I grew up on Philip K Dick and his fantasies about global nuclear war, robots that were indistinguishable from people and a world engulfed by consumerism. Luckily global nuclear war didn’t arrive yet, but who is to say Iran or North Korea won’t oblige in the future? Oddly enough Dick’s vision of our society isn’t far off being right. He was a paranoid delusional but that doesn’t mean his vision of a planet where everything is under surveillance won’t come true.  But it may not end up with totalitarian states. North Korea notwithstanding, or President Putin or Chinese Leader Xi Jinping trying to put the concept of free speech back in the bottle.

Dictators understand that they cannot allow the internet into their society.  Free Information has the potential to undermine communist control in China and as much as they try to contain it, smart people work around it. (And face the consequences if found out).

The law of unintended consequences rules however.  Twitter and NATO helped topple Gadaffi in Libya but now we have civil war in Libya, as no one prepared for the end game. Worse ISIS has taken control of a large chunk of the country and shipping migrants and terrorists into Europe as fast as they can. As Assad and Putin destroy pretty much all of Syria – driving everyone who doesn’t want to live under Assad’s dictatorship out. We reap the harvest of Syrian migrants because we lack the courage to make united efforts to tackle oppression. The ruined city of Homs or Aleppo stand as a monument to extreme cruelty and a warning to our own cities in Europe that face an enemy that cares nothing for human lives.

Despite the misery in our headlines we love reading about or watching disasters. The destruction of an ecologically perfect planet by rapacious soldiers led by a fascist moron became one of the most successful movies of all time. Avatar To be honest I could have enjoyed it just as much without the soldiers (or the proposed three sequels.)
We live endlessly with this idea of paradise lost and it crops up again and again in fiction.  Yet paradise is and has always been an illusion, or at least something that only very few people ever experience, usually at the expense of the toiling masses. The elegant classical rich merchant mansions that followed land enclosure demonstrates that well enough. The idea of entitlement first came to those who gave themselves ‘titles’. Downton Abbey was built on greed.

Social Media is Freedom or Oppression?

Speaking for my generation, I prefer privacy. I realise, sometimes with shock that the young don’t care for it all. They want to share everything about their lives, every scrap, bad and good, nothing is private, their joy or bitterness and this is the enemy of totalitarian societies where secrets are power.  Facebook rules the world alongside Google.  People not only know where you live but what you eat and whom you sleep with and it doesn’t seem to matter.  No one predicted this. Not even William Gibson. No one expects the unexpected I guess. The Selfie Culture rules. However scrubbing that past away when you no longer need it or want to hide it is a diferent matter. Your future employer will be watching too and judging. **Possible career option of the future Social Media Scrubbers…. We Clean Your Past.

Take an alternative view of society portrayed by movies and books such as:
A Clockwork Orange, Escape From New York, Total Recall, Outland, Snow Crash, Land of the Dead, Sin City, The 100… The Wasteland (short stories)

The futures they show are hell on earth. Everyone is a criminal. Extortion and prostitution is the norm, as is disease and a short life expectancy. Sometimes they are prescient however. We are moving to a world where anti-biotics no longer work. We live in a world were population growth is out of control and political corruption rules. (See Africa).

Mexico is a virtual drug economy where gangsters regularly do mass killings and mass corruption of the police and army is normal. You can say the same in Nigeria, Zimbabwe, Sudan. Most sci-fi stories set a human and ecological crash in New York or LA or Chicago, but it’s much more likely to be Lagos or Jo’Burg. Where is that great Mexican novel that is tune with the reality of a failed state underpinned by oil and drug money that flows only to a few corrupt rich?

You can point to Detroit as the city that time forgot and yes you can easily build a case for dystopia there, but then again, some people are beginning to reclaim the empty city lots for urban farming and who knows, people might start to rescue the abandoned art deco factories and homes.  A new non-industrial eco-city might blossom.

It is easy to come to a judgment about the death of capitalism by looking at Detroit, but if you know your facts you’ll always know that the history of America is to ‘use’ then ‘discard’ and move on.  Gentrification and preservation are relatively new ideas there. In the seventies people were writing off New York, garbage was piled high on the streets, crime was rising exponentially and real estate crashing.  It was rescued by human will and the enforcement of laws.  Fixing ‘broken windows’ mantra.

It’s too easy to write whole countries off, but if you take the long view you can be a much better predictor of events.  Cities will continue to grow and thrive because that’s where the jobs are.  Cities of fifty million people won’t be unusual in the next fifty years.  Whether you’d want to be living there is another matter.  The future LA of Bladerunner was based on a reaction to a visit to Hong Kong by Ridley Scott.  Predicting is fraught with danger.  If you had told anyone in majority-white Vancouver forty years ago that 45% of the population would be Asian in 2016 they would have considered you mad. Not only has the population changed, but what it does and how it lives and eats and of course came with it the rise of gang culture, crime and a much more dynamic city.  Speak to a futurologist and they will tell you the future is China and they will come to dominate the world.  But this may not be inevitable.  Internal dissent is rising – a desperate Government has to keep growth at 7% to keep a lid on it and it is struggling to do that. The country is exposed to outside influences that often contradict what the Government wants and believes. Air quality is a political issue. Schools built on contaminated ground ‘normal’ as there are no checks and balances on corrupt officials.

Around 1600AD China had seen the world and suddenly closed the door on it.  Who is to say they won’t do that again? Of course since they are the world Number Two economy it would cause an economic catastrophe if they suddenly stopped buying our ‘stuff’, but I’m not predicting they will. The Chinese are rich now with 193 billionaires according to the Sunday Times Rich List April 2016. It would take some extraordinary malign political power or catastrophe to halt or reverse Chinese consumerism.

Europe is flattening economically. We are probably a bit disappointed that Greece elected to stay in the Euro. We were all secretly ready to watch the road crash of the Euro collapsing like your auntie who always said about your boyfriend or girlfriend that it would all come to a bitter end.  It hasn’t yet and beware of predicting that it will. The closer one is to history and events the harder it is to see ahead I guess. Now Britain flirts with the idea of ‘Brexit’, leaving the European Union. It’s a crazy idea actually, to walk away from a market of 500 people and probably an illusion we would be any freer outside it. Poorer certainly and it would be irreversible, we couldn’t change our mind a year later and ask for our coat back. It’s divorce and everyone knows that both parties get hurt in a divorce. Only the lawyers go home happy.

Right now everyone says it’s like the 1930’s and therefore history will replay as fascism or communism, but history usually repeats only as farce. Averting our eyes to poverty is very human.  Ever seen the pictures of people sunbathing on Spanish beaches as illegal African immigrants wash ashore and scavenge in the bins. It really happens. Right now the same is happening in Greece and Italy as boats still come every day laden with migrants and aim to make their way to Germany. But how many of these migrants end up in work? And if they don’t get work or money what will they do? Europe has compassion fatigue and no one is happy about the deal with Turkey. So many people in Turkey want to leave and seek freedom of expression from an increasingly oppressive government. They will hardly want to return once their visa’s expire.

Twelve Monkeys – the movie, (now a TV series) is a favourite movie of mine.  Having written a pandemic novel myself (Another Place to Die : Endtime Chronicles) I look at this with awe.  Yet people surviving underground for decades?  This requires some organization.  That this disjointed group would also discover time travel is cool but highly unlikely. But I’m not judging. We’d all like to believe it will be possible. Time travel will probably be always a delusion.  (I’ll look at the back door now in case my other self cares to step in and correct me – no? Well I’m disappointed.)

This doesn’t stop us writing about time travel as a literary device.  It’s so tempting to go back and ‘fix’ stuff or mess with it. Talking of which ‘Abraham Lincoln – Vampire Hunter’  Are they serious?  Teaching history is going to get real complicated I think from now on.  No, Miss Elizabeth Bennett was not really a zombie, nor Mr Darcy, but your kids might think they were.

The science fiction I enjoy is about us, about our society and the things that are transforming us.  Can we get things right?  Neal Stephenson perhaps got closest to predicting the death of the high street and how the mafia will come to control the economy.  Even now I find it hard to believe that people won’t want to wander a mall in future or Winchester High Street and have coffee and see a movie, ‘cause what else will people do with their time when it all disappears?  Shopping on-line is well – boring. Maybe they’ll be shopping in 3-D. Thrilling huh. Department stores are so last century but I wonder what people will do with their time if they don’t ‘shop’. Attitudes change, lifestyles have been transformed by smart phones. Read a whole book? Are you kidding? Kids with neck problems from staring at phones all the time and arthritic thumbs from texting are temporary phenomena. Having a personal drone recording every moment of your life 24 hours a day – the norm! It’s coming. What will you do if your drone leaves you to follow someone else because their lives are more interesting? Only kidding, don’t fret.

Predicting the future at this moment is much harder than usual. President Trump or President Cruz? Both would be a disaster, Cruz more than most and expect all the rights women gained in the last decades to be reversed by him. Who knows what kind of world it will be in 2020 after he’s turned the clock back and dismantled Obamba care.
Paulo Bacigalupi is the most prescient writer I think with his Ship Breakers and The Wind Up Girl, both required reading for any sci-fi readers. Here is a guy who has really thought about the future.  But in Ship Breakers all he had to do was observe that on the India coast labour is so cheap that they break up decommission ships by hand. Transpose this to the USA and you have a future shock. His latest The Water Knife is about who controls water rights in a Climate Changed USA – It couldn’t be more relevant. Read it now if you haven’t.

The same goes with space travel.  Studies show us that the longer humans are in space the greater the risk to bone density.  Essentially if you intend to go to infinity and beyond you aren’t coming home again.  Not many sci-fi writers seem to get that. Given what is happening right now on Earth that might be tempting to go into space but psychologically will we ever find the right kind of people to make the Star Fleet if they know it is a one-way ticket?  And where is that Warp Drive?  Has Dyson got the patent yet?  We got to the Moon forty years ago but here we are still stuck in the fossil fuel age and planning nostalgia trips to the lunar surface at £100 million a ticket.

This brings me to teleportation. Another popular theme in fiction. My novel The Repossession (TOZ in Turkey) is in part a study of that phenomenon. What follows is a discussion about just how hard teleportation will be to develop:

**This is an © extract from a scene at the dinner table in Chapter Two between Rian and his tormentor, his Mother’s boyfriend.

“Teleportation is bunk, Rian.  Pure bunk.  No one will ever beam up Scotty.  It’s impossible.  The future never happened.  There are no aliens and we don’t commute in flying cars.  Star Trek is rubbish science.  Bunk.”
The usual dinner conversation.  Rian would say something and Mr Yates MBA would pounce on it, try to make himself look clever, and his mother would eat it up.  Nevertheless, Rian defended his position.
“I’m just saying that if we accept climate change as inevitable then teleportation would eliminate air travel and that’s a whole lot of pollution that goes with it.  We could save the polar icecaps and the bears.”
Mr Yates stared at Rian a moment and Rian could see the muscles in his thick red neck pulsating as he sought to deliver a withering reply.
“You shouldn’t bait Mr Yates, Rian,” his mother said.  “You know science-fiction is just that, fiction.”
“The problem with science-fiction,” Mr Yates finally barked, “is that it makes people believe that there are solutions for everything.  There aren’t.  Take teleportation.  What you envisage is just magic.  It can’t happen.  The amount of energy needed to deconstruct a human made up of trillions upon trillions of atoms would be equivalent to the energy output of ten nuclear reactors, at least.  Plus, reassembling those same atoms back in the right order is a monumental logistical task.  Way beyond what any software programme could do.  We are talking turning your whole body into digital form, into photons, and sending them across town by light waves, then putting it back together exactly as it is now.  Your clothes too.  Impossible.  One slight wrong calculation or dropped piece of code and your arm will come out your head or you’ll just collapse into a heap of jelly.  It would have to reassemble skin, bone, and eyes.
            “It would need the basic carbon raw materials to generate it at the end destination.  Any idea how complex your eyes are?  Hell, just putting your feet back together would be beyond the power of any machine for decades ahead.  Decades.”
“Scientists say…” Rian began again, but Mr Yates interrupted.
“Quantum physics states that you cannot say for definite the position and velocity of any single particle.  More importantly, Rian, for teleportation to work, and let’s assume someone actually has all the computer power in the whole world at their fingertips to store a trillion, trillion atoms – in order for you to be ‘transmitted’, much like an email with an attachment say, you, in the process of being disassembled would be destroyed.  The new you across town would be a copy and each time you moved you would be another copy.  Can a computer also deconstruct and store your memory?  Your imagination?  If it can’t, you would be a 16-year-old baby with no memory of anything.  Your memory would get wiped every time you teleported.”
“Never mind losing your soul, Rian,” Mrs Tulane interjected.
Mr Yates beamed at her.  “Quite.  Every human is unique – I’m telling you it will always be totally impossible.  We should not play God.”

© Sam North/ Hawksmoor May 2016

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Although Sam writes about the troubles of the world in his books he always writes to the overcoming of them, we are facing troubled times, we have made a mess of things, but as we made the mess, it is time for us to clean it up, so get of we are doomed wagon and step to making the changes, it all starts with each one of us, in the way we vote (Bernie) the way we treat each other, the respect we have for self. The only reason tyrants and dictators have power is because you handed it to them, underneath all that power-hungry ego are scared, little boys.

This is an awesome world, let us stop f—ing it up and do something about it.

Sara Troy. 

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••• The International Writers Magazine: Fear of Flying

Do you have a fear of flying? If so, you are not alone. Many people are afraid of flying and go to extreme lengths to avoid it. Some people get so anxious on flights that they turn to alcohol and prescription medications to cope, only to later end up with bigger troubles after becoming so intoxicated that they try to brawl with others on the plane.

If you are afraid of flying, avoiding taking a flight is the worst thing that you can do. Learn why that is true and identify ways to confront the underlying cause of your anxiety. This fear of flying article explores factors that trigger fear of flying. It also provides helpful advice about strategies that you can utilize in the short-term to overcome your fear. Long-term solutions for coping are also reviewed. Get started on overcoming your fear of flying now.

The Psychology of the Fear of Flying and How to Overcome It

It’s October 15th and Alija Kucuk is preparing for his flight from JFK airport to Palm Beach International  in Florida. Kucuk has an intense fear of flying and to try and calm his nerves, he takes some Xanax and then starts drinking. By the time he’s on the flight, he’s a mess, and the subject of one of the more infamous air rage incidents in recent times. His intense fear of flying led to an extreme attempt to knock himself out, which failed, turning into an on air brawl.

Kucuk is not the only person to have turned a fear of flying into air rage while in a plane. Many more avoid flying wherever possible, travelling by car or train to far off places in order to avoid going up in the air. Some famous cases include Whoopi Goldberg who drives from state to state, and Sean Bean, who climbed New Zealand mountains to avoid helicopter rides while filming his part as Boromir in Lord of the Rings. What causes this fear of flying and can it be overcome? This guide attempts to answer both of these questions.

Part 1: A Fear Of Flying

What are the root causes of the fear of flying that presents itself in some people but not others. In this section we consider whether it is a phobia or a rational fear. Then we take a look at a number of triggers and how the psychology of a fear of flying works.

Fright Or Phobia?

Is a fear of flying a rational fear or an irrational one? A fear of guns, for example, is wholly rational as is a fear of alligators or tigers. An irrational fear or phobia is a fear of something that is not in itself dangerous such as a fear of spiders (arachnophobia).

In terms of terminology, this paper refers to the condition as a ‘fear of flying’ because no better term has been invented. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders defines a specific phobia as “an anxiety disorder classification that represents unreasonable or irrational fear related to a specific object or situation.”

For this reason, we will not be referring to it as either ‘aerophobia’ or ‘aviophobia,’ which are better transcribed as fearing drafts of air. For the sake of clarity and consistency, we will also refrain from using other common terms including flying phobia and flight phobia.

Fear of Flying Triggers

Our fear of flying can be caused by a wide variety of reasons. These include by rational and irrational concerns. Rational causes can be best defined by the reaction to the 9/11 attacks. After these terrible events, less people bought air tickets and instead chose to drive or use public transport to cover long distances. Similar things have happened after crashes or if certain airlines have a bad safety record. These are rational responses which tend to die down after a period of time or if a company is proven to improve itself.

Such incidences also act as confirmation events for people who fear flying. Constantly reading about the relatively few crashes and disasters reaffirm concerns, but they can also trigger new cases. As Alex Preston has written, “flying is a magnet for our vulnerability, for our fear of death, for our existential panic” and every incidence of failure reminds us how unnatural flying is to human beings.

Others, such as Captain Tom Bunn who has spent three decades developing effective methods for treating fear of flying, believe different triggers may be at play. These can relate to childhood traumas or PTSD – Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. “When an upcoming flight comes to mind, we are bothered by the same things that bothered us in childhood: being alone, powerless, not responded to, and unable to escape.”

In addition, there are strains of thought suggesting other phobias can come into play which cause a fear of flying. Taken at face value, this means any reaction to flying or the thought of flying is a symptom of a wider psychological condition under the DSM’s specific phobia definition. Phobias such as claustrophobia, acrophobia, and agoraphobia have been cited as potential triggers for panic attacks before or during flying.

Existing phobias build into a wider range of anxieties and concerns which may put people off or place them in a difficult psychological position. These include social anxieties caused by crowded conditions and being surrounded by strangers. They also include triggers such as hot, stale air, not being in control of the situation, not knowing the cause of bumps, strange sounds, actions and turbulence, or a lack of trust in unknown air staff and pilots.

The Triumph of Imagination

Captain Tom Bunn highlights the lack of reason or logic in the fear of flying. Afterall, only one in 45,000,000 flights lead to a fatality. If we go back to Alex Preston’s piece highlighting all the incidences he’d read about, you would not think so. Bunn terms it as a triumph of the imagination over reason, showing the ultimate cause is within our own minds.

The man can over dwell on a certain thought or fear. If blended in with a phobia such as claustrophobia, control conditions such as OCD, past traumatic events leading to PTSD, or social anxieties the mind can take those issues and project them onto the idea of flying. It then is unable to escape a spiral of thought, fear, and reaffirmation leading to stress, anxiety, and agitation. Some, like Kucuk try to take medications or drink to solve the problem, but this can often make it worse, leading to a high profile blow out. In most cases, sufferers become so averse to flying they either restrict their own travel or take long overland or sea routes instead.
Information Sources

References:

Bunn, Tom, 2015, Fear of Flying: Suffering From Imagination, Psychology Today
Bunn, Tom, 2015, Why It’s So Hard for Anyone to Get Over Fear of Flying, Psychology Today
LeBeau, Richard T., Glenn, Daniel, et al, 2010, Specific Phobia: A Review of DSM-IV Specific Phobia and Preliminary Recommendations for DSM-V, American Psychiatric Association.
McMahon, Paula, 2016, Jail for Man who Attacked Flight Attendant, Threatened to Blow Up Flight to S.Florida, Sun Sentinel, FL
Mouawad, Jad, and Drew, Christopher, 2013, Airline Industry at Its Safest Since the Dawn of the Jet Age, New York Times
Oakes, Margaret & Bor, Robert, 2010, The Psychology of Fear of Flying (Part 1): A Critical Evaluation of Current Perspectives on the Nature, Prevalence and Etiology of Fear of Flying, Travel Medicine and Infectious Disease, Vol.8, Issue 6.
Richmond, Raymond L., 2013, Fear of Flying, A Guide to Psychology and Its Practice, website

Part 2: Overcoming the Fear of Flying

It is possible to overcome the fear of flying, but it means confronting the underlying cause whether that is through better education over flying safety, understanding your triggers, or your other phobias. This section will cover a few ideas on how to overcome your fears.

Personal Psychology

For most people with a fear of flying, as we have seen, the cause is linked to the self and the triumph of imagination over reality. This also means that the solution to the problem lies within ourselves and how we both view and approach the world.

The aim is to reduce the release of stress hormones in this situation. When stressed, we produce oxytocin to inhibit the amygdala. If you can reduce your oxytocin production in an airport and when boarding a flight, you will have no problem. There are generally speaking three steps to controlling anxiety:

– Identify flying as being non-threatening.
– If there is a threat, take control of the situation – concentrate thought on what you would do if a situation occurred.
– If control is impossible, escape.
The Anxiety and Depression Association of America go further by outlining a wide range of coping strategies. Many of these apply to the fear of flying and can be divided into those which help you at that moment of anxiety, and those which help you in the long term when not immediately faced with flight. They are backed up by Professor Robert Bor, as specialist in the field and author of several books on the subject.

In terms of the moment:

Think about the destination, not the journey
Take a time out to meditate
Challenge negative thoughts
Stay hydrated
Limit alcohol and caffeine
Accept that you cannot control everything
Welcome humour into the situation
Maintain a positive attitude
Talk to the cabin crew
Plan ahead
Consider the long term solutions too, by practising these, the short term tips for overcoming anxiety will become easier:

Learn about what is triggering your anxiety
Study positive information about flying and the fear of flying
Get involved with other sufferers or aviation groups
Eat well-balanced meals, exercise regularly, and get plenty of sleep
Study yoga and relaxation techniques
Talk to someone about the problem
Get educated on flying
Taking the initiative yourself is not for everyone. Do not be afraid to see a psychologist or counsellor so you can find a path for overcoming your fear or deeper anxieties/phobias. This is especially true for PTSD sufferers.

Take a Course

Believe it or not, but many airports and airlines run courses and workshops for people with a fear of flying. Alex Preston found himself on such a course run by Virgin Atlantic. Founded and run by cabin crew and Virgin staff, the course runs a number of seminars aimed at helping people bet flying-related trauma.

These courses, also found in America and Europe, cover the physics of flying, tackle common misconceptions head on, and explain events such as turbulence. They also include relaxation techniques and plenty of reassurance. If you can afford such a course, it is well worth making one part of your education and anxiety focused treatment.

Helping Children Overcome Their Fear

Children can be just as scared of flying as us wary adults. In fact, they can be more scared or suffer from the traumas which develop into a phobia in later life. When examining a child’s fear it is important, according to Roy Benaroch MD, to consider if the fear is part of a larger issue to do with anxiety or a part of other phobias. Or perhaps, it is born out of a lack of understanding of air travel coupled with scare stories.

Flyfright.com and Benaroch agree that the most important thing to do is to talk to your child and to slowly introduce them to the thought of flying. Start a few weeks before a trip, ask how they feel about flying and if they are scared about any aspect of it. Talk them through how planes work and the process of boarding, flying, and landing. Explain what turbulence is, fog and other things which might affect the flight.

Also consider:

Encouraging your child to talk rather than to cry or throw a tantrum
Let your child watch real planes
Let them bring a comfort item
Bring books, toys and other distractions
Give them toy airplanes
There are also courses available. Companies such as Virgin Atlantic and British Airways offer child friendly courses. The BA course is divided between kids aged 7 to 11, and those aged 11 to 17. All courses are hosted by professional staff and professional counselling teams. If your child is not responding well to education and quiet comfort, consider using a child psychologist to further work through the issues.

You Can Do It Too

Remember Sean Bean? He spent hours climbing mountains to film short scenes as Boromir, the tragic villain-cum-hero of The Fellowship of the Ring. Throughout his life he’d avoided flying wherever possible and especially disliked flying in helicopters.

Filming in New Zealand helped him overcome some elements of his fear by simply giving him no other choice if he was going to fulfill his role. However, the filming of Flightplan (2005), a movie co-starred with Jodie Foster, he put serious effort into overcoming his fear. This involved going to flying school and learning about how planes work. Knowing how resilient they are and racking up the hours have, while not making it much more pleasant for him, have dulled his fear and allowed him to fly more often,

If Sean Bean can do it, then so can you. Take your time, reach out for more information, learn how flying works, take courses, speak to professionals and find ways to calm your mind. Most of all, take the big step of trying it. It will not be easy at first, but as Sean Bean shows, with time, it can become easier.
Information Sources

References:

ADAA.org, unknown, Tips to Manage Anxiety and Stress, Anxiety and Depression Association of America
Benaroch, Roy, 2012, Fear of Flying, The Pediatric Insider, website
Bor, Robert., Eriksen, Carina., & Oakes, Margaret, 2009, Overcome Your Fear of Flying, Sheldon Press
British Airways, unknown, Children’s Courses – Flying with Confidence, website
Davis, Darrell, unknown, Fear of Flying Tips for Children, Flyfright.com
Jones, Charisse, 2014, Airports Take on Fear of Flying, USA Today
Unknown, 2005, Q&A with Sean Bean, Phase 9 Entertainment
Virgin Atlantic, unknown, Flying Without Fear, website
Walker, Tim, 2009, Why Fear of Flying is Just Plane Stupid, The Independent, London

© Phoebe Parlade April 2016

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Hack Writers••• The International Writers Magazine:Lifestyles

Beware Of The Toasters, Because I’m Sure They’re Going To Get You, Yeah! • Joe Swain The first time I took a hammer to a machine, it was one of those big Xerox photocopiers with an A3-sized glass slab under its hood and an attitude to suit.

It was my first office job, in the early days of the technological revolution, and the fat guy with the purple face wanted me to copy something, and fast. It was a tall order, involving unbinding, fanning out the dog-eared pages, splitting into manageable portions, multiple copying and then binding.

I knew it would require the perfect application of all my newly acquired Office Troll skills, and I might just have made it if it hadn’t been for that damn machine.

It started okay. Seven copies of the first two portions lay neatly in collecting trays, the sun streaming through the tiny, high-level window and my plastic cup of coffee doing its stuff on my hangover.

But then the friendly fire started. Every Tom, Dick and Sharon wandered in, doing the old, “mind if I nip in with a quick one-pager” routine. I should have just growled like a guard dog and stood my ground, but I was young. I wanted to be the most popular photocopier the office had ever seen, and I particularly wanted the man with the purple face to like me because he was the one paying for my hangovers.

With my deadline looming, I could only pray that the machine would sense the urgency of my predicament, roll up its sleeves and help. So I frantically stuffed larger and larger piles into its feeder.

“Don’t let me down now machine,” I muttered, all the time imagining myself as a young Gordon Gekko manfully shoveling the coal of hope into the steam engine of unfulfilled dreams.

But then of course fate raised its ugly head, ushered in stage left by Sod’s Law, and the machine suddenly ground to a halt.

More like a trainee vet than an office junior, I lay on the floor with my arms buried deep in its innards desperately twiddling dials and flapping levers in a last-gasp attempt to induce delivery.

But the machine simply sniggered to itself and bombarded me with messages ranging from ‘paper jam’ and ‘sorter misfeed’, to ‘call tech support you half-wit’.

The purple-faced man buzzed around me as a cordon of tutting staff formed at the door, edging me closer and closer to a calamitous meltdown. Colleagues peppered me with useful questions. “Do you at least know where the original is?” and “I suppose you realise I’m going to be late for my meeting now?”

Buzz, buzz, buzz!

Someone edged in just a fraction too close and the precariously balanced piles of copying fell to the floor.

Buzz, buzz, buzz.

The machine emitted a deathly metallic scraping noise and then belched a final plume of grey smoke.

“Oh no, look what you’ve done now,” moaned one of the tutters at the door.

It was the final straw. I snapped.

I rose from my hands and knees, dusted down the remains of my self-respect, and with as much calm as I could muster went to fetch a hammer. The drop jaw look on faces as I systematically smashed and pummeled the photocopier into a mangled wreck of twisted polycarbons was somewhere between shock and fear, and the purple-faced man, far from blowing a fuse and sacking me on the spot, proclaimed admiration for my forthright sense of self-expression, gave me the nickname ‘Mad Dog’ and then stood back in awe as I went on to become one of the most ruthless and admired business tycoons of my generation.

I wish. In truth I never made it up off my knees. My colleagues tutted themselves into a frenzy of self-flagellation and the purple-faced man had to go to his meeting armed with just a few well-shuffled sections of his report.

It did however teach me a very important lesson about machines. That once you get past their glossy sheen of usefulness, they are essentially evil. And that one day, if we’re not careful, they’re going to gang up on us and take over the world.

And it would seem, if the findings of an eminent authority on the subject, Louis Del Monte, physicist, entrepreneur, and author of “The Artificial Intelligence Revolution” are anything to go by, that the day of reckoning (or ‘singularity’ as he prefers to call it) might soon be upon us.

“Today there’s no legislation regarding how much intelligence a machine can have, how interconnected it can be,” he recently told Business Insider magazine. “If that continues, look at the exponential trend. We will reach singularity by 2045 and from that point on the top species will no longer be humans, but machines.”

Del Monte doesn’t think the takeover will come in the shape of a ‘Terminator’ style war, so much as a marriage which eventually goes wrong. That humans will willingly allow themselves to be turned into cyborgs [part human, part tech or machine] – a trend we are already seeing with faulty limbs being replaced with artificial parts, and computer controlled pacemakers – and that by the end of this century, most of the human race will have become cyborgs. The allure being immortality.

But eventually of course the machines will view us as an unpredictable and dangerous species. A species that creates wars, has enough weapons to wipe out the world twice over and which makes computer viruses. Hardly an ideal spouse.

Indeed a 2013 experiment at the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems in the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale of Lausanne, Switzerland designed and built some robots with the specific purpose of cooperating with each other in finding beneficial resources like energy, while avoiding hazardous ones. Shockingly, the robots learned to lie to each other in an attempt to hoard the beneficial resources for themselves.

“The implication is that they’re also learning self-preservation,” Del Monte concludes, “Whether or not they’re conscious is a moot point.”

As worrying as this might sound, if my own conclusions from the photocopier incident are correct, we’ll be perfectly safe, unless the machines start ‘ganging up on us’.

Uh oh, that reminds me. Have you heard of something called the ‘internet of things’? The toasters are apparently talking to the washing machines, the life support units are chatting to the electricity meters, and the traffic lights are colluding with the driverless cars.

All of which equates I think to ‘ganging up’.

Which means there is only one course of action remaining. I must devote the rest of my life to inventing a time machine and then take a leaf from Arnie’s book and travel back in time to that fateful day in the photocopying room. Only this time I must not shirk from my task, but find that hammer and do the job properly, exactly as I once imagined.

That act alone will galvanise the human race to rise up and reject the inevitability of mechanical servitude. Which means of course that this computer I am using now will never exist. So, if you never get to see this article, you can rest easy in the knowledge that I was successful, that my actions inspired a powerful human backlash and that the takeover by machines was averted.

If however, you’re reading it now…

Buzz, buzz, buzz.

© Joe Swain April 6th 2016
joeswain@hotmail.com

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