Logging in to life

 Subject: Logging in  to life

It is no longer sufficient to be me, I have to answer to a doppelgänger me, an electronic web based me who requires passwords, and email addresses to sustain his or her identity. The heart that pushes blood through my veins is not enough anymore to signal I am alive but instead I need a code to acknowledge it. This wouldn’t be so bad if the code was forgiving, if it had human empathy but it’s founded on the bytes of a program which is impervious to the frailties of a brain of an 83 year old man who has managed many things in his rich and varied life but is now flummoxed by the insensitivity of the log in procedure.

How bewildering to be asked again and again for the same set of digits, a mixture of numerals’s plus a high and lower case set of letters which are rated highly if they don’t mean anything. Perhaps that’s the answer, none of us mean anything any more we are just computer code sitting inside a mainstream computer manufactured by Fujitsu, a postmaster perhaps who’s fallibility against the computer is questioned and he or she is jailed on the computers say so. What happens when we add to the mix “AI” which not only determines the rules but the sentence.

We are in a pickle as we try to cut costs by cutting out the human interface in fact making the human interface more obscene by the humans total reliance on what the computer spews out. The frustration in not being able to have a face to face conversation where the conversation blends human cognisance  with tolerance and finds a way towards understanding. The websites which lend you alternatives to questions you wish to ask but non to the actual question you asked leading you down blind alleys into a frustrating loss of the will to live in this dystopian world. Now whilst  I know this is an age thing it’s also the substance of who we are. The answer to most non mathematical questions are many sided and perhaps it’s the herding of people into binary answers, yes or no that bedevils us into making concessions, substituting our truth for the popular truth.

The Donald Trump’s and Boris Johnson’s of this world would rather do away with the nuanced assumptions of our particular truths and inflict theirs with a mendacity of lies and deceit so popular in our media. There is no shame any longer in being caught lying, it’s part of the political landscape, the lingua franca of politics which shames the rest of us for putting up with it. How do we shame them if they are incapable of one of the most basic responses known to man. The rules in Parliament that it’s inadmissible to stand up in the House Of Commons and tell a lie to Parliament ‘intentionally misleading Parliament’ is a serious sackable event for a minister but is circumvented by bluster and innuendo. It brings Prime Ministers Question Time close to farce as the government and the opposition trade verbal blows at the dispatch box each out bidding the other in point scoring with little attempt at telling the truth. As role models they are a sorry lot to follow and much of our social decline can be traced back this lack of honesty which if not evident in our superiors places less and less value across society as a whole.