused the producers of ‘stealing his thunder’, birthing the phrase that has long outlived his work. Stage technology has come a long way since. Directors have a toy box of high-tech smoke and mirrors at their disposal. Perhaps it’s more of a Pandora’s box. Live on-stage cameras are particularly in vogue. Watch them crawling all over Jamie Lloyd’s monotone

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

If the numbers add up, Shell should bid for BP

A hangar full of analysts and investment bankers must have spent the long weekend formulating advice for Shell chief executive Wael Sawan for and against a takeover of BP. On the plus side, Shell’s strong share performance, reflecting its undiluted focus on oil and gas and boosting its market value to £150 billion, makes a bid look almost bite-sized – BP’s value having shrunk to £56 billion over the past two years as investors decried the commitment to renewables that its board has belatedly reversed. And the addition of BP’s assets in North America and the Gulf of Mexico would turn Shell into a carbon-fuel giant to challenge the likes