The Fear Index

like the wing-beat of great birds high in the air? That is the fear of naked men. That is the flight of naked men.”’
    He stopped. He looked around at the upturned faces of his clients. Several had their mouths open, like baby birds hoping for food. His own mouth felt dry. ‘Those are not my words. They’re the words of an Inuit holy man, quoted by Elias Canetti in Crowds and Power : when I was designing VIXAL-4 I used them as a screensaver. Can I have some water, Hugo?’ Quarry leaned over and passed him a bottle of Evian and a glass. Hoffmann ignored the glass, unscrewed the plastic cap and drank straight from the bottle. He didn’t know what effect he was having on his audience. He didn’t much care. He wiped his mouth on the back of his hand.
    ‘Around 350 BC, Aristotle defined human beings as “ zoon logon echon ” – “the rational animal” or, more accurately, “the animal that has language”. Language, above all, is what distinguishes us from the other creatures on the planet. The development of language freed us from a world of physical objects and substituted a universe of symbols. The lower animals may also communicate with one another in a primitive way, and may even be taught the meaning of a few of our human symbols – a dog can learn to understand “sit” or “come”, for example. But for perhaps forty thousand years only humans were zoon logon echon : the animal with language. Now, for the first time, that is no longer true. We share our world with computers.
    ‘Computers …’ Hoffmann gestured towards the trading floor with his bottle, slopping water across the table. ‘It used to be the case that we imagined that computers – robots – would take over the menial work in our lives, that they would put on aprons and run around and be our robot maids, doing the housework or whatever, leaving us free to enjoy our leisure. In fact, the reverse is happening. We have plenty of spare, unintelligent human capacity to do those simple, menial jobs, often for very long hours and poor pay. Instead, the humans that computers are replacing are members of the educated classes: translators, medical technicians, legal clerks, accountants, financial traders.
    ‘Computers are increasingly reliable translators in the sectors of commerce and technology. In medicine they can listen to a patient’s symptoms and are diagnosing illnesses and even prescribing treatment. In the law they search and evaluate vast amounts of complex documents at a fraction of the cost of legal analysts. Speech recognition enables algorithms to extract the meaning from the spoken as well as the written word. News bulletins can be analysed in real time.
    ‘When Hugo and I started this fund, the data we used was entirely digitalised financial statistics: there was almost nothing else. But over the past couple of years a whole new galaxy of information has come within our reach. Pretty soon all the information in the world – every tiny scrap of knowledge that humans possess, every little thought we’ve ever had that’s been considered worth preserving over thousands of years – all of it will be available digitally. Every road on earth has been mapped. Every building photographed. Everywhere we humans go, whatever we buy, whatever websites we look at, we leave a digital trail as clear as slug-slime. And this data can be read, searched and analysed by computers and value extracted from it in ways we cannot even begin to conceive.
    ‘Most people are barely aware of what has happened. Why would they be? If you leave this building and go along the street, everything looks pretty much as it’s always looked. A guy from a hundred years ago could walk around this part of Geneva and still feel at home. But behind the physical facade – behind the stone and the brick and the glass – the world has distorted, buckled, shrunk, as if the planet has passed into another dimension. I’ll give you a tiny example. In 2007, the British government lost the records of twenty-five million people – their tax codes, their bank account details, their addresses, their dates of birth. But it wasn’t a couple of trucks they lost: it was just two CDs. And that’s nothing. Google will one day digitalise every book ever published. No need for a library any more. All you’ll need is a screen you can hold in your hand.
    ‘But here’s the thing. Human beings still read at the same speed as Aristotle did. The average American college