When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth

No prizes for recognising that quote from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. It is said for the first time by Sherlock Holmes in “The Sign of Four” and then repeated with small variations in a couple of the short stories. Doyle clearly intended it to be remembered by his readers and indeed it has popped into my mind a number of times during the seemingly endless discussions of Brexit that have filled the airwaves for the last three years.

This morning Radio 4’s Today programme had a panel of “ordinary people” giving their opinions on Brexit. As is normally the case with these things there were some strongly opinionated people expressing themselves very forcefully. I was struck by one lady in particular who was of the opinion that the European Union was treating the UK terribly unfairly. I waited for the presenter to remind her that almost every problem in the current situation was entirely of the UK’s own making but I waited in vain. The red lines that Theresa May set out on assuming the Premiership and her haste to trigger Article 50 have led inevitably and inexorably to the situation in which we now find ourselves. The Withdrawal Agreement text that she has agreed with Michel Barnier, improbable as it seems, is pretty much the best possible deal that is available once the impossibilities of her red lines have been eliminated.

So, for that lady on Today (who almost certainly will never read this) and for anyone else who is interested, here is my take on the situation as we await the “meaningful vote” on the Withdrawal Agreement in parliament next week.

The European Union is a group of developed nations that have agreed to pool certain aspects of their sovereignty in order to improve the lives of their citizens and their standing in the world. It has an aspiration to form an “ever closer union” which has been present since its founding treaty and to which the United Kingdom signed up in 1972. As part of pooled sovereignty EU states have assigned it responsibility for a large number of aspects of modern life ranging from licencing of medicines to common standards for food safely to aviation safety to external trade tariffs and many others. Since 1993 its members have agreed to form an internal market in which goods, services, capital and labour may be freely moved without tariffs or obstructions. Interestingly the internal market rules were largely written by a British civil servant, Arthur (later Lord) Cockfield.

UK membership of the European Union has always attracted a share of controversy in a way that simply doesn’t happen in other member countries. Even Greece, which suffered greatly under European rules following the flawed introduction of the common currency, has shown no inclination to leave the union altogether. Other countries are desperate to get in. However it must be recognised that there has long been a body of opinion in the UK that was uncomfortable with the idea of pooled sovereignty and aspired to stand alone in the world, perhaps inspired by communal memories of the 1940s and Churchill’s oratory about fighting on beaches and landing fields. This opinion was most strongly felt in the Conservative party and it eventually led to David Cameron’s decision to use a popular referendum to try to quell the infighting in his own party. Millions of words have been expended on that process and I don’t propose to add to them here. The upshot was a narrow vote to leave the EU and the flight of David Cameron from the public arena.

At that point we had an advisory referendum result that suggested that our sovereign parliament should take action to withdraw the United Kingdom from the European Union. It said absolutely nothing about how long that process should take or what arrangements should be made to replace functions that the EU currently performs on behalf of its member states.

Enter Theresa May who was at that time probably the most authoritarian Home Secretary in British history. She became Prime Minister as all the victors of the referendum campaign like Johnson, Gove, Fox and Leadsom apparently decided that the job was now firmly in the “too difficult” category. Never one to be deterred by logic, common sense or human decency, May immediately declared that the referendum result must be implemented in the most draconian way possible and as fast as possible.

Meanwhile the other EU states moved to get themselves organised for the loss of one of the big three members – the other two being France and Germany. Every one of the other 27 states expressed regret that the UK was going to leave but respected its right to make that decision.

As the UK had decided to leave the Union and Mrs May had decided to eschew available options to reflect the near 50/50 split in the referendum vote by choosing a “softer” version of Brexit it is very hard to see how the remaining 27 members could have acted much differently to the way that they have.

The EU exists to further the interests of its members. The UK has decided to leave and so the starting point for future relationships is that it will not be a member. Therefore it cannot expect to enjoy the benefits of membership as a right. Any limited future access to the benefits of the EU must be negotiated with the remaining members who will, and indeed must, look after their own interests in those negotiations. So for example, if the UK wants access to the internal market for financial services then it must be prepared to offer something of value to the European Union. If it wants to go on selling its marine catch free of tariffs to the EU then it will probably have to concede some access to its waters for EU fishermen. If it wants to avoid border checks between Northern Ireland and the Republic and indeed between Dover and Calais it will have to agree to uniform Customs rules on both sides of the border. This is the normal give and take of international negotiation and it is absolutely fine. The immediate problem is that such international negotiations typically take years to conclude and Mrs May’s impetuosity means that we have less than four months left before we are shivering in the cold.

Hence the need for a transitional arrangement and furthermore one that respects international law. The biggest controversy around the transitional agreement is the need for a “backstop” agreement on the Irish border. This need is driven by the impossible contradiction of Mrs May’s red lines. The UK is leaving the internal market and the customs union but there will also be no hard border in Ireland and no difference between Great Britain and Northern Ireland. These positions are logically incompatible. They directly contradict each other. They may each be achieved separately but they absolutely cannot be achieved together.

So, coming back to Sherlock Holmes, if we eliminate this impossibility then what remains – Mrs May’s deal, however improbable is all that is left. Unless of course parliament decides to grow a pair, recognises that the whole thing is lunacy of the highest order and goes right back to square one. With or without a second referendum in which rather more attention is paid to enforcing electoral law and spending rules.

Magical Thinking

I was listening to a conference presentation in Bangkok the other day - he said, shamelessly dropping place names. The subject of the presentation was the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in managing airline pricing decisions. It’s a fairly specialised topic and you will be glad to hear that I don’t intend to say any more about it than that. I was struck however by an illustration that the speaker used to add colour to his remarks. He was talking about how the AI makes decisions that the human user of the system cannot understand. Not only that, but the designers of the system cannot explain how the machine made that particular decision. Just like in Angry Birds.

This game was a brief sensation a few years ago. If you are the one person who has never seen it, it is a smart phone app in which the player uses a virtual catapult to launch improbably-coloured cartoon birds at a variety of targets. In the game the launching is done by dragging a finger across the screen and then letting go. The cartoon bird then “flies” in a parabolic arc just as if it were a real physical object propelled by the release of elastic tension and moving under the influence of gravity. The physics of the situation are modelled accurately and somewhere in the calculations reference must be made to Hooke’s Law of elasticity and Newton’s Laws of motion and gravitation. And the player of the game knows nothing of this. She just knows that if she pulls back the spring the bird will fly in a certain way. If it misses the target she needs to adjust the point of release.

It is an example of a phenomenon of our modern times, a technology that is used by millions of people without any of them understanding how it works. This situation has arisen largely over the last twenty-five years or so and I believe it is having a profound effect on the way society functions. Probably not in a good way.

Until some time around the 1970s there was no technology in widespread use that could not be comprehended by a single individual. When I studied computers in college we started from the electronics – transistors, diodes, resistors and the like. We were taught how these things functioned at the physical level and then how they could be put together to make logic gates and then how these logic gates could be assembled to make computer processors. Then we were taught how these processors could be controlled using binary codes input as varying voltages and how these codes could be built up into computer languages with which we could do useful work like calculating linear regressions. We were undergraduates and it was reasonable for us to grapple with computers from the flow of electrons in semiconductors all the way up to high-level languages making sophisticated calculations.

The same considerations applied to other technologies like radio and TV sets, motor cars and aircraft. It wasn’t that these were products of lone artisans working from their cottages, but somewhere along the line there was a group of people who understood everything about how they worked.

Not any more.

Modern technology is built in layers. In any kind of intelligent device the base layer is silicon that has been etched at nanometre scales to create billions of transistors on a scrap of material the size of a fingernail. Chip fabrication is an exquisitely precise function that requires factories costing billion of dollars to set up and run. The engineering of those chips is a highly specialised skill possessed by a small number of people world wide. The next layer up is the code that allows those chips to do work, responding to physical inputs and manipulating voltages that eventually translate to useful outputs. On top of that are the higher-level languages, the networks, the aggregation and packaging of devices, the operating systems and finally the development environments in which programmers can create apps like Angry Birds. Each layer in the process has its own specialists with their own esoteric skills. At each layer the engineers and programmers typically know nothing about the internal workings of the layer above or below. At best they know things along the lines of “If I do this then the machine will respond by doing that”.

And the end-user? She only knows that if she slides her finger just so, the cartoon bird will fly across the screen and break the glass in the greenhouse. The processes by which that happens are completely unknown and if anyone tried to explain them the response would probably be glassy-eyed incomprehension.

Angry Birds is just one trivial example of the way that technology has advanced to a point where it might just as well be magic. This was expressed by science fiction writer Arthur C Clarke in his third law which states[1];

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

I think that we have reached a point in our development at which Clarke’s third law has real practical consequences.

We now have a generation of people who have grown up with technologies that do amazing things and literally nobody knows how they do them. Some people know parts of the story and they also know that colleagues and friends know other parts. Rational human beings accept the expertise of their peers and take on trust the pieces for which they do not have direct understanding. The problem comes with the irrational ones.

If nobody can understand the full functioning of a device then it becomes possible to believe more or less anything about it. Maybe there are tiny little birds hiding inside your iPhone for your entertainment. Ludicrous idea? Of course it is but when the real explanation is too complicated to comprehend why not believe something simpler? If it were just the workings of video games then maybe this wouldn’t matter, but it isn’t.

Global climate change is primarily caused by the emission of certain gasses into the atmosphere. The mechanism is actually quite simple, provided you have a basic understanding of atomic physics and electromagnetic radiation. But for the many millions of people without that knowledge it’s a phenomenon on a par with shooting birds across a screen. And so it is characterised as “unknowable”, which allows cretins like Nigel Lawson to go on radio and TV and claim either that it doesn’t exist or that it is entirely an act of God and beyond human intervention. 

During the Brexit debate Michael Gove infamously said that the British people have had enough of experts and he may well have been right. People are so accustomed to technology that does things for them as if by magic that on an unconscious level they believe that everything in their lives is amenable to magical intervention. Of course it must be possible to walk away from the world’s biggest and most prosperous trading bloc with nothing to put in its place and still have £350 million more per week to spend on health care. The reasons why this is untrue are complex and depend on an understanding of underlying factors, most of which are opaque to the mythical man in the street. So-called “experts” are really spoilsports who deny the existence of magic despite all the evidence of Netflix, Twitter and a doorbell that shows you on your phone screen who is trying to get in.

At some point however the magic has to stop. As that great philosopher Montgomery Scott so often remarked

“Ye cannae change the laws of physics Jim”.

Magic isn’t real. Physics is. Climate change is with us already as the experts have always known it would be. The “laws” of economics are less well defined than those of physics but on the whole people who spend a lifetime observing and studying economic phenomena are more likely to be correct than those who just pull ideas out of their hats following a booze and fags session down at the Dog and Duck.

The greatest British novelist of the late 20^th century was Iain (M) Banks[2]. In his science fiction writings he created a universe, The Culture, in which humans and artificial intelligence live side by side and on the whole rationality prevails. It’s a captivating utopian vision. Some humans display irrationality – sometimes on a monumental scale, but these are clearly the aberrations. They are the exceptions that prove the rule and they usually (but not always) get their comeuppance. I’d like to think that Banks’s vision offers a distant goal. A way of thinking about how societies might evolve as technology advances at a rate beyond human ability to keep up. I’d like to think it but I’m afraid that the descent into magical thinking that we have seen over the last few years makes me fear that we might not make it.

---

[1] Discovering the first two laws is left as an exercise for the reader.

[2] You may disagree but then we have to fight

Indian Uber May Not Be Quite Ready for Prime Time

As a bit of light relief from politics and world affairs, here is a traveller’s tale I posted on Facebook last year. It’s the sort of thing that makes for a great story in retrospect but is just a bit nerve-racking while it’s happening.

Sometimes India can catch you out.

The work day was done. I was back at the hotel and just needed to get to the airport. I didn't have any Rupees but I had been assured by one of the new cool tech CEOs of India's cyber hub that Uber works just fine here.

I switched on roaming data and opened the Uber app. A little bit of trial and error found where I was and where I needed to be and my car would be here in 7 minutes. I waited on the roadside outside the hotel where eight lanes of cars and three of motorbikes and tuktuks were wrestling for space on the two lane road. A Maruti Suzuki drew up - the make and model I was waiting for. The first six characters of the 10 digit number plate matched the one in the Uber app and I didn't have time to check any more as the hotel security guard threw my bag into the back seat. The small dark-haired, dark-skinned driver looked more or less like the blurry picture Uber had given me. So I got in the front seat and he took off. Slowly. 

The Uber app said "Congratulations, you're on your way"* and all seemed well until about half an hour later by which time we had moved almost half a mile in traffic now at least twelve lanes wide on a four lane road. Then he turned to me and said

"Hindi, Hindi, Hindi, Hindi, Uber shake head shake head".

This was a worry. Did I mention I had no Rupees? I did to him at that point, but his English was on a par with my Hindi and I didn't think it was worth trying Spanish or French. 

So on we went. At one stage the traffic swelled to about 15 lanes across at a point where two four-lane roads met. Cars were going sideways to eke out a couple of metres of forward movement. Then we got to the toll gate where a scruffy youth came to demand something in Hindi. The driver demanded as well and I pointed out, perhaps superfluously that I don't speak Hindi. Eventually the driver gave the youth money and he got back a slip of paper that he placed on the dashboard. Less than five minutes later we had advanced three metres and passed through the toll gate. Then there were twenty lanes of traffic on a six lane road so progress continued as before. 

Eventually the traffic thinned out a bit and we took less than ten minutes to cover the last mile which included several security gates with bored-looking soldiers controlling access to the airport precincts. That's when the fun really started.

Arriving at the airport terminal the driver jumped out and took my bag from the back seat. I had been telling him for some time, in English, by mime and through the medium of interpretive dance that I had no Rupees. I offered him US Dollars and/or Euros but he didn't seem very happy about that.

"Hindi hindi hindi hindi hindi"

he said, now really quite agitated. I said

"I can't give you what I don't have"

and shoved the greenbacks towards him again but his reply was predictable. I said again that I didn't have anything else and started to walk towards the door of the terminal. This really didn't amuse him and he engaged the services of another Hindi-speaking driver who was just standing around to berate me a bit more. At least that's what I assume he was doing. Did I mention that I don't understand Hindi?

I spotted an ATM. The answer to a prayer surely. Well it would have been if it had worked. 

Then the driver spotted an ATM inside the terminal. I said

"If I go in there I won't be able to come back out",

which is true but all he said was

"Hindi hindi hindi"

so I went inside. Sure enough the ATM he had seen didn't work either. At that point I seriously considered walking away. He couldn't follow me into the terminal and, not being an actual Uber driver, he had no record of my identity. But my conscience remained in control and I reminded myself that this was just a bloke trying to put food on his family's table. So I walked the length of the terminal to find an ATM that did actually work. I drew out a thousand Rupees, way over the odds for the taxi ride but I supposed he deserved a bit extra for the buggeration. Then I hiked back to the door where I had come in and persuaded the soldier on guard to let me lean across him to pass out the loot to the driver who had been waiting patiently for my return. On seeing the bank notes he gave a delighted grin and said

"Thank you sir!"

which may have been his only words of English apart from "airport". Still, that's four more than my knowledge of Hindi.

When I eventually arrived home I had an email from Uber to say that I had ridden 0.7 km at a cost of 16.8 Rupees on Friday evening. It appears that not only did I get into a car that was not my Uber, but also that someone else did get into mine and had a free ride at my expense. I can live with that.

In Praise of Experts

Yesterday the last of twelve young football players and their coach were extracted from a small ledge four kilometres into a flooded cave system in Northern Thailand. The dramatic rescue involved hundreds of people working to a common cause but it was made possible by a small number of highly skilled cave divers including Rick Stanton and John Volanthen. Like many people watching on television around the world I was in complete awe of the skill and courage of these two and the team of over 90 other cave divers they led to ultimate success. I also mourned the death of Saman Kunont, the Thai diver who gave his life as part of the effort.

Sadly, being the person I am, a small part of my response to these dramatic events was to recall the words of Michael Gove who, at the time of writing, is the last remaining Brexiter in the UK Cabinet. In June 2016 during the campaign ahead of the referendum on UK membership of the European Union, Gove said in an interview that “people in this country have had enough of experts”. 

Well here’s the thing Michael. This person in this country has not had enough of experts.

What is an expert after all? There are many and various areas of expertise to which a person may aspire. To achieve expertise requires aptitude, enhanced by training or education and followed by long practice. In his book Outliers, Malcom Gladwell proposed that 10,000 hours of practice was the magic number that would elevate a practitioner to the status of expert. Gladwell’s hypothesis has been widely criticised but whether the number is 10,000 hours or 100,000 is not really the point. It needs to be a big number.

I have encountered experts in many fields during my life and career.

In the halcyon days before 9/11 I sometimes managed to travel in the jump seat of an airliner. This was both fascinating and humbling. To see and hear two pilots work together in harmony to operate an immensely complex machine and navigate it safely through the crowded skies of southern England was an experience I still treasure. I have done a little flying myself so I could follow a lot of the conversation and appreciate the complexity of what was going on, all in the measured, confident tones of real experts. Neither I nor the hundred people in the passenger seats behind ever had enough of these experts.

One day in the 1980s I was working as a project manager for a company supplying message handling systems to the financial institutions in the City of London. One of my customers was having an upgrade to its systems and I had done all the planning and paperwork ahead of the work that was to be done on a Saturday. In those days the City was a completely dead zone on a Saturday and special arrangements had been made to give us access to the offices until seven pm. I had organised two engineers to be on site with me. One of them was vastly experienced with the system in question and the other a very good engineer but without expertise in this particular system. In a long and sorry story that I may tell another time, the experienced engineer managed to get himself stranded in Amsterdam. I arrived on site at 8 am to find the client representative and the second engineer and an old system that needed to be stripped down and put back together. Have I ever mentioned that I am a software guy? I was basically fit for fetching and carrying and bringing the coffees. A long day followed during which the system was stripped down and laid out very carefully on the floor. The engineer, Lee, was getting guidance by phone from a couple of his colleagues who were on site at a similar job nearby. The upgraded parts were fitted and then Lee tried to put everything back together again which is where things went a bit pear-shaped. Basically he didn’t have the expertise to do the job. By now time was getting tight. We were going to get thrown out of the office at seven pm whether the job was done or not. If the system wasn’t back together again and working, a major insurance company would start its new week with no communications available. This would potentially cost it millions and probably lead to my employer facing a huge bill for compensation. Lee and I were on the phone looking for help from anywhere but not finding any. By 6.30 I was convinced that I was getting fired on Monday. Then at 6.40 a miracle happened. I heard the chime of the lift arriving at the floor we were on and a few seconds later in walked the two engineers Lee had been talking to earlier in the day. They had finished their job and come over to help out. Unlike Lee and me, these two were experts. They knew this complex system inside out. The next 18 minutes passed in a haze as two people assessed the situation, determined what needed to be done and just went ahead and did it, scarcely saying a word as they worked. They didn’t need to. They knew the job and they knew each other. The system that took hours to take apart went back together and booted up in 18 minutes flat. We all got out of the door just as the security people were locking down the building.

I could quote many more examples of experts I have encountered. They operate in different fields but they have many things in common. Almost every expert I have ever met has been not only skilled but also willing to share his or her expertise. Real experts are not threatened by others gaining skills. They know that development of expertise is not a zero sum game. And just like the cave divers in Thailand most experts I have known have been willing to share their expertise with others for the greater good.

So, Mr Gove, I must profoundly disagree with your assessment that British people have had enough of experts. Experts are the exact opposite of the political chancers who pass laws to set the value of Pi to exactly 3.0 or who write easily demonstrable lies on the side of a bus to ride populist sentiment for their own gain. Experts deal with the world as it actually is and not how they just wish it to be.  If anything I think we need more experts and an economic system that encourages more people to grow expertise. I suppose that in some great yin and yang endeavour to find balance in the universe we might also need some idiots. Fortunately the career of Michael Gove assures us that there is unlikely to be any shortage of those.