Working for peanuts is all very fine

"While Humanity will be amusing itself, or enjoying cultivated leisure—which, and not labour, is the aim of man—or making beautiful things, or reading beautiful things, or simply contemplating the world with admiration and delight, machinery will be doing all the necessary and unpleasant work. The fact is, that civilisation requires slaves. The Greeks were quite right there. Unless there are slaves to do the ugly, horrible, uninteresting work, culture and contemplation become almost impossible. Human slavery is wrong, insecure, and demoralising. On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world depends."

That's what Oscar Wilde had to say in "The Soul of Man under Socialism". I was reminded of it because of the machine-assisted future imagined in Cthulhu 2050: Whispers Beyond the Stars. There, robots do the majority of jobs and most humans are given a stipend to survive on.

Is that how things will turn out? It's often said that new technologies don't take away jobs, they just change the jobs we have to do. Thus, a modern city has far fewer ostlers, crossing-sweepers, grooms, and so on than a 19th century city where transport was horse-drawn. But AI/robotics is potentially quite different from any technological advance we've seen before. It might turn out that there aren't any jobs (maybe apart from actor, priest and sex worker) that an AI agent or a smart robot won't be able to do better than a human.

Who wants a job anyway? We're conditioned these days to identify employment with a sense of self-worth, but Louis XIV would have laughed at the very idea that he should have a job, and Oscar makes the case that we should really aspire to be artists and connoisseurs. 

But that cuts both ways. Nobody can want to spend their days driving a car, for example. For an AI to drive a car on today's roads -- to attain SAE level 5, that is -- it can't simply be an unconscious machine. It would need a world model that recognizes that objects persist when out of sight. It needs to be able to interpret the likely behaviour of a human pedestrian or other motorist. It might be called on to make Trolley Problem assessments. It must, in short, be fully capable of rational thought. And if you have built a real intelligence like that, it's not ethical to condition it from "birth" only to enjoy driving cars for you. That's raising another conscious entity to be your slave: it's not only wrong, it never works out well in the long run for either slaves or masters.

Suppose that by 2050 (which might be optimistic; the AI we currently have is not close to general intelligence) we have a host of super-smart ASIs, genius-level intelligences capable of imaginative thought, what would humans do? Suppose those ASIs doubled the world’s wealth. (Not that we necessarily even need AGI to get a massive economic benefit from AI, of course.) Assuming the human population didn't just double, and if that wealth were distributed just as unevenly in the future as it is today, the poor in India and Africa would be raised to the current levels of the poor in Latin America. Latin America to present-day China. China and the Pacific countries to modern Europe.

But will it work like that? What will those people do? And how many people do we need on the planet anyway? Two billion? Seven billion? Fourteen billion? Or maybe far fewer. We would no longer need a huge population in order to ensure enough geniuses for progress (if you accept Julian Simon's argument to begin with) and we're already aware that unwillingness to solve the climate problem caused by too many people means our civilization may not survive another century. Maybe a global population of twenty million humans would be sufficient. If such a calculation makes you uncomfortable, welcome to the world where tigers (global population 6000) and elephants (global population 450,000) live.

Some have asked, "How will the big corporations make money if nobody has a job? There'll be nobody to buy their products." The answer to that is: money is just a token for the ability to get things done. If you had a million robot slaves, you wouldn't need money; you could just reach out your hand and whatever you need would be given to you. I don't raise this point because that's my picture of the future, just as a reminder that we are not talking about the world as it is now with a little boost like a steam engine or a power loom. It will be a different paradigm. Speculating about it is fun as long as we're willing to think way outside the box.

Mi amore chicka ferdy

The hot news today (well, it's been a bit quiet) is that Britain's prime minister, Bojo the Clown, has been watching his favourite movie. Take a guess. Darkest Hour? Churchill? No, it's The Lord of the Rings trilogy. It reminded me of a prophetic scene in Can You Brexit? where PM is relaxing with a spot of high fantasy escapism:

Johnson's choice of viewing comes as no surprise when you realize that his childhood ambition (ie just before he was made leader of the Nasti Party) was to be world king. And he made it, almost, because whenever he's on TV the name Cnut springs to mind. But let's not be too hard on him; there are far less qualified wannabe world kings out there.

There's little point in trying to flog Can You Brexit? now, I guess. People think that the pandemic has made the whole question of Brexit irrelevant. So I'll just say that Spanish Flu didn't negate the consequences of World War 1, and point out that if you want to give a non-fantasy, halfling-free gamebook a go, it's still on sale and you can also play it for free here using the character sheet here. Bonus points if you can salvage Britain's national health service from the current crisis. Come to that, bonus points if you can salvage Britain.



Anyway, enough of Lord of the Rings and of UK politics. Be here on Friday when we're off on a one-shot roleplaying adventure set in a whole other fantasy land. You won't want to miss "The Only Way Is Narnia".

Blood Sword redux: The Kingdom of Wyrd

The Kingdom of Wyrd is where the Blood Sword saga really begins. Well, kind of. You've already met your Big Bad in the form of Icon the Ungodly, the scene has been set with scheming celestial Magi and a gritty medieval world, and if you don’t know the rules by the time you get out of the Battlepits then no crash course will ever help you. But this is the book where you’re given the quest that’s going to carry you through to Doomsday. Literally.

I wonder if I even knew what the Blood Sword was going to be when I got started on this series. Most likely Oliver sold it to the publisher on the strength of a lurid title. (That’s why the “dragon” in Dragon Warriors. “It says fantasy.” Me, I wanted to call it something like Dead Men and Heroes, but these were children’s publishers we were dealing with.) So, title first, and only then we will have figured out how to get a Blood Sword into it. Readers will notice that most of the time in the books I call it the Sword of Life, not least to try to distance myself from the gore-dripping logo the art director saddled us with.

An ancient magic weapon split into pieces that you must collect… Hmm. That will have been Oliver. And it sounds like I’m scornful, but he was right. Even back then, I’d have wanted to design the series like my role-playing games – and my campaigns are never about saving the world – but Oliver was forever reminding me that these books were for kids, and the top-sellers in the market were Fighting Fantasy, which back then never knowingly used an original plotline. Reviewers have observed that in among all the epic world-saving, what really interests me is the personal. People, not ideas. But I can see it helped to have that MacGuffiny treasure-hunt arc to hang it all on.

Each Blood Sword book has a theme, and in this one it’s the danger of idealism hardening into totalitarianism, revolution coagulating into stasis. Now, I tend to think that gamebooks are better the less dungeon they have in them. By that I’m not ruling out all scrambling through chthonic spaces, just those tidy-as-a-carpark catacombs where you get a logic puzzle in one room and orcs playing skittles with a baby goblin in the next. But I said to a role-playing colleague, Mike Polling: “I need to suggest the stultification of the imagination, a world where somebody gained the power to shape dreams but their dreams have all grown stale and a bit boring.” And he said: “You just described a dungeon.”

So in a way that’s what the Warlock King’s palace is. A classic dungeon (no orcs, though; no skittles) and it’s justified in story-terms because it’s all a construct in his mind. The Kingdom of Dreams is the role-playing game where you have to take on the Dungeon Master and slay him. Very apposite for my style of role-playing, that.

The palace isn’t a big part of the adventure, though. Much more of it is a free-wheeling wander around the world of Legend encountering a variety of mad, bad, dishonest, decent, driven, daft, wise or vengeful NPCs. The feminine principle is a big factor in this book. Look how often your bacon is pulled out of the fire by a woman. It’s not that I think the female mind is actually any wiser or more creative than the male, but in the world of mythological archetypes churning away under the skin of the story here, the Warlock King is the ultimate Bad Dad, all controlling and about what’s good for you, while characters like Uraba the seer and the old lady in the woods are aspects of the Mother, the Yin that bends and flows around all opposition. Who knows why I took it in that direction. Margaret Thatcher was in power at the time. She was Britain’s very own Warlock King, driven mad by being too long in power and too absolute in her convictions. So maybe I felt we needed a nice feminine example as an antidote.

Talking of which, my favourite thing about the book is Uraba. She was unexpected. I was learning that good writing is about surprising the reader. And I liked starting the story in medias res, something I took to Jason Bourne levels in book four.

The vampires out on the pack ice were swiped from August Derleth’s story “The Drifting Snow”. I read it once when I had a bad cold, and in that slightly feverish state it stayed lodged in my subconscious like a psychic cyst. And then, writing about those poor half-starved player-characters shivering under the gleam of Red Death, it came back to me. Merci, Monsieur le Comte.

Oliver Johnson had even less time to help out with this book than on The Battlepits of Krarth. I detect his hand in much of the last act of the book that takes place inside the Palace of Eternal Dusk, especially the doppelganger on the funeral bier and the various mythic trials – the Leaves of Remembrance, the Handmaidens of Oblivion, and so on. Giving a personal name (Gristun) to the Warlock King’s guardian beast, that will have been Oliver with his background in early Gothic literature. Always mainlining the Hippocrene, him. And I’ll bet he thought of the old knight who needs your help with the Lady in Grey – not least because she doesn’t fit the prevailing theme of this book that the women are the trustworthy ones.

The most purely Johnsonian bit in the book is Captain Lazarus and his obsession with the World Serpent – except I’m pretty sure I’m the one who came up with all that. We were like Lennon and McCartney, you see, amusing ourselves by pastiching each other’s style. (The walrus was Paul.) And here’s a funny thing. Editing this book, I was baffled to find that Lazarus doesn’t quietly slip off into the brine if his goal is thwarted. I could have sworn that scene was in there, but I searched the flowchart and couldn’t find it. Then I realized I’d put it into the novelization of this book, and it was so delicious and fitting a bit of character development that I was tempted to retrofit it into The Kingdom of Wyrd. But no, I did promise this would be the classic version. All those revisions can wait till the next edition.

I say that, but I felt the denouement was too unforgiving. I wouldn’t kill my players in an RPG just because they failed to find one item. So I tweaked the final duel with the Warlock King to give you more of a chance. Oh, and classic edition or not, the Enchanter has a whole new spell that can be very useful on those tactical maps. You’ll see.

This book has one of my favourite Russ Nicholson pictures, the one of Blue Moon’s meteorite stalker. And the original cover wasn’t nearly as awful as the image of Slimer (seriously, why?) on Battlepits. It's a meaty 570 sections, about 68,000 words not counting the glossary and the rules; I like having room to stretch. Kingdom is the book where the series really starts to hit its stride. Next up: The Demon’s Claw.

On behalf of the group, I hope we passed the audition

I intended to put this up to commemorate the start of the Interregnum (and also the anniversary of the Beatles’ last public performance, on the roof of Apple Records) but missed that target by a whole month. Better late than never (maybe) here’s my wife Roz and I on Leo Hartas’s radio show. Tune in every week to hear the Bantering Boys, Thursday at 9pm GMT on 10Radio. When you're listening late at night, you may think the boys are not quite right - but that's just the beer before the show, and anyway it's banter; it's not meant to make sense.