I watched the second of the Hannah Fry programmes on the subject of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and this edition was particularly scary. It focused on the ways in which the insurance companies in the private American healthcare system used AI to predict the days and even hours of treatment that they would fund after which time you were on your own as it were. Left to the mercy of the algorithm, seriously ill patients were bundled out of hospitals and transported home. Of course, this was all profit (or minimisation of cost) driven and eventually it was revealed that all kinds of assumptions were built into the algorithm the net effects were discriminatory. One such factor was the amount spent by individuals on their own healthcare and this reflected economic hierarchies in which white patients could afford, and did, spend more on their health than ethnic minority patients resulting in thousands of black patients receiving sub-optimal funding. AI is being introduced into the British healthcare system but, it is said, more cautiously but I wonder if it is only a matter of time before AI is used to calculate treatment times and discharge rates even in the UK healthcare system. Yesterday, as I was walking down into town, I was speculating to myself what could be done about the increasingly self evident lack of democracy in the American political system. My attention had been directed to this matter by watching some of the ways in which prominent members of the American government are not actually held to account in hearings before Congress whereby they can lie, prevaricate or refuse to answer questions without any sanction from an incredibly partisan chairman of the committee. I started to wonder about the power of the electorate in these circumstances given a backdrop in which there is a massive division in American politics and congressional seats do not often change hands. I started to wonder about the number of electors for each Congressional seat and discovered that when the American constitution was written this was of the order of 50,000 per seat but is now 750,000 per seat or fifteen times larger. I suspect (but would have to be more research on the matter) that who wins or loses a seat is as much dependent on demographic factors (people joining or leaving the electorate) or migration factors (people moving jobs or houses) than it is of people who actually change their minds and perform the switch from Republican to Democrat or vice versa. So, to my mind, the extremely tribal nature of American politics makes one despair whether the idea that America is a democracy is increasingly open to question. It is being said that Trump will almost certainly lose his majority in the Congress come the mid-term elections in November but already there are indications that Trump may try to subvert the result, perhaps by cancelling the elections altogether (as he has speculated that he might) As I keep on reminding people, Hitler came to power using the tools of democracy and then used every lever of power to sustain himself in office.
Later in the morning, my son called around and as this coincides anyway with the weekly visit of my domestic help, we tend to have a jolly half hour with each other. My son reminded me of the running conversation he used to have with colleagues at work whether all fathers, when they got to a similar age, developed the same set of habits such as always collecting odd screws together in any glass jars and keeping them ‘in case they might come in useful’ which is something I always do. I decided to delay my visit into town today but then I set off and called in at Waitrose to buy a birthday card for my daughter-in-law as well as picking up the (last) copy of the newspaper. My Pilates class went off as normal and I think I might have felt a little better after it, so perhaps I was in. need of exercise. Wen I returned home, I made myself a dinner of mackerel fillets on some toasted sourdough bread, augmented with a side dressing of tomato and beetroot. As it is practically 3.00 pm when I return home, I prefer to have a quickly prepared lunch in any case. During some of the afternoon, I engaged in the rather pleasant ask of reconstructing the spreadsheet I utilise to keep track of my finances. Now that I do not have a mortgage to make a great hole in my finances each month, I am in the happy position to make some savings for things that require a once-off yearly expenditure (as I was in the habit of doing in past years) These calls on large expenditures tend to come into three categories of car-related expenditure, vacations and house maintenance but by keeping all of my savings in one pot as it were, I can always transfer money from sub heading to another if necessary. Tomorrow is going to be quite a busy day because as well as the weekly shop, I have a routine hospital appointment in the afternoon so I may try and have an early night tonight. Later in the evening, there is going to be the second in a series of programmes on European identities presented by Katya Adler, who has a renowned expertise as a foreign correspondent. Last week she looked at regional identities in Italy and in France whereas this week she is going to concentrate on Germany and on Spain. In many if not most, European societies the population will very strongly identify first and foremost with a region and its cultural identity and central government is often seen as remote and lacking in relevance. My wife and I used to see this a lot when we travelled to various parts of Spain where people would proudly identify as being an Andaluz, a Gallego or a Catalan for example and only after this would they identify themselves as Spanish. Of course, in Spain there are a variety of languages apart from Castellano the principal ones being Euskara, the language of the Basque country, Catala and Gallego as well as variations of these spoken on some of the islands such as Valenciana. So with federal or semi-federalised political systems, it comes as no surprise that we see the rise of the right wing parties that often an expression of regional identities as well as the response to the economic uncertainties such as globalisation and migration. These regional identities were often forged in opposition to fascist dictator of which the prime example is the bitter struggle between Franco and the Catalans (around Barcelona) in Spain.