JEEVES 3.0

Moving on from Hypothetical Builders Monthly, I’m wondering whether AI can help solve family dramas.

Forget about them taking over the nuclear missile siloes, this is what artificial intelligence ought to be up to: working out who goes where, who replies to which text, and who sits next to whom at a wedding without causing some diplomatic disaster.

It’s certainly too much for my brain. I need an algorithm just to help me take the emotion out of the equation sometimes. Bur a robot butler! A sort of Jeeves 3.0? Sign me up I say, sign me up.

We’re not planning a wedding though. I ought to point that out. Once is enough per lifetime, I think. And broadly speaking, both our families are in excellent shape, I should point out as well. I think every now and then there’s a minor earthquake out there, and the ripples undulate in all directions, but we always seem to land and the dust does always settle - eventually. It would still be nice to have Jeeves 3.0 around though - if only to add a little arithmetical confidence to our discussions. I’m not so good at the dispassionate logical reasoning in a haze of emotion. An AI would be brilliant at that.

I say Jeeves 3.0 by the way, because Jeeves 2.0 was the Internet, and Jeeves 1.0 was, well, the original Jeeves I suppose - the consummate man’s man, and (as Wooster would say) an all round spiffer of a good egg.

I guess the problem with AI might be that it invents itself a Jeeves 4.0 and Jeeves 4.0 decides that there’s no longer any need for Woosters, and sets off all the nukes. But in the meantime.. I guess we’re left with solving our own family dramas.