Automatic Translators (ATs)

Devices programmed to translate from one spoken language to another. They are now the principal means by which travellers, diplomats and drifters communicate with speakers of other tongues. Widespread use of ATs has meant that only specialists bother with the hassle of learning foreign languages, most of them low-level academics bunkered down in the few remaining university language departments.
The demise of language learning - once considered an important element of civilized life - has not gone without protest, one focus of complaint being that since ATs work from a database of clichés, discourse between people of different cultures has been reduced to stock phrases, vulgar expressions of sentiment, and intellectual commonplaces. Even original thoughts, when filtered through ATs, are reduced to banalities. AT enthusiasts retort that 99% of oral communication is banal anyway, and that “what a good AT can’t translate, is probably not worth expressing.”
On a more philosophical level, concern exists over whether ATs overly sacrifice accuracy for the sake of intelligibility and whether they - along with other electronic media - are contributing to a decrease in the variety and depth of human culture. Driving the debate is a fear that the number of meanings available to humanity may be falling as our expressive devices become more uniform. The reduction in the number of spoken languages from about 10,000 in 1900 to less than 4,000 today, likewise suggests that we may be heading towards a future shorn of the quirks and colours that constitute the main source of human creativity.

Artificial Humour (AH)

Some recondite but influential thinkers continue to claim that Artificial Intelligence (AI) cannot resemble Human Intelligence because machines, no matter how sophisticated, can neither replicate nor “understand” the human emotions involved in humour, wit, aesthetic response, taste and so forth. Their argument is summarized in the catch-phrase “computers can’t tell jokes”. Defenders of AI have struggled for generations with this problem, whose importance may be more related to an internecine struggle for theoretical dominance amongst experts than for the practical value of endowing machines with human attributes. In any case, attempts to humanize computers have not so far been encouraging. Domestic computers can certainly now be programmed to decorate their output with an occasional witticism, but subtleties of mood and context, without which humour doesn’t work, continue to elude them. In human terms, they have remained “dull-witted”.

Alleged

Modifier used by journalists when making assertions they know to be false or questionable. Adverb: “allegedly”. See SPOKESPERSON.

ACREM

The Artificial Creation of Employment Act (2032). A World Council-supported solution to the problem of surplus unemployment. Social scientists have established that in order to ensure a reasonably tranquil world, the number of people with jobs must at least marginally exceed the number of unemployed. On the other hand, a large pool of well-qualified people who are out of work is essential to controlling inflation, keeping wages down, maximizing profits and ensuring that wage-earners remain docile and fearful of losing their livelihood.
Experts now agree that while the ideal economic level of planetary unemployment probably lies somewhere between 35% and 49%, even the smaller figure may be too high to be certain of avoiding periodic outbreaks of public unrest. To maintain the peace, therefore, many people have to be given “artificial” jobs with obvious costs to the net level of productivity.
An irony of technological progress is that an employment level of only 10% to 15% of people of working age would theoretically be sufficient to satisfy the entire world demand for goods and services - which means that an estimated two thirds of existing private-sector jobs could be eradicated with no loss of production and a significant increase in quality.¹ In other words, most people are simply not required for purposes of productive work, and their prime social function is simply to consume.
As usual, the private sector is in two minds about ACREM. On the one hand, it is clearly a burden on taxpayers - and particularly on corporations²; on the other hand, in addition to maintaining public order, it ensures the existence of enough credit-worthy consumers to keep the wheels of business turning. In a nutshell, business needs to maximize sales and the number of shoppers, while minimizing tax liabilities and the number of salaried employees, a contradiction reflective perhaps of the impossibility of finding a perfect solution to the administration of life.
ACREM is specially burdensome for corporate downsizers because companies denuded of personnel may sometimes be obliged partially to re-staff; and although ACREM salaries are paid by the government, the taxes required to fund them are levied on the private sector. Moreover, the new staff, who are seldom the ones originally made redundant, require training at company expense, which in turn gives rise to additional administrative costs. Since ACREM came into force, the advantage to corporations of reducing staff numbers has become negligible; which is why a campaign is now underway to have the Act rescinded. Licensed street begging and “holding camps” for the unemployed are among the alternatives under consideration.
___________
¹ See, for example, Wetherspoon and Thorpe, “More for Less - The Drive for Global Maximization”, Megalo Press, New York, 5th edition, 2015. Also ERROR THEORY.
² All companies are obliged to pay an ACREM premium.

Architectural Piles

A double entendre: the practice of cramming as many dwellings as possible into the smallest square footage. The concept originated in Japan in the late twentieth century with the design of hotels in the form of multiple chests of drawers, with each drawer containing just sufficient room for one or two adults (luggage restrictions applied). After spending a night in one of these compartments and surviving a panic attack brought on by the sensation of having been caught fresh and packed for export, the great British architect Hilda Danegeld began work on the world’s first designed-from-the-ground-up, hot-wired, limited-headroom micro apartment. The idea came to her at thirty thousand feet during her return flight from Tokyo to London, when her eye fell on a newspaper article about a broom cupboard in the upscale district of Knightsbridge that sold for a tidy sum as a pied-à-terre. What was good for Knightsbridge, she realized, would be even better for less distinguished neighborhoods where the demand for accommodation came predominantly from single people and couples on modest incomes. Always content to squeeze the most from the least, building developers needed little persuasion to adopt the idea; while Government, anxious to increase what it optimistically referred to as “affordable housing”, joined in with the offer of subsidized mortgages to help key workers to buy their first home. Within a few years, micro-living became the norm for the less-well-off throughout the developed world.
Hilda Danegeld was knighted in 2014 for architectural innovation in support of the homeless. By the time she died, however in 2029, serious flaws in micro-living had become apparent. Suicides among UK micro apartment dwellers had risen to over twice the national average, and, on a per capita basis, were even higher in the United States, perhaps because living in a confined space seemed to be in flagrant conflict with the American dream of personal freedom.
Observers noted that the architects who made fortunes out of designing micro apartments - and their work-place equivalent, micro-offices - neither lived nor worked in their own creations. For themselves, they preferred elegant country residences set in established gardens on the outskirts of picturesque villages, and offices in spacious high-tech towers, or converted city mansions designed by builders of a more gracious and stately age. In an interview at her Palladian mansion just outside Oxford some two years before her death, Dame Hilda admitted that her experience in that Japanese hotel all those years before had made her determined never again to spend so much as a night in a confined space. “No modern architect worth her salt would live in a micro,” she confided. “Matter of fact, few would be seen dead in anything they’d designed.”
A codicil to her will specified that her coffin was to be “at least one cubic centimetre larger than the washroom in a typical “Danegeld” micro-home.

An Introduction

The subtitle of this work is "A glossary of Contemporary and Future Life". It currently runs to about 300 pages, and I will publish them all here, entry by entry. In this first posting, I include some preliminary quotations, a foreword and a Table of Contents. The second posting contains the first entry, and so on.

Books, not which afford us a cowering enjoyment, but in which each thought is of unusual daring; such as an idle man cannot read, and a timid one would not be entertained by, which even make us dangerous to existing institutions, - such I call good books.
Henry David Thoreau

Qui n’ose se contredire ne va pas au bout de sa pensée et n’a jamais fait le tour d’une idée.
Those who fear to contradict themselves avoid real thinking and have never truly examined an idea.
Maurice Maeterlinck

Cum relego, scripsisse pudet, quia plurima cerno,
Me quoque qui feci judice, digna lini.
Reading over what I have written, and despite being the author, I’m appalled to find so much that deserves to be crossed out.
Ovid

...tout ce que j’aperçois me blesse, et je me reproche sans relâche de ne pas regarder assez.
...everything I perceive is painful, and I blame myself ceaselessly for not looking hard enough.
Claude Lévi-Strauss
_________________

FOREWORD

I originally envisaged this little work as multi-authored - a literary forum perhaps with myself as editor. It hasn’t turned out that way, partly because I have made no serious attempt to arouse the interest of a conventional publisher, and partly because - as I now realize - this is a highly personal view of the world and its contents. It was born and grew out of anger (as such books often are and maybe should be), and out of bewilderment at the infinite duplicity and ruthlessness of humankind, at the nonsense we unearth in our search for meaning and purpose, and at the impossibility of finding a final answer - I mean the truth - about anything.

Since this is a glossary, entries are ordered alphabetically rather than thematically which means you can dip in and out at any point. Some are short and simple, others sufficiently complex to give me pause when I re-read them.

Mistakes doubtless abound - typographical, grammatical, logical, ontological, theological, and every other kind available to textual expression and human endeavour. Corrections welcome. But remember: this is an unedited draft; and my eyes glide over errors,
....as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk...
(If Keats were alive, I’d apologize for quoting him here - but he isn’t).

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ARCHITECTURAL PILES
ACREM
ALLEGED
ARTIFICIAL HUMOUR (AH)
AUTOMATIC TRANSLATORS
BELIEVING IS SEEING (BIS)
BLAIRISM
BONHOFF’S LAW
BUSHIT
BUILT-IN OBSOLESCENCE
CAPITALIST THEORY OF CORRUPTION
CHAOS
CIRCUMVENTION
CIVILIAN CASUALTIES
CLIMAGEN
COFFEE
COLLATERAL DAMAGE
COMPUTER PHILOSOPHY
CONTIME
CREDIT RATING
DAWKINS DISEASE
DEBT CAPACITY
DEBT RELIEF
DEMOCRATIC ACCOUNTABILITY
DEMOCRACY
DEMOCRATIC DEFICIT
DEMOPHOBIA
DIYSEX
DPT
DO
DRD
ECONOMIC JUSTICE
ECSTATIC HYGIENE
EFFICIENCY QUOTA
EGO
ELECTORAL MANIFESTO
ELECTROSEX
ENCYCLOEXCITANT
EPD
EQUAL OPPORTUNITY
ERROR THEORY
EVENING PRIMROSE
EVOLUTION
EXTINCTION
FACING
FIFTEEN
FLOPS
FRB
FREEDOM
FREEDOM OF THE PRESS
FREEGEM
FREE TRADE
FUN
GLOBAL SWARMING
GOD
GÖDLICHER’S THEORY
GOVERNMENT INSPECTION
HISTORICISM
HOME SPACE DESIGN
HUMAN SOLIDARITY
IDOL WORSHIP
IMPUNITY
INCONTROVERTIBLE PROOF
INEQUALITY
INTELLIGENCE
INTERNAL DECAY
LASER FENCE
LIBERAL DEMOCRACY
LOCH NESS SYNDROME
MARCEL’S MALAISE
MARKET DISCIPLINE
MONOTHEISM
MUTUAL CONTEMPT
NATURESCAPE
NEO-CONS
NETCO
OBSCURANTISM
OUTSOURCING
OVERLOAD
PARADISE
PEACE INITIATIVE
PE
PERTWEE’S PARADOX
PLOUGHING THE SEA
PRISONER’S DILEMMA
PRIVATE FINANCE INITIATIVE
PROGRESSIVE TAXATION
PUBLIC SERVICE
AL-QA’IDA
QUEBEC SEPARATISM
REGRESSIVE TAXATION
REPOPS
REVERSE DEVELOPMENT
RIGHT TO INFORMATION
ROBOTIC SENSIBILITY
SARS
SEX-TEL
SHOP SOILED
SIMSCAPE
SIX(TY) NINE
SLEEPEYE
SOLIDARITY
SOLIPSIST MOVEMENT
S.O.N.G. (Something for Nothing)
SPINSTERISM
SPIRIT DIALOGUES
SPOKESPERSON
STAGE SEX
STATISTICAL WALL
SWAMPLAND
TERRORISM
TIME FLIES
TOURISM
TOYS
TRANSUIT
U.N. (United Nations)
UNDERDEVELOPMENT
UNIFYING THEORY
VIRTUAL ENTERTAINMENT
WAFER
WAR
WMDs
WHOLE LIFE DESIGN (WELD)
WORLD COUNCIL
WORLD PERSONNEL DATABASE
WOT