David Boyle's Blog, page 57

When you measure social issues, they get worse

For reasons some people know locally, I'm only too aware of just how much domestic violence there is, in the UK and beyond.  It is insidious, destructive and much more common than most people think.

But yesterday's mega-survey of the EU, which found that the UK had some of the worst levels of domestic violence (the 5th worst, in fact), has set me thinking about the peculiar effects of counting, and what happens when you take statistics too seriously.

I'm aware that these are not official figures.  They are based on a survey, but the same peculiar effect applies, and I wrote about it in my book The Tyranny of Numbers.

In quantum physics, the mere presence of the observer in sub-atomic particle experiments can change the results. In anthropology, researchers have to report on their own cultural reactions as a way of offsetting the same effect.  Perhaps that is some clue to the peculiar way in which statistics tend to get worse when society is worried about something.

Why, for example, did the illegitimacy figures shoot up only after the war babies panic in 1915? At the time of the panic, the number of illegitimate births was actually astonishingly low – and the number of marriages strangely high. After the panic, the illegitimacy rate suddenly increased.

Why was the number of homes unfit for human habitation in the UK in 1967 (after TV film Cathy Come Home) were almost twice the figures for 1956 – despite over a decade of intensive demolition and rebuilding?

The garrotting scare in the 1860s was the same. The story began during the silly season in August 1862, and public horror got so bad that Punch was advertising a range of fearsome neck-guards with metal spikes to protect your neck. But the increase in the crime statistics came immediately afterwards, once the Garotters Act had brought back flogging for adults. 
The tragic death of Stephen Lawrence in a racist attack led to widespread concern about race attacks in London. But after the public inquiry on the subject in 1998, Metropolitan Police figures of race attacks leapt from 1,149 to 7,790 in one year.

It was the same with the sex abuse statistics. They toddled along in the UK at the 1,500-a-year mark until 1984, when an unprecedented wave of publicity on both sides of the Atlantic catapulted the issue to the top of the public agenda. 
Between 1984 and 1985, the NSPCC reported a 90 per cent increase in reported cases, and in the following year they reported a similar rise. 
Child abuse campaigners would say that the actual rate of child abuse is never reflected properly in the statistics. They may well be right – the same would be true of the figures for racist attacks. All I'm saying is that the actual statistics wouldn’t have told you anything, except how strongly the public felt about it at the time. 
So often, the statistics start rising after the panic, rather than the other way round, as an eagle-eyed society tries to stamp out the unforgivable. That’s the Quantum Effect of statistics.

It’s difficult to know quite why the figures go up. Sometimes the definitions change to reflect greater public concern. Sometimes people just report more instances of it because it is in the forefront of their minds. Sometimes, maybe, what we fear the most comes to pass.
You may be seeing something of the same Quantum Effect in the story about domestic violence.  The figures are high, both official figures and survey results, when people notice domestic violence.  It is high when they define incidents as domestic violence.
On the other hand, the figures are low when society is blind to domestic violence, when they turn a blind eye to it, when they define it as just one of those things.  The statistics may tell the absolute reverse of the truth.
This may be an explanation for why the domestic violence figures seem worse in the liberal Scandinavian countries, where people are very aware of domestic violence and worried about it.
None of this suggests that domestic violence isn't an appalling cancer.  But it does suggest that the figures won't give you a very good guide to it - because they tend to get worse the more worried we are about the issues.
It is a strange phenomenon, and it gets stranger the more we trust the data: the truth is that - the more worried we are about something - the worse the figures get.

A whole new kind of brevity in publishing

Years ago, I went to a palm-reader in Kathmandu - my only visit to anyone remotely like that.  I'm too coy to say here what he told me, except that one of the main elements of my personality was what he called 'brevity'.

This may not be obvious to anyone who has endured one of my lectures.  But it is true that I value brevity as a skill, as one of the only ways of conveying ideas in a sufficiently riveting way.

I was reminded of this today by a very thoughtful review of my ebook Alan Turing: Unlocking the Enigma by Nick Sidwell of Guardian Shorts, which talks about the advantages and disadvantages of writing complex biographies in less than 20,000 words.  There are, after all, longer biographies of Turing you can get your teeth into. This is what Sidwell says:

"If you don’t have time to read one of those longer books: read “Unlocking the Enigma.” If you want to remind yourself of who Turing was before tackling a longer work: read “Unlocking the Enigma.” If you simply want to discover who this often misunderstood man was: read “Unlocking the Enigma.” You will not regret a minute spent in its company. It’s just that if you truly want to learn about Alan Turing, just don’t expect it to be the only book you read on him."

This is a generous way of putting it.  But the truth is the ebook market has turned out more different from mainstream books than I ever expected.  
They tend to be around 20,000 words and to retail for £1.99 or £2.99, and to give the authors much more generous royalties.  It is in this market, which is growing dramatically, that the action is - not the rather expensive end of ebook publishing, dominated by the much pricier electronic versions of real books, published by the old publishers.
In fact, I have ended up - for the first time in my career - in a Top Ten bestseller chart.  This was the Thin Reads top ten of Kindle Singles.  OK, my Alan Turing book seems to have slipped out again this week, but the damage is done - I am now addicted to the Thin Reads Top Ten and can't stop looking at it.
It occurs to me that the two genres, thin reads and fat reads, may actually go off in different directions - the fat reads beautifully published and designed, the thin reads very basic but expertly brief, enough for a few days commuting and for busy people who want some background reading in more depth than they can ever get in a magazine.
In the meantime, if you wanted to test out Alan Turing: Unlocking the Enigma, you can download it onto a computer if you don't have a Kindle - and it only costs £1.99.
All I can do is repeat the review. I have, says Sidwell, attempted "to squeeze an elephant into a dog kennel. On the face of it, it shouldn't fit. Yet, for the most part, he is highly successful".

In fact, the process of squeezing elephants into dog kennels is highly instructive.  It isn't really about summarising; it is about finding the underlying narrative and trying to tell it in a compelling way.

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Why did PIE confuse people?

There is a difference between liberals and socialists.  Tell me something I don't know.

OK, give me a chance.  The thing is that I've found myself falling back on a peculiar definition of my own that sometimes helps me realise why people are disagreeing.

It is based on their blind spots.  Socialists seem to me to have a blind spot about the abuse of power, hence the inevitable way that Labour governments eventually start restricting civil liberties - and how they fall back on centralised control in any given situation.

It isn't that they are convinced tyrants, or anything like that: they just don't see the problem.

Liberals are alive to the abuse of power at the core of their being, but they tend to be blind to the abuse of money.  Hence their failure to come up with much in the way of distinctive economic ideas since Keynes breathed his last in 1946.

Again, it isn't that they are somehow bankers themselves, they're just not very interested in economics.  They don't see it.

This is a rather roundabout way of writing about the strange story about the Paedophile Information Exchange in the late 1970s, and the involvement of the National Council for Civil Liberties (NCCL).

It is strange to grasp this, because of my youthful appearance, but I can remember the late 1970s rather well.  Flared trousers.  Three TV channels.  Grunwick.  Ah yes, it all comes flooding back.

I was a student at the time and into the more libertarian and anarchic causes, like joining the Liberal Party.  They were the only MPs to vote against the nuclear reprocessing plant at Windscale, as we called it then - of course I had to join.

I remember the debate about PIE in student circles.  I remember thinking it seemed very odd at the time, but don't remember much more about it.  The truth is that I find it quite hard to fling myself back into the attitudes of the time.

I'm only writing about this now because Jonathan Calder was brave enough to do so, remembering the different atmosphere on the political left at the time - the psychological attempts to abolish "the very concept of childhood".

But my rule of thumb for distinguishing liberals from socialists is relevant here.

We are a far more liberal society, in many ways - I'll come back to this - now compared to 1979.  As liberals, we have the advantages and disadvantages of that shift in attitudes.  We are more alive to the abuse of power, and more blind to the abuse of money all around us.

We see child abuse now for what it is - the abuse of power.  We have done so pretty much since the explosion of interest in the issue since 1984, or thereabouts.

But I have been wondering if this was relevant to the mistake that NCCL made at the time.  The people in charge in the late 1970s, and now in the gunsights of the Daily Mail, were socialists and socialists have their own blind spots.  The NCCL trio were clearly alive to the abuse of power or they wouldn't have been working for NCCL in the first place, but even so - I wonder...

It is kind of de rigeur at this point for columnists to add in a defensive condemnation of PIE, explaining - as if we needed to know - that they were wrong.  And of course they were wrong, but it is interesting why they confused people at the time.

As Sam Leith pointed out in the Evening Standard yesterday, this isn't really about Messrs Harman, Dromey and Hewitt.  It is about why society as a whole tolerated PIE back then.

So our collective shift from the naivety of socialists (blind to how power can be abused) to the naivety of liberals (blind to how money can be abused) is relevant here.
Jonathan is quite right to imply that this isn't the whole story.  There is another side to this, and although we are a more liberal society than we were in 1979, I'm not sure we are a more tolerant one in every respect.

It isn't just the way in which a child abuse industry has emerged, terrifying parents who are not confident enough to resist, or the bureaucratic processes that get in the way of actually protecting children.  It is the wider attitudes in society that manages to condemn adultery ever more fervently, that increasingly purses their lips at the way other people bring up their children...

I could go on.  We all know society's new hypocrisies and train our mouths accordingly.

Why NHS Change Day might save money too

It is more than two decades since Al Gore’s National Performance Review during the Clinton years.  It emerged after the scandal of wasteful Pentagon spending, because the cost of simple items ballooned when they went through armed forces bureaucracy - a serious lesson about centralised procurement.

The $7,622 coffee percolator bought by the air force was the most spectacular, but the one that really caught the public imagination was the $436 hammer bought for the navy, or – as the Pentagon called it – a ‘uni-directional impact generator’.

One of the first schemes the Review launched was an annual Hammer Award for public sector employees who had made huge efforts to work more effectively.

That was the point. The Review set out a series of principles for saving money by scrapping rules and bureaucracy and giving power back to staff. Then they urged them to get on with it and told stories about their progress.

Regular newsletters were packed with suggestions. Abandon sign-in sheets and clocking-in machines. Buy equipment locally if you think you can get a good price. Waive the need for travel expense receipts for sums under $75.

One of their key stories was about the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) office in Maine, the equivalent of the UK’s Health and Safety Executive. It consistently came top of the league for how much they were doing, for the most citations and fines, yet the workplace safety in the state was still the worst anywhere.

When they realised this, the Maine office created a small revolution. They tackled the most difficult factories first, and created employee teams there to solve the problems. If the companies agreed to support them, they would suspend their inspections and punishments.

The result was that the accident injury rate went down by two thirds. It wouldn’t have been possible without inspiring staff to seek out new ways of doing things – and without a big idea that pointed them in the right direction.  More on the NPR in my book The Human Element.

Reform of public services in the UK has gone mainly in the opposite direction.  It has involved less responsibility for frontline staff, less flexibility, less local imagination.  We have had nothing like Gore's NPR, except perhaps NHS Change Day, which is - fanfare - today!

It is a brilliant example of how you can humanise a service by starting with the human energy below.  The influential NHS blogger Roy Lilley has written a hymn of praise.  I agree with him that this kind of thing won't change the realities of budgets, but absolutely agree that:
"It's a mechanism and a route whereby the frontline staff all over the country get THEIR chance and THEIR voice to give THEIR idea for how to make a difference and for that chance and voice to be equally heard, equally respected and given space to be implemented by their managers and leaders..."

Quite right.  But I'm not sure it is irrelevant to budgets either.  It is the inflexibilities in the system that ultimately waste money, and days like this which can begin to iron them out with the power and energy of people on the frontline.

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The terrifying new metaphysics of data

I watched the film Lincoln recently, only a year after everybody else.  Apart from wondering why we can't make such intelligent films about political history in the UK, I was fascinated by the portrayal of Lincoln himself - his endless supply of homely tales which infuriated his colleagues but played such a role in defusing tension.

By coincidence, I've just been reading the absolutely compelling autobiography of Peter Drucker, Adventures of a Bystander.  Drucker really invented the art of management writing, and died recently (well, in 2005) just short of his 96th birthday - carrying on writing and consulting almost until the last moment.

Drucker describes Charlie Kellstadt, retired chairman of the retailers Sears Roebuck, enraging his fellow committee members in a Defense Department advisory group, doing exactly the same - long tales about selling bras which took apart the arguments of the young guns, absolutely but without rancour.

But Drucker drew some conclusions about this, writing in 1978, that have absolutely taken a grip on my mind today - because they are directly concerned with a major theme of this blog.  Namely, the gap between figures and reality.

Robert Macnamara, Kennedy's cerebral Defense Secretary - and a forerunner of government targets - went ahead with this particular plan anyway, ignoring Kellstadt, because the figures were right.  But the figures didn't express the wisdom that Kellstadt had gained selling bras.  The result was the disastrous decision on the Lockheed Jumbo air transport contract.

It is three and a half decades since Drucker was writing, and five decades since Kellstadt was irritating Macnamara's committee.  That gap between figures and reality is much more tenuous now.  Whole swathes of those who run the world no longer believe there is a gap - vast institutions are run without regard to any gap at all.

You might well say that this was why our organisations, public and private, are generally speaking so ineffective.  I couldn't possibly comment.

But Drucker put his finger on the issue, which is as much theological as it is economic.  He described the shift in the world since he was working at a London merchant bank in the 1930s called Freeberg & Co - then there just a few people, maybe in banking, who saw the word like that:

"Our whole society has moved to the perception and metaphysics Freedberg & Co represented.  It has shifted to seeing symbols as real: money, 'trades' and 'deals', interest rates and Gross National Product.  Our whole society assumes, in the words of the medieval logician, that Nomina sunt realia: that the symbols have substance while the objects they represent are mere shadows."

Drucker describes this metaphysical approach to life as 'ultra-nominalism', a version of the medieval philosophy, that "treats symbols and images as the ultimate reality, and people and things as shadows".

And of course, he is absolutely right.  That ultra-nominalism has grown in strength, increasingly blind to the shadow world that we used to know as human reality.  There is even a debate about whether this human reality is different at all from the figures that purport to describe it.

It explains the slow hollowing out of our institutions, and maybe also our bizarre failure to act on the world.  But for anyone who still believes there is a gap between data and reality, can I recommend my own book on the subject, The Tyranny of Numbers.  

It is more than a decade old but there is life in the old dog yet.  And over that period the new metaphysics has growth rapidly in strength.  It may now be changing reality by ruling it non-existent.

Those of us who know otherwise may have to fight to keep the old language alive, which is the only way we will be able to assert a separate existence for awkward reality beyond the data.

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Why the home ownership dream ended

Here is a picture of the flat where I was born.  Randolph Avenue in Maida Vale, a former red light district fallen on good times.
It was a slum in 1958 when I first emerged there, in a rented ground floor flat. Now the same flat is occupied by the head of Benetton Europe (not actually this front door, in case you are casing the joint).  I can’t even afford to sleep rough there. There’s the problem.

Now, there are some predictions I make where I don't really want, for my children's sake, to be proved right. But unfortunately what I said in my book Broke: How to Survive the Middle Class Crisis is all too true.
As it said in the Daily Telegraph this morning, home ownership in the UK is at a 25-year-low - not back to the levels before Margaret Thatcher came to power, determined to shape a property-owning democracy, but almost.

Home ownership is down to 65 per cent, its lowest level since the 1987 stock market crash, when Nigel Lawson was Chancellor.  No coincidence this, as I will explain.

Also a third of all homeowners are now over 65.  The young are being priced out, and flung into the not very tender embrace of the private landlords.

Does this matter?  Well, I think it does.  It means a loss of independence, a dependence on the whims of landlords, and continuing rental costs carrying on for the rest of your life.  

There is a peculiar resistance to home ownership on the left, is if renting was somehow ideologically purer.  I don't see it - and there certainly is no insulation from the rocketing costs that way.

The 30-year housing bubble has also led to huge additional costs for taxpayers, as the Telegraph report explains:

"The figures also disclose that there has been a significant increase in the number of people who rent their homes claiming housing benefit.  Over the past five years, the proportion of people claiming benefits who rent privately has risen from 19 per cent to 25 per cent, while in the social housing sector the figure has risen from 59 per cent to 66 per cent."

But I take issue with some of the coverage of the bubble.  It is always written as if this was some kind of betrayal of the objectives of the Thatcher government.
It isn't.  It is a direct result of the poor decisions they made then.  Three in particular:
1.  Debt.  The idea that rising home ownership could be built sustainably on unrestrained debt, an idea that is popularly supposed to have been embraced by Margaret Thatcher after persuasion by Nigel Lawson, was always wrong.  If there is no limit to the money available for mortgages, then it will always tend towards inflation - and the shrinking homes and the lengthening mortgages are an inevitable result.  We have seen 40-year terms and are well on schedule to end up with the enslaving Japanese-style grandparent mortgages, paid off by the generation after next.
2.  The Corset.  The Corset was an instrument in the 1970s and before which regulated the amount of money going into the mortgage market, keeping house prices as level as possible while still allowing housebuilders to make a profit.  It was abolished by Sir Geoffrey Howe in 1980, as a direct result of the end of exchange controls - but nothing was put in to replace it.  As far as I know, nothing was even considered.
3.  Big Bang.  Yes, the City needed reform, but the free-for-all ushered in by the flawed reforms presided over again partly by Lawson, with help from Cecil Parkinson, inevitably unbalanced the economy.  The avalanche of money going through the City inevitably got recycled into bankers bonuses - which in turn got recycled into rising house prices.
No, I don't include the failure to build homes as one of the main causes - though clearly it hasn't helped.  When more than 60 per cent of new homes in London have been snapped up by foreign investors, then you have to look elsewhere for the cause - which is, as I say, the unconstrained growth of the mortgage market.
It was based on a peculiar, fundamentalist view of market economics.  In the context of the 1970s, it looked creative.  But from the benefit of three decades later, you can see that - however much you believe in free and open markets (as I do) - the fundamentalist idea that markets produced real prices when they are left to themselves is as damaging as religious fundamentalism in its own way.
And just as destructive.  Unless we do something about it, it will destroy the dreams of the next generation, constrain them in jobs they hate because it is all that will satisfy the demands of Mega Landlord PLC.

More about how we got into this mess, a series of blow by blow accounts, in Broke.

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Where is 38 Degrees now there's work to be done?

I got so cross with the internet campaigners 38 Degrees over the Lobbying Bill, for their half-truths and infuriating ability to concentrate useful political energy on a chimera.

But they were right that the Lobbying Bill was much less than perfect, and particularly in its failure to tackle the funding of political parties.

In fact, it is hard to see how restricting money that goes into electoral campaigning will make any difference when there is the loophole, shouting at the top of its voice.  Any passing billionaire who wants to impose his views on UK elections only has to fund a political party - either his own or someone else's.

This is usually the cue for anyone involved in politics to shake their heads in despair.  Only the Lib Dems, chronically under-funded, have any obvious benefits from restricting donations to political parties.  The others just need the money and tend to keep their heads down.

So, it's hopeless, right?

Well, no, it isn't.  Just for a moment, we have a political opportunity to act.  Labour have thrown all the cards up in the air by changing their relationship with their trade union funders, and in a creative way that has huge possibilities for energising their support base.

It also just so happens that the Conservatives are horrified by the way huge donations are now bypassing them altogether and going to UKIP.

There is an openness in Westminster to tackling the basic problem, the Old Corruption as William Cobbett put it, on a cross-party basis.

Can it be done in the year before the next general election?  What we really need is an enlightened internet campaigning organisation to take up the cause, when they could make a major difference?  They have the support base, invigorated by the Lobbying Bill campaign, who just need pointing in a more creative direction.

Where is 38 Degrees when you actually need them?  Don't tell me they are still out chasing chimeras?

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Does the UK government want Scots to vote yes?

It really is rather peculiar.  So peculiar that historians may comment on it in years to come if the vote is unexpected, but the campaign by the UK government to keep Scotland in the union is really so badly judged, so unimaginative and ill-considered, that I begin to suspect some kind of conspiracy.

I don't really.  I don't believe in conspiracies.  Regular readers of this blog (if there are any) will also know that I am not as determinedly against Scottish independence as I should be.

I believe nations should be smaller, and that we would all be better and more peacefully governed if they were.  Despite the fear of the electoral consequences, and despite the horror of nationalism - even Scottish nationalism - I believe smaller nations is a Liberal idea, and one that would have been recognised by William Ewart Gladstone himself.

But I understand the case against independence too.  What I don't understand is why is it being put across is such a bizarrely corrosive way.

Exhibit #1.  The UK government spokespeople have been using their habitual tone of voice for squelching regional aspirations and plans - you know the kind of thing; patronising, negative, superior and miserably depressing about everything.  Sorry, your dreams are just uneconomic - that's all there is to it.  Go off and bother some other government department.  It might have been calculated to encourage the case for independence.

Exhibit #2.  They put up George Osborne, of all people, to explain to the Scots that they will not be allowed to share the pound if they vote 'incorrectly'.  Of all the people designed to cause irritation north of the border, could they possibly have found anybody better?

Exhibit #3.  This is the topical one.  Of all the issues to fight on, the management of Britain's North Sea Oil seems the least likely to imply a persuasive case for union.

The very fact that David Cameron has decided to raise this issue at all is some measure of the denial in the UK establishment about how badly North Sea Oil has been handled over the past generation.

While Norway saved the profits from the oil windfall, for investment in their own people, successive UK governments organised things with their usual dull short-termism, just adding the revenues to the bottom line until it was all used up.  Consequently we never used the proceeds to re-equip UK manufacturing.  We never used the proceeds to provide us with modern, renewable energy.

North Sea Oil pushed up the value of the pound, throttling what remained of the old UK manufacturing base - and we never used the proceeds to invest for the future.  It allowed us to cling too long to fossil fuels - and we never used the proceeds to gear up for the future.

When I tried to come up with a list of the ten most disastrous political decisions since 1945, for some reason which I can't now remember, I put the failure to invest the proceeds of North Sea Oil at the top of the list.

Fortune magazine wrote about the Norwegian oil fund - now the biggest sovereign wealth fund in the world - a few weeks back and revealed political divisions about exactly how it should be used.  But let's face it, that would be a good problem to have.

Thanks to the miserable short-term thinking of our governments, we will not be agonising about how to spend the equivalent of Norway's $830 billion.

So ask yourself: why does David Cameron bring it up?  Is it because he doesn't know any better?

We need to be nervous of Google's investment in robots

It's a funny thing, but just 48 hours after I posted the question about what makes Alan Turing the ubiquitous English hero for the 2010s, then the Observer reports the next twist in the tale about the famous Turing Test.

Let me quickly explain for the uninitiated.  The test was set by Alan Turing in 1950 as a way of deciding mathematically whether or not a computer could think.  Turing suggested that the test would be passed when you couldn't tell whether you were taking to a human being or a computer in written conversation.  He believed that moment would have arrived by 2000.

So when the world's leading apologist for Artificial Intelligence, Ray Kurtweil, the author of The Age of Spiritual Machines, talks about that moment happening by 2029 - then it is already nearly 30 years late.

I'm not a big fan of the fringe enthusiasts of AI.  This is not to say that I believe somehow humans can never be outwitted by a computer.  We constantly are.  But the Turing Test has been bundled up with a whole range of extra peculiarities it was never intended to serve, and in particular about human nature.

Turing certainly believed, as Kurzweil does, that computers will be able to tell jokes and flirt - it was these issues which dominated the debate back in 1950, as you can find out in my new Kindle Single about Turing, Alan Turing: Unlocking the Enigma.

The first problem is that, actually, the bar is pretty high.  The American philosopher Daniel Dennett suggested this question to tell the difference between a human and a computer;

“An Irishman found a genie in a bottle who offered him two wishes. ‘First, I’ll have a pint of Guinness,’ said the Irishman, and when it appeared he took several long drinks from it and was delighted to see that the glass filled itself magically as he drank. ‘What about your second wish?’ asked the genie. ‘Oh well,’ said the Irishman, ‘that’s easy. I’ll have another one of these!’ Please explain this story to me, and tell me if there is anything funny or sad about it.”

Dennett said that, if a computer could genuinely answer this question to the satisfaction of a human interrogator - with all its complicated social peculiarities - then yes, then you could certainly say it could think. It is still unclear whether that will ever happen.

The second problem is that these are questions about the nature of humanity. The roots of the Turing Test in logical positivism and English philosophy is part of the problem. Turing was trying to find a way – not to decide about the human soul but whether machines could think. He saw no real distinction between whether the computer could fool an interrogator that it was human and whether it was actually thinking.

That raises other questions too.  Is the computer doing the same as a human being when it flirts and tells jokes?  Or does that beg the question?  Is its motivation the same?  Does it matter?

But what really unnerves me about all this, and Google's link up with Kurzweil, is that it plays into a corporate agenda which asks us to believe that a virtual doctor or teacher is indistinguishable from a real one - or, as Kurszeil says, that virtual sex will be better than the real thing.

This not only misunderstands human nature but risks fobbing all but the ultra-rich off with a machine in the classroom and surgery, unaware that it isn't the basic functions of teaching that are important, but the relationship with another flawed human being that makes it work.

I may say that this may also be the problem with virtual sex, that perfection misses the point - it is the less than perfect human being that makes it worthwhile, and makes the teaching and medicine effective.

Find out more, not just in my Alan Turing  ebook, but in my take on the future of authenticity, The Age to Come.

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Why are we so fascinated by Alan Turing?

It is now 102 years since he was born, or nearly, but this really appears to be Alan Turing's moment.

Not only was the government moved to give him a pardon, rather belatedly, for his conviction for homosexual acts back in 1952, but the stills have been released to great excitement for Benedict Cumberbatch's portrayal of the man in the film The Imitation Game.

It is even being talked about as an Oscar contender for 2015.

Now even the hotels of Manchester, where he lived and died, are joining in.  Jurys Inn Manchester has just published their own guide to his life.

What is it about Turing that speaks so much to our own age?  On the face of it, this is quite simple.  He was brave enough to be himself about his sexuality - in fact, he managed to flout respectability, to the frustration of his mother, for most of his life.  He famously wore a gas mask on his bike to avoid the pollen, and held his trousers up with a piece of string.

As the father of the computer age, and the great prophet of computability, he is a good nominee for the creator of our world.  He was a problem-solver, the breaker of the unbreakable Enigma code, when our age is so full of uncrackable problems.

I've had the chance to think about this myself, because the short biography I wrote about Turing has just been published as a Kindle Single (Alan Turing: Unlocking the Enigma).

My own feeling is that nothing about Turing is quite straightforward.  Confident in his own abilities, amusing and witty with friends, yet shy and uncertain in company, except with the few people he trusted. Relying on relentless logic, yet also managing an almost mystical ability to intuit mathematical proofs.

He combined a rigid clarity and scepticism about human specialness, but he was also fascinated by fairy tales and was famously obsessed with the Disney film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.   One of his closest friends was Alan Garner, later the author of The Weirdstone of Brisingamen.

The overwhelming feeling about Turing, reading the details of his life – and his mother wrote a detailed tribute after his death – is just how English he was.

Many of his fellow countrymen failed to understand him at all, and he worked part of his career with American and German mathematicians at Princeton University, but he was deeply English in his sheer practicality, for the literalism with which he turned intellectual ideas into practical projects, and for his empiricism.

He was a true successor to the great British empiricists, John Locke and David Hume, and the exclusion of every consideration except sense data. It is a theme that keeps returning in his life and work.

But I think our fascination may be more subtle than that.  We are beginning to regard Turing is the very apotheosis of a man of genius crushed by the petty mores of his own day, and perhaps that is a little how we all regard ourselves.  No wonder we admire him: he was the real thing.

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