We were shopping until dropping in Loudeac yesterday and decided to stop off for a late snack lunch at McDonalds on the way home and have a McFish, or whatever.  We went in and there was a young woman at the counter with a microphone and earpiece head set on.  Very 21^st century, she obviously thought, though I remember teachers wearing the same stuff way back in the last one, communicating with deaf kids.  Anyway, our communication was pretty much curtailed before it started.  When we tried to order she told us we must order at the computerised terminals.  No ifs, buts or maybes; use the terminals or don’t eat.  So, we didn’t eat.

Now, we’re both pretty IT literate and there were advantages of using the control panels.  You could have an English option menu and, of course, you could take as long as you wanted, making your mind up.  So, objectively it’s a good way to do it.  I don’t know if after ordering you had to sit in a specified place or, as I imagine was the case, you were given a number and when it was called you would, like Palov’s dogs, leap to your feet obediently to collect your food reward and a smile for those fleet of foot and a scowl for tardy balloons like me.  I didn’t want to know.  I just wanted to have a few words with a person and not be treated as a number.  Old fashioned of me, perhaps, but I also think it matters. 

I assume McDonalds rationale, as well as aspiring for efficiency for the customer in ordering their food, is probably that it means there’s no queuing at the counter and less people have to be ‘front of house’, taking orders and collecting them for the customers.  This, of course, positively impacts their wages bill and resultant profits, (In the US each restaurant generates on average $2.5 million per annum) keeping the fat cats at the top of the company in plenty of spondulicks and the shareholders happy.

Now, please understand I am not against McDs.  In bygone days when there were no McDs in Indonesia I once flew up to Singapore from Jakarta so I could simply go to the McDs on Orchard Rd, have two Big Macs and then fly straight back to Jakarta again.  I was a fan.  I’m not such a fan now but think their product, generally wherever you are in the world, comes tasting as you expect it.  Since I no longer eat meat I wouldn’t have a Big Mac, but their fish burger is good as a ‘grab it and eat’ type of temporary filler.  Anyway, I’m not trying to convert you to McDs, just saying I don’t have a grudge.

Please understand, also, that I am not against capitalism in general terms, though I am against the obscenities it can produce.  (e.g. 1% of bloated plutocrats owning half of the planet’s worth; top 10% of adults hold 85%, while the bottom 90% hold the remaining 15% of the world's total wealth; top 30% of adults hold 97% of the total wealth meaning, of course, that 70% of this dear old planet Earth’s population own only 3% of it, with nearly 50% living on less than $2.50 a day, with 1 in 7 of the world’s population being hungry and one third of the food produced on bountiful planet Earth being thrown away.)

No, capitalism brings forth anomalies, as does democracy (Trump and Brexit being the latest somewhat inconvenient democratic choices) but as Sir Winston Churchill purportedly said, “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.”  I believe the same can be said for capitalism.  Look, for instance, at the effectiveness of collective farming in the USSR.  It was hugely inefficient whereas kulaks who owned their own little smallholdings and sold their produce on the open market did well; sadly that was why Stalin went after them.

So, I haven’t got a grudge against McDs or the capitalist system though I am not an uncritical fan of either.  My concern is the lack of human interaction which increasingly occurs in the name of efficiency and probably is motivated by the relentless drive for profit.  Less and less are people involved in service.  Long ago out of town supermarkets put paid to the High Street visits and chats with the butcher, the baker and the candlestick maker, or the milkman who delivered to our houses.  Then many people tended not to actually go to the supermarkets either, and like us, for years in the UK, the food shopping was ordered on line and delivered.  Limited human interaction, but greatly reduced prices of food and general goods.  Economies of scale – mixed blessings?   

Amazon have opened a new store in Seattle, checking out its success I guess, where you just walk in and take what you want and walk out again.  The place is coming down with cameras which tot up your shopping and liaises with an app on your phone which debits your account accordingly.  There is no human interaction at all.  Doubtless we’ll soon see stores based on this experiment proliferate. Shortly too, of course, driverless taxis will whisk us efficiently through the traffic and we will be denied the inefficient joys of chatting with the cabbie.  In person banking and telephone banking are out, internet banking is in.  Apparently it’s more efficient, and of course in many ways it is – and it saves the banks money.  And bugger the customer! Try to talk to somebody at a bank in the UK who can make a decision.  I used to pay extra to do so. 

Consider, too, social interaction.  At the risk of being clichéd, we email, we text, we use Facebook, WhatsApp and Messenger, we use Snapchat, Instagram and we tweet.  Increasingly the younger generation are turning away from the cumbersome medium of email which doesn’t necessarily produce an instant response, and away from the ‘demands’ and ‘intimacy’ of Facebook for their social interactions, and are using WhatsApp for texts and the essentially non-verbal Snapchat or Instagram to portray the interesting points in their lives in pictures.  

Games are often played online.  Your fellow competitors could be anywhere in the world and you know nothing of them except within the context of the game, and interestingly, most of the time one doesn’t want to know anything more of them than that.  The same applies to studying online.  You can also, of course, break the law speeding, be nicked, receive a fine and penalty points, pay the fine and inform you insurance company of your points without there being any face to face human interaction.  Same with illegal parking.  Loads of stuff, and more to come, all in the name of cost effective efficiency.  Justice, patently not being seen to be done though.  And you try overturning an unfair fine! 

Increasingly younger people have turned away from their cumbersome laptops and rely solely on their cell phones.  These ever more, incredibly sophisticated platforms which easily fit in their pockets – it still amazes me how many put them in their back pocket and damage them by sitting on them! - mean they can use them for all the activities I’ve mentioned thus far and thus, more and more, avoid human interactions.

Oh yes, and let’s not forget talking to neighbours.  Everybody used to do that.  Now it’s the exception, not the norm, especially outside rural areas, and especially with people under 25. We also have the efficient ‘home working’ and ‘hot desking’, maybe going in to see colleagues face to face once a week; you can, in extremis, have a conference call or Skype them to at least avoid having them in the same room!  No wonder so many people are lonely, and as Mother Teresa said, “Loneliness and the feeling of being unwanted is the most terrible poverty.”  People are losing the ability to talk to each other.  Give another generation or two of this and most people will present relationship difficulties and social communication problems we at present associate with autism.  It has already started.    

I shall not bore you with other examples.  In truth I am merely illustrating a trend which is increasing.  It was so slow originally we barely noticed it, enjoying merely the ‘efficiency’.  Now it is growing exponentially.  So, why should I/we be concerned about that?  Well, that’s a bit complicated, but also very obvious when one thinks about it.  (Especially since I have children and a grandchild and care about the world they are inheriting.)

Homo sapiens has overcome huge obstacles and much stronger critters to become the Lord or Lady of all s/he surveys by working together.  Humanity is the cooperative species.  That’s how we managed to overcome mammoths with their superior strength, sabre-toothed tigers and so forth.  It’s how we progressed because we shared our learning and experiences.  We had to develop a sophisticated language and learn social skills to achieve this.  When Og came round to your cave to borrow some flints to light a fire he knew to leave his spear at the door, wipe the mud off his feet on a patch of grass outside and say please and thank you.  As we started to settle, domesticating animals and tilling the land, increasingly people became specialists in different areas of knowledge and skills, and cooperation through communication grew, increasing again as village, town and then city communities developed.   The use of words and social communication skills were a crucial part of this progress.

With the rise of machines, human interaction has reduced and we face an interesting future.  Artificial Intelligence, especially once quantum computing is cracked, (anticipated to be within the next 5 years, max) will mean there are other intelligences sharing our planet which are much smarter and faster than us.  It is perfectly possible that if AI is functioning within a quantum context they may well be more intuitive and creative than us as well.  Perhaps we should hope not and leave ourselves a little, meaningful niche.

 Assuming they are not malevolent, slowly but surely they will take on humanity’s ‘burdens’, leaving humanity free to do ... what, exactly?   Sit in little pods, intravenously fed and living our lives in virtual worlds with no contacts with others?  Certainly that would be the easy answer for the bloated plutocrats to foist upon the 99%, many of whom would embrace the option with enthusiasm, whilst the hugely wealthy, one imagines, to extend their lives and powers will become increasingly technically enhanced and develop as cyborgs which after a time one would have trouble picking out of a line-up with AIs as not being a machine.   Of course a more efficient thing than the pods would be doing ones civic duty when ones usefulness is over and taking a pill so as not to be a burden on ‘society’, or more precisely, the 1%. 

Playing the ‘Glad Game’ an apparently positive factor related to less human interaction will be a decline in the population in all likelihood.  Ironically it will happen most, initially at least, in the wealthier nations.  In poor countries people still tend to talk to each other face to face and need to cooperate, but even there it is changing.

Questions of philosophy or semantics, or both, will increasingly have to explore and stretch the definition of human beings and humanity as less and less human interaction takes places, and further questions of morality, too, will have to be faced concerning letting the pod or pill thing happen.  Of course, the rights of AIs to the same sort of respect (possibly more initially, as they’ll be worth a shed load of money) and freedoms of choice and so forth will need to be addressed, assuming they don’t just take rights to themselves as a disappearing humanity becomes increasingly dependent on them, and they replicate themselves without the help of humanity.  Maybe they will replace humanity, becoming humanity, ironically communicating hugely, sharing enormous amount of data continuously.  Will they have souls?  Yes, I think so.

That aside, a humanity which doesn’t communicate on a human basis with other parts of humanity, face to face, also runs the risk of seeing others as different, and it doesn’t take a lot of work to get ‘different’ to become ‘enemy’.  Some of the 1% already encourage this.  It is only when we understand each other can we have trust, and trust is necessary for cooperation, and cooperation, until recently at least, has meant progress, and has been central to our broader humanity.

And what will happen to love?  Hopefully it is part of the true, inextinguishable human condition and the AIs will feel it, in all its inefficient glory, the new, improved, communicating and socially adept humanity who will reach out to the stars.  I think that it’s rather sad though, that we can’t all wise up to what is happening and put a stop to it, or better still, control it.  All we have to do is take an interest in each other and make an effort talk to each other, and listen a bit more.  Do it, and spread the word, eh!