Tempting as it is to lay as much blame as possible at the feet of Philip Green – a man whose 63rd birthday cake involved an edible version of himself, topless, in bed with his chihuahua, silk sheets recreated in sugar paste, gold candles fringing the mattress like a flaming cage – the decline of British Home Stores was not entirely his fault. Like Austin Reed, the high-street tailor that went into administration the day after BHS, this was a business that collapsed in large part because it failed to be flexible in a changing marketplace.
Both came to rely on the patronage of people who, either through a lack of access or an abundance of ethics, opted to shop physically rather than digitally. But as discussions on Twitter over what you’ll miss about BHS (mostly: somewhere to go to the loo) also indicate, unless your shop serves a need that cannot be met online, it will now struggle to survive.
Even Argos, whose current raison d’être is to trump Amazon by letting you get your mitts on a cheap toaster the same day, has seen a 36% year-on-year drop in profits. This its chief executive credits to “a continuation of the challenges we saw towards the back of last year with high street footfall and the move online”.
All perfectly obvious, of course. Yet there are fundamental cultural implications here to add to concerns about the decline in how much we prize advice and expertise, the loss of jobs, and community and city-centre toilets. As we turn our backs on bricks-and-mortar shopping, the landscape that greets us is a cul-de-sac in which our desires are second-guessed and swiftly sated. It is a search-engine sinkhole whose walls endlessly shrink, in which the endgame is to make you eat yourself.
Once upon a time, for instance, I fancied myself quite good at buying people presents. I would think carefully about what a loved one might like, then try to find it. I would pop into shops in which I might stumble across something slightly inspired. These days, you’re now only as caring and thoughtful as the keywords you tap into eBay. Such easy surfeit means our expectations of spontaneity require reprogramming.
But though everyone knows that the internet has radically altered the way most of us shop, socialise and even set about trying to have sex with someone, the comprehensive nature of such change – as well as the accuracy with which our actions can be anticipated – bodes far worse for those of us in the so-called creative industries than we choose to acknowledge.
We no longer blink at the fact that checkout assistants are being replaced by automated tills. That robots might one day drive us about or help us pick up our spectacles is felt to be obvious. But we are certain there are some professions that will remain immune to advancing technology. Such smugness will end badly. The art we currently produce, after all, struggles to reflect this shape-shifting new world. Books, films and TV series fare best if they are set far in the past or faintly in the future, because those things we traditionally enjoy about fiction – people falling in love, for instance – are increasingly being rendered redundant by the way we now conduct our lives.
Shows that position themselves to bisect with the present may surf a wave but they come with a pressing sell-by date. That biotronic twist in the revamped Night Manager looks snazzy now. It might seem less so a couple of years down the line.
But what is still studiously ignored is the inevitability that artificial intelligence won’t change just how we see drama or what its plot is, but who will write it too. Software will at some point paint masterpieces and pen bestsellers. Even, perhaps – if it evolves to become especially extraordinary – opinion columns in our newspapers.
Last summer, researchers in Germany designed a deep learning computer algorithm that uses image recognition to distil and comprehend the essence of how a great work of art is painted – style, colours, technique, brush strokes. This year will see the publication of a book that claims it’s possible to know with 97% certainty whether a manuscript will hit the top of the New York Times bestseller list.
The system at work in The Bestseller Code crunches themes, plot, character, pace, punctuation and word frequency to predict success. Its findings range from the obvious – a smattering of sex scenes helps, likewise a dog and a 28-year-old heroine – to the less easy to predict (such as, devote 30% of the novel to two specific topics).
Granted, neither the German researchers nor the boffins behind the code are creating original content. But the programs they are devising are either mimicking it perfectly or computing it fully. And once you understand a formula back to front, it becomes possible to pinpoint its genius, then do it yourself. Over and over and over again. Writers’s block is not a problem.
The traditional argument against such a scenario says that deep down we can still recognise real, human inspiration: the sweat and the blood behind a work of art. But this appreciation too is eroding. Increasingly we see people as constructed profiles and aggregates of attributes. The etiquette of interaction has taken a hammering on account of this, and with it our sense of what it means to be human.
Even the most creative are not immune from such reduction. On Tuesday, BBC Radio 4 broadcast a documentary tied to the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death. It included a contribution from Dr Michael Witmore, director of the Folger library in Washington DC – the biggest resource of bard manuscripts and literature in the world. Shakespeare was, said Witmore – one of the foremost scholars studying his work – quite seriously, “an incredible content provider”.
It is a description as accurate – Shakespeare was a helluva prolific kinda guy – as it is unnerving. Witmore meant it well, though. Soon, there will be no higher praise.
