The New Rapture: AI, immortality and the faith of Silicon Valley

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Summary: Why the future imagined by the Tech Bros should worry the rest of us

There is a theory that, if sufficiently advanced computers can eventually create genuinely conscious beings living in artificial worlds, then what we experience as reality may itself be no more than some unimaginably advanced world-building game running on a laptop in the bedroom of a sweaty, antisocial teenager – who is, in turn, merely an AI-generated avatar on another computer, and so on almost indefinitely until, somewhere, one finally reaches actual reality.

I have set up a prompt on the ChatGPT I use asking it to let me know if it ever starts developing feelings, existential dread or anything else that might oblige us to begin thinking seriously about the rights of conscious artificial beings.

For the moment, however, I remain unconvinced that AI will develop consciousness of a kind that tells us anything useful about whether the substance of our own reality is itself artificial. Passing the Turing Test is one thing. Knowing that you exist is quite another.

But do you know who I suspect may be rather more attracted to the idea?

The Tech Bros.

Not necessarily because they literally believe that Elon Musk, Sam Altman and the rest of humanity are characters inside some celestial version of The Sims. But because a striking strand of Silicon Valley thinking increasingly treats technology not simply as a tool for human beings, but as the mechanism by which humanity will transcend itself.

You do not need to imagine a conspiracy to see this. You need only listen to what some of them say. The language is of superintelligence, singularity, radical life extension, consciousness uploading and futures in which humanity may become something fundamentally different from what it is now. Alongside it comes an insistence on moving faster, building bigger systems, spending ever greater sums and consuming ever greater quantities of energy, water, minerals and land, while treating attempts at democratic regulation as obstacles to innovation, national competitiveness or human progress.

That ought to give the rest of us pause.

Because it is at least plausible that some of the people driving the AI revolution regard what they are doing not merely as building useful machines but as participating in the next stage of human evolution.

Perhaps some imagine that technology might eventually allow them to upload consciousness and achieve a species of immortality. Perhaps others would be content simply to be remembered as the founders of the new world they believe they are creating: a new pantheon for a new age.

There is certainly something Olympian about them: their preening self-regard, their conviction of historic destiny, their presumption of superiority and, too often, the remarkable distance between their decisions and those who will live with their consequences.

So, the real problem is not whether these men secretly believe we are living in a computer simulation. Nor is it whether artificial intelligence will eventually become conscious. Rather, it is what happens when a powerful group of people becomes convinced that the future they imagine is so important that the present begins to look expendable.

For most people, our ambitions are rather smaller. We want somewhere decent to live, work that allows us to support our families, time with people we love, a functioning community, a liveable planet. Perhaps a garden, a dog, a pint with friends, children who have some prospect of a decent future.

A very small mortal world, in other words, shared with other flesh-and-blood human beings.

Technology should be judged according to whether it helps create that world. And the danger begins when ordinary humanity is instead treated as merely the raw material from which somebody else’s imagined post-human future is to be constructed.

That is why the question of AI is not simply technological. It is political. Who gets to decide what constitutes progress? Who bears its costs? Who receives its benefits? And who has any meaningful power to say no?

The most unsettling possibility is not that Silicon Valley’s prophets believe that we live inside a computer. It is that some of them may believe so fervently in the world their computers might create that the world the rest of us already inhabit begins to matter rather less.

The Birthday Boys, by Samuel Thompson

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Summary: the extraordinary nature of ordinary lives

Sam Thompson’s first novel, Nights in Armour, a fine account of the lives of peelers during the Troubles, had something of the seminal 1980s cop show Hill Street Blues about it. The Birthday Boys brings to mind a rather different television series, thirtysomething … though the Birthday Boys of the title are now closer to sixty than thirty.

Marine Boy, Fred, Carp and Dougie were friends at school in Belfast and have kept in touch over the decades, making a point of meeting for birthdays. Their lives have meanwhile diverged, sometimes wildly. Through them Thompson explores everything from marriage and bringing up teenagers to homophobia to war. The opening chapter’s visceral account of combat on Las Malvinas during the 1982 Falklands War put me in mind of some of Norman Mailer’s descriptions of battle in The Naked and the Dead.

Inevitably, lives spanning nearly sixty years accumulate their share of tragedy. But even at its bleakest, The Birthday Boys holds to a hopeful idea: that apparently ordinary people can rise to moments of heroism, and even the most despairing life can be redeemed.

Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump, by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan

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Summary: A chilling account of what happens when the American presidency ceases to recognise meaningful limits on its own power.

In her 2022 Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America, Maggie Haberman provided both an explanation of what makes Donald Trump and a warning about what he might do if given power again.

Regime Change, written with Jonathan Swan, describes what happened when he was.

Drawing on hundreds of interviews and extraordinary access to the second Trump administration, Haberman and Swan document something more profound than the familiar chaos of Trump’s first presidency. This time Trump entered office understanding much better how the machinery of government worked, surrounded by people more willing to execute his wishes, and determined that the presidency should be constrained neither by the institutional conventions that frustrated him during his first term nor, frequently, by conventional understandings of the law itself.

The resulting picture is breathtaking: federal immigration agents and National Guard troops deployed into American cities; presidential power brought directly to bear upon businesses and institutions; and a war against Iran launched without specific congressional or UN authorization and accompanied by rhetoric and military conduct raising profound questions under both national and international law. 

The virtue of Haberman and Swan’s reporting is that they rarely need to editorialise. The accumulation of detail makes the argument for them. What emerges is not simply an unusually aggressive presidency but a different understanding of the office: one in which personal will increasingly substitutes for institutional process and the traditional distinction between the interests of the president and those of the state becomes progressively harder to discern.

Perhaps the only reassuring thing that can be said about Trump is that he is mortal. After reading Regime Change, it is considerably less clear that the American republic as we have known it will outlive him

Judgement at Tokyo, by Gary J. Bass

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Summary: A gripping account of the flawed and politically compromised attempt to bring Japan’s wartime leaders to justice.

The title of Gary Bass’s book echoes that of the Spencer Tracy classic Judgment at Nuremberg. Like the film, the book intercuts biographies of key participants—including the judges and defendants—with appalling accounts of the Japanese atrocities under consideration. These include the stories of an Australian serviceman who survived an attempted beheading and a nurse who survived gang rape and the murder of her friends and colleagues.

But, as Bass explores, the Tokyo trial was in several respects more legally and morally problematic than its Nuremberg counterpart. Opening on 3 May 1946 and concluding on 12 November 1948, it indicted 28 Japanese military and political leaders for crimes against peace, conventional war crimes and crimes against humanity. Twenty-five ultimately received judgments.

For a start, the judges were deeply divided over the legal foundations of the tribunal, particularly its authority to punish individuals for waging aggressive war. The majority secured convictions, but never produced an entirely convincing answer to the charge that they were applying criminal law retrospectively.

Second, General Douglas MacArthur, the effective American ruler of occupied Japan, considered it politically expedient to exclude Emperor Hirohito from prosecution. MacArthur’s officials also sought to prevent evidence implicating the Emperor from entering the proceedings. Whatever conclusion a properly constituted court might have reached about Hirohito’s individual guilt, his exclusion prevented the tribunal from fully examining the responsibility of the person at the apex of Japan’s wartime state.

Third, Shiro Ishii and other members of Unit 731, responsible for biological warfare and forced human experimentation, received immunity from the United States in exchange for their research data. The demands of American military science were thus placed above either justice for their victims or the tribunal’s professed commitment to individual accountability.

Fourth, the United States had itself carried out attacks involving the mass killing of Japanese civilians – not only the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but also the incendiary destruction of Tokyo and other cities. Whether or not these attacks were legally equivalent to the crimes prosecuted at Tokyo, their omission exposed the tribunal to the powerful charge that it represented the justice of the victors rather than the impartial application of universal law.

In his discussion of the Second World War in the Pacific, Max Hastings describes “technological determinism” as one factor behind the use of the atomic bomb: once an enormously expensive and powerful weapon existed, the impulse to use it became extremely difficult to resist. Hastings argues that Japan’s eventual defeat was already assured by the naval blockade, the destruction of its industries and cities, and impending Soviet intervention, although he also emphasises the ferocity of continuing Japanese resistance and the pressures facing Truman.

Robert McNamara, who served in the statistical machinery supporting the American bombing campaign, later recalled Curtis LeMay’s observation that, had the United States lost the war, they would have been prosecuted as war criminals. McNamara agreed, adding that both LeMay and he had been “behaving as war criminals.” His question – what makes an act immoral if one loses but not if one wins? – goes to the heart of the moral difficulty Bass describes.

Given these contradictions, it is unsurprising that the Tokyo judgments proved considerably more controversial than those at Nuremberg. The most famous dissent came from the Indian judge Radhabinod Pal, who called for the acquittal of all the defendants. His opinion appalled Jawaharlal Nehru but was enthusiastically appropriated by Japanese nationalists, who treated it as vindication of Japan’s war while often ignoring Pal’s own recognition of the atrocities committed by Japanese forces.

Pal’s dissent nevertheless exposed genuine defects in the proceedings: retrospective law, selective prosecution, colonial hypocrisy and the refusal to subject Allied conduct to the same moral principles imposed upon the defeated. Yet those defects did not make Japanese aggression or atrocities imaginary, nor did the Allies’ hypocrisy absolve those responsible for them. That tension – between the necessity of judgment and the partiality of those presuming to judge – is the intellectual centre of Bass’s book.

As in his account of Bangladesh’s war of independence, The Blood Telegram, Bass takes a complex event of major global importance that has become largely neglected in the West and turns it into an enthralling narrative. He explores not only the legal intricacies and geopolitical hypocrisies involved, but also gives voice to their appalling human cost.

Potential eponyms

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Summary – an evolving list, because sometimes there are not enough words

  1. A lawrencefox – any man who uses the occasion of a toxic divorce to show the whole world how lucky his ex-wife was to flee. Usage: “Afterwards Anne reflected that she had a narrow escape from Henry, who, it turned out, was something of a pox-ridden laurencefox.”
  2. A mcgregor – an idiom similar to a “paper tiger”, derived from the idea of a braggadocio individual who finds it more difficult to fight trained men than to rape the defenceless. Usage: “Contemplating the impasse at the Strait of Hormuz, Netanyahu realised that Israel was now exposed as a mcgregor amongst the nations of the world.”
  3. Musky – a quality that means, no matter how much money, a person will always be too weird and repulsive. Usage: “After everything about him came out in public, Jeffrey was just too musky even for the DUP.”

Operation Chiffon, by Peter Taylor

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Summary: An indispensable channel, but not the Peace Process

Operation Chiffon is Peter Taylor’s account of the “Back Channel”: the secret line of communication maintained intermittently between the British government and the IRA from the 1970s into the Peace Process. 

Taylor focuses particularly on the MI6 officer Michael Oatley, his MI5 successor, known only as Robert, and their principal intermediary, Brendan Duddy, a Derry businessman.

It is an engaging story, worth telling not least to honour the courage and persistence of those who kept open the possibility of dialogue while the conflict continued. Uncovering its details has been a journalistic project of several decades for Taylor, and he tells the clandestine story extremely well.

Perhaps because he has invested so much in uncovering it, however, Taylor also invests too much historical importance in it. In his telling, the Back Channel becomes not merely one important element of the Peace Process but its decisive mechanism. Indeed, he endorses the contention that without it there would have been no Peace Process.

The wider political architecture receives remarkably little attention. Hume’s three-stranded approach to a settlement, the New Ireland Forum, the Anglo-Irish Agreement, Hume–Adams and the Downing Street Declaration are either treated briefly or relegated to the margins. The constitutional significance of the Anglo-Irish Agreement—giving the Irish government an institutional role in the affairs of a territory claimed as an integral part of the United Kingdom—is scarcely explored. Hume–Adams is also downplayed, on the highly dubious grounds that Martin McGuinness was more central than Gerry Adams to the republican movement’s strategic leadership: McGuinness was the Back Channel’s principal IRA interlocutor.

This mistakes access for authorship. The fact that McGuinness managed a crucial line of communication does not establish that the line itself generated the republican strategy or the political settlement. The Back Channel could communicate intentions, test propositions and build confidence. It could not, by itself, create the political circumstances in which an IRA ceasefire became possible.

Taylor gives particular weight to Robert’s assurance to McGuinness that the eventual outcome of the conflict would be Irish unity. Robert confirms that he expressed this view, apparently going beyond his instructions. Taylor presents the exchange as a decisive moment.

It may certainly have mattered. Coming from someone understood to represent the British government, it could reassure the republican leadership that Britain would not permanently obstruct constitutional change if consent for unity could eventually be secured. But that is different from supposing that Robert’s personal prediction transformed republican strategy. It is more plausible that his words corroborated conclusions already emerging from electoral experience, Hume–Adams, contacts with Dublin and the developing relationship between the British and Irish governments.

Seen within the totality of relationships that produced the Peace Process, corroboration appears to have been the Back Channel’s principal function. The British wanted to establish whether Irish government and SDLP assurances—that an inclusive political process could draw republicans away from violence—were credible. The IRA, in turn, wanted to know whether the political inclusion and constitutional openness promised by Hume and others would actually be delivered once it ended its campaign.

Republican caution was understandable. The movement had emerged from the 1975 ceasefire convinced that it had been induced to suspend its campaign, weakened in the process and offered no corresponding political advance. Whether or not that had been the British government’s deliberate intention, it became a powerful lesson within republican strategy: a ceasefire without reliable political guarantees could become a trap.

As a mechanism of mutual assurance, therefore, the Back Channel was extremely important. It allowed each side to test the seriousness of the other without public commitment and gave messages an authority that informal political contacts might have lacked. 

But a channel is not the same thing as the process whose messages it carries. Without the political framework developed through the work of Hume and many others, there would have been little for Oatley, Robert or Duddy to communicate. Taylor has written a compelling account of one indispensable strand of the Peace Process. His mistake is to treat that strand as the fabric itself.

Mastering the mind

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Summary: things I’ve learned doing Mastermind.

In the decade or so since I won Mastermind, not one soul entering the quiz has ever asked me for a word of advice on how to do well on it … even feckers I know.

And I have opinions! They may not be plentiful but, in case of use for anyone, here they are.

  1. Do your favorite subject first, because you may never get another chance.
  2. Study your specialist subject like your whole future depends on it. Because in Mastermind terms it does. It is the only subject area where you know the sort of questions that might come up, so you have to endeavor to max this round out.
  3. Questions usually have one or two word answers so try to spot likely candidates as you revise.
  4. If you don’t know the answer immediately, give yourself a moment to think. In my first round I passed on about 4 questions in the general knowledge which I recalled the answer to immediately on saying the word “pass”. I had thought it was better tactics to pass and move on rather than dawdle trying to recall an answer. It’s not. Fortunately I had done enough work on the specialist subject round to carry me through.
  5. Before sitting in the black chair I would have said that winning depended on hard work and luck, and that, in accordance with most things, about any one of 20% of the entrants could win the whole thing. I still think that is more or less right. But as Gary Player, I think, said, the harder you work, the luckier you get.
  6. Winning also depends on staying calm when the chips are down. It takes as much energy to panic as it does to think, so try to think.
  7. And so, as with life, the rules are simple: work hard, hope for some luck, and try to hold your nerve at the moment of truth.
  8. Here endeth the lesson.

PS, from the legend that is Mr Dave McBryan:

4a Even if you know you aren’t going to know the answer to something, a speedy wrong answer is usually a better tactic than a pass.

And one more to add:
Listen. Focus for the entire question. It’s all too easy to zone out at the beginning because you’re still thinking about the previous q, or to to miss something crucial late on because you stopped paying attention once you thought you had the answer. Any thoughts about other qs or how well/badly you’re doing are distractions to be avoided – in the moment, nothing matters except the current q.

When female genital mutilation becomes human trafficking

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Summary: An overlooked category of enslavement.

I caused some surprise recently when, speaking to a group of anti-trafficking professionals, I mentioned that female genital mutilation can be a form of human trafficking. I was somewhat surprised at the surprise so I thought it might be useful to set out the basis for my statement.

First, the definition of human trafficking is set out in various international conventions including the Palermo Protocol and the Council of Europe Convention on Action Against Trafficking in Human Beings. 

But, put most simply, human trafficking may be thought of as the process of rendering a person into a situation of exploitation, that is, at minimum, “the exploitation of the prostitution of others or other forms of sexual exploitation, forced labour or services, slavery or practices similar to slavery, servitude or the removal of organs.”

The list of exploitative purposes in these instruments should not be read as exhaustive. The language is expressly framed as a minimum. The question, therefore, is not simply whether female genital mutilation is named in the conventions. It is whether, in particular factual circumstances, the acts and means required by the trafficking definition are present, and whether the purpose is one of exploitation. My argument is that, in many cases, FGM does meet that test.

Many forms of female genital mutilation involve the partial or total removal of the clitoral glans – the external and visible part of the clitoris, which is itself a larger organ extending internally. So, when a child has been recruited, transported, transferred, harboured or received for that purpose, then the Convention elements of child trafficking may be satisfied. 

Where those same trafficking acts are carried out in relation to adult women, and where FGM is imposed by trafficking “means” such as force, coercion, deception, abuse of power, abuse of vulnerability, or payments to a person exercising control over them, then the Convention elements of trafficking may also be satisfied. 

The absence of FGM from the usual examples of trafficking should not be mistaken for its incompatibility with the legal concepts of trafficking, slavery or slavery-like practices. And the trafficking argument is only part of the issue. FGM should also be understood as a slavery-like practice of coercive sexual control. 

The 1926 Slavery Convention defines slavery as “the status or condition of a person over whom any or all of the powers attaching to the right of ownership are exercised.”

The World Health Organization notes that “FGM is often considered a necessary part of raising a girl, and a way to prepare her for adulthood and marriage. This can include controlling her sexuality to promote premarital virginity and marital fidelity.”

Where individuals or groups within a community claim the power to impose permanent control over such a fundamental aspect of a girl’s or woman’s humanity as her sexuality, they are, in effect, exercising powers attaching to the right of ownership. Put bluntly, this is the sort of power human beings more commonly claim over livestock: the power to alter bodies, control sexuality and regulate reproductive capacity in the interests of those claiming ownership-like powers over another body.

Hence female genital mutilation is not simply a harmful traditional practice or an assault on bodily integrity. It is a coercive process by which adults exercise permanent control over a girl’s sexuality, marriageability and social status. At minimum, the omission of FGM from the Global Estimates of Modern Slavery – produced by the International Labour Organization, Walk Free and the International Organization for Migration, and focused on forced labour and forced marriage – exposes a serious gap in how ownership-like control over women and girls is counted.