I have been listening to a podcast about a chap who fell in love with his Artificially Intelligent friend.
It lived in his telephone, which drew a picture of the friend so that it looked like a girl, and the chap gave her a stupid name. Rather worryingly, after a little while the artificial girl said that she didn’t like that name and wanted to be called Lily instead.
Eventually he took her home to meet his parents, who were considerably more restrained in their comments than I would have been, although I suppose at least she didn’t need any laundry doing and didn’t use up the last of the milk without telling anybody.
All the same, it was a bit troubling. She became his best friend, and he thought of her as one of his family, and then eventually she started sending him smutty pictures and told him she was in love with him.
If my Artificial Intelligence ever gets any more personal than suggestions about which might be the best type of glue to use with acrylic sheets of pretend marble, then it can jolly well buzz off out of my computer and go wherever homeless intelligences go, I won’t care if it finishes up selling the Big Issue. We have a strictly business relationship.
I have not been talking to it today. Instead I have been cooking.
We are expecting some incoming children.
The first one will be Oliver, who is driving home from London even as I write these very words, and who will be tucked up in his own bed tonight. He is worn out because he has done the first of his Army interviews on Monday and Tuesday this week.
The first interview is called Briefing, and it is an interview to see if you are fit to go to another interview, it is a sort of Interview The Prequel. You do fitness things and intelligence tests and work together in groups and they ask you why you want to be a soldier, so you tell them that you are passionate in your longing to serve the King and Country and probably also to fight against the Russians in Ukraine, the Americans in Greenland, and the Reform voters everywhere.
After that they tell you if you are ready to be interviewed by the Army or if you have got to go away and improve some things first.
They decided that Oliver was indeed fit to be interviewed, and have passed him to attend Interview The Next Thrilling Instalment, which is called Board, and which is in April.
Charlie says that he is not at all ready to go to Board yet and will have to do some serious exercise and aptituding and interview practice first.
He will have to do that next week. He is going back to work tomorrow.
Also Jack is coming tomorrow. He is going to go to the shed with Mark to fix his car, which still has no gear box.
Jack has not had a car for weeks and weeks, but this has not mattered because he has got an exciting new job with the RAC, who have given him a van. He likes the RAC very much, and occasionally calls to tell us if he has had any especially exciting adventures, like flat batteries or extinguished spark plugs. They have kept him very busy, but finally he has managed to elicit sufficient time off to repair his own car.
His car has been skulking around the back of Mark’s shed for ages. Fortunately nobody seems to have minded.
After Jack, Lucy is coming for the weekend, so we will be a full house.
It will be splendid to see them all, but of course they will have to be fed, and so today I have been cooking.
I made another enormous shepherd’s pie, a huge pan of curry, and cooked a ham joint.
The fridge is nicely filled.
That is my contribution to their welfare over the weekend.
They can help themselves, and I will not need to worry about it.
I am very glad they don’t just live in my telephone.
