What do you do after a long ramble through park land with large herds of free-roaming deer when the weather is rainy, chilly, and blustery? Dry off and warm up in a café with a hot drink and something to eat. That’s exactly what the Badger and his wife did at the end of a bracing wander around Petworth Park. The café, in Petworth House which sits magnificently at one end of the park, was busy but we found a table next to a small group of millennial couples who had hiked cross-country from Midhurst seven miles away. They were refuelling with tea, sandwiches, and hot soup in readiness for the trek back. Their lively conversation wasn’t about their hike or their return journey, but about the internet and AI! Some of the group, the Badger sensed, clearly had a background in IT. As they finished and rose to leave, one commented cheerily to another that ‘There should be a simple way of describing the internet that doesn’t use jargon or refer to technology’. After the group left, the Badger’s wife challenged him to do just that using a maximum of ten words!
Thoughts bubbled in the Badger’s brain for the rest of the day, and later that evening he told his wife that he’d converged on a description for the internet that met the challenge. She merely shrugged her shoulders disinterestedly and continued surfing the internet on her smartphone. Undeterred, the Badger announced that the internet is ‘All human interactions, from good to evil, sped up’. She simply nodded and told the Badger to use it for his blog, and that’s exactly what he’s done!
There are probably many valid and better alternatives, but the Badger thinks these words powerfully describe the internet, that nebulous entity which not only invisibly connects people, places, information, stories, beliefs, knowledge, and ideas globally, but also entertains us, sparks our curiosity, and mirrors our aspirations, flaws, and contradictions. The words also encapsulate the fact that all the good and bad attributes of humanity waltz together on the internet at a speed humankind has never encountered before. The fight between good and evil for domination is thus unrelenting, perpetual, and affected only by human ingenuity. Sometimes good dominates and other times evil does, which is why we should be wary, cautious, and conscious of safety, security, and privacy when engaging in the virtual world where the yin-yang of modern life is played out.
The Badger’s wife has now suggested a new challenge – to describe AI in ‘a simple way that doesn’t use jargon or refer to technology’ using a maximum of ten words. The Badger’s first thought was to describe AI using the same words for the internet. His second thought? To avoid challenges spawned when your spouse overhears something in the conversation of strangers!
