Dear Editor,

A former neighbour, Christopher of Waterfall, told me about a book he’d read. This was decades ago, when ideas were commonly disseminated through books.  This book, which I never saw myself, contained a concept called subjunctivision. It went like this: you’re watching a baseball game, and a fast play happens and the batter is caught out, ending that inning. Then the announcer comes on and says, now, let’s watch that play as if it were basketball. 

Now, that’s ridiculous, of course – those two sports are not the same at all. But this is the principle by which so-called artificial intelligence combines imagery to create the deep fake illusion such as Prime Minister Mark Carney advising us to invest in Kevin O’Leary’s bitcoin. Kevin, the former ‘Mr. Wonderful’ of the Dragon’s Den TV show, is a major investor in what will be the world’s largest data centre, located in Utah, against the wishes of those who live nearby. 

The book to which I referred invoked the power of one’s imagination to envision a new combination of things we know in real life. Imagination; it’s all in your brain stem. Just read Politics of Ecstasy, by Timothy Leary, from the 1960s. 

The present-day version of subjunctivision requires huge banks of computers, often running spurious nonsense programs, just to keep the imaginary ball in the air. Our collective outsourced imagination has been hijacked by the Epstein Billionaire class, not to expand people’s imaginations, but to enslave us to false narratives. A side effect is huge buildings full of humming computers, requiring water for cooling and gobbling up all the electricity available. Such an array is useful for plotting the logistics of a space capsule, or mapping the genome of a prehistoric human ancestor. But, just as nuclear power was hijacked to make bombs that no one wants to use, AI-located Imagination has been taken from us to serve those who least deserve it. Anyway, that’s my opinion on this matter. 

Robert Wills, Shawville and Thorne