What Is The Point?

Given the many causes for anxiety out there in the world, I mainly try to keep things light on this blog: a bit of photo-phluff, some personal stuff, nothing too rough or off the cuff [Oh, do stop it. Ed.]. TBH I'm mainly equipped and inclined to entertain, not to inform or educate: I'm not the BBC.

But... Six months ago I did post some thoughts on AI (Nisi Dominus Frustra...). Now, although we are still at the stage where "AI" is essentially just a catch-all term for various ways of mining vast stores of data and sticking the results together in a convincing way, it's clear there are issues here that are not going to go away, and that will become more urgent as the technology either improves or, more likely, its bubble bursts; either could be catastrophic. The main, admittedly pedestrian conclusion I came to was this:

When, I wonder, will it dawn on them [employers and investors] that the pursuit of efficiency, productivity and profits by automation and the elimination of expensive, fallible "human resources" is not the point? That people are the point, and not the problem? Not any day soon, it seems. 

As the TUC’s assistant general secretary, Kate Bell, said recently:

"AI could have transformative potential, and if developed properly, workers can benefit from the productivity gains this technology may bring." She added: "The alternative is bleak. Left unmanaged and in the wrong hands, the AI revolution could entrench rampant inequality as jobs are degraded or displaced, and shareholders get richer." (Guardian, 27 August 2025) 

Cleverness unconstrained by wisdom may yet be the downfall of our species. AI might usefully be regarded as humanity's attempt to outsource our own most distinctive feature, perhaps best represented by that traditional cartoon of a man sawing off the very branch he is sitting on. Over my working life I have witnessed several waves of happily-employed, ordinary, decent people being made redundant and their lives rendered purposeless by technology; some of it, I'm ashamed to say, implemented by me. It sometimes seems that clever technologists will not rest until the last opportunity to enjoy a meaningful life through work has been eliminated.

Obviously, a "wot I fink" piece on a blog that, without exaggeration, is nothing more than a tiny slip of paper hidden under a small rock in an enormous quarry full of similar rocks is not going to be changing any tech-titan's mind, but we do what we can, don't we? Besides, I expect the collapse of the global economy will make the case more effectively than I can. However, I thought it might be worth adding a few words about my point that "people are the point".

I've been watching episodes of Digging For Britain, a BBC TV series of round-ups of the latest archaeological discoveries, presented by my second favourite professor, Alice Roberts. Fun as they are to watch, the episodes are quite formulaic. At some point, Prof Roberts will kneel, Hamlet-style, in the dirt beside an excavation and – gazing at some skeletal remains or some time-worn and rusty bling, buried by or dropped from the leaky pockets of our forebears – she will deliver some well-informed words about prominent supraorbital ridges and worn joints. But, unlike Hamlet, she can have no idea whose remains or lost property she is contemplating.

Similarly, in that graveyard scene we hear Hamlet reflect, "To what base uses we may return, Horatio! Why, may not imagination trace the noble dust of Alexander till he find it stopping a bunghole?". In imagination, yes; but archaeology instead finds a bunghole, and is unable to hazard any guess as to whose dust might be filling it. It's a roundabout, one-way trip from corpse to clay – apparently a cloud of red Saharan dust is due to pass over us in Britain this very week – and imagination is all we have to link Humpty Dumpty with the mess of eggshell unearthed among the rubble of what seems to have once been a wall. [1]

But surely few things are as poignant as the ruined skeleton of some unknown individual, interred with varying degrees of ceremony centuries or millennia ago and now exposed to view on a popular TV programme – bad teeth, characteristic syphilitic bone damage, and all – simply in order to be cleaned  up, measured, analysed, and stored in a box in an overfull warehouse somewhere. To this favour we must come...

So, as we get older, those of us prone to fits of reflection may find ourselves wondering, what is the point of all this?

Apparently it was made by CPO, Worthing, UK (poster bottom left),

who seems to take August off

Generation upon generation of suffering humanity – and the skeletal evidence demonstrates abundantly that this is more than just a trite expression – have been comforted by stories about an afterlife to be enjoyed in assorted Happy Hunting Grounds or, for the wrong 'uns, frightened into better behaviour by the prospect of Hot Hells of Eternal Torment. The point was to ensure you got the right stamp in your eternal passport, as determined and supervised by the Belief Police. It's hard for us 21st century sophisticates to grasp, but those beliefs were real enough for, say, 16th century sophisticates to literally go to the stake over them. You? No, me neither.

Countless thousands upon thousands of bodies have been laid to rot in peace in that most secure of storage facilities, the solid ground of Britain itself. Every episode of Digging For Britain shows that, once you scrape the surface to start work on something like a new housing estate pretty much anywhere on our islands, ancient burial grounds will be revealed. Call for the archaeologists! But for all their efforts, we have little to no understanding of what beliefs were held within those empty skulls, not least those found in so-called "deviant burials" – heads ritually decapitated, and placed in the grave at the owner's feet – but we can be sure that what we're seeing is the work of the Belief Police, keeping society in check by enforcing certain useful shared fantasies about an afterlife, however bizarre.

But, to return to Hamlet, his most famous soliloquy becomes rather meaningless, once that "dread of something after death" has faded away. [2] Quite apart from a precipitous decline in religious belief, we are the first generations to know – as a matter of plausible scientific fact, not baseless belief – that our planet itself will be rendered uninhabitable in about a billion years by the sun's expansion, if not sooner, and that beyond that lies the prospect of the "heat death" of the entire universe. I mean, really, sub specie aeternitatis, and minus any belief in an afterlife, what is the fucking point? So go ahead, Hamlet, mate, pick up that knife and make your own "quietus". Why not? Even though you've never carried a fardel, whatever that is, in your entire privileged (albeit fictional) life. BTW, seen Ophelia lately?

Which is all pretty depressing. But enter humanism – hooray! – stage left, to rescue the idea of there being a point to it all, after all: people.

Alice Roberts happens to be one – a humanist, that is, as well as a striking example of a people – and is in fact a past President of Humanists UK, who define a humanist as someone who

Trusts to the scientific method when it comes to understanding how the universe works and rejects the idea of the supernatural (and is therefore an atheist or agnostic)

Makes their ethical decisions based on reason, empathy, and a concern for human beings and other sentient animals

Believes that, in the absence of an afterlife and any discernible purpose to the universe, human beings can act to give their own lives meaning by seeking happiness in this life and helping others to do the same.

Which is, admittedly – compared to the Nicene Creed, say – a bit on the woolly side. I mean, how are your Belief Police ever going to interrogate, torture, and execute people with that comfy chair of a catechism? Nonetheless, I suspect that considerably more of us in Britain are passive signatories to a humanist manifesto than to the stated beliefs of the Anglican Church. I mean, when you look an obviously brilliant man like former archbishop Rowan Williams, you have to think: Seriously? This is the imaginary ladder you chose to climb, all the way to the top? Idiotic hat and all?

So, look, I know you don't really expect me to divulge the meaning of life, the universe, and everything, at least free of charge (although I can reveal it's not "42"). But I will repeat my previous conclusion, putting it like this: the pursuit of maximum profit in the most "efficient" (i.e. people-less) way is a theology, and essentially anti-humanist in its disregard for "human wellbeing". AI is just the latest attempt to extract more profit for a few at the expense of the many under the false manifesto of "doing away with tedious, repetitive tasks", supposedly freeing us all up to be, I dunno, poets or something. And yet at the same time AI dangles distracting and supposedly time- and effort-saving baubles in front of us, saving us the tedious, repetitive chore of actually creating anything; "Hey, AI, write me a poem in iambic pentameter rhyming couplets about Rowan Williams' dark night of the soul after he met Alice Roberts". This is consumption disguised as creativity. Getting bored with that yet?

But the sort of work that 21st century sophisticates might regard as tedious and repetitive, dangerous even, is not necessarily seen that way by the people who actually do it, provided it is reasonably well-paid, comes with a pension, plus some flexibility in hours and time off. Not everybody wants to sit at home all day or in an office looking into a computer screen. As I wrote in a post, Trouble, all the way back in June 2009:

It's easy to dismiss the likes of the BNP across Europe as merely the ignorant politics of an underclass of unemployables – alienated, tattooed, violent, foul-mouthed and hedonistic – who resent the arrival of successive waves of the eminently employable; most recently, le plombier polonais. But the rise of this new underclass is really the bewildered, self-harming response of a vital stratum of our society to its perceived abandonment, and it's a shocking development to anyone who grew up in the working class of the 1950s and 60s. It didn't used to be like this.

"This" needs to be taken seriously. Very seriously. Above all, there has to be meaningful, decently-paid work (skilled and unskilled manual work, for the most part) for the legions of young, strong, not particularly bright people born in this country, or there will be trouble. Lots of trouble.

Or, as perhaps more succinctly put by Raoul Vaneigem:

Down with a world in which the guarantee that we will not die of starvation has been purchased with the guarantee that we will die of boredom.

The Revolution of Everyday Life

1. I notice many diggers on the programme wear ironic t-shirts, some bearing this definition: "Archaeologist: someone who does precision guesswork based on unreliable data provided by those of questionable knowledge".

2. I've mentioned this before, but as an ultimate example of meaninglessness, consider the fact that the words "To be or not to be: that is the question, whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune ..." can – improbably, unbelievably, outrageously – be arranged into an anagram: "In one of the Bard's best-thought-of tragedies, our insistent hero Hamlet queries on two fronts about how life turns rotten ..." (The author of this anagram has apparently been identified as Cory Scott Calhoun). Actually, it does have a meaning of sorts: get a life...