Bad and good

When I lived on our farm with my parents AI meant something different. It meant that our bull was not needed and the vet came to visit our cows instead. The big bull, kept in an iron gated pen in the corner of our yard, was redundant. AI was artificial Insemination in those days. Nowadays it is Artificial Intelligence. Mind you I saw someone famous on the TV who got them both muddled up the other day.

AI is now seen as a threat and there was an AI conference held at Bletchley. I did not hear much about it afterwards but there is nothing to worry about – apparently.

Last night I saw the new Beatles song called ‘Now And Then’, I saw and heard John Lennon and George Harrison (both deceased) singing along with real life Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr. How can this be? Well, it can because of new technology which can deceive us and we see the dead along with the living and we cannot tell which is which if we do not know already.

This is an unknown hidden world and I am not sure that there are safety rules in place that we all must adhere to. There are fake videos I have seen of people I ‘know’ from TV telling me things and it may not true. Celebrities do not necessarily own their real image and voice.  There could be lots of misleading information presented to us and we could believe it.

I love it when my mobile predicts the words that I am going to write in my text. But sometimes I am concerned that it knows what I am going to write before I have even thought of it. The Bletchley conference is a concern after all.

Back on safer ground I have been selling my books at a local craft fair along with other authors. It was all so exciting and I met such interesting people. One person had lived in Russia, someone came to talk to us who had worked for the BBC, one person bought five of our different books because she could not decide which one to get and one had sent a book of mine abroad to her daughter so that she could learn English. What a good time we had.

But our ash trees are not having such a good time in our garden. Our beautiful trees throughout the country seem to be slowly succumbing to ash die-back. Here at home, we have two old ash trees, one does not seem to be thriving, some branches are dropping off. Our trees are dying and we cannot solve it for all our technology.

(Taken from my column in the Shropshire Star)