"What did you do in the Summer?"

is the standard grade school assignment at this time of the year. In the Spy's case, it did not involve writing this column at the start of either July or August. Sorry about that. Far too busy.

Early May had seen the Spy experience a mysterious illness that lasted on and off for a couple of weeks, though he was able to present at a literary conference in the middle of that. COVID test negative, but the kits might not have been valid anymore. Isn't technology wonderful? However, the rest of the summer was spent in relatively good health. Mid-June saw him presenting on AI at the CCDS (Canadian Council of Deans of Science) in Newfoundland. He was a stand-in for Glen Van Brummelen, his dean as the latter had a Math conference conflict. Unlike the Spy, Glen (a Math historian) is famous for having recently discovered who invented the decimal point. Made the cover of Nature. Wow! On return, concerts and awards events for the grandkids consumed several evenings.

The first half of July was spent on the road as the twelve of us in three generations of Sutcliffes went camping across southern British Columbia and Alberta, ending up for a week just outside Calgary, then back via Banff. Along the way, we took in the scenery along highways three, two, and one, Bromley Rock, Head-Smashed-In-Buffalo-Jump, the Calgary Stampede and parade, Heritage Park, Tunnel Mountain campsite, and a couple of half days with the kids playing in a river and swimming in and hiking beside a lake. The roads were good with no detours, light traffic, no fires or accidents to dodge, with cell coverage blissfully nonexistent for hundreds of kilometers (hey, every country in the world has those except four--Liberia, Myanmar, the U.K. and the U.S. Don't you find it odd that the U.S. is one of the few countries using Imperial units?)

The only technology issue was the twice-dead battery in the Spy's Subaru Ascent. A morning had to be sacrificed for a trip to Calgary Subaru, whose people were gracious enough to squeeze it in without an appointment. They recharged and discharged the battery twice and reported nothing wrong with it. The car and battery were still under warranty so no charge. No problems on the way home. Had a light been left on? Had the battery only needed a drink of juice and a wake-up call? Who knows? Isn't technology wonderful?

Bottom line--an amazing trip. The kids traded around at every stop and all had a great time, great food, greater company.

On return, the Spy had to get serious about the manuscript for the fifth edition of The Fourth Civilization—Technology, Ethics and Society as it had to go to the publisher by the end of August. Thousands of changes were needed as the fourth edition was back in 2004, but of note is that apart from one section added to the chapter on AI, none of the chapter names, subheadings, and sub-subheadings have changed since the first edition written in 1985 and published in 1987. AI issues that we in the industry knew about and discussed back then are the ones in the headlines today. For that matter, we knew what is now called the Internet was coming--it was only a matter of who would invent it. Many other predictions from earlier editions have over the years been re-written from future tense to past tense, or simply dropped as now too mundane (yawn), despite being labeled by the commissioning publisher's editor back in the day as "fantastic" and "science fictional". Some of the Spy's fantastical 1980s predictions were the demise of the USSR, the fall of the Berlin wall, and a renewal of Eastern European ethnic wars--all now so far in the past as to be nearly forgotten, except by the Russian dictator and once KGB director for the former East Germany for whom one DT has such great admiration.

Much work also went into changing the spelling and punctuation from the quaintly Canadian mix of British and American (not the same mix as the Australian, which had to be used in his novels) to the equally but differently inconsistent American style to suit the new publisher. Unfortunately for the wallets of future students, the 350K+ words have to be bound in two volumes. However, the book does divide neatly after the second of four parts.

Mix all that activity in with gardening, processing the produce, and now preparing for a fifty-fifth teaching year, and it shouldn't be too hard for the reader to see why writing columns temporarily fell by the wayside.

Speaking of domestic issues,

the Spy messed up when making dill pickles. After he had the vinegar mix poured into the packed jars and the lids on, he suddenly realized he'd left the dill weed out, so the lids had to come off, the dill installed, and the lids replaced. Two jars didn't seal but can be used after four months or so once the pickling process is complete. The others ought to keep. He thinks he did the sweet pickles properly, and all ten jars sealed up nicely.

But while he tells tales on himself, one other task resulted in disaster, as he missed a 4-colour pen in a shirt pocket when doing laundry. The wash was OK, but in the hot dryer, three of the tubes blew their ink. It took two hours to clean up. One shirt and pair of pants were rescued with spot remover, but another shirt had to be chucked as the ink was fast in the fabric. The dryer drum is permanently multi-coloured. Isn't technology wonderful?

The Spy is bemused, but also frightened

by those politicians who act surprised (what else is new?) that the world is in an inflationary period, and household budgets have become incapable of keeping up. If they really are surprised, they know even less about basic economics than we thought. Of course, the politicians who are "out" have no more understanding than that when they feign outrage over phenomena they would probably themselves have shepherded in had they instead been "in" to do so.

The big boosts in government spending during and after COVID, we-l intentioned, but carelessly applied in many cases (hard to stop that habit once you start) meant far larger than usual deficits. Should it not be obvious that government deficits and the subsequent borrowing that adds to the debt mean that new money was created out of. . . well, thin air? Extra money chasing the same goods automatically causes inflation. The more of the one, the more of the other, as night follows day. Throw in the fragility of highly optimized supply chains, wages that never keep up, and (for Canada in particular) extreme housing cost increases, and you have the recipe for gutting the middle class, loss of confidence in government, social unrest, despair that feeds the drug problem, hospital overloads, and even more inflation of homeless numbers.

Speaking of the drug problem, can we really claim any of this is surprising? Given the technology to develop new and more potent pain-killing narcotics, was not the new wave of addictions and deaths predictable? Likewise the severe pressures on emergency services, hospitals, and undertakers, plus the sharp uptick in homelessness? And isn't it just as predictable that providing "safe" injection sites, but not compulsory addiction treatment turns out not to be the promised harm reduction, but only death postponement? Remain a drug addict long enough, and it eventually kills you. Again, isn't technology wonderful, especially when predictable consequences are sloughed off and ignored? Countries that apprehend addicts and compel treatment don't have nearly as large a homelessness problem or as many overdose deaths as North America does. Check out and compare the cores of a few European cities.

Apple, Google, Microsoft and others

are all in on AIing (is that a verb?) various of their software engines, typically for browser searches and promises of other benefits, some specified, others mere vague handwaving--all well and good as far as it goes, but there are flies in the ointment. It turns out that these products may require more local memory or higher-end processing chips than current hardware provides, so there are sharp limits on backward compatibility. Thus, phowners (is that a word?) who want such features may have to upgrade their devices far sooner than they anticipated. More seriously, as detailed here in past columns, an AI with unfettered access to the Internet has, on many topics, far more misinformation available to it than it does information, and on others none at all. In the first case, the returns are probably mostly lies, and in the second, pseudo-compositions made up from. . . well, nothing. Ah, but all that nonsense will certainly be eloquently worded, a quality one would be hard-pressed to attach to the many politicians who do likewise. Remove the lies and some would be utterly speechless. Nice outcome if it happened.

At the same time hardware tech giants are wrestling with increasingly widespread legislation mandating that devices such as phones, tablets, readers, computers, and the like, must be repairable by more than just in-house technicians who have privileged access to the necessary tools and parts. As with any initiative that opens up even the possibility for competition, this is good news for consumers, who will have more options for repairs and will likely pay less money to get them. At the same time, it will scarcely affect tech companies' bloated bottom lines.

But returning to obsolescence,

the Spy notes the rapid pace of updates on Apple's M-series chips (already up to M4 and looking like becoming an M(Year Mod 100) sequence. This is to be expected to an extent with new technology, but when an expensive latest-and-greatest thingummy turns out to have a lifetime measured in months before being dethroned by something supposedly more-better-gooder, it could leave a bad taste in consumers' mouths. At WWDC 2024, there were no new products announced, but Apple will have a steady stream of them containing M4 hardware right up to the 2025 meetup when the M5 chip will likely be revealed. Repeat until repeat until.

Meanwhile back at the ranch (sorry Roy) although the WiFi-7 standard has been out for some time now, apart from a handful of routers, products are scarce in the retail corral. The Spy has been scouting for access points in that class, but there ain't many of them there cattle with brands on 'em, and the few that are visible out on the range have an awful high price tag hangin' from their hides.

The latest twist in Canadian Politics

has the leader of the former Liberal party of BC (not to be confused with the federal Liberal party) that recently re-branded itself as BC United, and is currently the official opposition in the Provincial legislature, saying it will now not run candidates in the next election, to be held less than two months from now! (Beat that, US Democrats! This is an entire major formerly governing party packing it in.) Factors in this bombshell: the universally abysmal unpopularity of the Federal Liberals, the reciprocal resurgence of the Federal Conservatives that has loaned credence and popularity to the unrelated Provincial Conservatives (who haven't been elected to seats in the legislature for decades), and the disastrous rebranding that left most voters not knowing who the former provincial Liberals and their leader even are anymore. (Talk about hoisting yourself on your own petard!)

The BC United leader apparently looked at his party's now fourth-place sub-10% polling popularity, got together with his own former MLA and now Conservative leader, and threw him the towel. Isn't polling technology wonderful? Several of those now BC (not so) United sitting MLAs had already defected to the Conservatives, and more will now undoubtedly follow suit. Did you follow all that? The new (effective) coalition probably can scour sufficient votes to roundly defeat what has been a nominally socialist, marginally competent but free-spending government. More debt and therefore more unaffordable inflation. Can the next lot do any better?

Apparently we do live in interesting times.

--The Northern Spy

Opinions expressed here are entirely the author's own, and no endorsement is implied by any community or organization to which he may be attached. Rick Sutcliffe, (a.k.a. The Northern Spy) is Professor of Computing Science and Mathematics and Assistant Dean of Science at Canada's Trinity Western University. He completed his fifty-fourth year as a high school and university teacher in 2024. He has been involved as a member of or consultant with the boards of several organizations and participated in developing industry standards both nationally and internationally. He is a long-time technology author and has written two textbooks and ten alternate history SF novels, one named best ePublished SF novel for 2003. His various columns have appeared in numerous magazines and newspapers (both dead tree and online formats) since the early 1980s, and he's been a regular participant and speaker at churches, schools, and academic meetings and conferences. He and his wife Joyce celebrated their fiftieth anniversary in 2019 and lived in the Langley/Aldergrove/Bradner area of B.C. from 1969 to 2021 and cancer happened, so he latterly continues alone, depending heavily on family and friends to manage.

URL s for Rick Sutcliffe's Arjay Enterprises:

The Northern Spy Home Page: https://www.TheNorthernSpy.com

opundo : https://opundo.com

Sheaves Christian Resources : https://sheaves.org

WebNameHost : https://www.WebNameHost.net

WebNameSource : https://www.WebNameSource.net

nameman : https://nameman.net

General URLs for Rick Sutcliffe's Books:

Author Site: https://www.arjay.ca

TechEthics Site (Fourth edition of text; the fifth is in preparation) : httpss://www.arjaybooks.com/EthTech/index.htm

Publisher's Site: https://www.writers-exchange.com/Richard-Sutcliffe.html