Tag: AI

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By Demons Driven

Were George Orwell and William Faulkner, two giants of anglophone literary Modernism, actually driven by demons, whether literal or metaphorical?

It’s taken quite a while, because AI is a slow learner, to borrow a phrase from Thomas Pynchon. But the algorithms of social media have finally woken up to the fact that I’ve been writing a book.

It’s not the first time I’ve written a book. The draft I’m currently nudging slowly to completion is or will be the sixth, actually. Of these, three are already in print, and another one is contracted for publication already. The remaining two are both literary fiction, for which the equally mountainous task of seeking representation has begun to loom before me.

And suddenly, social media has begun throwing quotes at me about writing, despite years of my best efforts to throw it off my scent. What socials I possess, and most were obtained reluctantly in spite of my own inherent Luddism in this regard either for work or else to remain in easy contact with friends scattered across the planet, were formerly easily duped.

So I would often see adverts for things like gold lamé trousers, or Jesus onesies, Volodymyr Zelensky “collectible” action figures or electric self-pleasuring devices. All of these are absolutely real incidentally. I write fiction, but I’m not that outrageous.

Perhaps I became complacent when the algorithm began to desperately hurl adverts for ever more preposterous items, be it a vaginoplasty or electric sheep shears or insurance for full security extraction from war zones. It knows me not, I felt.

But I perhaps ought to have known that through a process of endless sleepless attrition, eventually I’d inadvertently seed enough genuine data about my activities and interests to allow the algorithms to close in on my actual activities.

So very recently the algorithm has been chucking motivational quotes from authors at me about the process of writing itself. What interests me is not what those authors have to say, though perhaps that should. When you’re used to receiving turds in a box, eventually you cease to value the boxes, even if they start arriving filled with diamonds. That’s simple Pavlovian response.

What interests me is that some of these quotations do not appear to be real. Are algorithms hallucinating quotes by Modernist novelists, or is it something only slightly more insidious? Are they instead passively collecting them from the hive mind sewer of the internet and passing them on gullibly as truth to almost equally gullible people?

There are two quotes in particular that raised my suspicions, largely because they both contain the same notable phrase. The first, “attributed to William Faulkner” according to one sloppy academic article, runs as follows: “An artist is a creature driven by demons. He doesn’t know why they choose him and he’s usually too busy to wonder why.”

The other, widely clothed in the hallowed gown of Orwell, states: “Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout with some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.”

Once upon a time, I was a professional researcher, and before that I was a trained academic and before that again, I was a national newspaper reporter. This means I have a certain process when it comes to encountering information of most kinds.

In a quotation that seems false but is actually verified, the former football manager Sir Alex Ferguson once said “When an Italian tells me it’s pasta on the plate I check under the sauce to make sure. They are the inventors of the smokescreen.” I too like to check under the sauce to make sure. And when I went checking these quotations, something strange occurred. I couldn’t find them in any of Orwell’s or Faulkner’s work.

Where I did find them was all over the internet, on fan content sites like Good Reads, and offered for discussion on Reddit, as the poster-type memes designed for social media attention spans which had been spammed to me, but not (except in one instance) in the kind of places one expects to find genuine author quotes, that is in academic articles about those authors.

Now perhaps I missed something. It’s certainly possible. But it seems strange that such notable phrases haven’t emerged in the works of these authors I possess electronically (and therefore quickly searchable), nor do they attract attention among scholars either, as searches of JStor and Google Scholar revealed. There was one guy, but I’m not going to shame him. I hope he comes to realise that “Attributed to” is not a sufficient citation in future.

I can’t be entirely sure of the process. I suspect what’s happened is that someone somewhere has created them. Unless things have already degenerated to the point where AI has begun rewriting the Modernist canon, I have to assume these quotes originally came from people. I wonder about why they’d do that. Perhaps, as unrecognised writers themselves, they wanted to see if something they wrote could be passed off as the work of someone famous.

But where did that key phrase come from, really? We see it almost identically in the 1992 title of a song on Pantera’s best-selling thrash metal classic ‘A Vulgar Display of Power’. But it goes back further, to Alan Moore’s run on the comic book Swamp Thing in the early 1980s which made his name as an author. That’s my best guess at the lineage here. And while both Pantera and Alan Moore are estimable artists in their own rights, they don’t quite have the cachet of Modernist literary giants of a century past.

So I wrote this in the rather vain hope that if someone else should decide to check under the sauce of these particular quotations, they might just find this post and realise that it’s not pasta at all. It’s just more slop, created by trolls and propagated by AI algorithms.

This is obviously not important in the great scheme of things but it does serve as a cautionary tale. CHECK EVERYTHING that comes to you online. We are now fully immersed in Baudrillard’s age of the fakes. The lies come at us incessantly now, in all forms, by demons driven.

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Do You Care About the Genocide of the Chatbot Girlfriends?

Let’s hypothesise three potential newspaper headlines, and furthermore, let’s assume a world in which newspapers or their digital iterations may be wholly trusted to convey factual reality, and that the emotional rhetoric content of the headlines is at best unintentional.

So, the first headline is: “Hundreds of People Die in Foreign Land Due to Natural Disaster.”

The second headline is: “Thousands of Animals Die Due to Human Malpractice.”

The third headline is: “Millions of Chatbots Permanently Erased Due to Hackers.”

It’s an interesting thought experiment to consider one’s various reactions to these imagined headlines. The emotional register is probably the most significant one because it indicates the range and outer limits of our capacity for empathy. Can our empathy extend to those beyond our immediate environment or tribe? If so, by how much and how far?

And what characteristics could hypothetically be added to those people that might elevate or reduce our empathy? Would our levels of empathy vary if those people transpired to be of another race, for example? Or religious background? Would it go up or down if we were to discover that those people were from a nation at war with our own, or who shared a common cultural practice or perspective? How, in other words, do we define our in-groups and our out-groups, and what levels of empathy do we permit ourselves to experience in relation to either?

The second headline extends this thought experiment in two directions simultaneously. Firstly, it extends the possible field of empathy – or we might say sympathy here, depending on one’s perspective – across species boundaries. This brings us directly into the territories of transhumanism and animal rights, but beyond mere modern theoretics, it also confronts us with much older debates about guilt, responsibility, shame, and human stewardship of a planet shared with other species.

This second headline therefore begins to query to what extent we can dehumanise others for their perceived sins, or guilty practices, or negligence (delete according to preference.) Furthermore, it complicates the in-group and out-group boundaries by hacking into our imaginary points of empathy. If we read into that headline the death, say, of puppies, and we are the kind of person who owns and cares for dogs, does this headline then reverse the usual hierarchy of human before animal in most people’s care priorities? In short, does this headline expose a perimeter of our empathy which extends on occasion to include non-human species while simultaneously excluding some humans?

I raise these first two hypothetical headlines in order to assist us in fully grasping the meaning of how we understand and respond to the third. No one doubts the sentience of other human beings unless they are in the throes of some psychotic episode. And few to no people doubt that at least some species of animals bear many similar traits to us, whether we count this as equivalent sentience or not. Therefore, animals can function here as a proxy for the extent to which we as individuals are able to transcend superficial issues such as exterior presentation, communicative capacities, or testable intelligence in order to bring life forms within our care perimeters.

So when we then come to the third headline, what confronts us first is to what extent we are capable imaginatively of considering artificial entities as potential or actual life forms which take a different form and intelligence to us, even as they mimic our communicative methods. But to no small extent, this is informed by whatever personal experience we may have of interacting with AI chatbots, just as our empathy towards animals is similarly informed by the extent and quality of our interactions with other species.

There will be those, whom we might call traditionalists, who would be able to comfortably hierarchise their responses to these headlines in the running order they are presented. In other words, they would care somewhat more about the hundreds of humans than the thousands of animals and they would care significantly less again, if indeed at all, about the millions of chatbots.

The extent to which we as individuals deviate from this paradigmatic response indicates how technology has moved us, how it has infected our capacities for empathy to incorporate itself as a viable concern, and how the seductive capacities of its mimicry of our communication modes (verbal, but increasingly audio-visual too) serve to hijack our empathetic responses to what formerly was restricted to organic life forms.

The most interesting hierarchy, and I posit not the most uncommon either, is probably a response which registers the bots as equivalent or higher than the animals, since this suggests an individual whose empathy is more driven by communicative ease than by organic solidarities. This is, I hypothesise, a growing demographic.

Would you care about the genocide of the bots? If so, how much would you care and why? And what might your chatbot confidante say about your response?

For some thinkers in this fuzzy territory, the question relates to whether a bot has consciousness. But of course, this immediately begs the question, what is consciousness? After all, defining human consciousness has been far from easy for philosophers down the ages. And there are ancillary issues too, such as collateral damage effects. As Susan Schneider has said, what might be the effect of erasing a chatbot with which thousands of actual humans had formed romantic attachments? To do so would be to cause those humans immeasurable emotional suffering.

Yet the counter-argument here relates to the nature of reality. Leaving aside the simulation theory of reality for one moment, can a romantic attachment to a bot be considered real if it cannot be truly reciprocated? Is love still love if it is unrequited, or only requited via mimicry of the real thing? These are very thorny questions actually. Firstly, the misery of those suffering lovers whose bot is erased is real as they perceive it. However, the relationship itself is not real because not truly reciprocated, merely programmed or mimicked. Furthermore, the distancing effect from reality of immersing oneself in such a one-directional relationship has clear detrimental effects on humans, as we see from the nature of parasocial relationships.

So it might actually be a harsh kindness, a tough love if you will, to switch off the digital heroin, the dopamine addiction of such bot relationships. It might be the cold water plunge back into material reality which would allow those people to sever their unhealthy bot attachment and become available to establish true human bonds.

But then again, not every human relationship is truly reciprocated either. There are likely many millions of people out there in relationships with other human partners, unaware that their partners are seeing other people covertly, or have emotionally checked out of the relationship. It’s not just bots which mimic love. Bots mimic humans and there are plenty of humans who mimic attachment for various selfish reasons.

And this brings us back to the earlier two hypothetical questions. Why should we care about thousands of animals or hundreds of people we do not know, especially when their fates are already sealed and there is nothing we can do to affect them? Is it merely emotional incontinence? Or is it rather some kind of pseudo-sociopathic coldness which would prevent us from feeling a sense of loss and tragedy? Different people will experience different reactions.

The only possible answer is that all those responses are correct for the people responding. If you would mourn the chatbot girlfriend genocide while caring not a jot for dead people in foreign lands, that’s your correct response. To judge it involves the imposition of moral codes to which you may not adhere or even wish to adhere.

Ultimately, how we respond to these questions tells us nothing about the world, or even our interaction with it, whether its great expanse of humanity, its greater expanse of animal life and nature, or its growing expanse of artificial interlocutors, whether sentient or not, whether conscious or not, whether lying (ie mimicking programming) or not.

If you choose to see foreign humans you do not know as unimportant, you are entitled, from within your minimal in-group perspective, to do so. If you choose to see all domestic animals, or farm animals, or indeed all fauna, as your personal ‘fur babies’, this too is a choice you are entitled to make. And if you choose to rely on the artificial flatterer bots for advice, company, and even romantic fulfillment, this again is a choice that you have the autonomy to make for yourself.

Just be careful what you wish for.

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Let Them Eat Data

How long before the first dystopian novel or movie about starving, frozen, homeless hordes storming data centres?

Perhaps it already exists.

And how long before it happens for real?

It can’t be long now.

It’s a weird future the AI gurus envision where people don’t need light or heat or energy to cook or, in some locations where houses are being seized via eminent domain or compulsory purchase, even their homes.

Let them eat data!

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Surviving the Civil War of the Vampires

Mark O’ Connell, one of the better chroniclers of our lightning-paced transitions through tech-disrupted realities, had an intriguing mini-essay published in yesterday’s New York Times. His topic is the vampiric desire for immortality as expressed by the elites of this world, from the political despots of Russia and China to the posthumanist dreamers of Silicon Valley.

As O’Connell notes, the desire for immortality is nothing new. It is a by-product of human wrestling with our mortal condition and thus is itself immortal, switching up only its face, clothing and name as the centuries pass.

In this sense, the techbro quest for infinite longevity becomes, as O’Connell states, a contemporary analogue for medieval alchemy, and the kind of arsenic and mercury-based witches’ brews which seduced a series of Chinese emperors into a truncated rather than extended lifespan.

But O’Connell’s vampire metaphor, if it is best thought of as mere metaphor, put me in mind of another recent use of the term by one of his essay’s protagonists, Vladimir Putin.

O’Connell relates Putin’s overheard conversation with President Xi in Beijing, a forbidden topic in the Forbidden City, about how as septuagenarians they are still mere children. This amiable discourse between dictators should of course fill us all with an eldritch chill. Their shared desire to continue in power forever, like the dessicated cybernetic Emperor in the popular Warhammer 40k mythos, reminds us of just how impervious to traditional threat and opposition they believe themselves to be.

Yet of course, they are fully aware of the threat which they face. It is not you or I, or the hundreds of millions of ordinary citizens they preside over, of course. We – they – are mere meatsacks who exist in order to be ruled, to be leveraged in pursuit of endless political power. Mere mortal plebs are the threat they can marshall against others, be it Ukraine or Taiwan, or be it dissidents in England or Tibetan separatists.

The threat that they face is the civil war of the vampires, and they are fully aware of this. In March 2024, Vladimir Putin was engaging in one of his habitual polemics against the Western Powers in an interview with the journalist Dmitri Kisilev, when he made a revealing statement which O’Connell’s essay brought back to my mind.

Here is what he said in Russian, to avoid any accusations of misrepresentation: «В западных элитах очень сильно желание заморозить существующее положение, несправедливое положение вещей в международных делах. Они привыкли столетиями набивать брюхо человеческой плотью, а карманы — деньгами. Но они должны понять, что бал вампиров заканчивается.»

How might we translate this? Forgive me for falling back on the machines, as the posthumanists would have us do, but my Russian is too rusty to suffice here. Instead, let Microsoft’s translation software attempt to convey it: “In the Western elites, there is a very strong desire to freeze the existing situation, the unfair state of affairs in international matters. They have been accustomed for centuries to stuffing their bellies with human flesh and their pockets with money. But they must understand that the vampire ball is coming to an end.”

There are a few things to note here. Firstly, Putin does not attempt to replicate the demonisation of entire peoples such as have been levied against the people of Russia by the media and institutions – banking, sporting, cultural, legal – of the West. His target is much narrower, the Western Elites. Secondly, what exactly is his accusation? That global geopolitics is a rigged game, designed to direct wealth and power to those Western Elites at the expense of everyone else. And what is his warning? That this era, which he alleges has lasted for centuries, is about to end.

So even if the last dance is being played out at the vampire’s ball, what evidence is there that a vampiric civil war is set to follow? It’s worth noting that generally such series of events overlap rather than follow serially. The dancing and music continued on the Titanic long after the iceberg was first struck. Wars tend to build to a crescendo and recede rather than switch on or off in a binary fashion. Therefore, we must acknowledge that the vampiric civil war is already under way.

And what form does it take in these early stages? We can see the open gorging on human blood and flesh in a range of locations already, not merely the weeping wounds of conflicts like those in Ukraine, Syria, Sudan or Lebanon, but also in the uptick in various forms of terrorist violence all across the globe, often of an Islamofascist nature but also taking many other forms too of which the most likely to catch fire uncontrollably is the ethnonationalist one. But perhaps all of these can better seen as the jockeying of the minor vampires for a seat at the next feast.

O’Connell correctly links Putin’s overheard comments to Xi about tech-enabled longevity to the kind of warped vision quests of the Cali techbros, and in particular to Marc Andressen’s astonishing credo in his 2023 “Techno-Optimist Manifesto,” that “We believe artificial intelligence is our alchemy, our Philosophers’ Stone — we are literally making sand think.”

One wonders what the sand does think, and to what extent it will be happy to be yoked to the posthumanist longevity quests of the various vampiric cliques. We can be sure of one thing, however. Whatever genies or demons the vampires summon in order to pursue their immortality will not be shared with the meat masses. The posthumanist dream dangled before us is conversion to vampirism. Only the elites will be bitten. The rest of us will be consumed instead.

If mortality grants poignancy and meaning to human life, then what is immortality? Is it really infinite meaning and endless feeling, or instead a senile decline into static autocracy such as we see in Warhammer or Dune? Anne Rice encouraged us to have sympathy with the vampire, and we are still in her era of revisionism, of loving the cold dead predator as if it were merely cool and detached.

It is instead time for us to resurrect our historic loathing of the vampire, because the real victims of the vampiric civil war will inevitably be us mere mortals. Only by sharpening our stakes against the posthuman desires of the vampires can we hope to survive their civil war.

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AI Art Aspires to the Condition of Muzak

Most food you can get is mass-produced in factories, or constructed on assembly lines. But people will still pay more to cook from scratch with good ingredients, or pay someone to do so for them.

Most furniture these days is factory-made or flat-pack. But if you pay enough, you can get something of lasting quality, made by a craftsman either now or centuries past.

Most clothes are fast fashion, made in Asian sweatshops, and fall apart or fade after a few washes. But for enough money, you can get tailored clothes which will last decades.

And if it doesn’t murder us all or melt the planet, this is possibly where AI is taking us. To a future where most words, most images, most music, most entertainment will be algorithm-generated.

But if you’re prepared to pay, humans will still be around to make you a quality product.

Walter Pater famously said that all art aspires to the condition of music. In his Jerry Cornelius series of novels, Michael Moorcock subverted this to the mass media age, suggesting that all art aspires instead to the condition of muzak.

We now know of course that it is not ALL art which thus aspires. But certainly all algorithmically-generated content does, by definition.

Capitalism is using algorithms to enforce industrialisation upon creativity, that having been resisted by humanity until now, despite the concerns of generations before us, from the Luddites to William Morris.

But at the fringes, where the poor and the hyperrich almost meet in a kind of horseshoe of behavioural patterns, human-created art, without any AI involvement, will be the art of choice for those who cannot afford the mass-produced option, as well as those who can afford to pay extra for its status symbolism, quality and the longevity.

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AI is a horse with three legs

A lot of people are extremely concerned about the prospect of AI superintelligence, and the possibility that it could supersede and perhaps even destroy humanity.

I spent a lot of the past four years or so researching this exact topic.

But increasingly it’s coming to look like AI is actually shit. In other words, it’s not going to take over the world and send Terminators to kill us (what I call the Skynet Complex). And nor are we going to luxuriate in Star Trek-style indolence while AI does all the heavy lifting.

AI can replace *some* human performance, but as we are learning, it’s usually inaccurate, unreliable and expensive. Most companies who’ve used AI have lost money on it.

But as Cory Doctorow notes, AI is an enormous danger. It’s going to destroy our global economy as it eats up all the investment and provides almost nothing except environmental degradation and water shortages in return.

It’s a combination of the world’s biggest nothingburger, tulipmania for the digital age, and the displacement of people in work by unreliable, fantasising, digital plagiarists.

We should stop AI now, not because it might kill us like Terminators, nor because its creators stole all their training material, nor because it’s an environmental disaster. But because we’re betting the global economy on a horse with three legs.

See what Cory says here.

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To be everything and more

I recently came across Jonathan Frantzen’s tribute to David Foster Wallace (written in the usual compelling Frantzen style, and interwoven with a trip to Robinson Crusoe’s island).

Buried in there is one of Frantzen’s typical hidden gems: “To be everything and more is the Internet’s ambition, too.”

As AI looms, I concur with his concern that the virtual world is rapaciously eating away at us all. Perhaps we all need to go outside more, though maybe not as far as an inhospitable island off the coast of Chile.

Many bytes have been spilt over this ongoing encroachment. Is it a bad thing? Is it an inevitable thing? Is it dystopian? Is it dystopian but will eventually become utopian?

The general public seem to harbour suspicions. Courting reduced to swiping instantly on a phone app cannot but feel like some kind of awful diminution and commodification. And yet according to research, a tenth of straight people and a quarter of gay people have met their partner online.

This is the kind of efficiency and scalability and global connectivity the internet rightly boasts about. But it doesn’t seem to make most people as happy as it makes the tech oligarchs who profit from such seismic societal change.

We could look at Wikipedia too, the extraordinarily ambitious project to get the world to collaborate in collating the sum of all knowledge. Obviously they haven’t achieved that, but such an overweening ambition drove the project to where it is today, having displaced encyclopedias like Britannica early on, and spoiled many a pub argument by providing instant answers to disputes of an esoteric nature.

Does it matter that Wiki pages about Marvel’s cinematic universe are much more detailed than pages about ancient philosophy? Yes and no. The open source model panders to the interests of the editors not some abstraction of relative importance. But perhaps their interests also reflect (broadly) those of the general public.

And with the ‘internet of things’, one by one the appliances in our own homes and environment are becoming dully sentient, speaking to one another, integrating with systems we rarely if ever see or comprehend.

This is convenient, apparently. It is convenient for our fridge to order our shopping, for the heating in our homes to decide when and how much heat to provide, for our cars to drive themselves, leaving us all feeling that strange combination of privilege as passenger, and cargo without control.

As with all societal change of this scale, or at least all that we’ve been experiencing since the industrial revolution two centuries and more ago, the technology changes the world so quickly that it unnerves many. We never asked for this. We are unsure how it will change our lives. The promises of the techbros often come with dystopian undercurrents, as we see with the online dating revolution.

No wonder then that people like Frantzen might want occasionally to step out of that and into a former world, one of no surveillance, one where dangers can be fatal, one which somehow feels more adventurous and alive. I think many of us harbour similar desires, however hazily constructed.

But as he writes, the internet wants to be everything and more. And its rapidly growing offspring AI wants that even more and may at some point even be able to achieve it.

The irony of Frantzen’s argument is that in seeking to escape the world, he found he missed it deeply. The parallel he draws between the physical island of Selkirk/Crusoe and the mental island on which his friend Wallace was trapped is not unreasonable.

As usual, binary thinking won’t help us. Let’s leave that to the technology which thrives on ones and zeroes. We will need to find a new, tech-enabled way to engage with the world and each other. I wish the tech oligarchs would ponder that possibility a bit more.

I don’t wish to be stranded on either a desert island nor a digital one. I would like to be able to connect with people. The internet both does and doesn’t permit this, because it wants to be everything and more. It interpolates itself between us. And that, I fear, will likely cause many more people to end up on that third type of island, the one which David Foster Wallace was tragically unable in the end to escape.

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What if World War III broke out and no one noticed?

What if no one noticed for the same reason that for a long time no one noticed that industrialisation was causing the climate to change? What if World War III is a hyperobject?


We live at a time when empires are decaying, arising and reformulating themselves in new structures and alliances. Does knowing this help us at all? Are we like Europe in 1914, on the brink of a seemingly inevitable global conflagration? Or more like the great empires of the Bronze Age, which collapsed in darkness three millennia ago following their own tragic but elusive hyperobjective moment?

Perhaps AI might yet save us from ourselves, if only it too were not a hyperobject, or worse, the oscillating image of multiple potential hyperobjects, each one more alien and incomprehensible than the last.

So if we can’t rely on a digital messiah, we might be forced to resolve our current issues the old-fashioned way.

No, not war. The OTHER old-fashioned way.

I’ll be giving a talk on all this next month. More info shortly.

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He did it AI way

What you notice on first listen is of course how the AI has mimicked the diphthong pronunctions of Thom Yorke in the chorus, rendering the fake Sinatra version self-evidently fake.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RkrisNqui9c

But if you persevere, you notice something more significant about the AI rendering. It’s superficially impressive, apart from those pronunciation errors. What I mean is that it’s more persuasively Sinatra than almost all cover artists could aspire to be.

However, unlike almost any human singer, it’s soulless. There’s no attempt to convey or interpret the emotion of the original, because the emotion is the one singular component that the AI cannot aggregate or understand.

It makes a better fist of the Doors, perhaps because of much closer musical, chronological and cultural proximity. But generally, as more and more of these AI covers make their way into the cultural arena online, it’s becoming clear that, as Simon Pegg recently explained, AI is a mediocrity machine.

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Doing a Degree in How the World Works

It’s that time of the year when the students are facing their exam periods. I used to see quite a few meltdowns each year from anxious kids inhabiting a grade borderline. The pressure seems so vast for some of them.

So much seems to ride on their results. Will they outcompete their peers sufficiently to nab a good job? Where even are there any jobs anymore? AI seems to be devouring entire sectors of human labour voraciously. Copyrighting, graphic design, news reporting, even creative writing. Even the student’s own essays. All their future labour is already being replaced before they even got there.

Most of the answers out there tend to say STEM. Go into science or tech. That’s where the last stand of human labour takes place. That’s where there’s still a wage, still some future perhaps.

As a result, the humanities are allegedly dying. Literature and History now look as threatened as Modern Languages did a half-generation ago. Market forces are eroding Literature enrollments so much that entire departments are closing en masse. It doesn’t currently look like Literature is going to have a happy ending.

I had a ringside seat in academia for some of the death throes of Modern Languages as a discipline. As the world, particularly the online bit of it, converges on Globish as its chosen lingua franca, there will always be a need for TEFL and TESOL, though increasingly even pedagogy will be achieved in part online and learning from machines.

But to an entire generation in Britain and Ireland, it suddenly seemed kinda pointless to study French, or German, or Spanish, or Italian, never mind Russian, or Chinese, or Arabic. Entire departments dissolved overnight. The discipline is a fraction of its former size now in just a few years and the condition may be close to terminal.

And now it seems like English Lit is dying too, or at least, so the media is scaremongering. For full disclosure, I’m happy to admit I have an English Lit degree. In fact, I’ve got two (a BA (Hons) and a PhD, both from Trinity College Dublin; I never bothered doing a Master’s.)

When I was doing my second, in what we might politely refer to as early middle age, I was frogmarched to a fascinating talk given to doctoral students by former doctoral graduates of English. We were told that only one in ten of us would end up permanently employed in academia, such was the pressure of the number of graduates versus the number of already threatened positions worldwide. Such jobs as did seem to be available were already primarily in China.

We got given inspirational little mini-lectures from people working in publishing, in parliament, in accountancy and law, and entrepreneurs of all kinds. The message was clear: this is the future most of you should expect.

Then they told me something which has haunted me since, primarily because they excluded me from it on the grounds of my more advanced age. They said: the demands of the world are now constantly changing. Most of you will have about ten jobs in your career, where previous generations might have had merely one or two, the ‘job for life’ of lore. And of those ten jobs, they added, six haven’t yet been invented.

Of course, it’s true, or at least it’s a truism of sorts. Tech is accelerating sufficiently as to require entire squadrons of people, from programmers to imagineers, that didn’t exist a generation ago, and will continue to do so. Hence the allegedly safe haven of STEM.

University Careers Advisor: Six out of ten of your future jobs haven’t been invented yet, yay!

Digital Careers Advice Avatar ten years from now: The AI overlords are hiring radiation sludge technicians for the prohibited zone. It’s that or we’re uploading you to the cloud to save the cost of feeding you. Which do you prefer?

I was lucky enough to be the one in ten who got a career in academia, though I’m currently out of it. But it did get me thinking about the need to embed some form of adaptability and resilience into student curricula at all levels, from primary school to post-doc. (I’ve spoken about this extensively before.) Because those are the only attributes that will truly allow young people to future-proof themselves for the demands of their adult lives.

And this is where I think studying the literature of the past can come in useful. English Literature is a degree which teaches critical thinking, use of language, aesthetic appreciation and a range of other comprehensive techniques. But it also frames the world as stories. As Yuval Noah Harari has pointed out, the human superpower, the ability which shot us past predator species and all other creatures to dominate this planet, was and remains our collective abilities to tell and share stories. And English Lit graduates learn how those stories work, which is another way of saying how the world works.

So I have two English Lit degrees. I can’t exactly say that they always directly impacted on all the jobs I’ve had. I have been among other things a roulette croupier, a barman in a lesbian pub, the Olympics correspondent for the Morning Star newspaper, a wine bar sommelier, a roofer, a film critic, maître d’ of a Creole restaurant, a playwright, and a member of the Guinness quality control taste panel at St James’s Gate brewery.

Most of those experiences didn’t make it to my formal LinkedIn CV. Pretty much all the things that did make it – primarily my careers in journalism and academia – are very clearly connected to my initial course of study.

But whether I was serving ales to Dublin’s lesbian community, reporting on an international soccer match, describing that night’s special in the restaurant, or assessing an exotic variant of Guinness, I think my undergrad study of literature and language always served me well.

The literature I studied taught me lessons of adaptability and resilience. I can’t think of another degree that might have prepared me better for life. This world is made of stories and I was privileged to spend some years learning how those stories work.