Hamish Gobson’s diary: the view from across the Uisge
Tuesday 1 August 2023
MY CAMPAIGN for affordable government in Scotland received an unexpected boost last weekend. I was out in my informal laboratory above the beach cataloguing a new batch of samples for my collection of Dreghorn Browns, the group of seaweeds (fucus murrellanus) which I use for political fortune-telling. Since seaweed does not have vocal chords, it cannot banter. So I was listening while I worked to the Chatham House podcast about current affairs. This week’s edition was called “Is AI a Threat to Democracy?”.
The editor/anchor is Bronwen Maddox, the Director of Chatham House, and a women of many accomplishments, including having a famous father who I once met in unusual circumstances in a far away place—but that is a story for another time! She asked a member of her distinguished panel of guests this important question: “What is the most positive, or most exciting thing that, for you, the technology [of Artificial Intelligence] could bring?”
Alex Krasodomski, a senior research associate with the Digital Society Initiative, started his answer by quoting the famous American biologist Ed Wilson: “The problem with humanity is that we have stone age emotions; we have medieval institutions; and God-like technology.”
Thinking of Scottish Strongman, Humza Yousaf, the stone-age emotions point seemed pretty much on the money. Like so many in the SNP he displays the feelings of inferiority that any stone-age man would exhibit when confronted by clean shaven people who are able to speak inflected languages, operate typewriters or drive without insurance.
“Medieval institutions” was also a good fit as the Holyrood parliament was designed by a monkish loner called Father Dewar (for details see here pp. 329ff). His aim was to prevent public opinion making a nuisance of itself in politics. A vow of silence was imposed on all debaters, thus making the parliament ideal for those drawn to “oriental” flattery and lying by indirect means. Open discussion is not the idea at all. Rather it is to establish what Dewar the Dictator called “consensus”, a word which implies the suppression of all contrary, complicated or creative opinion. (on this see here: pp 33-7, 50, 101-2, 107, 207, 272) How very “post-oriental” of him!
This is, of course, quite unlike the situation in Ireland, where the parliament is full of entertaining come and go between law-makers, as this clip demonstrates. In Scotland, the broken-backed wetness we have come to expect of Douglas Ross and his limp-wristed Unter-Ilk stands in sad contrast to our more manly Irish cousins, like the Healy-Rae brothers from Co. Kerry, which is about as “unoriental” as you can get within the British Isles.
The cause of our national humiliation as a failed democracy—or “demacrocity”, as James Healy-Rae once called it in the Dáil—was the smug authoritarianism of St Donald of Dewar who, incidentally, liked curries. Due to his gerrymandering of the parliamentary “constitution”, all we have in the “debating” crypt of St Deid’s of Holyrood is one bored-looking preceptor reading diligence texts cleared by the Party scripture control canon while the over-paid monks sit in silent contemplation of their salaries, expenses and high-end mobile-homes, or fahrthausen.
The third point Professor Krasodomski made is even more closely related to AI and the Scottish contribution to world progress. The media is awash these days with stories about the amount of money being poured into the “God-like technology” of artificial “intelligence”. Billions are spent developing the computing power necessary to give the appearance of life in pre-programmed machines.
Hundreds of billons go into super-computer research; other billions go into the parallel processing chips which are needed for AI applications. Even bigger sums are spent reprogramming society so that we all behave as predictably, dishonestly and hypocritically as the God-like machines require.
The threat which AI poses to democracy lies precisely in that de-Irishing of life due to the imposition of the silent-monastery algorithm on all Members of the Scottish Parliament (except when Fergus Ewing is talking about the Greens). Only machines and those who represent them may speak. This is what Scotland has achieved—at a fraction of the cost of Silicon Valley.
Sadly, Bronwen Maddox’s group chose to ignore the Second Country of Empire, perhaps because our solution to the AI dilemma is so elegantly economical. Instead of pouring uncounted billions into creating apparently intelligent machines, we spend a few hundred millions on a dead parliament which is an ideal habitat for robotic humans. The secret is the old Scottish virtue of thrift.
The nationalists have re-calibrated thrift in such a way that we will never again have to struggle to build a couple of ferries for a miserly £97 million, when £350 million would be perfectly adequate. Never again will householders have to pay £500 for a domestic heating system when, by means of a simple heat-exchanger, we could get the job done for £10,000. Never again will we have one party in government spending tax-payers’ money on its electoral bungs when we could have two of them spending on two different sets of electoral bungs—and so on.
This is what Euro-Scots call being “economical with the argent.” But why stop at cash? The same applies to words. Humza Yousaf has shown the world how an ordinary human being, programmed only by his own political prejudices and ambitions, can reduce its political vocabulary by 50 per cent. Instead of the conventional “Yes” or “No”, Humza was able to re-conceptualise the future in an audacious simplification by limiting the range of possible answers to just: “Yes”. That explains at least one otherwise inexplicable fact of recent history.
All the algorithms in the free world could never have predicted what Yapping Yousaf would do when given the opportunity to lead the SNP. He was asked right at the start if he might not in the end destroy his Party due to his own inability to think outside the stone-age inferiority box which he hopes will keep him in power forever. With only one answer on his crib-sheet, he was forced to say: “Yes”.
Every algorithm in the whole world stood up and objected, but in the end our stone-age strongman was proved right. He was the only man in the whole parliament capable of doing the Opposition’s job as well as his own.
What Silicon Valley fails to grasp is that there is no sense in paying billions to develop artificial intelligence, when Humza Yousaf comes at a fraction of the cost of a full-spec chatbot. As a word producer, he has no equal for economy and thrift in the long history of both western democracy and oriental militocracy.
Not even the most intelligent machine is capable of committing political suicide unless it is programmed to do so. It takes a High-end Humza to do that. No journalist or person could have predicted the behaviour he has exhibited since his promotion to lead precentor in St Deid’s. Even Macbeth’s witches might have struggled to conceive of anything so off-cauldron as a nanoscale Humza “hovering through the fog and filthy air” in order to destroy his own future.
Perhaps only my seaweed would have been capable of algorithmizing correctly. But, as a proud analogian rather than a cringing digitalian, my trust in science is not unlimited. Had any batch of fronds predicted that an ambitious parasite would have been prepared to destroy its own host in the name of “continuity”, I would not have believed it. Not even the Covid virus was so stupid. I would have felt obliged to check my interpretation by re-reading the leaves concerned, ideally at spring tides when the full moon is in Aquarius, or the Southern Sun is in St. Kilda.
But my fronds rarely let me down. Here is one prediction they have made which I am prepared to disclose so it can be checked by you, the reader, after the polls close on 7 May 2026. My Dreghorn Browns tell me that Humza will have finished what he started when he became Leader of his Party. The dread sign “SNP” will no longer stand for the Scottish Nobrain Party. Now it will be the Scottish Nomore Party.
My seaweed assures me the world will be a happier place as a result. It certainly ought to be a cheaper one, Bronwen. Forget AI – NoI will be the fashion of the future.
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Hamish Gobson lives on the Hebridean isle of Great Todday (Todaidh Mór) and features in Nicola Sturgeon: the Years of Ascent (1970-2007) – A Citizen’s Biography of a Driven Woman in a Drifting Parliament (Ian Mitchell, 2022) – available on Amazon and also reviewed here by Tom Gallagher.
Also written by Ian Mitchell is The Justice Factory (second edition): Can the Rule of Law Survive in Twenty-First Century Scotland? which considers the future of liberal democracy, taking Scotland as an example.
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Photo of seaweed by kichigin19 from Adobe Stock