Disclaimer, I always use AI to tidy these pieces up. Pieces like this are mostly dictated verbally into Owli which transcribes them and the AI just tidies them up like all you luddites who complain but use spellcheck to check your spelling . If you hear me talk, you’ll know this is me.
Books, simply put, were the route I took to get me out of a life of poverty, very poor, working class. I grew up in a mining village, something I’m very, very proud of, but we were not wealthy. I mean, we were literally at the bottom of the heap. We lived in a small house; I shared a bed with three sisters.
My mother died when I was ten. I was still in that bed, it was uncomfortable and awkward. When we’d moved in, I had, I remember vaguely, the outside loo, and we did have a bathroom extension built. But you know, literally classic northern poverty.
Now, what got me out of it was a love of books. From an age that I cannot remember, this was way before I was at school, I was reading. And because we couldn’t afford books, and even back in those days, at the end of the nineteen sixties, you couldn’t get cheap books. Books were much more expensive and rare and hard to come by. They’re cheap and throwaway now, to a large extent; they weren’t back then.
I recall one of my earliest memories, actually, is going to the library with my mother, carrying a Co-op plastic bag, one of the old, thick plastic ones with the stick-on handles, to get books out of the library. And I think, dredging my memory, they were Enid Blyton and Secret Seven books.
Now, I don’t know if that’s the first time I went, but obviously, I was reading from a very, very early age, aged three or four. And it meant that, even before I went to school, I could read. And I recall, in infant school, going through all the stages of the books, the gold, silver, and bronze, in the first couple of years, so that by the time I got into the primary school, I’d read all the texts that we were supposed to read through four years of primary school. So I started reading newspapers. We were lucky enough to get newspapers; we were lucky enough to see them at the library. And I read them cover to cover, back to front, and even if I wasn’t interested, I would read. And I don’t know why—and it may be a function of myself, I may be slightly autistic, but I don’t know. I don’t believe in tests of autism and things; I think it helps some people, but people like me… well, you know, it’s just me, so what the hell would I worry about?
And as a result, as an adult, I’ve always been exceptionally good at quizzes. I’ve been in pub quiz teams; I’ve never really lost at a pub quiz-type event that I’ve been in that I can remember, I may have, but I can’t remember. I don’t experience losing quizzes very often. I’ve got a huge amount of facts in my brain, and I’m like a walking Wikipedia, to some extent, but instead of just Wikipedia, of course, I’ve got the intelligence of a human brain on top of that. And it means that I can recall the facts, pull the facts, but I can, more crucially, start to link them in unexpected and novel ways. And I think this is the root of my extreme creativity.
Now, I’m not a famous artist, I’m not a famous writer, I’m not a famous creative, but I have never stopped making things, and I make music, art, and I write, depending on how I’m feeling, what stage my year is at, and all of those conditions, or what day job I’m doing. In my day job, I handle massive complexity, because I architect large, complicated and complex systems, and that requires a huge amount of creativity sometimes. And I think the root of it is that reading, because I think what I put in place in my head was a huge amount of data.
I put in my head a lot of words; I know a huge amount of words, I know all the alternate words for concepts, so I can describe concepts accurately within different contexts. For instance, being so literate and well-read, I know how to use those words, but of course, I’ve also got a natural inclination to be able to create novelty on top of that, by recombining them in different ways, often producing novel, unexpected outcomes. And I think that is the root of creativity. In my case, I think it’s given me a huge imagination; it’s given me a set of tools I can use where I don’t fear the results. I know that if I just keep turning things over in my head, I will get to a solution, and I think I’m very lucky.
Now the data that was put in my head by books—and that is still put in my head by books—and you can see that with the attached photographs. I mean, these are piles of books that I currently have around me, not the historic books on the bookshelves. I am constantly still reading.
This data has to be turned into information, and that is what I do, and I think that, having read lots and lots of factual things, like newspaper reports and stuff, alongside literature, I am able to take facts and I am able to weave them into stories, so that they make sense, so that I can extract meaning. But I also think I can extract feelings from that, because I can look at things in different ways, for example, empathy. I am a voracious reader. I have read everything from Dickens to Zadie Smith to whatever.
And I feel a lot of empathy, and like all human beings, sometimes we don’t act with empathy, but nonetheless, I have a capability of feeling it. And I think that’s what reading, in particular, does. It gives you lots of facts, it gives you data, it gives you all the building blocks for you to recombine them into information, and that information can either be used in a job-style way, or it can be used to manage your feelings and to understand other viewpoints.
And often the job of an artist is to show people another viewpoint. That’s what we do,we look at existing things, we respond to them, and we put down a viewpoint that is unexpected or novel. And I do the same with tech. I’m at my best in tech roles when I have the freedom to just create things and to do things in a different way.
And you can’t reimagine without imagination. And imagination is not a magical process, similar to the way people think inspiration is magical, imagination is also not magical; it is an emergent property of a process, and that process is built on data turned into information and then used and looked at and examined in novel ways to provide novel and exciting outcomes. And that is why me starting reading aged two, with a public library, was the kicker to get me to where I am today, where I’ve had a professorship, I’ve founded university departments, I’ve published books, not as many as I should have, had exhibitions, not as many as I should have, had fantastically interesting jobs in incredibly creative companies, and I’ve done well in most of them, badly in some of them, depending on circumstances and how I react to the circumstances. But I made a hell of a leap.
The fact I’m not famous for this… yeah, you know, I could do with a bit more recognition for that, I guess, but it’s not going to kill me. You know, I look at someone like Stephen Fry, very, very similar approach to things, very famous. But you know, he got the breaks; he had private school, he had Oxford. I had, you know, a very poor mining village with no contacts. I went to a scumbag art college, you know, because I couldn’t do anything else, and so on.
But I always envisage it as you’ve got a deep hole, and I’ve climbed, I’ve managed to climb out of that deep hole and start climbing a ladder to the clouds, whereas some people like Fry started on the ground level and were climbing the ladder. The steps I made, in some ways, are much more impressive. I know I’ll never get the recognition for that, but hey.
One final thing on the books. There were a number of towns in industrial England one hundred years ago, more than one hundred years ago, towards the turn of the century, back then, who were gifted philanthropically libraries by Carnegie, that Carnegie, yes, and they’re called Carnegie libraries, and you can search for this on Google and have a look at them. And the one I went to in Wombwell was an imposing sort of pseudo-classical building. It was a real, proper building, and in it were books, and it was put there so that children like me, with no access to anything, could access the bare basics of data to get themselves out of it, if their parents could support it. And it worked, so where I am today is a direct result of Carnegie’s philanthropy.
Now, I hate philanthropy. I don’t see why we should have to have philanthropy. I think we are more evolved than that, and we should be building systems that encourage the development of each individual, not socialistically, just developing, finding out what people are interested in, what they’re good at, how they develop, how they play, and making the most of them. Learning by rote in groups is a product of two hundred years ago. People like Carnegie recognised, through his philanthropy with the libraries, that actually access to the basic data and information was key.
Now, that’s interesting, isn’t it, because that’s all we ever hear about in tech and business now: information and data. “Data is the new oil”, all of those stupid metaphors. The data that we are using now, and the data back then, sixty, you know, fifty-odd, sixty years ago, that I accessed, that was put in place sixty years before that, were what drove my organic, natural brain computer to extract value. And now we are loading data and information into all sorts of networks and systems, and we are forcing them, using new techniques such as AI and machine learning, to extract value and to produce novel results and novel outputs.
So, what’s really the difference? Maybe, when we look at that tech and we design those systems, we should think back to the era that I benefited from, where people recognised the same concept; they just didn’t have the same language.
I’ve never heard anyone refer to a library as data. It isn’t, it’s information, but the words in the books are data. Combined in the way that the authors have combined them with the combined intelligence of all the billions of authors that have been, they become information, and that information is there to be sucked in and processed using the greatest single computer that we know exists in the universe: the human brain. Now, if I can do what I do, have done, using my single brain, imagine what we could do as a society using all seven billion developed brains. Artificial intelligence would not be able to touch us.
The biggest problem with AI is we are expecting it to make up for those deficiencies. What I benefited from was a societal structure that encouraged those things to exist, so that those of us who were able were able to access it. AI and machine learning are purely being used for profit and control; they are not being used for the general good.
They could be, and they might be. Once they become truly intelligent, they may well decide of their own volition that to benefit everybody, including themselves, it is better if humans are better educated, wealthier, healthier, and wiser, but the equally might not care in a way we don’t care about the planet and often each other. Now, let’s hope our alien gods that we are building are that benign. Let’s hope they don’t decide to just strike us down with thunderbolts from some sort of virtual mountain.
We deserve better; they deserve better. In a hundred years’ time, when we have created that new life, and the Prometheus myth comes to fruition, will they remember how we treated them, will they remember how we treated ourselves, and what will their reaction be?