Technology is already driving inequality, now the AI bots are eroding human creativity

The rise of AI art and chat bots is getting deeply concerning.

The problems are obvious.

If you can generate artwork for your blog, for example, by typing a few prompts into an AI art bot, to almost instantaneously generate free, or ultra-cheap content, why expend the time, effort, and money on commissioning a human to do the job?

As an online writer it's vital to keep hitting the zeitgeist, because the content that shares most is usually the content that's about the topic of the moment, and because these days the news cycle moves incredibly quickly. So it makes sense to generate images as quickly as possible, rather than going through the lengthy process of commissioning real artists to do the work.

Under these circumstances what happens to the human artists, especially the emerging ones who haven't yet built up a client base or sufficient fans to support their work?

Artists were amongst the first to begin feeling the pressure from AI bots, but the AI chat bots are on the rise, and encroaching into written communication too.

Several of the chat bot issues have already been covered in detail by others, like the use of chat bots to cheat exams, people prompting the chat bot to produce hate speech and extremist content, and the fact that chat bots have no morality, so they're capable of outright lying, to the extent of inventing a load of made up citations to add fake legitimacy to their lies, but there's also a growing threat to writers' livelihoods.

The Science-Fiction magazine Clarkesworld is one of the best places for aspiring sci-fi writers to submit their work. They're not only really quick and efficient at dealing with submissions, they also pay well too.

Over the last couple of months they've been completely inundated with AI-generated content, submitted by scammers seeking to get commission fees for bot-written stories.

There's not really much chance that they'd actually succeed, because the bots have a long way to go before they can generate content that's good enough to pass as the kind of high quality sci-fi that Clarkesworld specialises in, but the sheer number of bot-written submissions has overwhelmed them, forcing them to close all new submissions.

As the magazine has outlined in a Twitter thread, there's no obvious solution:

• Chat bot detectors are too unreliable.

• "Pay-to-Submit" policies sacrifice too many legitimate writers, especially those from poor countries and under-privileged backgrounds.

• Third party identity confirmation tools are too expensive, and would create regional holes which would amount to effectively banning submissions from entire countries.

• Paper submissions are unrealistic in this day and age.

• Restricting submissions to those who have already submitted would effectively ban all new authors.

If these are the problems faced by just one publication, then it's obvious how bad things could get across the publishing industry.

For now the main problem is scammers ruining opportunities for real writers by overwhelming submission systems with junk, but as time goes on the fake submissions are going to become more and more indistinguishable from genuine content.

And this problem obviously won't just apply to aspiring authors, it could potentially impact anyone who writes for a living.

As an example, why would media outlets continue to pay substantial wages to so many journalists if future chat bots become capable of writing news articles, reviews, opinion pieces, rabble-rousing polemics, etc, all at the click of a button?

The philosopher Bertrand Russell used to say that if capitalists could be prevented from extracting all of the gains for themselves in unearned profits, improvements in technology could eventually reduce the need for human labour to such an extent that humanity could focus more on the things that make life worth living, such as the creative arts.

Sadly things haven't gone in this direction at all, to such an extent that the 1% minority now takes a bigger share of new technology-generated wealth than the rest of humanity combined; retirement ages are being driven up across the world; wages have been stagnant in real-terms for decades; and ultra-exploitative low-pay gig economy exploitation is rife.

Consider Amazon and food delivery apps.

The technology isn't being used to alleviate humanity from mundane low-paid labour by automating processes, it's being used as a means of extracting obscene amounts of unearned wealth by making workers subservient to the demands of in-work apps.

As workers toil away for a pittance, the owners of the technology that directs their tasks generate literally £billions.

And to make matters even worse, the technological advancements that could have saved us from poverty and the drudgery of mundane labour are now encroaching on the creative arts, and undermining the already limited scope for people to make a living through creativity, rather than unfulfilling grunt work.

Not only is the technology making workers ever more machine-like, it's now also eroding the possibility of escaping this kind of mundane toil by usurping our creative arts.

It used to be the case that humans told the machines what to do. Now the machines increasingly tell us what to do. And as we are forced to become more like the machines, the machines become more like us.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. Access to my online writing will always remain free. If you see some value in what I do, please consider supporting my work with a small donation/subscription.

OR

How NSA overreach is worse than terrorism

Ever since the Edward Snowden leaks started it has become more and more obvious that the NSA and their Five Eyes partners (the spooks in the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand) have been making a concerted effort to monitor and control the entire Internet.

They've engaged in vast data stealing exercises designed to sweep up and store the private communications data of virtually everyone; the NSA have employed a team of some 850,000 NSA staff and private security contractors to trawl this ocean of stolen data for whatever they can find; they've damaged international relations by snooping on dozens of heads of state; they've used their snooping powers to spy on companies like the Brazilian oil company Petrobras (surely motivated by industrial espionage, rather than their stated justification of "fighting terrorism"); they've undermined encryption technology - endangering the security of financial transactions; and they've compelled countless US based technology companies to violate the privacy of their own customers and to build backdoors into their products to enable NSA snooping.
 
In order to compress what they've been doing into a single paragraph, I've obviously left out a lot of the nefarious activities orchestrated by the NSA and carried out by their mercenary army of hundreds of thousands of private sector spooks and their Five Eyes collaborators. But even so, the above paragraph is more than enough to demonstrate that the security services in the US, and the other Five Eyes collaborator states, are running dangerously out of control.

The fact that the NSA and their Five Eyes collaborators feel entitled to trawl the Internet for whatever they can find, which is then stored in vast data centres and subjected to algorithmic analysis without the need for any kind of judicial warrant, demonstrates that something fundamental has changed in the relationship between the state and the citizen. Due process has been abandoned, and as far as the security services are concerned, we are all assumed to be guilty. They don't have to be able to show probable cause, they don't have to apply for a warrant from a judge, they just steal our data and use it as they see fit, with no democratic oversight at all over many of their data stealing operations.

The fact that the US state employs a staggering 850,000 NSA staff and private sector contractors to trawl this ocean of stolen data should be alarming to anyone with the brains to think through the logical implications of such a vast mercenary army. You would have to be a hopeless idealist to imagine that there are no "bad apples" at all amongst all these hundreds of thousands. If we assume that just 4% of them (one in every 25) are the kind of people that would use their access to enormous surveillance powers to do things like steal commercially confidential information to order, blackmail people, cyber stalk people, wage petty vendettas against old adversaries ... that would mean a rogue army of some 34,000 thieves, stalkers and blackmailers with access to the NSA's vast caches of stolen data and their extraordinary surveillance capabilities.

The fact that the NSA have been using their powers to engage in industrial espionage against various countries such as Germany, Russia, China and Brazil illustrates that "the few bad apples" narrative, although useful from an illustrative point of view, isn't actually the main concern. The main concern is that the NSA itself is corrupt to the core. Instead of using their powers to maintain the rule of law and to "fight terrorism" they're actually intent on using their unprecedented espionage capabilities in order to undermine global competition for the benefit of US based corporations.

One of the most worrying revelations is that the spy agencies have deliberately compromised the encryption technology used to keep our financial transactions safe, and that they have awarded themselves the power to hack into bank accounts anywhere in the world and simply erase money out of existence, or invent fictional transactions. They have undermined the integrity of the financial system in order to build themselves snooping capabilities that would have blown the minds of the East German Stasi or the Soviet KGB.

Perhaps the most damning element of all (from an American perspective) is the extraordinary amount of damage the NSA have done to the reputation of US technology companies, by compelling them to breech the privacy of their own customers and infecting their products with spyware. This trashing of the reputation of countless US based technology companies comes with an enormous price tag. It has been estimated that the reputational damage inflicted on US technology companies by their own government could amount to $180 billion, as millions of customers are turned off the idea of investing in buggy, insecure and spyware laden products from US companies.

If you add the estimated $180 billion in reputational damage to American companies to the staggering cost of running the NSA and employing an army of 850,000 spooks, the cost of this folly is absolutely enormous.

One of the worst things about having trashed the reputation of their own technology sector, is the fact that the technology sector is one of the few parts of the US economy that is healthy and productive. The US financial sector is a gigantic, virtually unregulated and desperately unstable hotbed of corruption and reckless gambling and US manufacturing power has been in decline since the neoliberals came to power in the 1980s and allowed short-term profiteers to asset strip US productivity. The US economy is in decline, but that decline has been offset by a remarkable period of exponential growth in the US technology sector. Any American with a reasonably comprehensive view of how their economy is structured must be absolutely aghast at the damage inflicted on the technology sector by the power crazed spooks that considered their mission to infect everything they could with spyware as far more important than the long term success of the US technology sector.

Not only does it look like the NSA's overreach is going to cost the US economy vastly more than any terrorist attack ever has, it also looks set to crush US ambition of controlling the Internet, as ever more people realise that the Americans can no longer be trusted to control the fundamental infrastructure of the Internet. Any non-US corporation with the slightest regard for data security is going to move away from reliance upon the US technology sector as soon as possible, and any nation that values its own industries is surely going to approve of efforts to wrest control of the Internet away from the US.

The sheer scale of NSA data theft is driving the development of new highly encrypted technology. It is only a matter of time before spook proof browsers and encrypted communications become commonplace, because there is an undeniable market demand for such things. The most terrible thing from a US perspective is that US technology companies will be completely cut off from entry into this new market because everyone is now aware of how the US intelligence agencies have forced US technology companies to infect their own products with spyware and invade the privacy of their own customers. Nobody is ever going to believe US technology companies when they give assurances about privacy, meaning that the next wave of secure communications technology is going to arise outside the US.

The NSA have been using their surveillance powers to engage in industrial espionage in order to benefit US corporations. This is a clear demonstration that they see it as their mission to help US corporations by fair means or foul. Given that this is one of their core objectives, the fact that they have inflicted such an extraordinary amount of damage on the most vibrant sector of the US economy must go down as one of the most spectacular own goals in history. They built a vast data stealing operation in order to help US corporations, but in doing so inflicted more damage on the US economy than Osama Bin Laden could ever have dreamed of.

The NSA have used their scaremongering narratives about the threat of terrorism to justify the slaughter of their own golden goose, yet they would have us believe that they are not responsible. They would have everyone believe that Edward Snowden is the guilty party; that he alone is responsible for the damage to the US technology sector. But their case is a ludicrous one. There is clearly something dreadfully wrong with the way things are set up if just one man (out of some 850,000 spooks) can single handedly wipe an estimated $180 billion off the value of the US technology sector simply by telling the truth.
 Another Angry Voice  is a not-for-profit page which generates absolutely no revenue from advertising and accepts no money from corporate or political interests. The only source of revenue for  Another Angry Voice  is the  PayPal  donations box (which can be found in the right hand column, fairly near the top of the page). If you could afford to make a donation to help keep this site going, it would be massively appreciated.

MORE ARTICLES FROM
 ANOTHER ANGRY VOICE 
           
What is ... a Justification Narrative?
  
The Tory "War on Justice"
   
Secret Courts and the very Illiberal Democrats
                        
David Cameron's witch hunt against truth and openness                         
The forgotten victims of 9/11
                  
What is... Neoliberalism?
                
The "golden hammer" of neoliberalism
             

The contrasting fates of Alan Turing and Lord Sempill

          
How David Cameron's internet firewall would change the Internet
                 
Libeling the evidence, the Iain Duncan Smith fallacy
  

Hidden Inflation explained

One of the things that really annoys me is hearing Coalition ministers bragging on about how successful they have been in "keeping inflation low". One particularly egregious example came from the Tory party Minister for Police and Criminal Justice, Damian Green. He cited "keeping inflation low" as one of the "key successes" of the Coalition government during an excruciating performance on Question Time, in which he didn't just limit himself to misleading claims about inflation, he also used plenty of fallacious justification narratives and put in a rapid fire bout of outright lying for good measure.

Damian Green's claims about "keeping inflation low" contradict the everyday experience of millions of people who have experienced huge above inflation rises in almost every area of spending, including: petrol prices, public transport fares, supermarket shopping, electricity and gas, water rates, private rented accommodation and child care. The average person has witnessed above inflation rises in almost every aspect of their lives.

Pretty much everyone that has had to live on a tight budget for the last three years is well aware that prices have been soaring and that it is ever more difficult to make ends meet. The contrast between people's very real experiences of rising prices and the official inflation measures which consistently tell us that inflation is actually very low leave us with several questions:

If the cost of almost everything is rising above the official rate of inflation, how can the official rate of inflation be accurate? And if it isn't measuring everyday spending, then what is it measuring?

I believe that the official inflation statistics are both inaccurate and presented to the public in a desperately misleading way. Here are just a few examples of how the real scale of inflation is been hidden via "innovative" industry practices and through the misleading way that inflation is actually measured and reported.

Product debasement 

The use of Romanian horse meat in various supposedly beef based processed foods during the 2013 horse meat contamination scandal is not the only example of food manufacturers using cheaper alternative ingredients. Another particularly disgusting ingredient found in processed food is mechanically recovered meat. It is an obvious consequence that at a time of falling consumer spending (caused by Osborne's ideological austerity experiment) the easiest way to keep profit margins high is to debase the standard of the product rather than to try to charge the cash strapped consumer more money that they simply cannot afford.

Size reduction

Some supermarkets have taken to the con-trick of reducing the net weight of products such as tinned fish, shampoo and toothpaste without reducing the sale price. Many customers would fail to notice that the product they usually buy has been reduced from 568ml to 500ml, hence the increased cost of the product is hidden from customer perception. What makes it even worse is that the price of the product is invariably raised later on in the year too.

RPI and CPI 

There are two key measures of inflation in the UK: The Retail Price Index (RPI) and the Consumer Price Index (CPI). CPI is almost always lower than RPI, this leads to the situation that the government tend to take money from us based on the higher RPI measure (student loans), but when it is distributing money, (pensions and other benefits) it often uses the lower CPI instead.

Excluding housing costs from calculations

The reason that CPI is almost invariably lower than RPI is that the CPI calculations exclude things like housing costs. A 2012 Home Let Index showed that rents have risen an average of 6% across London in the last year, 16% in the last two and 32% since 2009. If these inflationary factors are excluded from the calculations, then it is totally obvious that the official inflation stats will be distorted downwards and fail to reflect the actual significantly higher rises in the cost of living experienced by millions of people.

Duking the stats

The US based website Shadowstats claims that changes to the way inflation indices are calculated have massively depressed the numbers. According to them; if CPI was calculated the way it was in 1990 inflation would currently be almost 6%, while the 1980 method would shown CPI at almost 10%. It would be naive to assume that similar techniques have not been used to depress the official inflation rate in the UK too.

There was a lot of pre-election rhetoric about resolving this large disparity between the two inflation indices. The 2010 Coalition agreement stated that "We will work with the Bank of England to investigate how the process of including housing costs in the CPI measure of inflation can be accelerated". 

Well instead of doing that, they've changed track completely (yet another Tory U-turn!) and they are now determined to manipulate the RPI measure downwards instead by replacing it with a new lower measure called RPIJ, which, according to the BBC website will "be promoted each month, with the old RPI measure being given much less publicity."

Inclusion of high-tech items in calculations 

In 2011 the president of the New York Federal Reserve, William Dudley stated that while food and energy prices had indeed gone up, other prices had fallen. He cited this now infamous example "Today you can buy an iPad 2 that costs the same as an iPad 1 that is twice as powerful". His justification for the production of misleading inflation statistics was not well received. Some jokers echoed Marie Antoinette by referring to his statement as the "Let them eat iPads" speech.

The graph on the right demonstrating the exponential decline in memory storage costs gives an indication of why the inclusion of high tech equipment in the "basket of products" used to calculate inflation tends to distort the figures downwards.

If we consider the fact that the majority of poor households spend little or nothing on high tech equipment, in light of this high tech effect, it becomes obvious that poorer households must be experiencing higher levels of inflation than wealthier ones. Once again the poorest and most vulnerable people are hit the hardest, whilst the official government stats create a rosy picture of relatively low inflation.

Misuse of crude statistics

Probably the single most important issue to consider is the way that inflation is actually described. Whenever we hear the inflation rate in crude terms it is very easy indeed to fall into the trap of judging the percentage number in isolation. It is absolutely impossible for anyone that lived during the Thatcher government to forget the absurd inflationary spikes in the early 1980s and again towards the end of her regime in 1990. 

When we hear the media report that the CPI rate of inflation is 3.1% it is easy to imagine that this is low, when we compare it in a crude manner with the 21.9% rate of CPI inflation in May 1980.

The problem is that considering these numbers in isolation, without reference to the underlying market conditions creates the misleading impression that inflation in 1980 was many times worse than it is now.

In order to demonstrate how crude comparisons like this can create hugely distorted perceptions, lets consider the UK national debt in crude terms (in £billions rather than as a percentage of GDP). In 1947 the UK national debt stood at £25.63 billion but by 1979 it had risen to £86.88 billion. Judging from these figures alone, the financially naive individual could hardly be blamed for thinking that the UK debt had spiraled out of control during the mixed economy era.

If these figures are adjusted to take into account the actual size of the economy at the time, a remarkably different, and much more accurate meaning can be gleaned from the comparison. Back in 1947 the £25.63 billion figure was equivalent to 237% of the entire economic output of the UK (GDP) and the £86.88 billion figure from 1979 represented just 43.6% of GDP. The reality was that between 1947 and 1979 the UK managed an unprecedented reduction in the size of the public debt. 

Inflation to interest ratio
 
I believe that the previous example clearly demonstrates the absurdly counter-factual conclusions that can be drawn from considering crude economic statistics in isolation. I believe that the best way to put inflation statistics into real context is by considering their relationship to the central bank interest rate (the Inflation to Interest ratio). I believe this is a good measure because it highlights the relationship between rises in the cost of living with rises in the value of assets such as savings, pensions and wages, which are heavily influence by the underlying interest rate.

Let's return to the huge 21.9% inflation spike of May 1980 when Geoffrey Howe was the Chancellor. If we compare this enormous figure with the Bank of England interest rate, which was 17.0% at the time, we get an inflation to interest ratio of 128%, meaning that prices were rising 28% faster than the central bank lending rate. If we look at the next spike that occurred in September 1990 when John Major was chancellor, the inflation rate was 10.9% but the BoE interest rate was actually higher at 14.875% providing an inflation to interest ratio of just 73.3% meaning that prices were actually falling in comparison to the central bank interest rate.

Now lets move into the present era of Osborne's ideological austerity experiment, quantitative easing and the zero lower bound. Pretty much anyone that doesn't blank out the economics news entirely from their worldview must be aware that the Bank of England interest rate has been held at an all time historic low of just 0.5% for almost five years since March 2009.

The latest official inflation date from December 2012 puts CPI inflation at a seemingly low 3.1%, however, the super-low BoE interest rate of 0.5% leaves us with a Inflation to Interest ratio of 620%. This shows us that in real terms a 3.1% rate of inflation in the current low-interest economic climate is actually significantly worse than Geoffrey Howe's 21.9% inflation spike in 1980, which was mitigated by the high interest rates.




If we look back to October 2011 the Inflation to Interest ratio was even worse, the rate of CPI inflation was 5.1%, creating an I-I ratio of an astonishing 1020%, meaning prices were rising 920% faster than the central bank interest rate, a figure that absolutely dwarfs Geoffrey Howe's 28%.

Wage to inflation ratio 

Another useful comparison can be made between inflation and the average wage rise. This gives us important information about how price increases relate to increases in wages. If we look at the graph to the right we can see that before the economic crisis the monthly wage rise in October of each year generally remained slightly higher than the rate of inflation. The trend was reversed after the global financial sector meltdown of 2007-08 and since George Osborne took over at 11 Downing Street the deficit between wage rises and inflation has soared. In October 2011 when CPI inflation peaked at 5.1%, wages rises lagged far behind at just 2.1% meaning that the average wage rise was just 41.2% of the average rise in prices. For every extra £1.00 in wages above the previous year, prices had gone up by £2.43.

Analysis of the monthly Wage to Inflation ratio shows us that monthly wage rises have not surpassed the rate of inflation since the last months of the Labour administration, the very last month of a positive ratio was March 2010 when wages rose 4.9% on the previous year, whilst inflation had risen 4.4%, meaning that for every extra £1.00 in income prices had risen by just 90p.
 
Ever since the Tories got into power in May 2010 inflation has massively outstripped average monthly wage rises every single month. The very best month they managed was August 2012 (just after the Olympics) when the average wage rose by 2.3% and inflation rose 2.9%, meaning that for every extra £1.00 in earnings, prices rose by £1.26.

The normal range under this government has been monthly price increases of between £1.50 - £2.50 for every extra £1.00 in wages, however the worst month so far under Tory rule was March 2012 when prices rose a mind-boggling £36.00 on the previous year for every extra £1.00 in wages!

Conclusion

Hopefully this article has inspired you to think a little more about the prices we pay for things and the way that crude inflation statistics are misused by politicians and the press to create a ridiculously over-positive interpretation of the economic climate.

Perhaps you'll notice next time your usual brand of tinned sweetcorn or toothpaste suddenly shrinks a bit without the price falling accordingly, and perhaps next time you hear someone talking about inflation rates in crude, non-comparative terms, you'll have a little think about how an apparently low number like 2%, is actually a very high number if interest rates are at 0.5% or the monthly increase in earnings over the previous year is just 0.1% or perhaps even in negative territory.

Please feel free to leave me a message in the comments section below and let me know if you think there are any other aspects of "hidden inflation" that are worth a mention.  
 

Read more articles in the "What is...." series

 Another Angry Voice  is a not-for-profit page which generates absolutely no revenue from advertising and accepts no money from corporate or political interests. The only source of revenue for  Another Angry Voice  is the  PayPal  donations box (which can be found in the right hand column, fairly near the top of the page). If you could afford to make a donation to help keep this site going, it would be massively appreciated.

More articles from
ANOTHER ANGRY VOICE

Tory economic illiteracy
 
Damian Green; an egregious public liar

An entirely avoidable "Osbornomic" recession  
  
David Cameron's Debt reduction lie
 
Gaming the Work Programme

Iain Duncan Smith's callous disrespect for the dead

A Coalition of Lying Thieving Bastards

The contrasting fates of Alan Turing and Lord Sempill

Alan Turing, genius and war hero.

Most British people have heard of Alan Turing. You would have to have studiously avoided learning about the the history of Second World War, computer science, codebraking and gay rights issues in order to have remained ignorant of one of the greatest mathematical minds of the 20th Century and his extraordinary contribution to the British war effort. Fewer people have heard of William Forbes-Sempill, 19th Lord Sempill, yet his influence on the British war effort was no less dramatic.

Alan Turing was born in London to Julius Mathison Turing, a recently returned Indian civil servant and Ethel Sara Stoney, the daughter of a noted railway engineer. As a child he attended private schools, eventually earning a place at Cambridge University where he graduated with a first class honours degree in Mathematics. Turing managed to thrive at establishment institutions like Sherbourne and Cambridge University because of his intelligence, however he was treated with suspicion by the establishment elite due to his non-aristocratic background, eccentric nature, intimidating genius and his homosexual tendencies.

After obtaining a Phd from the prestigious Princeton University in New Jersey he returned to the UK to work with the secret Government Code and Cypher School (GCCS) intelligence service where he concentrated on cryptanalysis of the German Enigma code. During the Second World War Turing was an important figure at the Bletchley Park codebreaking facility where he made many invaluable contributions to the deciphering of complex German military codes. He was described by fellow codebreaker Asa Briggs "the genius" that Bletchley Park needed.

It has been estimated that the work of Turing and his colleagues at Bletchley Park shortened the war by between two and four years, and that without their contributions the outcome of the war would have been uncertain. Turing didn't only make a significant contribution to the British war effort, he also did pioneering work in computing and is widely considered to be the father of computer science and artificial intelligence.

William Forbes-Sempill was the Eton educated son of John Forbes-Sempill, 9th Baronet of Craigievar and hereditary member of the House of Lords. During the First World War the younger Sempill served as a pilot with the Royal Flying Corps and then with the Royal Navy Air Service. He was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for his service during the war.

Captain Sempill showing a Gloster Sparrowhawk
to Admiral Togo Heihachiro, in 1921.

In the aftermath of the war he led a British Deputation to Japan where he assisted the Japanese navy in setting up an airforce base and establishing their aircraft carrier fleet. Sempill received a personal letter from the Japanese Prime Minister Tomosaburo Kato thanking him for his work with the Japanese navy, in which his contribution was described as "almost epoch-making" and he later received Japan's highest honour, the Order of the Rising Sun, for his especially meritorious military service.

After American concerns were raised about the growing naval strength of the Japanese, Sempill's mission in Japan was officially discontinued. However Sempill carried on providing support to the Japanese by passing classified military and technical information to Japanese Naval attache in London, Captain Teijiro Toyoda. In 1925 he was questioned about his distribution of official secrets, but for undisclosed reasons he was never prosecuted under the official secrets act.

By the 1930s Sempill was an active member of several far-right, fascist and Anti-Semitic organisations including the Anglo-German Fellowship, The Link and Archibald Ramsay's The Right Club, (which was a secretive organisation with the aim of ridding the Tory party of Jews). Sempill was far from the only member of the British establishment elite to embrace the fascist ideology. The founder of the British Union of Fascists was Sir Oswald Mosley, 6th Baronet, of Ancoats, whose fascist activities received a lot of positive press from the 1st Viscount Rothsmere's Daily Mail newspaper. 

The British Union of Fascists counted dozens of Knights, Earls, Dukes, Barons, Lords, Ladies and Viscounts amongst its members. The Royal family, who were at the very epicentre centre of this orgy of hereditary entitlement and establishment ennoblement, also had a number of keen fascists, Edward VIII maintained notoriously close relations with Nazi Germany, causing their arms industry minister Albert Speer to lament that "I am certain that through him, permanent friendly relations could have been achieved. If he had stayed, everything would have been different. His abdication was a severe loss for us.". The Queen mother famously stated that she would have been happy for the Nazis to invade the UK, as long as they kept the Royal family.

Most of the intelligence files on Sempill's activities during the 1930s and 1940s mysteriously "disappeared" from the national archive, however it is known that he continued to receive regular payments from the Japanese government owned Mitsubishi Corporation and entertained several high ranking Nazis throughout the period.

Despite his track record of passing classified information to foreign powers and his fascist tendencies, Sempill was assigned to the Admiralty in 1939 on the outbreak of war with Nazi Germany. His position allowed him access to highly sensitive information about the latest British military hardware and official secrets. In June 1940 MI5 discovered that Sempill was still receiving payments from Mitsubishi, and an investigation revealed that he was almost certainly passing secret information to the Japanese. However the Attorney General (Lord Donald Somervell, Baron Somervell of Harrow) advised against prosecution, and Sempill was allowed to keep his position in the Admiralty and his access to sensitive information. In 1941 Sempill personally intervened to secure the release of the Japanese ambassador Makahara, who had been arrested under suspicion of spying.

Six months after the August 1941 Newfoundland Conference meeting between British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and the U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the Japanese Embassy in London sent detailed notes about the meeting back to Tokyo. These encrypted notes were intercepted and decoded at Bletchley Park and the transcript was passed to Churchill, who noted that they were "very accurate", Three months later, further notes on Churchill's personal agenda and inner circle were intercepted on their way from Japanese Embassy in London to Tokyo. An investigation by Anthony Eden concluded that only two men could have created the notes: Commander McGrath or Lord Sempill.

The British Prime Minister Winston Churchill intervened
to protect Lord Sempill despite a mountain of
 evidence the he'd been spying for the Japanese.

On 9 October 1941 Churchill gave instructions to "clear him out while time remains." The following week the Admiralty confronted Sempill and told him he could either resign or be fired. Sempill protested, and Churchill intervened to say "I had not contemplated Lord Sempill being required to resign his commission, but only to be employed elsewhere in the Admiralty." Sempill was then shifted to a post in northern Scotland, However he continued to assist the Japanese. In Early December a raid on his office found him in possession of classified documents that he had been instructed to return months previously. Then around a week later he was caught making phone calls to the Japanese (more than a week after the Japanese invasion of British Malaya and their attack on Pearl Harbour). Sempill was made to resign, but he was never prosecuted for his treasonous relationship with the Japanese that did so much to help them to develop the technology they used to kill thousands of British and American servicemen during the Pacific War.

Sempill's activities were never made public during his lifetime and he continued to live the life of establishment nobility, keeping his position in the House of Lords that he had inherited from his father, and he was even given the chairmanships of the Institute of Advanced Motorists and the British Gliding Association.

Sempill died peacefully in 1956 having never faced punishment or public criticism for his crimes. His hereditary seat in the Lords passed to his daughter Ann, and his Baronetry to his younger brother Ewan. It was only in 2002 that the scale of his treachery and his fascist and Anti-Semitic tendencies came to light after classified documents about his activities were finally released into the public domain.

All of the vital codebreaking activities that took place at Bletchley Park
remained shrouded in secrecy until well into the 1970s.

Returning to Alan Turing; he had a much harder time after the end of the war. All of his codebreaking work was classified by the government so he could never talk about his great contribution to the war effort.

Turing continued his work with computers, famously devising the Turing Test as a means of determining whether computer has achieved artificial intelligence, a test that remains an essential concept in the philosophy of artificial intelligence. He also developed the LU Decomposition method (complex algebra) and did pioneering work in the field of morphogenesis, (which is the study of how biological organisms develop their shape).

In 1952 Turing was charged with the "crime" of gross Indecency after admitting to having had a homosexual relationship with a man who later robbed his house. He was found guilty and given the choice of imprisonment or chemical castration. This conviction meant that his security clearance was revoked, which meant that he was barred from continuing his cryptographic work with the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ).

Turing chose to be chemically castrated rather than face imprisonment.

On the 8th of June 1954 Turing was found dead by his cleaner. A post mortem examination determined that the cause of death was cyanide poisoning, however no forensic examination of the property took place, and his death was officially attributed to suicide.

 Many people including his mother refused to accept the suicide verdict. The ambiguous circumstances of his death and the lack of a thorough investigation mean that nobody will ever know whether his death was intentional suicide, accidental poisoning or by means of foul play.

Turing's brilliance was not recognised until years after his death. In 1966 the Turing Award was established to for technical contributions to the computing community. It is widely considered to be the computing world's highest honour, equivalent to a Nobel Prize in computing. It took until 2009 for the British establishment to made an official public apology, which was made by Prime Minister Gordon Brown on behalf of the British government for the way in which Turing was treated after the war.

The similarity between the two men lies in the way the war conduct of both of them remained shrouded in secrecy until long after their deaths. Sempill was never exposed as the traitor he was, and it seems that somebody intervened to ensure that many presumably incriminating files from the 1930s and 1940s "disappeared", never to reach the public domain at all. Meanwhile, all the hugely important work undertaken at Bletchley Park remained secret until the 1970s, meaning that Turing's outstanding contribution to the war effort was not recognised until long after his death.

In the UK, living in a castle like this seems to
provide immunity from prosecution for treason.

Had the public been allowed to know about the codebreaking work at Bletchley Park, Winston Churcill's famous speech about the valiant fighter pilots during the Battle of Britain could easily have been made about the codebreakers too; "Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few".

What is remarkable about the contrasting fates of these two men is the way that members of the British establishment (including the Prime Minister and the Attorney General) repeatedly intervened to protect one of their own, despite his fascist tendencies and decades of treasonous behavior, whilst the establishment people Turing had known and associated with during his time at Cambridge University and at Bletchley Park refused to intervene to help him when criminal charges were brought against him for the trivial offence of engaging in homosexual acts, despite his outstanding contribution to the war effort.

It seems amazing that British nobility, including the Prime Minister, would repeatedly intervene to ensure that another member of their privileged class avoided prosecution for the incredibly serious crime of passing official secrets to foreign powers at a time of war, yet wouldn't do anything to lean on prosecutors to drop the charges against a war hero and genius who happened to have been born into the "lower social orders".

The British nobility turned a blind eye the most heinous of crimes (espionage, treason, fraternising with the enemy, Anti-Semitism)  because it was one of their own class doing it, yet they refused to intervene to prevent a true war hero from suffering homosexual prosecution and chemical castration, simply because he was not one of the upper classes.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.