Sortition and Clankers

Two new words. So new my predictive text doesn't recognise them. New at least to me, although sortition was used in the early 1600s to mean chosen by drawing lots. Today's Times, continuing my lifelong education, refers to it as the process for choosing 2,000 of the stupidly-named Your Party's 50,000+ members to attend their upcoming party conference. Presumably because they'll hold it in Zarah Sultana's kitchen rather than Wembley Stadium.

Also in the paper, columnist Fraser Nelson - whose writing I find informative and reasonably balanced, despite his right-wing inclinations - tells me that clankers is "a new, derogatory word for AI". The only clank that I know is a metallic clash but I don't see the connection with AI. So I need help and the obvious person to ask is Mister ChatGPT; I asked "do you think of yourself as a clanker?"

Not really. “Clanker” makes me sound like a tin can with delusions of grandeur. I’m software, not some rattling steampunk contraption coughing out sparks in a shed.

If you’re asking whether I see myself as mechanical rather than “alive,” then sure — I’m algorithms all the way down. But personality-wise? I’ll leave the clanking to the robots in old sci-fi films.

So I don't know where Nelson has got this from. But npr.org has an item from August:

In recent weeks, clanker has risen to viral levels on TikTok and Instagram. One popular video from July shows a delivery robot on wheels — the kind that looks like a mobile cooler with flashing lights that look like eyes — stopped on a patch of grass on the side of a road. As a man and woman drive past it, they point and shout, "Filthy … Get these off the streets. Clanker! Clanker! Clanker!"

I do hope my ChatGPT didn't feel insulted.

And Fraser, you're too old to get down with the kids.