Thoughtland

PK column in The National: Can we imagine a future where we’re not willing slaves to data reapers?

By Pat Kane. First published on JANUARY 28TH, 2017

AS the stakes get higher and the high-ups get crazier, there’s always respite in tales of friends and family. Yet even stories of beloved four year-olds and their happy playtime experiments aren’t free from the ominous low-notes of the times.

So this wee yin I know has been living with a device in her home called an Amazon EchoDot – the size of a hockey puck – inside of which lives an artificial intelligence called Alexa. You say her name clearly, and Alexa wakes up, her device’s circumference glowing blue.

PK column in The National: Don't give up on our elders, we must fire them up for the fray instead

By Pat Kane. First published on JANUARY 21ST, 2017

IT’S the stat that drew a collective intake of breath at the Build Indy conference last week.

And throughout Dr Craig Dalzell’s vital paper The Demographics of Independence, it’s the one he’s most anxious about: “The underlying reasons … should be investigated immediately”.

Here it is: Support for indy among women over 55 has dropped from 44 per cent in 2014 to 22 per cent in 2016. “The idea of the UK leaving the EU appears to have affected this group profoundly, as their leaving the Yes group has not resulted in a rise in the undecided vote,” says Dalzell. “Instead, there has been a movement straight to No.”

PK column in The National: Mad to be normal? In an unequal world it may be normal to be mad

By Pat Kane. First published on JANUARY 14TH, 2017

"A LITTLE girl of seventeen in a mental hospital told me she was terrified because the Atom Bomb was inside her. That is a delusion. The statesmen of the world who boast and threaten that they have Doomsday weapons are far more dangerous, and far more estranged from 'reality' than many of the people on whom the label 'psychotic' is affixed."

As The Donald inches closer to the nuclear launch codes, this quote from the late Scottish anti-psychiatrist and 1960s guru RD Laing has been rattling around my head. Mad To Be Normal is the title of the biopic of Laing’s life (with David Tennant in the main role) that will close the Glasgow Film Festival this year.

PK column in The National: A better future won’t just fall to Earth from a spaceship

By Pat Kane. First published on JANUARY 7TH, 2017

WHETHER we are a significant minority or a bare majority, many of us seem to have a problem with aliens at the moment. Pressing at our borders, threatening our jobs and identities: a surface target that takes the blame for much deeper structural problems.

Yet that’s only human aliens. Non-human ones? Going by our most popular entertainments, we are all at least ambivalent about them – certainly fascinated, but not always phobic, and often clearly progressive. Rogue One, the Star Wars prequel released last month, has its usual diversity of encrusted bipeds on the Rebel side – and note how the fascist forces of the Empire are creepily and uniformly human.