Saturday 10 June 2017

The Other News

I picked up two bits of news this week that I think largely went unnoticed amidst all the other stuff going on in the UK, but both of which might have longer shelf-lives than the newly elected government.

Firstly, on Wednesday (7th) lunchtime, 50.7% of the UK's energy was supplied by wind, solar, hydro and wood pellet burning. This to me sounds like big news. 50% of Britain was powered by renewable energy for the first time! Add in nuclear, and by 2pm low carbon sources were producing 72.1% of our electricity!
     If that's not exciting enough the result of this was that prices fell to a 10th of their normal level - so we were saving the planet and saving people money. You just don't get these kind of good news stories, but the media barely seemed to notice. If nobody dies they're not interested.
     Now admittedly Wednesday lunchtime was both sunny and windy, but still this is brilliant, and it's not just in the UK. There are record levels of wind power being set all across Northern Europe! Now we just need the rest of the world to get on board.

Secondly, Boeing is researching the possibilities of having commercial-passenger jets piloted by computers (or artificial intelligence). Now, you might think the biggest concern here is 'can they make it safe?' And yes, that is one of the main questions they're trying to answer. But that was not my first thought.
     My first thought was, 'why?'
     Why do we need planes flown by computers when we have perfectly good pilots that do the job already, and what are all the pilots of the world going to do when they are usurped by this artificial intelligence? Go on jobseekers, I suppose.
     Actually, my issue isn't really with this specific story, but with the general trend of the world to replace humans with machines that do the same job. As far as I can tell, new technology that is actually useful are the things that help us to do jobs, not do the jobs for us! It's no wonder there are so many people out of work, and soon the pilots are going to join them. My commiserations if that includes you.

So, there you go, energy and the economy solved in one blog post. All we need are more wind farms and fewer bonkers ideas about having robots do everything for us. Now, back to work everyone, before you find a machine has taken over.