WHAT A WONDERFUL WORLD THIS WILL BE [529]

With so many visions of the future in narrative fiction having proved to be incorrect, mostly because they were written to comment on the present at the time of their creation, it does not mean that I should subsequently be nostalgic for visions of the future that, for all the longing and hope they generate, did not come to pass.

That said, I wouldn’t mind seeing “The Jetsons” again. As of February 2026, the HBO Max streaming service is weeks away from launching in the UK and, while its US version has a spotty record of maintaining access to animated shows, regardless of how recent they are – so much for the Internet being permanent, I suppose – this may not be true elsewhere in the world.

More than Hanna-Barbera Productions flipping its successful show “The Flintstones” from the Stone Age to the Space Age, “The Jetsons” is about a family living in a utopian society one hundred years in the future, where people live above the clouds, work only a couple of hours a week, and need only exercise their fingers.

However, because it was first broadcast in 1962, the family is still a two-plus-two unit – father George, mother Jane, children Judy and Elroy, with pet (talking) dog Astro, and their robot maid Rosey. This makes it a standard family sitcom, but one where the family is the only familiar feature. 

Whereas “The Flintsones” is more like the “present day”, but with a Stone Age sheen – any device can be opened to find to being worked by an animal, saying “it’s a living!” – “The Jetsons” will have a little more ingenuity to its jokes, like George being caught in a traffic jam of flying cars, until a message appears to fly to a different place, but all the others do so as well, or a robot having a malfunctioning voice that requires it to knock itself to work properly, like a human would do to an old TV. The future has arrived, but it isn’t perfect.

Everything from buildings to cars in “The Jetsons” are in the space-age Googie style, prevalent from the end of the Second World War, but the show appeared just as ostentatious fins and rocket motifs started to disappear from American cars, replaced by cleaner Modernist lines. Predictions of flat TV screens, videophones and flying cars were also tempered by then-current understanding of how technology worked: a device that could 3D-print your dinner was programmed by inserting the right punched card into a slot, instead of selecting from a screen.

It is interesting to compare “The Jetsons” with “Futurama”, a similarly future-based animated show that has been revived more than once over the years. “Futurama” has a more cynical, ironic edge, and its world is more identifiably our own – one in which you can imagine yourself living, despite being set a thousand years into the future – than the utopia of “The Jetsons”, without sliding into dystopia. This familiarity has meant “Futurama” hasn’t needed to retrofit its idea of the future as the decades have progressed – rather than just being the style of the show, the buildings in “The Jetsons” are on poles to lift them above the pollution on the ground, an addition made with “Jetsons: The Movie” in 1990.

It appears I am not the only one done with “The Jetsons”, as talks were reported in October 2025 for a live-action version of the show, starring Jim Carrey and with Colin Trevorrow directing. With no-one having any comment on this report, least of all Warner Bros. as the owner of the property, we have nothing to go on about what the vision of the future in this version, apart from Trevorrow’s extensive background in science fiction films, from “Star Wars” to “Jurassic World”. So long as it looks forward, and not down, I’ll be happy.

THEY SYE THAT TIME ‘EALS ALL THINGS [528]

When I started my current administration job in 2012, “Typist” was a title still held by some people, literally typing up instructions and details received from businesses via fax machine, to be manipulated in a database later. This harked back to when typing was a specialised role that involved training for speed and accuracy.

Typing is not a lost skill, but is lost as a role, for everyone now types, as much a part of everyday life as typewriters once were, and computers now are.

I hope this trajectory eventually happens to artificial intelligence, at least in the way we currently use it – once its introductory period is over, and once tech companies are done foisting it on us, it will recede into the background. The useful tools of A.I. will remain, like accelerating scientific discoveries or managing your calendar, and the more frivolous and novel uses will fall away, like generating a picture of yourself sat on a horse, or asking a chatbot what you should do next with your life.

It would be a lovely future, one I am hopeful for, because it means we will have stopped talking about A.I., some consensus having been reached on ethical and moral boundaries, from the use of the technology to the collection of the data, from how to power data centres to where to place them, and from who can access the technology to who is allowed to control it, and just who and how is all this meant to be paid for. Yes, it would be a lovely future.

As much as I do not use A.I. by choice – I can write, manipulate pictures, make videos and find answers well enough for my own purposes, thank you – generative A.I. systems now form, or are additions to, programs I encounter every day, and that is not by choice. I am my generation’s equivalent of someone who doesn’t, or won’t have the internet at home, or a computer, just as the generation before them had to contend with whether they let a television into their house, or electricity.

My refusenik nature with A.I. is also informed by the daily view count of this website. I have seen it grow exponentially during 2025, with thousands of views a day, but a nagging thought tells me that many of these are not from people. As much as I can prevent my work from being skimmed, I am left to contemplate whether this action should be taken as a complement, when it really shouldn’t be.

Copyright infringement and data harvesting are still areas waiting on government legislation, but plagiarism, impersonation and fraud are existing problems, and once more people acknowledge that generating funny pictures and videos involve this in ways they don’t see, they may reconsider using it.

What I need to do now is enjoy the freedoms of not using A.I.: I know what I want to do or make, so I should be able to do that without fear of what will happen to it, or without having to acknowledge the slop that it can compete with. The only reason “slop” has arrived so quickly as a name for mechanically recovered content is because it is too obviously so – for as much as you can rail against people for consuming slop, they most often know it is slop, and know not to substitute it for what is real. You can denigrate the tools, you can overestimate the provider, but the biggest trick to making a good piece of media is not to underestimate you audience.

In short, I am bored of talking about A.I., for my refusal to use it willingly means I have already taken a stand against it.

IT’S TIME SOMEONE PROGRAMMED YOU [527]

The Russian "Aidol" robot collapsing at its unveiling, November 2025

When I ask “what comes after A.I.?”, what I mean is I need to know the ultimate outcome of the upheaval caused by the application of artificial intelligence into everyday life, especially as someone that has, as far as they are concerned, done their best to avoid it so far.

Am I thinking about a “post-A.I.” world, one where the technology has essentially become an endemic, integral part of how life is lived, or a world where people got bored of waiting for the future it promised, too conscious of the monetary and environmental costs of maintaining mainframes and data centres? Or am I thinking of a future beyond both these options, one mapped out by the machines that outstripped ourselves? This was science fiction once.

Right now, the A.I. programs we use remain “mechanical”, weighing user prompts against available data to generate the next outcome. This step went wrong when I asked Microsoft Copilot to explain “prompt engineering” in the style of Jack Kerouac, but because there was no actual thinking involved, that was to be expected. Already able to write confidently, draw with some ability, and manipulate photographs on a computer exactly how I need, I really have no use for the way A.I. is being pushed right now - I write this after the week Apple added generative text, equation and image functions to its Pages, Numbers and Keynote productivity apps, so long as you take out an “Apple Creator Studio” subscription to avoid missing out.

In February 2023, I wrote that I had already concluded I would not have a use for any creative generative A.I. program: “[If] you want help, or you simply want to cheat time and process, then you have now created a marketplace, and the producers want paying. Not only is it more rewarding to write that essay yourself, but it is also cheaper.” Three years of using A.I. programs have since followed, a wealth of data collected from users and subscribers, who consented to their collection of that data by their using them. It is not enough data to replace the plagiarism of copyrighted material, but enough data for me to consider whether the addition of A.I. functions to every program imaginable means tech companies will soon have “enough” data for whatever their next step turns out to be.

“Artificial general intelligence” is what I understand to be the current goal, going beyond mechanical prompts to match the human ability to think, well, intelligently. Could this then develop into an artificial general superintelligence, extending beyond the capacity of human thought? If we achieve that, we need to think now about legislation against equipping it with arms and legs.

It appears I am thinking about what comes after A.I. because there needs to be a world that still needs us. The current implementation of artificial intelligence relies on being told what is good for us in the long run, as if anything that doesn’t involve it is a backwards step, but a lot of the possibilities don’t appear to involve us. My job is in administration, but for how long will that job last? What kind of world would we have if A.I. stops being foisted on us, and just becomes a tool, just as the computer itself became?

Yes, this was an article about finding the right question. Next time, I will try to answer it.

 

THEY CALL ME BABY DRIVER [526]

Every so often, I will see a quadricycle parked around town. It is a Citroën Ami, a tiny two-person electric car sold by the French carmaker since 2020, the latest in a line of tiny French cars that its citizens can drive, on a moped licence, from 14 years of age – if they were born before 1988, they don’t even need the licence. To me, it looks like an idea of what future cars could have been, until it was not.

In the UK, the Ami meets the limits allowed under the AM category moped licence: it weighs 425kg before the battery is installed, and its tiny 5.5kW electric motor produces only eight brake horsepower and a top speed of 28mph. No petrol option exists, which would have been restricted to a maximum capacity of 49cc. Presumably, leaving town involves driving the Ami to the nearest bus or train station first.

Similar cars have been available in the UK. Famously, the Reliant Robin, the three-wheeled fiberglass-bodied car that weighed not much more than the Ami, can still be driven under a category A motorcycle licence, often a major selling point. Scutum Logistic’s Silence S04 Nanocar is sold through Nissan in the UK, including a more powerful version that requires at least a full motorcycle licence, while the French tradition of “voitures sans permis” continues under the Aixan brand, and even via the Renault Mobilize Duo and the Twizy, which had no doors. To avoid confusion, the “Invacar”, an infamous 1970s single-seater car leased to disabled drivers through the UK government until 2003, had a similar engine and power to a Reliant Robin, but requires a full category B car driving licence due to its weight.

Meanwhile, the driver’s door of the also-fibreglass Ami – all models are left-hand drive – is a “suicide door”, hinged at the back, making it interchangeable with the front-hinged passenger door – windows flap open, instead of us. To avoid installing any navigation and media controls that could become obsolete over time, you instead dock your smartphone in the middle of the dashboard to use the My Citroën app instead, with an activation button on the steering wheel.

The current price for an Ami in the UK is £7,695. On Citroën's UK website, it says the Ami “epitomises Citroën's legacy of pioneering automotive innovation. Much like the iconic 2CV revolutionised transportation, Ami introduces affordable quadricycle mobility to today's world, making it ideal for modern urban journeys.” However, any model of Citroën 2CV, which was still a regular car, and legislated, insured and taxed as such, will outrun an Ami – even the initial 1948 model could reach 40 mph, but not much further.

It would be simple to bundle the Ami with previous “microcars” like the Messerschmitt, Bond Bug, Peel P50 and Isetta, the latter famously licensed by BMW, but the introductions of those cars were motivated by post-war demands for a personal transport more substantial than a motorcycle, and threats on fuel supply, which subsided with the likes of “superminis” like the Citroën 2CV, Renault 4 and the Mini.

Aside from the Ami being a perfect first car for someone, albeit one to graduate from if you want to safely travel long distance – the range of its battery is only forty-seven miles –  looking at it gives me a feeling of what a car of a far-off future could have been, like a personal transportation module that would then attach to a guiding rail – this would have been after the introduction of the People Mover at Walt Disney World, but before the realities of trying to make a self-driving car on a regular road.

For me, the Ami is still too much like a car for me to consider, as I can’t drive a car – I could get a moped licence, but being forced away from the sides of the road, into the way of cars, isn’t desirable. If it was more like a cycle, and I could drive it on a cycle track, then perhaps I would be happier.

I SAW THE NEWS TODAY, OH BOY [525]

ITV News, with newscaster Lucrezia Millarini

When I previously discussed how BBC radio had no news to broadcast on Good Friday 1930, I clarified how specific the circumstances were: allowed only to report from newspapers and news agencies, the public holiday meant no newspapers were published that day, no wire services were running, and no other news was physically reported in time.

 

Today we, the audience, are like the BBC were then, primed to be on tenterhooks. The gap in time between the reception and dissemination of information has almost entirely been closed. Continuous, unedited live audio and video from anywhere can instigated at a moment’s notice by most people, ready to be picked up by anyone else. 

 

All technological and practical constraints that shaped TV and radio news have been removed. Instead of five-minute summaries or half-hour bulletins, the news is as long as you want it to be. Therefore, only you can shape what those limits are.

 

Because I will look at my phone an untold number of times per day – I don’t wish to know that number either – I can call myself up to date with the news, having looked at various reputable resources through the day, from the BBC, various UK newspapers including “The Guardian” and “The Times”, and American sites like CNN, “The New Yorker”, “The Atlantic”, “The New Yorker” and “The New York Times”. For this reason, once I arrive home from work, the last thing I want to watch is more news – a quick cursory glance through the evening will confirm if anything else has happened outside of business hours.

 

Our family, however, continues a tradition of watching the news from ITV in the evening. A half-hour regional news magazine has been anchored at 6pm longer than I have been alive, but the national ITV Evening News has become so long that, as a family, we consciously break away from it to watch something else. ITV’s evening news originally preceded the original news for fifteen minutes until 1998, when it was decided to make it ITV’s main news of the day, doubling the length to give more time to each story. From March 2022, it doubled again to an hour, adding the occasional longer investigation, but having more stories overall. The consequence, for us at least, is fatigue – there are only so many ways you can hear how human beings can be killed. Fortunately, we are relieved when “The One Show” begins.

 

Replicating daytime radio, hourly daytime news and weather summaries began appearing in 1986 on BBC One, with ITV following two years later. Largely made redundant by TV news channels and the internet, mornings on UK television are filled with people talking about the news: BBC One has “Breakfast”, “Morning Live” and an hour-long lunchtime news; ITV has topical shows “Good Morning Britain”, “Lorraine”, “This Morning” and “Loose Women”; BBC Two rebroadcasts the corporation’s global news channel, plus “Politics Live”; and Channel 5 has a succession of discussion shows from 9.15am to 3pm. Everything is up for discussion from various commentators, some appearing multiple times across these shows, some becoming identified with certain shows, like Sonia Sodha and Nick Ferrari on “This Morning”, or Kevin Maguire and Andrew Pierce on “Good Morning Britain” – all of these people also have regular newspaper columns. If you think one show is going on about the same subject for too long, or you want to hear what someone else thinks about the same subject, you have a choice of viewing. Only “Breakfast” and “Good Morning Britain” maintain news bulletins separated from commentators. Meanwhile, Channel 4 broadcasts American sitcom repeats in the morning.

 

This cacophony of news commentary is what led me to cancel my subscription to “The New York Times” once I realised I was only reading its comment section, and to complete the word puzzles. In truth, I cannot work out which of these was driving me most to the paper, but even if I agreed with what I was reading, too much of a good thing is still too much, and I haven’t played Wordle since.

 

I was planning this article just as the United States announced tariffs on countries that did not support its intention to take over the Danish territory of Greenland. Such a discombobulating story led me to constantly check my phone for updates, whether they would come or not, until I had enough of a context and grasp on the story. But “flooding the zone” of public discourse with announcements and edicts to keep politicians and countries on edge, dutifully repeated by news channels to keep us informed, only puts everyone on edge – it is an inevitably parasitic capture of the news cycle.

 

I think the only answer is to create your own bulletin – create times when you can update yourself, leave time to think, and see if there are any updates later. It may sound odd to compare it to the Muzak Corporation’s system of background music, known as “Stimulus Progression”, but it worked on the basis that motivational music be followed by periods of silence to limit fatigue.

 

I can only say this has worked for me – I have cut my phone usage by over an hour a day since 2026 began, but again, word puzzles form part of that time.

WE ARE HERE TO GO [524]

Have you set any New Year’s resolutions for 2026?

Have any goals been set for the year ahead?

What rewards have you planned for when you achieve your Key Performance Indicators?

I have too often set myself up for failure by imposing targets on the organic flow of time, and too often have been disappointed when events didn’t work out as I hoped.

I have therefore been hesitant to risk further failure, but also unable to resist the post-Christmas, pre-New Year opportunity to, for once, switch off my attention.

The hopes of a single year can also be rendered trivial by considering in what “era” you may be residing. I have recently listened to a 2024 BBC radio essay series by Naomi Alderman, titled “The Third Information Crisis”, which led to her 2025 book “Don’t Burn Anyone at the Stake Today”. Alderman posits that, following the advent of writing and printing, the internet has placed us into a tumult that “we will be in for the rest of our lives, changing us psychologically, socially and emotionally in ways that cannot be reversed.” With individuals no longer seeing eye to eye, Alderman implores us to step back from confrontation, but not to retreat from it, and “try not to burn anyone at the stake today.”

Always hoping for a clear horizon, being told instead how to deal with an unending choppy sea is not what I would rather be doing – I would rather move than acclimatise. Forming a New Year’s resolution then became a distraction from action. All I could think of was “break programming”, whether that be my own, or expectations or edicts imposed from outside, and to make sure the new plan sticks, to “get going”.

I then realised that “break programming, get going” was all I truly needed. Every resolution is a potential action that is given purposeful direction. I need not boil it down further, or add further ingredients, for breakfast is already served.

My use of “programming” is literal. Have you fallen into a routine either of someone’s or your own making, at work or elsewhere? Once you break the programme, and are you prepared for the time it will take to implement a new one? Do you have the knowledge to rewrite the code, or do you know how or where to find it?

“Get going” sounds chiding, especially if you decide to add an exclamation mark, but it is positively emphatic: make plans, but more importantly make a start and, most of all, keep going, regardless of any stumble. I also happen to prefer “get going” to “you got this”, something I hear in the instant I’m sure I haven’t got “this”.

Most importantly, whatever you want to do, no-one will tell you how to do that. Ease in, get started, and if it doesn’t work, make changes. If that works, make sure it doesn’t become too much of a routine, one you resolve to change at the next New Year. Onwards, and so on.

I'M TRYING TO TELL YOU NOW, IT'S SABOTAGE [523]

NOTE: I wrote the following in 2023 – my work-life balance has since improved.

“I have only formed one idea for my next article, and I have realised I don’t have enough of an idea to last five hundred words, so I’ll have to leave it for something else. What I was trying to form was ‘the call centre as Hitchcock film’. Just as Alfred Hitchcock talked about inserting the idea that a bomb could go off into a scene, in order to build suspense, could be translated as the tension of the phone waiting to ring, from when you have to put your handset on your head at the beginning of the day... in fact, the phone doesn’t ring, the call just comes through without prior warning, like something hitting you in the face. I still think an article exists here, I just need to think more about it first.”

 

Well, the inverted commas containing spare moments from my diary mean I didn’t get too far. 

 

I am a writer, and I sometimes make videos. I work as an administrator, where my strengths are in “back office” processing, and after a particularly bad week in more of a front-facing customer services role than was really comfortable, my mind wandered back to Alfred Hitchcock, who once forgot his own edict that, after winding up tension in the audience, the bomb should not go off – there has to be relief. Hitchcock had a boy unwittingly take a bomb onto a bus in his 1936 film “Sabotage”, and he was castigated in reviews for letting the bomb go off, which he accepted was his error.

 

I would be much happier having this to think about during my work week – administration is my job, but writing is my vocation, and being creative is what I do.

 

“I don’t want the last week to force a decision to take a break, a thought I am wrestling with - it is like having a chance to salvage the last week, but not having the week to do anything about it... I still need to find a way to write these articles during the week. What I do need to do is make plans for future articles, instead of coming up with them almost at the last moment. I need to have another book where I can write ideas, adding notes and plans as I go - saying it is one thing, doing it is another.”

 

There should come a metaphor at this point linking Alfred Hitchcock’s suspense narratives to my dealing with work-life balance – something about stopping bombs from going off. I tend to take stressful work days home with me, and stress takes time from everyone. Until that resolves itself, this metaphor is To Be Concluded.

 

“I am doing my best at improving the quality of my writing, which usually results in finding ways to say the same things with fewer words, but it shows that I am not done with the form of the five-hundred-plus-word article after nearly seven years. Will that come after ten years, or will it come once I can make video production easier, or at all?”

 

“Never” was my answer, closing my diary for the day.