The Emperor’s New Gadget

It’s shiny and exciting! It’s going to save us all!

William Essex
2 min readJan 13, 2025
A brown door set into a concrete frame. The rest of the house, or whatever it is, has gone. In the distance, the horizon.
The house that AI built? Photo by Liam Spradlin on Unsplash

Odd little signs of the times. Just briefly.

This morning I wrote up my radio’s story about the UK government wanting to massively increase the amount of AI in the UK. [Don’t laugh.]

I didn’t mention — but was impressed by — how totally the media’s burbling on last week about the government’s economic failure — and all over the weekend — had been replaced by burbling on about this shiny new story about AI. [Almost as if the media’s easily distracted…]

No mention of the economy. Just — AI’s going to transform everything, blah, blah, blah.

This evening, they were still in full flow. Top story at 5pm was an extended series of vox-pops about how wonderful everything’s going to be, once we’ve got AI. We won’t even lose our jobs, one voice said.

Although, oddly, there wasn’t a little segment, not even a single sentence, that answered the question, “What is AI?” Usually, when they’re babbling on about something new, the what-is-it segment is a handy way of filling some time.

After AI, they had a story about Greenland. Including vox-pops from native Greenlanders — the Kalaallit people, I now know — and a segment lasting quite a few seconds on the history of Greenland, politics of Greenland, strategic significance of Greenland, population of Greenland, even historical injustices experienced by the Kalaallit…

…and they’d even found an independence movement willing to discuss you-know-who’s offer to buy Greenland. As if they were setting up the Greenland story to run and run.

But AI? Not a word about what it is. Not a squeak about the development, the history, the Turing and other Tests, what AI is made of, who achieved the breakthroughs, nor about how it achieves its miracles. AI’s already set up to run and run, but it was as if … there was nothing there.

What is AI? How will it transform my life? Does anybody know?

And just to fill in one other detail that was left out — can somebody please tell me what the Emperor’s actually wearing?

That is a Danish story, after all.

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William Essex
William Essex

Written by William Essex

Former everything. I still write books, I still write stories. Author of The Book of Fake Futures, The Journey from Heaven, Escape Mutation.

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