We were in a bright tall airy room with floor to ceiling windows to one side, plain with no decorations and bare walls also a row of numbered doors with name plates pinned to them. Bolted to the floor and together, lines of yellow uncomfortable seats. The person who designed them should receive an award for creating the utmost, ugliest, uncomfortable, seating arrangement ever, ensuring sore buttocks and back pain.
We are in the waiting room at the clinic, yes sitting, more perched on the seats, although one can’t really call them seats, while we patiently anticipate our turn to be called as we watch the others being summoned into the inner sanctums of one of the row of doors.
It had seemed a long wait but no more than twenty minutes when the final couple disappeared, leaving just the two of us and our mobile phones. It is then that I casually ask my darling wife, in what is now an empty room, with the exception of the two spies I just mentioned in our pockets, if she would like a new watch. Why that popped into my head at that moment I do not know but I am thinking one of those clever types which monitor heart, blood pressure, and much more including the time.
Very little was being said as we are now on how own, and after receiving an agreement that she would like one, my mobile phone then made its rumbling sound, demanding to be answered, and there on the screen was a firm selling smart watches.
Coincidence? I do not think so. It would appear that our phones, as there was no one else there or another listening device like a ‘jezebel’ in the corner who answers by the name of ‘Alexa’, could have been involved with what happened next. It could only have been the mobiles quietly listening and separating the ‘watch’ word and passing it on to sellers, of this type of item.
I am aware this brand of marketing has been in existence for a very long time. However, this was different with the speed which the answers came back on my phone. There cannot be another explanation as three further offers of buying timepieces arrived before we were called to one of the doors. They were all by organisations displaying their wares of magical watches. Welcome to the world where your brief and simple words are recorded and instantly passed on to those who have an interest in your mutterings.
I am sure we are not alone, and no doubt many other people, if not everyone can repeat a similar occurrence the difference this time was the speed these replies came, my guess is AI, Artificial Intelligence, which operates at the speed of light, if not faster, was involved.
Some of the offers were outstanding, for a genuine website to be able to offer 90 percent discounts is just nonsense, and obviously, it is a site hoovering up credit card details to the unexpected by offering items at ridiculous prices with no intention of forwarding them and doubtful if they even possess them. I declined by not answering all the attention-grabbing offers, in my view non-bargains.
‘NOW AND THEN’ JOHN
It was during 1980, twenty-three years ago, a sad and true event when a dyslexic person with poor eyesight scribbled the wording to a song. We know not how he wrote it, maybe at his desk, or perhaps he sat up in the middle of the night with the words ringing around his head, and wrote it down on a notepad by his bed. What we do know is before the words could be recorded, and shortly after, on the 8th of December that year, the talented musician and one of the founder members of the Beatles, John Lennon was shot and killed on the doorstep of his apartment building in New York.
It was a sad time, a brilliant artist the creator of so many famous melodies many with his close associate Paul McCartney, under their joint names of ‘Lennon and McCartney’ brought to an end by Lennon being shot in the back as he entered his apartment at the age of forty.
Inside a song lay uncompleted, that is until forty-three years later when his voice is reproduced in all its glory by ‘AI’ and the song ‘Now and Then’ is brought alive as if he is transported back from the dead, and a new melody is added to the charts of the Beatles.
ARTIRISHIAL INTELLIGENCE
There is a report stating the Prime minister Rishi Sunak has put in place a new AI Safety Institute to monitor and to control the introduction of Artificial Intelligence, he has also said that the UK would host a World summit on the safety of this invisible intelligence.
Meanwhile, the bank of NatWest, has changed the way it answers queries telephoned into its call centre, and has launched what it calls ‘the new AI-powered chatbot’ which it says ‘will be just like talking with a human’ as it replicates the bank’s real live staff, so in future your enquiry will be answered by a robot, as the existing staff will be, what is commonly called, on the dole.
Let us hope that the new fine body Institute of real people of this new Quango set up by the Prime Minister manages to control the frightening speed by which we are being taken over by the invisible intelligence purporting to be real people, as per the John Lennon being brought back from the dead, before we find ourselves reading reports that the previously dead Adolf Hitler, mimicking his action and speech, has made an alliance with Sir Winston Churchill, also dead, in developing the new Third Reich to control the World, with chairman Mao and Margaret Thatcher clapping on the side. Take care
Percy Chattey’s Ramblings 1 to 4 can be bought in book form, from Amazon
