Until last night I did not know I had an amanuensis.
I learned about it from that ever-dependable source of information, a bloke in the pub.
Fine word amanuensis.
John Milton, author of Paradise Lost, went blind at the age of 43.
Thereafter he dictated his endless verses to amanuenses, prime among whom were his daughters, poor things.
So there I was yesterday evening, leaning on the bar and bemoaning the state of the world as is the right of every male at the end of his seventh decade.
I was especially bemoaning the ubiquity of electronics as exemplified that afternoon by a schoolgirl walking home on London St so engrossed in her phone, so wrapped around it, so oblivious to the actual world about her, that she not only stepped out in front of my car, but she also didn’t realise that she had stepped out in front of my car and that I had braked abruptly in order to preserve her life.
And as she went blithely on her way, entirely unaware that she could at that moment be meeting her maker (though no doubt she would have paid him no attention, being preoccupied with Instagram), it seemed to me that rather than being our slave, technology was increasingly enslaving us and would only do so the more when AI kicked in properly.
And I went on to recount a recent visit to a podiatrist who asked whether I minded if AI ‘‘listened in’’.
I did mind in a way but said I didn’t.
And at the end of the appointment Dr Pod showed me the summary that AI had made of the consultation and it was both uncannily accurate and disquieting.
To which the bloke beside me at the bar, whose name I knew but couldn’t remember so I had spent the evening addressing him as mate, said that the Dr Pod story was pretty old hat and just about any home computer had been able to do that stuff for a while now, to which I said ‘‘really?’’ and he said, ‘‘yeah really’’.
He asked me what sort of computer I had and I said I didn’t know.
He said was it an Apple and I said I didn’t think so, and he said in that case it would be a PC and it would be perfectly capable of taking dictation like an old-fashioned secretary.
‘‘Really?’’ I said again.
‘‘Yeah really,’’ he said again.
Back home an hour later I followed his instructions and pressed the mysterious and thitherto unused key that has a diagram on it supposedly representing windows.
At the same time I pressed the ‘‘h’’.
And up popped a throbbing graphic looking like a stylised thistle.
The word ‘‘Listening ...’’ appeared on the screen and the thistle quivered in expectation.
‘‘Bloody hell,’’ I said.
‘‘Bloody hell,’’ appeared on the screen.
‘‘Bloody hell,’’ I said again, as ‘‘Bloody hell’’ appeared on the screen.
‘‘Bloody hell,’’ appeared on the screen again.
‘‘My amanuensis,’’ I said.
The cursor hesitated as if in thought.
‘‘Maya manual ansys,’’ appeared on the screen.
But generally it was pretty good.
Writing is the greatest of all inventions.
Before it, every word spoken blew away on the wind and was lost for ever.
The written word is a triumph over ephemerality.
It outlives the grave.
When I was at school we wrote everything by hand, using pens with nibs.
In other words we wrote as Chaucer wrote, or Shakespeare, or Dickens, in ink on paper.
The step beyond handwriting was setting words in type and printing them.
This was Caxton’s revolution that enabled the written word to be disseminated in countless copies.
At school only two people typed — the secretaries who occupied a little office each either side of the main front door.
Nobody printed.
Printing was still a remote commercial business.
But now, only half a century later, 2000 years of pen and paper have been swept aside.
The typewriter is obsolete.
The secretary is obsolete.
The printer is all but obsolete.
I can just speak my honeyed words to nobody, can just vibrate the air of this my little underground study and an electronic ear will catch my words and make them appear on a screen and at the touch of a button will send them anywhere around the world in seconds.
A tireless, unpaid amanuensis.
Milton’s daughters would have loved it. I don’t.
Old dogs and new tricks perhaps, but it just doesn’t feel like writing.
I doubt I’ll use it again.
• Joe Bennett is a Lyttelton writer.
