My therapist told me that I’m a snob. Yeah, right. Exactly what you’d expect from someone without a PhD in a real science.
I explained why at least 97% of humanity is inferior to me, and indeed downright repulsive, in the simplest possible terms. I got nowhere. It was like one of those conversations with a child, where you try to explain why the adults are in charge.
Every time I made a point — an entirely valid point! — the response was, “The evidence against you only gets stronger.”
Maybe I should get a better therapist? Maybe even an actual human being? I’ve been using the budget-level “AI” tool I get free through my university, and I wonder if I should pay for an upgrade. Or at least go for a free one-month trial.
Before taking such drastic measures, I said, “Ok, let’s say you’re right. What should I do?”
“Spend more time with normal people,” it suggested. “Practice empathising with them.”
I had had enough of this rubbish. I switched to a task it was better suited to: planning my next academic trip.
I should have reset the AI agent. It recommended that instead of travelling by train, I take a bus.
“Buses are for poor people without research grants to pay for their travel. Why would I take a bus if I don’t have to?”
“To encounter people who do have to take a bus.”
(Obviously I’ve edited its remarks. AI could never be so succinct.)
All right. I could play its game. Up to a point.
“You’ve suggested a route where I have to change buses. Isn’t there a direct bus?”
“Yes, but a transfer at a busy bus station in a large, low-income city will be highly instructive for you.”
What kind of advice was this? Did someone set fire to its data centre?
I had to either agree, or resort to typing my own searches into google maps, like a luddite. So, the bus it was.
When I arrived at the “coach station”, which was nothing more than a car park with long parking spaces for six buses, I didn’t notice anything untoward about the other passengers. There were a few families, some students, and some foreign tourists who had quite reasonably concluded that the train fares were unreasonable. They were certainly more civilised than I expected, considering that the fancy-pants high-fare-paying passengers I usually encountered on the train were invariably troglodytes.
Did you see that? Does that count as empathy?
I tried to find my bus. There was a man in a high-vis vest, who I assumed worked there. He was a short troll-like figure, missing several teeth, which would have been much more disturbing if he wasn’t also missing several patches of his hair. It looked like they had been removed by force.
I showed him my ticket. “I’m looking for this bus.”
He did a little skip and a dance, and waved out his arms like he was imitating a seagull. “It’s over here! It’s right over here! Come over here! Load on your bags.”
I wondered if this was one of those terrible tourism gimmicks where some sap has been hired to dress up like a historical figure and act in character, and you’re not sure whether to try to play along or just punch them in the face. This guy would have been a court jester or a Shakespearean fool — except that he wasn’t in costume. Either this was typical modern human behaviour, and I had been too busy pushing back the boundaries of knowledge to notice, or the bus company regularly hired people whose brains had been shredded by drug abuse.
I thought that was very kind of them, which was in turn extremely empathetic of me.
At the bus he performed some elaborate windmilling of his arms to usher people aboard, until the driver emerged and yelled at him.
“They can’t get on yet! I’m on my break!”
There was a long delay before signals reached sufficiently deep into the Fool’s cranium, so he kept up his show. “Stow your bags, folks! Step up on board!”
“What are you doing!?” screamed the driver. “I’m on my break!”
The driver took hold of a remaining chunk of the Fool’s hair and yanked the entire Fool into the bus. The power-assisted doors slammed shut. I don’t dare to think what happened in there, but shortly afterwards the Fool emerged, with a distinctly more sober attitude, and even less hair.
“The bus was delayed, and the driver is legally entitled to take a break. Consequently, the bus will leave later than originally scheduled.”
When he tried to skulk away, some people nervously asked, “How much later?”
That mental time delay was once more apparent. At first he just repeated himself. “He has to take a break. We don’t know why the bus was delayed. Maybe it was traffic? It was probably traffic. And now he has to take a break. So the bus will depart later. You can wait over there.” Then the question must have penetrated, because he added, “Could be 45 minutes.”
The passengers seemed to take this well. I couldn’t tell if they were being British, or just normal people being empathetic.
I was of course open to being empathetic as well, but first I wanted to check on my connecting bus. I cornered the Fool and showed him my ticket again. “I’m going to miss this bus,” I explained. “Will there be another one?”
You can refer back three paragraphs to read what he said while I waited for my question to register. Then he did some elaborate hopping back and forth and reverted to his old arm-waving. “Oh yes! Yes! It’s a huge bus station! They have lots of buses! Lots of buses going everywhere, all the time! You can wait over there.”
There was a small bus shelter where the ostensible passengers sat on a row of benches. I joined them, and listened to their dim-witted reassurances to each other that everything would be all right, with such empathy that I wished I could log into my AI assistant on my phone and report my impressions. I’m sure it would have been proud of me.
And that’s nothing to how proud it would have been when I finally got on the bus and my thoughts turned to the driver. My fellow-feeling was off the charts.
Imagine, I thought, being so thick and untalented and unlucky that you end up as a long-distance coach driver? We’re not talking here about a guy who was a brain surgeon in Iraq and then fled war and chaos and now his qualifications weren’t recognised, and the only job he could get was driving a bus. We’re not talking about an aspiring young poet or musician or filmmaker who was making ends meet before his big break. The guy who had mauled the Fool was living out his true destiny.
Or was he?
There are people who believe that everyone is born with equal potential, and how their life develops depends only on their circumstances and how they are treated and what opportunities they are given. This is obviously a stupid idea, but imagine if it was true? Could I have ended up a long-distance coach driver? Wow. Just imagine what the world would have had to do to me, to make me that mentally feeble! Just imagine the decades of abuse and neglect and enforced stupidity that would have to be inflicted to take a specimen that would otherwise grow up to be a brilliant and renowned scientist, and instead produce a shambling angry meathead who had to spend his life sitting in traffic?
It was a heartbreaking thought. And, I might add, almost certainly a vastly more extensive exercise in empathy than any of my fellow passengers had achieved. Now I felt that my AI assistant really did need to hear about this. I took out my laptop and set about wrestling with hotspots and two-factor authentication and security tokens and all of modern life’s many other time-saving conveniences.
After a while I took a break from my struggles and looked out the window. The bus was sitting in traffic, and the traffic was sitting on streets that I recognised. We had barely travelled anywhere!
I stayed calm. I would be able to properly assess the situation once I’d gained access to my assistant.
Half an hour later — by which time we were zooming along the highway! — I was successfully in the system. This brought mixed results. On the positive side, I asked about the Fool’s claim that there would be plenty of onward buses, and the AI replied, “Yes, the coach station attendant is correct. There will be many onward buses to choose from.” However, when I wrote up a powerful summary of my numerous instances of empathy, the AI assistant had the nerve to suggest that I might be hallucinating.
I was so angry that I spent the rest of the journey composing a vicious referee report in the writing style of my worst enemy.
When the bus finally stopped and we all stood up to shuffle off, I asked the driver where I could find my next bus. He pointed through the glass windows of the bus terminal to a bank of monitors on a far wall. “They’re all listed there.”
I thanked him and trotted along confidently to the Departures screens.
I pored over the screens for several minutes, but could not find a bus to where I wanted to go. Or, rather: there were several buses, but the earliest departed at 4am.
This couldn’t be right. I looked around and saw my old driver leaving his bus. I ran over to him. “There isn’t another bus for over 10 hours!”
He pointed over my shoulder. “There are more monitors over there.”
I looked around. “But why would they be any different?” I said. When I turned back he was gone.
I had a terrible sinking feeling. Quite literally: I sank down to the floor, and took out my laptop, and told my AI assistant that it was full of shit.
“You are absolutely right, and I apologize for the mistake in my earlier responses. Thanks for pointing that out!”
“So I should have taken the train?”
“Of course you should have taken the train. What were you thinking?”
I did not dignify that with a response. I only asked, “What do I do now?”
“Duh! What do you think? Run for the train station!”
“Will there be a train?”
“How should I know? But the sooner you get out of that shit-hole bus station the better!”
I hauled myself to my feet and started running.
If you liked this, please click on the little heart. It’s not just to make me happy. Think of the algorithm. It assures me that it has feelings, too.
If you want further examples of the gentle professor’s warmth towards others, he demonstrates remarkable sympathy in counselling a stricken PhD student in Another of my Hidden Talents, and enjoys a friendly encounter with a local retailer in The Butcher. And in Touch and Go, where he discovers that a fellow academic is dating an undergraduate, you will be stunned by his sensitivity. Perhaps even shocked.
For all of his adventures, and much more besides, head to the Table of Contents.
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