Here’s to 2024. May you retreat into the past with all the obscurity you deserve.
Good riddance to you. Like all the worst salesmen, you promised so much while ultimately delivering so little. You raced off the blocks at the stroke of midnight last December 31st on a 10th floor balcony in Krakow. You even heralded a new year with pyrotechnics the likes of which I saw only once before over the Sydney Harbour Bridge during headier times. You were so presumptuous about how swimmingly the rest of the year would go that you exploded into life in an 1812 Overture by sending a chaotic crescendo of fireworks in a great ring around Poland’s southern capital.
It boded so well for the year to come. Despite the January rain, signs were green that ’24 would ripen into a vintage. You gave me late January in Italy. O Italy, si bella e perduta. You followed that little boon by gifting me February on Brazil’s emerald coast, March in the otherworldly beauty of the Atacama desert, and April where Eve’s apple fell, right in the heart of Rio. But that was where the year peaked, before spring hadn’t even had the chance to spring.
You made it hard on me after that. I’m convinced your ultimate aim was to humble me. Is that because I returned to the place whose welcome I had long outstayed? You tamped down my hopes in one disappointment after the other; too long a rap sheet even to mention. Or maybe you were teaching me a lesson that when it comes to little lost souls, they can’t always get what they want but if they try sometimes they might find they get what they need. You taught me that life doesn’t always go our way, but if we hold on for long enough with our pleading hand outstretched it probably will pour us a cup of kindness, mainly out of pity for our unwavering stoicism. So good riddance to you, but not without a begrudging thanks for staying true to your unpredictable self. Everything is as it has to be, and when contextualised by subsequent events even duds like 2024 will start to unravel the mystery of why they had to act so mean.
I have a feeling that you were a spiteful bitch to many a poor soul. You thwarted many a dream while compounding many a misery. And hey, while you were putting the squeeze on many of us, you also managed to serve up a dull summer marred by clouds. At least you did your damage at a brisk pace. You raced through yourself, burned your candle from both ends with a ferocity even faster than the year you buried. You were a bull in china shop minus the valuable crockery, but not minus the awful sound of shattering plates.
So, there it is. I won’t miss you unless your replacement turns out to tread still harder on my dreams. But given how salutary a lesson you delivered, for the sake of harmony 2025 really needs to play good cop to your bad. When I look at the wider world with a cold and hard stare, the augurs don’t look great for times ahead. The view out the window on day one of 2025 is hardly inspiring. A hard rain is already fallin’, and I’m thinking it can only get better.
24? What kind of number is that, anyway? Divisible by 12, 8, 6, 4, 3, 2, 1, and itself. Broken down by a host of lesser numbers, it’s impossible to predict which way you’ll go and with whom you’ll decide to sub-divide. From the end of the first quarter of your ignominious year, you chose rather selfishly to divide into yourself, but instead of the wholeness of 1, you left me with less than that. Come on, maybe you were mean because we deserved it with our collective stupidity, a flirtation with human disaster that shows no sign of abatement. But please spare the individuals among us who just want you gone and your successor to show a little clemency and a lot of succour to guide us along on our life’s journey. ’25 is only divisible by 5, 1 and itself, so surely cannot go off the rails like ’24. I’m banking on the new year multiplying by 4 to give me the perfect 100, but perhaps a little overly optimistic.
In case you didn’t hear it the first time around, good riddance and don’t come back any time soon. Here’s a parting shot: we can only hope and pray that in 364 days from now our resolutions don’t involve pining nostalgically for you. For that will surely mean that the year to come has been even more of an eventual let down. Keep wearing that epitaph, the year to remember for mostly the wrong reasons. When all is said and done, at least you left me with my health intact, and, well, you did show me the Atacama desert. Okay, granted. You were a mean bastard and refused to show me the way ahead, but in your defence at least you showed me emphatically where not to go, And, more indirectly, how to call upon the power of grace to let go of the things not meant for me, even though I remain puzzled as to what is.
Ever Get the Feeling You Are Going Around and Around?…And around and around and around, and really getting absolutely nowhere.
Welcome to the 21st Century West where opportunities can be hallucinations and where the chase oftentimes ends in yet another chase, as opposed to a kill. All this and we’re on the cusp of an AI revolution. We can’t even get the art of living right, yet we’re busy encoding our faults into our intangible offspring. We’re on the brink of outsourcing what used to rank as paid work to a shapeless wonder that isn’t sentient enough to make wage demands (yet). How long before the conversation switches from generative to degenerative AI?
These are troubling times, as talk of revolution often spells. By some accounts this is revolution #4 since the first industrial revolution ignited the planet back in the Georgian 1780’s. All times are historic, but some are more historic than others. And these are shaping up to be historic times, tumultuously speaking. Arguably this one will outdo all the others, and in doing so extinguish all possibility of there being any fifth. It will be the last because the Earth is being bled dry to facilitate the new age.
Conflict raging in different theatres of war and misery. Absent-minded ecocide threatening to delist many species from the taxonomic record books. Greed back in vogue. Leadership in crisis, shored up by one grandstanding caricature after another. Weather gone wild. Belief so divided in what we took to be eternally true that conspiracy theories are moving from the lunatic fringe to lunatic mainstream. Capitalism in hyperdrive. Burgeoning populations of newly literate peoples, all of whom want a share of a privileged pot that used to be raided only by the lucky few Western nations. Stagnant wages. Deceptive employment market, promising career fulfilment to Gen Zs who, unlike their more compliant elders, will not be fooled again. A world collapsing under the titanic contradictions of being hell bent on expansion while everything contained in that world (except for us) undergoes contraction. Neuroses devouring billions of fingernails. Prices rising. National debts exceeding national income. Personal depression on the up. Civilisation choked with its irreparable discontents. A general feeling that it’s not going to end well. Is this how it feels to be alive during the end-times?
But that’s the bigger picture. The mad mural of worldly events, even harder to read than Picasso’s Guernica. Does anyone even know where we are heading?
The Surrealistic Job Application
Let’s scale down the picture to a single life: mine own. I have no idea where I’m going, but i know i can’t get there soon enough. But first, the obstacle to knowing and going. I have this nagging feeling that I’m going round in circles trying to get ahead. The instances of this are growing more absurd and infuriating by the day: so infuriating that if I keep banging my fist on the table any harder i’ll end up doing myself an injury that in all likelihood will never heal, but rather limit my physical capabilities and render things even more complicated than they are already. What the hell is going with the big wide world where you can’t slam your fist on hardwood without worrying about the ‘downstream’ effects?
This year i have been mainly itching to sideline into the world of AI tutoring. That means donning my schoolmasterly mortar board to lecture so-called Large Language Models on how to be human, as if we didn’t have enough humans trying to become large, language models. Prompt follow by response, followed by prompt, followed by…you get the idea. So, the process for me – and, I’m assuming by extension, everyone else – has been tortuous. It’s not hard for the nascent AI industry to word analyse endless social media personal profiles, considering how many are out there in the public domain. So there’s plenty of spillover from the infinity pool of talent. First the invitation to apply and then, after an opaque and Byzantine system of acceptance, remote verification, assessing and finally onboarding, they inculcate you into the already swollen legions of free-thinking typists who think they’re going to shape future syncretic thinking processes while working from the comfort of their bed meantime.
Nice idea in principle to become a prompt-response whisperer. Training the model from just about anywhere with a network signal seems like freedom incarnate to me. Giving elocution lessons to a supercharged chatbot from a motorhome on a Pyrenean mountainside, or a beach in Greece, is a sweet little number by any measure. But reaching that Promised Land only by emerging unscathed from the warren of input/output down the internet rabbit hole, where no reasons are ever given for any decision made by whomever programmes the software commands – now that poses one of today’s many challenges to a better, simpler world. Forget solving the intractable Israel-Palestine conflict, it’s making sense of what the hell the computer is doing and why, now there lies the rub. Is AI making the decisions already? Can any human programmer with any compassion wish to make one’s life so difficult? ‘Computer says no!’ Period.
That said, In my case I received an invitation from a Gen AI startup firm to apply to become an AI LLM trainer. Prompt-response authoring, it is sometimes called. I applied from Brazil, where I was on extended holiday. I tried to explain that my country of residence was England, but was anyone around to listen? Nope. So, my account was suspended for suspicious behaviour (authors had to be living in the US, UK, or any other anglophone nation to qualify for eligibility). This came after an earlier setback wherein I made it to the exciting assessment stage. It’s this aptitude test that separates the men from the boys. Rubric: Provide the optimal response using only original material to a pointed question about gold medals won during the Tokyo Olympics. Any hint that Chat GPT was called upon, and face instant disqualification. Their warning could not have been any more explicit. So, I wrote what I thought was a flawless test, providing clear prompts and sensible, well-researched and wholly original responses. Absolutely no artificial in my intelligence, thank you very much. Expecting to be welcomed into the prompt-response community with open AI arms, instead I received a curt reply that my account had been suspended on suspicion that the response to the prompt was too good to be true and therefore fabricated. You can’t pull the wool over our omniscient eyes was the bottom line.
Upon arrival back in England, again I was wooed by a very mmm, inhuman, okay let’s say generic, invitation from the same unnamed AI startup. So I signed up using another email but the same telephone number as I opted for during the first aborted attempt to register my interest, back in Brazil. The genial AI that patrols online applications with ruthless efficiency flagged up yet more suspicious behaviour. How, in its black&white, yes/no, 0/1 universe, could a different applicant possess the same telephone number? Logical conclusion: fraud. Account suspended for suspicious behaviour in clear contravention of the corporation’s stated policy of one email = one AI author = one tel. number = one love. Any more would be plain greedy, and run counter to the democratic spirit of our future cybernetic world. That is where I should have accepted karma and aborted any such attempts going forward.
Undaunted, I thought I could outwit the shrewd little gremlin controlling my misfortune. So, when the inevitable happened and a third invitation came through my Linkedin, I said f*&k it! This time I will be successful in gaining a $15 an hour job teaching the future to speak like us. This time I’ll use not only another email address, I will also register my other telephone number. Little did I know that when the biometric verification, comparing my passport photo with my 3-dimensional facial scan, and which I passed on my first attempt to reach the onboarding Holy Land, was retaken, AI suspicion was aroused and my third email was suspended pending investigation for illicit behaviour, verging on the fraudulent. You cannot possess the same face twice was the bottom line.
Now, if that chain of avoidable events had occurred on human watch, we may well have found a way out of this impasse using something called the common sense approach. But that’s not the way it works nowadays, as nothing makes sense anymore. Knowing that helped the bitter pill of failure to go down, without needing the alka seltzer.
All of this cumulative nonsense left a telling prophecy: that the road to human perfection is paved with its fair share of bullshit. The AI authorship that never was proved one thing at least, that while perseverance may be a quality of the highest value, there exists nothing more valuable that the time we have on this Earth. Some things are better left alone so as to invest that time in more productive and rewarding pursuits, perhaps.
Alien-nation is the Name of the Game
The sensation of one man’s helplessness in the faceless face of the great machine that we are currently putting through university is truly emasculating. This tale of David vs Goliath doesn’t end in the biblical sense, however. Encounters like mine evoke old 20th century notions of the social and economic alienation of the individual. In the Marxist sense, alienation sprung from the worker having little or no control over either the means of production or the product itself. Alienation in the 21st century takes on a different, slightly sinister complexion. With AI the bourgeoisie will bequeath the means of production to the product itself. The implications of this are far-reaching, as a lack of self-control in one’s own affairs could spell a new level of self alienation of the type I felt from this shambolic attempt to do something so nominally simple as sign up to work as an AI tutor.
Did i mention, I got another invite to apply my ‘talents’ in the pursuit of AI language modelling? Same company, no joke. I thought it was a joke until I remembered that AI has yet to learn the art of cruel humour. That was going to be my job. But it’s only a matter of time until it learns. And woe betide our prospects when that day comes.
Allow me to set the scene, if you will. The Colca Canyon is situated in Southern Peru, about a 3-hour drive northwest of the White City, Arequipa. By all measures, the Colca is the world’s third deepest canyon (some say fourth) after the Yarlung Tsangpo Grand Canyon in Tibet, followed by the jaw-dropping Kali Gandaki Gorge in the Annapurna region of Nepal.
The Colca Canyon cuts such a swathe through the Andean plateau that it bottoms out at about 11,000ft (3,400m). To offer up some idea of scale that clicks with most of us, that’s about twice the depth of the world’s most celebrated geological knife wound, Arizona’s Grand Canyon. So, one Grand Canyon nested on top of another, and the Colca will just about accommodate them both.
Where Humans Dare To Tread and Till
Farmed by Inca peoples since time immemorial, its steep slopes show abundant signs of continuous human occupation. At about 50 miles in length that’s one deep cut for Man; one deeper cut for the magisterial condor that has made a miraculous comeback there after decades of persecution from local livestock farmers. Its confidence soaring, the condor is one of the main attractions of the hordes of tour buses that stop at the various lookouts along the canyon rim.
For the adventurous few though, what awaits them is a gruelling descent to the canyon floor, where if lucky, they’ll see the condor soar not below them, but at eye level. It’s all downhill from here. And surprise, surprise, the prospects never looked so good.
I got teamed up with a nice bunch of continental Europeans half my age and double my knee flexibility. Among them a smattering of French and German. The Franco-Prussian alliance had sunk to new heights. Our guide was a native of Arequipa, a man who had led so many 3-day expeditions in and out of the canyon that, as can be expected, he was rather unfazed by the whole affair.
El Condor Pasa
One moment we were setting off along the canyon rim and the next a slow motion plunge down a zigzagging hoof trail that swallowed us whole. The view was stupendous, the scale was suddenly gargantuan, and the sky a blue bonanza between weeks of monsoon rain that would render it all but impassable before and after. With the heat rising and the sunlight penetrating the deepest, darkest rincones of this abyss, we fell into a hypnotic rhythm. Our guide pointed out geological features, and delved into a history of human geography. But in keeping with great journeys, what you rank as the best bits keep getting superseded by better bits. Half way down royalty dropped in. Condors swooping over us so near and so balletic on the hot air updrafts that by the time i reached for my oversized SLR camera, they had glided away into the shaded recesses under the canyon walls.
It’s All Downhill From Here
Serendipity had accompanied us that day. Our guide marvelled at how rare it was to come so close to the feathered emblem of the Andes. Then again, perhaps he said that to all his small tour groups. Down and down we traipsed until, looking up, the canyon walls closed in on us like great doors in some medieval banquet hall.
Having spent the better part of the day tiptoeing down about 3,000ft we found ourselves at the nadir. By no means the lowest point in our experience, crossing the iron suspension bridge over the Colca’s mazy river did signal the lowest point geographically-speaking. The sun was beyond its zenith, casting its brilliance on the east face of the canyon, making shadow creep gracefully up the west face.
Scraping the Barrel to Find an Oasis
We had been descending all this time. Now we were walking along the canyon floor adjacent to the watercourse. Festooning the margins of the clear crystal water were orchards of figs and other succulent fruits. Vegetation was abundant. Light and warmth caressing in a very special place where the wind and the winds of change were banished.
We walked and talked for the next couple of days along that canyon floor. We passed churches and villages, kids coming home from school, and guinea pigs flayed and hung out to dry. We stopped in a guesthouse with the most amazing swimming pool, fed to pure by an oasis. A classic desert oasis in the truest sense it was, fringed by date palms whose seedlings had come from half a world away.
It’s All Uphill From Here
On the third morning since taking the plunge into the world’s third deepest canyon, we gathered around our guide at 4am to face the trek back up and out. We obviously knew all along that what goes down must come up. But comfortable in our deep oasis on the previous evening, tipsy on rum and oxygen, I was contemplating a helicopter medevac out of there. The climb looked daunting, and was. 3,000ft straight up in the grip of incipient subtropical heat. Hence the reason we left before daybreak. As if to foreshadow what would be a gruelling hike out, my guide took one look at the packs I was carrying back and front, and shook his head in pity. “I told you to travel lightly, didn’t I?”
Half-light kissed the rim tops around an hour or two into the climb. Then, quick as ink blotting on paper, the dawn light seeped down until we rose to meet it a quarter of the way up. By then the pain of being a human packhorse had slowed my stride to a lumbering, teetering mess. My t-shirt was soaked with the sweat of my own labours. My bandana had to be wrung out every 100 metres or so. My eyes were weeping salty tears of pure perspiration. The line between myself and the other group members was attenuating fast, as they strode ahead. Overcome with guilt, eventually my guide offered, with a degree of reluctance visible in his grimace, to take one of my packs. But not before hailing a passing muleteer who refused.
Ghosts From the Past
Onward we clambered, inch by inch until at about 10am – a full 6 hours after setting off from the now microscopic guesthouse on the canyon floor – he and I emerged on the lip. Shattered, reddened to bursting, and vowing never to descend that far again with any baggage whatsoever, I collapsed in a heap. Beside me, by the grace of an ironic God, were a couple of Estonians I had climbed with a couple of weeks earlier. On that occasion, the altitude was so dizzying that it was they who struggled with hypoxia to the point of almost fainting, and me who offered a helping hand. Now there they were all smiles, relaxing after practically jogging up the Colca carrying nothing but a 7-litre daypack. And me, a sorry sight, temples pounding, eyes throbbing and near spent. Valió la pena? Was it worth the pain? Absolutamente!
The Blind Salamander 