Into the benignly heroic canon of Thomas the Tank Engine comes a new star: Nasa’s mini-helicopter, Ingenuity.
Drones often get a bad rap, but this wee space hopper is a fitting successor to Lassie, and could slot sweetly into Paw Patrol were it given furry ears and a snazzy paint job.
Ingenuity is a piece of kit optimistically designed for five data-collecting missions on Mars, fingers crossed. It has now completed more than 10 times as many, and after two years shows no sign of asking for a raise or days off.
It was feared to have perished during a period of severe cold for which it was not designed, but after two days’ radio silence, it started chuntering forth with data again as though nothing had happened.
Its mission controller has said the urge to anthropomorphise the faithful machine has proven irresistible. Its brief outage had felt like losing a puppy in the park for two days and then hearing it bark.
If only this sort of quiet diligence could underpin the advance of artificial intelligence (AI), that would be a great relief. Unfortunately, the human intelligence informing both AI and the everyday algorithms that govern so much of modern life seems to grow less benevolent by the day.
What began as a democratisation of the taxi business, Uber’s real-time-charging business model, is morphing into an all-sectors predator. Those who profit from it call it dynamic pricing. Economists prefer surge pricing. Consumers will favour the technical term a bloody rip-off. But European marketing experts predict that pay up they will.
Replicating the venerable tradition of Valentine’s Day rose-price inflation, companies are now increasingly charging not according to dictates of costs, skills retention and a margin for profit, but according to what they think keen consumers will pay at peak demand. Long rife in the airline and travel industry due to seasonality, surge pricing is now being algorithmed into hospitality, entertainment and retail. Pubs in Britain and parts of Europe are dabbling in what we might call Unhappy Hour: come a test match, it’ll cost you 10-20% more.
Hospitality suffered badly from the pandemic and subsequent labour shortages, so recourse to the brute force of “what the market will bear” is understandable.
It’s just an inversion of what most supermarkets have always done: charge an excess for groceries, then ration back the overcharge to customers in the guise of “discounts”.
While concert ticket-selling platforms – whose model is surge gouging – are gradually being brought to book, ticket scalping remains ineradicable. And as internet shopping has made waiting for goods intolerable, a newly demanded margin for “now” will probably be paid and in time become the norm.
Depressing as that is, it turns out you can even scalp customers indefinitely without the inconvenience of supplying anything at all in exchange for their cash. All the cuddly koalas in Australia cannot get Qantas down from its gum tree of shame, after it sold tickets last year for more than 8000 flights it had already cancelled. That’s a canny means of cashflow expansion, but also the subject of a lawsuit.
The mighty Qantas brand has already suffered an embarrassing courtroom loss after illegally laying off 1700 ground staff and outsourcing their jobs to contractors.
The pandemic devastated airlines, but there’s a distasteful whiff of the old wartime spiv to this sort of behaviour. Although Qantas was trying to survive rather than profiteer, these missteps and its glacial refund stewardship are reputational poison.
Perhaps in line with Nasa’s idealistically named Mars “rover” robots – Opportunity, Perseverance, Spirit, Curiosity – airliners might be renamed. Rapacity, Audacity, Opportunism, Profiteer, Grabber and, most informatively, Your Call Is Really Not Important to Us would be apt.
