VISIBLE PROBABILITIES

I wish you could actually see the pathway of probabilities. Say, you have an app that works on some wearable tech - glasses, for example. Then you say:

“Hey Siri. What’s the probability of seeing Gary Barlow in Sainsbury’s?”

And Siri flashes up (I don’t know) 6.7% as you walk towards the entrance, locking your car with the beeper. Then, as you go round, the number in the top right corner of your view changes. 4.2% in the meat aisle. 3% next to the headphones and electricals, and eventually 0% as you leave, and the chances expire altogether.

It would have been useful. What are the chances our kitchen will be done by Christmas? I might have asked it. Then, this week, I could have observed as the number slowly dwindled. It would have enabled us to get our hope focused somewhere else, I think.

Sigh. The one thing I didn’t want was to still be in that pod over the holidays. It’s so bleak; it’s like a builder’s portakabin, only with slightly less charm. It’s freezing in there, and the heater does next to nothing - and this, our first real, proper Christmas together in our house, is not likely to be enhanced by the ‘building site’ ambience. I honestly feel like I’ve let Sammy down by not managing to get this sorted out. I um. I can’t really bear that thought.

Gary Barlow probably has his Christmas hamper flown in from Fortnum & Mason by the way. Siri would know that. I just think it would be fun to actually see how likely a thing is, ebbing and flowing with real-time parameters, if AI could eventually take everything into account.

But of course, life is about navigating the minefields of catastrophe the old-fashioned way. Intuition, common-sense, tact, feeling, emotional resonance. I have a feeling that if we really did hand that over to a quick-thinking, omniscient computer, we’d be eroding our own humanity a bit.

We need the unpredictability, the bustle and fuss of Sainsbury’s, the last desperate dash for cranberry sauce and brandy butter - it reminds us that we are all humans, jostling alongside each other in a hugely unpredictable supermarket with the hidden probabilities of triumph and disaster rolling like a billion invisible dice, showing us the wafer-thin differences between the outcomes. We can’t all be Gary Barlow.