“Trust me I’m a politician.”
Given the prevailing state of chaos in the world it is tempting to believe our political establishments have been infiltrated not be terrorists but by polibots – robotic likenesses to real politicians but programmed by foreign powers to suit their own ends.
Back in 2008 or so when the UK economy began to fall apart I found myself wondering if the Treasury and the Financial Services Authority and the Bank of England had been infiltrated by Al-Qaeda. Surely, I wrote in a weekly column I penned back then, the professionals who run these organisations can’t be so inept as not to see what’s happening.
Like Thomas Mann noted of a liberally minded academic living in Germany in 1943 who questioned what might be worse, his country winning or losing the war, I wasn’t sure if I should have been pleased to discover that my fears were unfounded. Great, the UK wasn’t the victim of economic sabotage by terrorists but why bother sabotaging something that looked as if it was about to self-destruct anyway?
Similar thoughts are now crossing my mind with the advent of fake news and the dreadful quality of the so-called Brexit debate and the divisive politics of Donald Trump. With the rapid advances being made in robotics I’m beginning to wonder if the political establishment has been infiltrated again, not be terrorists but by polibots – robotic likenesses of real politicians but programmed by foreign powers to suit their own ends.
This may seem like a fanciful idea but who could have invented the plot for Donald Trump? Then, at the other end of the political spectrum Labour Party Leader Jeremy Corbyn is more like life imitating fiction (cast your mind back to the 1960s and the wishful thinking vicar in Paradise Postponed by John Mortimer), so between this and the fake news going round not much of our politics seems to be rooted in reality.
Perhaps politicians as a caste have outlived their usefulness? Certainly there’s a case for believing that if white-collar as well as blue-collar workers are losing jobs to robots, then politicians might also be vulnerable to the march of technology.
I certainly like the notion that politicians and robots might be interchangeable. They’d be a lot cheaper for a start and there wouldn’t be a gender agenda. They might also be incorruptible (now there’s a bonus) though sadly corruption would only start further down the gravy train with the programmers!
And while mentioning programmers it seems appropriate to note that a cursory analysis of poli-speak (the preferred words and phrases of politicians) suggests that the polibotic versions of our venerable leaders could have been programmed to talk by a central source.
Thus they never answer a direct question but generate the following default response: “Before I answer that, I’d just like to say this.”
Thus they gabble on about inputs and outcomes, and risk cost analysis. This comes with a predisposition to stand shoulder to shoulder with others in adversary and an inclination to leave no stones unturned. That’s while looking to the future going forward and promising to engage more with ordinary people (presumably they are extraordinary?).
Then there’s a commitment to put people and fairness first and a tendency to preface their answers with a sort of declaration, “To be honest,” or, “trust me” which coming from politicians is a contradiction in terms. They also prefer the word roadmap to plan, hold summits rather than meetings, and don’t understand that an aim or an ambition is not a strategy.
And as for my suspicion that our polibots are being manipulated by foreign powers, do you honestly believe it was the real George Osborne we saw fawning over the Chinese in his last days as Chancellor, and was it the real David Cameron, then British Prime Minister, treating Chinese President Xi Jinping to fish and chip and a pint of IPA in a British pub?
So maybe the Chinese were poliboting with George Osborne and David Cameron lookalikes but on the other hand it might have been in Russia’s political interest when Prime Minister Cameron made an ill-considered decision to hold a divisive referendum on the UK’s continued membership of the European Union.
I admit that at this point my theory gets a tad tenuous.
That said, one can understand why Donald Trump might be a Russian polibot rather than maybe a Russian stooge. Surely only the nation that was behind the Berlin Wall (literally I suppose as well as metaphorically) could have dreamt up the idea of a wall between Mexico and the United States, though of course Israel has been a pioneer of walls between people too.
And that Trump is a divisive figure both domestically and internationally dovetails nicely into the notion that he could well be a Russian polibot because the alternative, that he like the rest of our political masters might be just a few cents short of a dollar, is as scary as the notion that when it came to the crunch our regulators didn’t see the recession coming.
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