David Beresford
ANOTHER COUNTRY
Predictions offered by the oracles of the scientific age, intended for the stupefacation of their contemporaries, are more often quoted to the merriment of their descendants. The thought is prompted by Britain’s Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) which has been offering its thoughts on the future of crime.
They have predicted that the focus of crime in the future will be the theft of personal identity – pin codes, smart cards and the like. These will be central to security systems of tomorrow and hence to the success of criminal activity, according to the DTI.
It so happens that this prediction flies in the face of conclusions I have reached with regard to the future importance of personal identity, after much cogitation on the issue. This investigation was precipitated by the observation – based on the embittered reaction of an ambitious academic who failed to get space on the pages of this distinguished journal – of a battle being fought within the media to gain ascendancy on the dung heap that is reputation.
At the bottom of the heap are the so- called “experts” on any given subject, most of them members of academia whose anxiety to find “space” in the media is no doubt encouraged by the winds of change howling around the ivory towers of tenure.
Next are the broadsheet journalists who patronise the superficiality of tabloid journalists while resenting their better- paid jobs.
The aristocrats at the top of the heap are the TV journalists whom everyone patronises as “talking heads” and envies for their national and sometimes international fame.
What struck me about this hierarchy in the media was that there seems to be a relationship – or at least an inverse relationship – between their pecking order and the length at which they write, whether for the teleprompt, the front- page, or the “authoritative” pages buried deeper in a newspaper.
The television reporter, who glories in sound-bites, is given just about enough time to declare “the end is nigh” in appropriately funereal tones preparatory to adopting a cross-eyed look of humility which signals they are about to announce their names.
The broadsheet writer, in his, or her envy of the better pay enjoyed by the tabloid hack, fails to recognise that the higher reward is market-related, brevity being beyond most intellects. At the bottom of the scale the academic similarly persists in the delusion – not only dogggedly holding to the superstition that the longer the article, the more seriously it will be taken, but extending the principle to the length of words and sentences.
With the perception of a trend comes the temptation for prognostication and – rather than yield the space by default to some scavenging academic – I will snatch and buttress it with the help of another extrapolation regarding the possibility of a cure to my Parkinson’s Syndrome* .
Attention in that regard is focused at the moment on early clinical trials soon expected to get under way with a substance known as “neural growth factor” which it seems, at least from experiments with rats, not only promises to halt the inexplicable degeneration of a small clump of brain cells causing the condition, but can regenerate them. It had previously been thought that neural cells – unlike other parts of the body – could not heal after damage.
Taken in conjunction with the discovery of “stem cells” – basic cells which can be instructed by way of genetic coding to grow into specialised cells, including brain cells – this has raised the possibility that doctors will be able to “re-seed” a damaged brain in much the same way as a gardener does a worn lawn.
Scatter a few modified stem cells, squirt on fertiliser in the form of growth factor and there is your brain a year later, as immaculate as the wicket at Lords’, or turf at Ellis Park on the eve of a new season.
The question springs to mind: where does it all end? Self-evidently the gardening analogy leads from cultivation to grafting, which implies mind-meld.
In parallel the observed trend towards brevity in communicating the news will clearly progress along its present trajectory. The length of sound bites – which, logic suggests, will soon be halved by the abolition of the cross-eyed “sign-off” (the relevance of which to the election of Putin, or the latest disaster in Africa is difficult to discern) – will diminish to the point where the six o’clock news is no more than the flicker of a neural impulse.
In other words the global village will become the global brain.
This inevitable drift towards the amalgamation of brains has an intriguing resonance with a prediction made about their artificial counterparts, computers, by no less a figure than the chairman of IBM, Thomas Watson, who forecast a world market for only five computers. That was in 1949.
I suspect our descendants will one day be giggling at the predictions of the DTI.
*Parkinson’s Syndrome – sometimes referred to by bigots as “Parkinson’s Disease” – is a brain condition, which produces symptoms including shaking and rigidity of the limbs. It is progressive and no means of stopping or reversing its development in humans has yet been found, despite regular miracles reported among rats