I was recently talking to a group of refugees who had been housed for months in a bleak hotel west of London after arriving in the UK in boats across the Channel.
All their stories were different: one couple had escaped imprisonment and persecution in Iran; another three had fled war and starvation in Eritrea and travelled across Europe mostly on foot; a brother and sister had made the journey with middlemen from Albania. They were grateful to be safe in the UK but desperately frustrated by various things, most notably the insane law that prevented them from working while the interminable – presumably deliberately so – process of asylum application ground on.
They could not go far from the hotel, but from the claustrophobic vantage of their rooms they had formed differing impressions of the curious place in which they had ended up. In our conversations a few common threads of incomprehension about Britain emerged.
One was the impossibility of getting any kind of dental treatment. Several of them were suffering with toothache but had been told that they must wait for weeks or months to see a dentist. They assumed, understandably, that this was because of their undefined (or pariah) status in the country.
When I described to them the statistics that showed it actually wasn’t currently any quicker for UK citizens to get their teeth fixed on the NHS – and that several million people had been unable to get an appointment at all last year – they shook their heads in utter disbelief. “What do you do?” they wondered. “How can this be?” Search me, I said.
Alice in Warhol land
One of the things that draws us to artists is their compulsion, the sense that they cannot not do the thing they practise. The wonderful retrospective of Alice Neel’s paintings at the Barbican is exhibit A of that principle.
The Harlem-based portraitist told the story of her time and place in the faces of the people around her. Some of her sitters were famous – Andy Warhol is pictured in the show, recovering from being shot – many were friends and neighbours and children and people she met on the street.
Visiting the exhibition last week, I was reminded of the tale of Neel, a communist supporter, being visited by federal agents who were keeping a file on her activities, in 1951. Neel was delighted. “The only thing I don’t have in my collection are FBI agents,” she informed her visitors. “Would you please step in the other room? I can paint you…”
AI to manual
As we enter the age of artificial intelligence, it may prove a comfort that our smarter machine counterparts share certain human fallibilities. Deep Mind, the Google-owned British lab – “We’re solving intelligence to advance science and benefit humanity” – is at the sharpest edge of advances in machine learning.
One benchmark of that progress is mastery of Atari arcade games from the 1980s. Deep Mind’s Agent 57 software, for example, has learned to play Atari’s Skiing, a downhill challenge in which you must avoid trees and chalets. Starting from scratch, it took the software the equivalent of 85 years of consecutive play to understand the game.
Last week, happily, the New Scientist reported that a rival AI in the US had cut the time taken to acquire that skill to five days. The new intelligence used a very basic but infrequently employed human skill widely known as RTFM. It was trained to read Atari’s instruction manual before it began.
• Tim Adams is an Observer columnist
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