bios

This year I wanted to get PADI certified in Dahab, Egypt, cheapest of diving locales. And, inspired by the generous spirit of Italian fashion legend Brunello Cucinelli, open a plancha cart there serving labneh bread chicken wraps, something that showcased local bedouin foodways.

The cart would double as a social enterprise. I’d find a young local with ambitions, an Aladdin, a Mowgli, a bereft Moana, someone with an honest heart and a solid work ethic to give the thriving street food business to in a year once it was proven, profitable and viable long term. I’d put up the seed capital, my time, standards and imagination to get it going and they would get a real, rare chance at a better life.

This struck me as a virtuous and productive way to slow travel, leaving the world a better place in my wake unlike that cunt, Odysseus. It sounded like a great way to unwind and give something back after the ESL grind in China teaching rich kids how to conjugate verbs and trying fruitlessly to tamper their mindless knee-jerk nationalism with the tiniest sense of history.

Then I made the mistake of running the idea past the free local Chinese AI, doubao. Machine intelligence soon turned my humble craft venture into a global enterprise with hubs in several countries and an annual jamboree in Madagascar with delegates from all over. We had a brand name and a brand strategy. We had a pathway to unlocking UN funds. We thought seriously about the optics of Angelina Jolie as brand ambassador and opted for Mrs. Clooney. The app talked me out of Greta Thunberg and talked me into partnering with universities, legal aid resources and tourist centres to leverage knowledge streams and keep adding value.

I got so excited.

We agreed I would be a ‘vanishing mediator’ – arriving somewhere coastal and great for diving, the one concession to my selfish needs, and then hosting a design competition for the food cart with a focus on food safety, durability and mobilty. I would find a local mentor someone with on the ground knowledge and local market experience who could champion the cart, perferably a baker or chicken farmer, someone who could supply what we needed and advise on the pitfalls. And they would suggest the local worthy of a chance beside me at the cart. We would work hard, build awareness, spread good vibes and sell good value nutritious locally resonant street food to locals and tourists – and I’d move on, soon enough, slowly handing over authority and self-sufficiency to my partner, before vanishing.

The AI detailed a whole manifesto championing local food, local autonomy and the importance of the handover on agreed terms. I could see the whole thing unfolding in my mind. I could taste the wraps, smell the sea and feel the plancha burns on my hand. Helping others succeed is really powerful and I was moved…and then the desire to actually, really do it sort of made a deflated balloon fart sound of dismay in my mind…I had already ‘traversed the fantasy’ as psychoanalysts say. I had already speculatively pre-harvested all the hedonic rewards of the project with my AI interlocutor over hours of honing, adjusting, reasoning and elaboratiing. Actualising the abstracted venture seemed redundant – like putting a hat on a hat or calling Steven Seagall fat.

Nick Bostrom, eminent AI ethicist, imagined machine intelligence instructing global productive systems to hoover up resources to make paperclips even after we humans, perilously close to the last carrot, beg it to stop. The idea is to think through the goals we place before it and anticipate the hazards contained within the parameters we set. Fair enough but far more terrifying is the pre-emptive capture of our imaginations. More and more we are going to give up our dreams to machines. Leading us to the sweaty fallen world of Zion in the later Matrix movies, a grubby mindless pit of bad techno and lapsed agency.