hard to digest by autotelic

The UK Drug Policy Commission (UKDPC) has published a report critical of UK law enforcements supply side drugs strategy . The Commission which looked at the cost and effectiveness of UK drugs policy , found that:

The UK illicit drug market generates £5.3 billion in trade and poses the single greatest organised crime threat to the UK.

About one-quarter of the total cost of delivering drug strategy has been dedicated to reducing supply (£380 million in 2005/06).

Drug markets are extremely resilient to supply side enforcement , are highly fluid and adapt to law enforcement interventions, with drugs and suppliers taken out of circulation being easilly and speedilly replaced.  

While the availability of controlled drugs is restricted by definition, it appears that additional enforcement efforts had had little adverse effect on the availability of illicit drugs in the UK.

The available evidence suggests that street-level drug law enforcement should focus on forging productive local partnerships and not rely solely on police crackdowns.

The authors were unable to locate any comprehensive published UK evidence of the relative effectiveness of different enforcement approaches. They were also not able to identify any published comparative cost-benefit or value-for-money analysis for different interventions within the UK.

Enforcement can have a significant and unintended negative impact on the nature and extent of harms associated with drugs and this should be recognised and minimised.

The last point is the kicker as what the Commission,an independent body set up to objectively analyse and influence UK drugs policy and public understanding, is effectively saying is that cracking down on suppliers is actually making the drugs problems worse and we need to acknowledge this and focus on a meaningful drugs policy that reduces rather than generates drugs related violence and crime.

The police are going to read this report as a counsel of despair, they are effectively being told the war on drugs is unwinnable but its the politicians who need to act on this report and be brave enough to recognise that we need to legalise all drug usage without delay as its clearly the current criminalisation of drug use that's responsible for the crime.

Rather than burying this report or leaving discussion of it to the experts and bureaucrats we all have an opportunity to get real and have an open discussion about drug usage here as the  £5.3 billion UK drugs market - or its US equivalent - is not going to go away just because we basically disapprove of people getting stoned on various substances . Similarly , law enforcement can form as many local partnerships as they like but it isnt going to change the fact that there is,  always has been and always will be  a demand for mind altering substances from the curious, jaded and young.

Some people like getting stoned.Its a personal preference and a  human need , its as simple as that and much as policy and attitudes  towards pornography have changed in recent years from almost self righteous paranoid hysteria to a healthier acceptance that we actually like sex and can  get off on watching other people fuck so our attitudes to drugs need to change. Legitimise and socialise the drugs market, let people take drugs and wrest the market away from the criminals, lets stop trying to be more responsible for what other people digest than they are, let them eat soma I say , just make sure they form an orderly queue and pay for it so the £5.3 billion gets put to better use than enriching criminals and corrupting law enforcement officials and Governments. .

Whatever mid 1970's post punk New York New wave was about back in the day  I didn't expect one of its leading lights Blondie's Deborah Harry to be playing at a swanky environmentally unfriendly corporate gig in bleak times and an even bleaker post industrial environment 30 years later but that's the gig I found myself at yesterday  and basically whatever Ms Harry had back then  she  still has it in spades as last night she treated the British Motorshow audience to a musical masterclass in being alive and having fun in the here and now.

As a band Blondie has always suffered from the over focus on Deborah Harry, a bias perpetuated last night by the cameras broadcasting live images on to the two giant stage side screens , but you have to hope that after 30 years the band members are cool with this as Deborah Harry is Blondie in most people's minds and One Way or Another Harry was gonna get you, get you, get you, and last night she got the Excel arena audience real good and we got her , big time.

The mixed crowd bopped and pogoed along to chart topping classics ' Heart of Glass' , 'Call Me' ' Picture This' and a slower treatment of 'Sunday Girl ' from Parallel Lines , numbers that reminded people that Debbie wasnt simply a pretty face but someone who very clearly understood  that what we want and get from love and life rarely match and was able to succinctly sum this up in perfectly formed pop songs that somehow maintained a glamourous dangerous  edge. There was a stomping version of Atomic' from Eat to the Beat  and as Blondie  settled into their set  ' Rapture '  and the ' Tide is High' is from AutoAmerican, numbers I didnt really like at the time - the rap sequence from rapture was embarassing back then -  but what the fuck, they  sounded great last night.

There was also an odd  racy cover of the Stones 'Get Off of My Cloud' thrown in as a crowd pleaser and although Deborah Harry is only a couple of years younger than Jagger, who really isnt considered to be ' cool' on this side of the Atlantic ,  there was nothing of the pensioner about Debbie's attitude, movement or  performance, the corporate gig is  Jagger's natural environment, he  graduated  from art school to the stage, Harry danced and waited on tables for a decade before she got her break and she let people know in a coded way last night that she knew the gig was spiritually remote from where she had first set out from. One of them is still giving punters the real deal and its not the tea bag with the big lips and whiney voice .

Would have loved to have heard Union City and Denis , unforgivable ommissions , but personal favourite was the haunting 'Fade Away and Radiate 'whose seemingly throwaway lines have always struck me as incredibly sad and deep.

New Wave Nostalgia for dark times  - last night there was  no better way to fade away and radiate.
 

Some people think human -robot marriages will take place by the mid century although plenty  more people probably already think they are married to a robot . i'm wondering what the  malebots look like and if there is a gaybot out there yet. I guess we'll find out when Robort  Porn hits the net . 

Alfred had been missing payments on Maude since June and deliberately ignoring the rental company's mails so when the guys from Gazm called with the repossession  order he bulshitted his way out of it but within an hour of them calling he and Maude had split as he had no intention of going back to living on his own again. 

He'd hastilly packed an overnight bag with clothes  and paid the geek across the hall his last 50 bucks to deactivate and remove Maude's satellite  tracking device but the kid didnt know what he was doing and had fucked up some of Maude's thought processes as well. Alfred imagined that's why Maude had insisted on stealing a neighbours car.

' Fuck Mr Capcek ' she'd said when Alfred had meekly protested ' All property is theft'

Alfred had eventually been swayed as although the MORD 456-A fembot was a little out of his income bracket but not quite state of the art it was good value for money and programmed to move and rationalise like a natural.

He didnt have much time for real women which was just as well as they tended to regard him  as repulsive.  

It was when Maude killed the cop that Alfred had  really started to question  his attachment. He'd lost half his face in the third Gulf war serving his country and , well, as much as he objected to Maude's  disproportionate response to getting a traffic ticket , the cop probably had a family waiting at home,   he found it difficult to judge her too harshly as she  had always been there for him and that's all that counted wasnt it?

"You do love me though Alfred San "  Maude whispered into his ear later as they were holed up in a  motel.on the strip "
 
Her arms circled him protectively.

Alfred wondered if the geek had deactivated the lie detector.

'Of course I do  babe ' he said drawing his last breath '

There was a time when humanity faced the universe alone and without a friend. Now he has creatures to help him…Mankind is no longer alone.

 

Isaac Asimov (I, Robot).

The Instutute of Robotic Psychology and Robotherapy sees a great future for  person -robot relationships. Robotic psychology looks at the compatibility between people and artificial creatures on different levels such as sensorimotor, emotional, cognitive and social , in other words how they interact with each other, while Robotherapy basically looks at how robots can be used to interact and communicate with people for a wide range of therapeutic reasons , for example offering diagnostic ability , treatment , care, support or just plain  companionship.

The 'why' of Robotic psychology is pretty obvious as there have been massive advances in Robotics in the last couple of decades and a shift away from creating  robots for industrial application towards designing personal robots for use in the home. There are currently 2 million Roomba robots cleaning peoples homes and other affordable robots are being designed , programmed and built to take care of a variety of other household and personal chores all the time and South Korea has set a goal that 100% of households should have domestic robots by 2020.

The 'when'  of Robotherapy is also a known, there are already robot systems interacting with humans in the medical and care fields  and with people with disabilities and Japan hopes to roll out robots to help take care of its growing elderly  population by 2010.

In short, we're  over viewing robots as the stuff of science fiction or even workplace machines and seem content enough to allow them into our homes and further into our lives.

The real future of Robotics though depends upon advances in Artificial intelligence (AI) There are already robots which appear to have human decision making abilities and qualities , people grow fond of and relate to theIR robots as every Furby owner knows but there's a way to go yet before robots will roll of the production line with on board morality, emotions,  free will, and empathy right out of the box.

That said, there are many people who appear to lack these traits so its possible that robots may well end up being more human than we are.

Some people are worried about the way we are tampering with intelligence and fear that if we create super intelligent machines to help manage our lives  it'll only be a matter of time before they realise how dumb we are and take us out of the equation or get us working for them. At the other extreme , some people are more interested in how we might quite literally fall in love with Robots, view them as our partners and have sexual relations with them.

David Levy's 'Love and Sex with Robots 'looks at this interesting developing  area of person-robot interaction and explores how entities that have popularly been deemed as cold and mechanical could soon be viewed as objects of real companionship and desire. According to , Henrik Christensen, founder of the European Robotics Research Network the development of robotic sex toys may well prove the most controversial aspect of Robotics but he predicts that people are going to be having sex with robots in the next five years.' They may be pretty basic ' he says  ' but people are having sex with inflatable dolls , so initially anything that moves will be an improvement'.

It is not unreasonable to suppose that a lot of the R&D into making robots more lifelike may well come from the sex industry, after all porn has been the driving force of web technologies and played a large part, whether people want to acknowledge it or not, in take up of the internet.

So the future of Robotics could be the perfect partner and companion -  considerate , intelligent , sexy and sexually compatible ... or sessions with a robot psychotherapist if it doesnt work out.

This all goes to remind me that the greatest flaw in human design is the absence of a reset button.  

Last weekend researchers  at the Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford discussed the risk of global mega catastrophes , sudden catastrophic events which could bring about  the extinction of humanity , massive loss of life or at least  societal collapse and concluded we could probably all sleep soundly in our beds at nights as we have most of the known threats covered.

The discussion excluded 'slow burner' threats such as global warming and famine which may in large part account for the general optimism. .

The experts from a wide range of disciplines  concluded that the threat of a bioterror or nuclear attack had actually diminished in recent years due to reduced availability of materials and better controls and  detection methods .The threat from astroids was thought to be minimal too with NASA busy keeping track on the skies to make sure we dont go the way of the dinosaurs. The threat from the H5n1 strain of influenza was still considered very much real due to the mobility of modern populations but the gathering was told Governments were prepared for the worse case scenario and that for the first time in history we were in the position to stop an outbreak. Views about the threat from Nanotechnology and research and development in Artificial Intelligence (AI)  were not so upbeat as they are less quantifiable due to the infancy of Nanotechnology  and the fact that intelligence is the most powerful force scientists have ever tampered with.

By and large though the gathering of experts thought we shouldnt worry so much and was told that the reason  we do worry an awful lot about such disasters occuring is because, relatively,  we have little else to worry about nowadays. Obviously the global credit crunch ,   oil and food crises and threat of inflation havent made an impact on carefree academia yet but what worries me most is when scientists confidently reassure us that there is nothing to worry about.