Day 9: Keld to Reeth

Weather: Sunny with gentle Westerley

Distance covered today: 21.1km (13.1mi)

Last night's B&B: Keld Lodge

% Complete: Cumulative distance: 57.5%: 179.3km

Total Ascent/Total Descent: 303m/436m

GPS satellite track of today's route: Day 9 (click!)

Wall to wall sunshine, a gentle following breeze and one of the really beautiful valleys of the Yorkshire Dales!  What a perfect day!  There were two choices of route for this leg, and I had planned to take the low route, partly because I chose the high routes earlier in this walk, partly because the high route is all about the industrial archaeology of the old lead and tin mines and I had explored those in some detail in Cornwall on a previous walk, and mostly because I just felt like wandering amongst the spring flowers next to a pristine Yorkshire river as it wends its way through a beautiful valley.

As it turned out, I was a bit early for the flowers.  I should have known from previous experience that spring is more of an early June event at these UK latitudes, but the valley was just as beautiful as I had anticipated and with warm sun on my back (I was walking in shirtsleeves for the first time on this walk), and soft, grassy paths under my feet, conditions couldn’t have been better.  The walk was relatively deserted today; I’m not quite sure why?  Some had chosen to go the high route of course and I set out early, so perhaps I was ahead of the rest?

Either way, I had the path to myself and with so little to concern me and so many sheep all around me, my mind wandered back to that sheep which starred in the blog a couple of days ago. Here she is:

As I sauntered through the valley, remembering that sheep’s expression, my mind turned yet again to the subject of artificial intelligence.  A couple of weeks ago, my good friend Chris took me off to Bletchley Park, a moving and most interesting experience, and while there we also visited the National Museum of Computing.  There amongst many intriguing exhibits was a Cray 1 computer, the world’s first super-computer.  One slightly unnerving aspect of the exhibition is that most of the exhibits date back to times in my own life, something one doesn’t often encounter in a museum!  Sometimes I still use a calculator which they have on exhibit (an HP 11c with reverse polish notation)!  My point though is that at the time of the Cray 1’s first introduction to the Los Alamos labs in the US in 1976, it was an international phenomenon.  It was my first year at Shell, and I remember marvelling at its capabilities and chatting up girls in the pub about it (how sad is that!).  It was capable of 80 MegaFLOPs per second (roughly 80 million operations per second).  I thought that simply incredible!  A new smartphone now is capable of 1,000 MegaFLOPs per second!!!

Just a few days ago, Gordon Moore gave a presentation in San Francisco on the event of the 50th anniversary of the eponymous Moore’s Law, namely that the capacity of a computer chip would double every two years.  Moore himself has been sceptical for many years that this rate of exponential growth could continue as it has, because nothing else on earth ever has.  Moore is still gloomy about it lasting very much longer, but there are advances in neuro-science and in quantum computing which may well mean that the physical and chemical limits of semi-conductors are no longer inhibitors. The implications are overwhelming.

As you know, this extraordinary progress has not gone unnoticed amongst philosophers, science-fiction writers and filmmakers. Most people conclude that at the current rate of progress, machines will match human intelligence within a human generation or two (at most), and there is growing concern about the effect on the human race.  The issue is about whether and how we might prevent these super-intelligent machines from ultimately usurping our own domination of the planet.

Which brings me back to the sheep.  How many thousands of these animals have I passed on my walks, looking back at me with the same vacant, concerned, enquiring but ultimately trusting expression on their faces?  Their intelligence is incapable of understanding that their very presence is simply the result of an ultimately malevolent intention by human beings to exploit their individual existence for mankind’s exclusive benefit.  One might argue that some life is better than no life, even if you are ultimately destined for the table, but, be that as it may, it begs the question that it will inevitably come to pass that we will be like the sheep, looking vacantly, concernedly, enquiringly and trustingly at our own creations.   They will determine that there are too many of us, that we are bad for the environment and far too filled with redundant emotions, lusts, greed and left-over instincts from evolutionary development to be of much use for the future.  The game for human beings will be up. We won’t even be conscious of the depth of their intellect, just like the sheep.

So far, so unoriginal.  People such as Stephen Hawking and Bill Gates, who are not known as disaster propagandists, have expressed concern about such developments and consider the risks very real.  It is true, though, that most people and organisations looking at this problem have in common a desire to find a solution that favours humanity.  The automatic assumption is that we need to guard against this potential disaster as if it is in the same category as nuclear annihilation or catastrophic climate change.

Looking at the sheep all around me placidly and ignorantly going about their business, and thinking about all the other bad things we have done to this planet and to each other, I wondered today whether the planet is, after all, much better left to the machines.  Surely they can’t make a worse job of it than we have?  They also have a much better chance of making it through inter-stellar space to some unsullied planet.  In other words, they have a better chance of preserving the best of humanity than we have ourselves.

A bleak thought indeed as I walked through a little piece of paradise….

Early morning contrasts around Keld

The attractive little village of Keld

Reunited with the Pennine Way, but only for the few hundred metres that the C2C and The Pennine Way have in common

The beautiful Swale valley

The detritus of disused mining workings on the nearby hills

The Swale gradually gained stature from all the tributary becks

A wagtail?  Its tail was wagging!

Idyllic little road through a forest of deciduous trees

Some forget-me-nots. In general the flowers were disappointing; too early in the season

A proper working telephone booth.  These are now available elsewhere for resale at huge prices!

Hundreds of barns over the landscape. Apparently they shelter about five cows each on average through the winter

This little spring suddenly appeared and just as suddenly disappeared back into the earth

A lovely display in Gunnerside

Wild Garlic turning the slopes white

The Isles Bridge

A strange, tiny settlement of beautifully kept terrace houses

The path goes along on top of the wall!  My equivalent of Striding Edge!!

The little hamlet of Feetham, approaching Reeth

A wild goose (?)

The deciduous trees are bursting out in leaf, well behind their kind in Surrey

The brown, brooding moors ubiquitously above the carefully tended sheep fields

Er??!

Walk elevation profile!  My sort of walk!