When Your Technological Ghosts Come Back To Haunt You, Expect Humbug

Column On a Christmas Eve when nothing felt right, I lapsed into a deep yet disturbed sleep.

I awoke to perceive a diffuse glow. Was it a smartphone notification?

I opened my eyes. Three spectral presences crowded around the sides of my bed.

One – a middle-aged woman – cradled a NeXT Cube under her arm.

Another – an obese man with a prodigious neckbeard – plus a smartphone in each hand, and eyes that never looked up as he turned from one screen to the other.

The third – covered head to toe in a decaying, blackened cowl – stood silently.

I knew immediately what was going on.

"Aren't you meant to haunt me individually?" I asked.

"Sorry mate," replied the neckbeard, "we have KPIs. Efficiency and all that. Can't lose our holiday bonus."

"Not on what we're getting paid," added the woman.

The quiet one pointed a skeletal finger at the hourglass they held.

"Then let's get this started," I offered.

"Take my arm," commanded the woman. As I reached out, my bedroom melted away, replaced by a near-empty classroom.

"Neat trick," I mumbled, somewhat woozy from the transition. "Who are you?"

"I am the Ghost of Technology Past."

"Long past?"

"No, your past. Witness! In this classroom a boy sits alone, abandoned by all, absorbed in a book …"

We drew closer. I saw my nineteen-year-old self, punk and hairy, nose deep in an arcane tome: Literary Machines.

"I remember reading that! Ted Nelson's evocation of a world entirely shaped by hypertext, with all of human knowledge linked together into a global library, available to all …"

"Xanadu," she concluded. "This is the moment you became a True Believer."

"It never happened," I sighed.

"Utopias rarely do," she observed. "But it prepared you for something 'good enough' …"

The room dissolved again, resolving into a classic San Francisco apartment – foggy skies beyond large Victorian windows.

I saw myself sitting at a desk, typing away at … "My SPARCstation! Bought it used. Boat anchor of a monitor, must have weighed 25 kilos. But it ran NCSA Mosaic …"

"The first graphical web browser," she nodded.

"I remember setting it all up, then spending a week surfing the web. The entire web! It was so small, you could visit every page on every site …"

"Good enough hypertext to set off an explosive release of human energy."

"I threw myself into building the web. I knew in my heart it would be an incredible benefit for humanity." Oh, the innocence of youth.

"Your optimism played into the plans of others, with different intentions …" The scene faded out again, to be replaced by a corridor that looked very familiar.

"Third and Bryant?"

"The address of the San Francisco building where the web really took off. WIRED downstairs, and upstairs …"

"Oh," I sighed. "The Original Sin."

We approached two people hauling a large cart of gear – I was one of them – engaged in conversation with the bloke guiding the cart.

"So what are you doing with all of this?" I asked.

"Setting up a web agency with some friends," he replied.

"A web … what?"

"Agency. We're making advertisements for the web."

I couldn't comprehend what he meant.

"You put a banner into the top of a web page. Click on the banner, off you go to the advertiser's website."

"And companies will pay for this?" (How could I ever have been this dim?)

"Sure. We already have some big clients. And we can track all the IP addresses of everyone who sees and clicks on the banners, so we can tell advertisers where their viewers are coming from. It's going to revolutionize the business."

"It did do that," observed The Ghost of Technology Past. Until that moment I didn't know ghosts could eye-roll. It's not pretty. "What happened to your friend and his agency?"

"I heard they got bought out – and the firm that bought them out got bought out. That firm got bought out too."

"So they've become a tiny speck within an advertising Leviathan?" she inquired.

Before I could reply, the neckbeard interrupted. "Ghost of Technology Present. Pleased to meet you. Let's keep this moving right along, shall we? Grab my beard."

"What???"

"My hands are full," he indicated, waving his smartphones. "Go on."

I gave the beard a proper tug and the scene shifted to my office, just a few months ago. I sat at my desk reading email.

"Read over your shoulder," the Ghost advised.

I saw the email that held my slightly-former-self's attention: a polite and wistful "Goodbye and thanks for all the great articles" note from a publisher I'd written for regularly.

"I remember that. Another small publisher circling the gurgler of a medium profiting only the very largest."

"And six months later, what did you learn?"

I sighed. "They'd fired all their freelancers – and replaced us with AI."

"How'd that work out?"

"Badly," I looked him up and down, "but more efficient?"

"Hmph," he hmphed. "C'mon, we're off."

I tugged his beard again, finding myself on a path deep in some urban forest. I could see myself on the path ahead, walking side by side with a close friend, talking in hushed tones.

"You're worried about AI?" asked the Ghost.

"Cautious. I know it's very good at making simulacra – things that sound or look like us, but aren't us."

"That's why you brought your friend out on this walk." He knew.

"We left our smartphones in the car. Just us and the trees."

"You didn't want to be overheard."

"I'm sharing a Shibboleth."

"A private touchstone shared between individuals," neckbeard nodded, "so they can quickly verify that they are who they claim to be …"

"… and not a simulacrum. Getting too easy to do. Precautions make sense."

"Have you used that Shibboleth?"

"Not yet. But 2025 looks … spicy."

"I reckon you'll need it," he offered. "Good luck to you …"

• Data is the new uranium – incredibly powerful and amazingly dangerous
• Copilot's crudeness has left Microsoft chasing Google, again
• AI has colonized our world – so it's time to learn the language of our new overlords
• AI stole my job and my work, and the boss didn't know – or care

"What – are we done?" I turned toward him, coming face to face with that other figure: tall, dark, tattered, scary.

"O Spirit of Technology to Come," I moaned, reciting the formula, "I fear thee most of all."

They held out their hourglass. As I touched it, the scene transformed again.

In the skies above, I perceived armies of drones – each with a high-resolution camera and light beam aiming this way and that, capturing and parsing the emotion on every human face.

Below, people universally stared into their smartphones as if hypnotized, occasionally breaking out into disjointed dance moves, choreographed to sounds only they could hear.

After a long, lonely moment in this dystopia, I saw nearby one young woman, who, through some amazing act of will, tore her attention away from the screen in her hand. She looked up at the drones, then out at the sea of lost souls all around her.

Then she screamed. In that scream I heard the agonies of birth, the terror of the Morrigan, the sound of thunder and the roar of an earthquake.

Every screen went dark. Like hailstones, drones dropped from the skies.

Then I heard something that sounded like glass shattering – not just once, nor a few times, but billions upon billions of screens meeting their end.

After a long moment, I heard a rising cacophony of human voices, as people rediscovered the joy of being present with one another.

"Oh Spirit," I exclaimed, "I thought you would leave me in the pit! Instead, you've shown me how we can change course, and come back to ourselves. I promise, I will do better. I promise …"

With that I awoke, back in my room, with my smartphone sleeping next to my bedside.

That's when I realized that the Ghost had been true to its nature: I had been left in the pit. ®