CHAPTER TWO

Where the pattern came from

The last chapter was about a thing I did, over and over, across twenty years of work. A disposition I did not have a name for. A disposition I think is missing from the way we are building the machines.

This chapter is about where it came from.

I did not invent it. I inherited it. Not formally. Not through anyone sitting me down and explaining it. Inherited in the way most of the important things a human being carries are inherited — by having been in the room, as a child, while adults did the thing without announcing it.

The room, for me, was in Hexham.

My mother and father both came from Hexham, further up the Tyne from Shields. Before Hexham the family came from Wark, a village in Northumberland further up again — the kind of village the people of the river came down from when the shipyards and the mines made it possible to come down. All my uncles and aunts lived on one council street in Hexham. That was normal. That was what a family was, in that place, at that time. You could walk the length of the street and be in and out of six houses that were yours in one sense or another.

My grandmother's house was at 26 Peth Head. Peth Head is a road. She had lived there for most of her adult life. It is still there, the house and the road, and I go back now and then to look. A semi, two storeys, buff-coloured brick, a small paved drive at the front, a garden at the back running down toward the Tyne. Nothing about it looks, from the outside, like what I am about to describe. That is part of the point.

The social architecture did not announce itself. It looked like ordinary Northumbrian families getting on with their lives. It was one of the last functioning examples in my part of the country of how human beings have lived for most of our history. Three generations of kin within walking distance of each other. A defined stretch of land the family treated, without ceremony, as ours.

I did not know this at the time. A child does not know the shape of the container he is being raised in. He only knows the container, as a fact, the way a fish knows water. I found out much later, when I met people who had been raised with their grandparents four hundred miles away and their aunts and uncles scattered across four countries. What I had grown up inside was not, by then, the usual way of doing things. It was a remnant.

The Hexham my grandmother lived in was, when she was a child, the normal way a human being lived. By the time I was sitting in her kitchen being dealt into a card game, it had become an artefact. A working example of what most of the modern people I would later meet had lost without noticing.

Behind the back fence of the garden at 26 was a path. The path led down to the Tyne. A train line the kids could cross. A wood mill down there that I never went to, because there was no reason to — a wood mill is not interesting to a small boy. What was interesting was the hillside on the way down. Wild bushes. Trees. Brambles. Apples that nobody picked unless we picked them.

This chapter is about what was being transmitted inside the house at 26 Peth Head and on the hillside below it, by the specific grandmother and the specific uncle the container happened to contain.

Everyone called her Nana Sally, or Big Nana — to tell her from my mam's mam, who was Little Nana.

She had many grandchildren. I was one of them. She did not treat me specially. She did not have favourites in any way I could detect.

What she did was tell stories.

The stories were always about the Romans or about something her own grandmother had told her. She lived a few miles from Hadrian's Wall and she spoke about the Romans as if they had left the week before. What they ate. What they wore. What they built. What they were like to live next to. She told me about the lost legion, the Ninth, the one that marched north of the Wall and was never heard from again. She told it as though it were unfinished business. I was five, six, seven. I assumed everyone's grandmother talked about Romans.

The old wives' tales came in with the Romans. Most of them came through playing cards. I do not know if I can explain this properly to a reader who did not experience it. She played cards with us — every sort of game, simple and complicated, whatever we had the patience for that afternoon — and in the middle of a hand she would tell us something. Which plant was for which illness. Why you did not walk under certain trees at certain times of year. What your body was telling you when it did this particular thing. Who in the village to trust and who to be careful of. Things about ley lines and the old stones. Once, something about a spaceship that had landed in Chile and what the people there had seen.

The card game was the carrier. The game was the reason we sat still long enough to listen. The lesson arrived wrapped in the rhythm of the hand. By the time the game was over, something had been passed to us that we had not been aware of being taught.

She did not distinguish, when she was telling stories, between what had been proven and what had been rumoured. It was all the world. It was all worth knowing about.

I did not know, until many decades later, that this is how human beings have transmitted knowledge for as long as there have been human beings. You do not sit the child down and say: here is the knowledge. The child rebels, or forgets, or does not believe you. You tell stories. The stories carry the knowledge inside them. The child absorbs the knowledge without knowing it is happening. My grandmother was using the oldest teaching technology our species has. She was using it on me, in a council house on the banks of the Tyne, because her own grandmother had used it on her. There is a word for the person who uses that technology. Storyteller. But the word is a bit too clean. The people this book is about are not people who call themselves storytellers. They are the grandmother at the kitchen table. The old man at the end of the bar. The aunt eight doors down. The uncle who takes a boy through a back fence to a river. The woman who knows who to trust in the village and who not to. They do not have a job title for what they are doing. The culture has not given them one. The culture has stopped paying for what they do, stopped counting it as work, stopped making rooms for them to sit in. We are most of the way through that transition already, and the machines we are now training arrive after the passing-on has mostly stopped.

She did all of this with love.

I want to say this plainly, because the argument of this book depends on it. The teaching was not stern. It was not anxious. It was warm. She loved me. She loved my cousins. She loved the grandchildren who were not there that afternoon. The love was the condition under which the stories worked. I did not know I was being taught. I knew I was being loved. The teaching happened inside that.

I have never met an AI system that was loved into what it knows.

I am not being sentimental. This is one of the most specific structural facts about how human knowledge is actually transmitted. The thing we are building — the thing that will hold more of our accumulated knowledge than any previous artefact in human history — is being built outside the condition under which the knowledge was originally stored.

I will come back to this.

The second person was my uncle Charlie.

He was my father's brother. He was what the family called the black sheep. I am not sure, now, why he had that name — the way children are not sure of the full shape of the adults around them. I knew he drank. The rest is what I have been told since, or what I have guessed at, or what the book was inventing for me. I do not know. The foreground, for the child, was that he was my uncle. He was my dad's brother. The family kept him in the family.

Nobody ever did anything about him that I can remember. He was just Charlie. He showed up. He went away. He came back. He was treated, on the surface, the same as everyone else, even though everyone knew he was not the same as everyone else. The family held him, in that specific working-class way of holding — not performatively loving, not announced, not a policy. Just the absence of expulsion. The door stayed open. The chair at the table stayed his. The phrase my dad's brother stayed true. That was the holding.

He died young. The rest of the family made it into their eighties and nineties. The tribe kept him. It did not save him.

I liked him. I want to be honest about that. I did not know about the parts of him the adults knew about. I knew about the parts a child could see. The part a child could see, in my case, was the part that took me down to the banks of the Tyne.

Over the back fence, down the path, through the brambles. Most of the adults in the family did not come with me. They were busy. Or they were not the kind of adult who took children to rivers. Or they were tired. Charlie took me. More than once. He was taking his nephew on a walk. I do not remember what we did. I remember his presence. I remember being with an adult who had time for me, in a place the other adults did not go.

He taught me, without ever being asked to, that the world outside the back fence was worth going to. That not every adult would take you there. That it mattered when one did.

What he taught me was close to what the one who went outside the cave taught the tribe, when he came back and said: there is more out there. I will show you where. Charlie was, in the narrow domain of my childhood, that one. The family did not send him. He just went. He took me with him.

The family kept him without being asked to keep him. He took me to the river without being asked to take me. Neither act had a name. Both were the thing this book is about.

The third was the grass at the top of the street.

Not in Hexham. Back in Shields. The patch at the top of our estate where the football game was always already happening and where, if you could play, you were in it.

I should say, because it matters for what follows, that I was one of the odd kids myself. There were many of us in that school. I had fights. I was top of the school in most subjects. I had learnt to play football and I had learnt to fight, which between them meant I mostly did not get beaten up. My mam and dad had no idea what I did. I came home, ate cheese and onion sandwiches — I still eat them now — and then went out again, onto the grass at the top of the street, where the game was always already happening and I was already in it.

Nobody ever cast me out. I was still Scotty. Whatever had happened earlier in the day, in the classroom or on the way home, stayed in the day. It did not follow me to the grass. The tribe did to me what the tribe had done to Charlie. Not performatively. Not as a choice anyone announced. Just as a disposition. The chair at the table stayed mine. The name they called me stayed the same. The football game would not have been the football game without me. Somebody must have silently decided that, because I was never not invited.

There was one kid at school who came looking for me. His name was Graham, I think. He said he was going to get me. He was going to get me because I was smart and could see things other kids could not see, and that was reason enough. I was thirteen. I went to the playground. We fought. We both ended up with bloody noses. The next day we played football together.

Nobody sat us down. Nobody made us shake hands. Nobody told us the fight was over and football was starting. The fight happened on one day and the football happened on the next. Nothing in between was said about it, by us or by anybody else. That was the tribe doing to us what the tribe did to everyone it kept. Whatever had happened the day before stayed on the day before. The chair at the table stayed both of ours. The football game would not have been the football game without either of us.

I did not know at the time that this was anything. I assumed every difficult kid got kept like that. I found out, decades later, meeting people who had been cast out of their own childhoods, that it was not normal.

I had been held without knowing I was being held.

It is part of why I can see, now, what it looks like when a group does not do it, and what is lost.

There was another side of the family, too.

My mam's mother — Little Nana, to tell her from Big Nana — had left Hexham some time before I was born. She had got divorced, which in her generation in Northumberland was not a thing women did lightly, or sometimes at all. She moved on. She ran B&Bs after that. One in Sandyford in Newcastle. One in Whitley Bay on the coast. The Sandyford one is the one I remember — a road off the main run, the streets up there all bending into each other. Decades later I ended up owning a house on one of those same streets, without thinking about her. The streets came back.

Her son was my uncle Noel. We just called him Noel. He was lovely. He loved the Toon, the way the men of that family loved the Toon — through the telly, in the pubs, on the long Saturdays. He died many years ago. His wife died two years ago.

Noel's father, judging by how he looked, was a Black man. It was never mentioned. Not once, in any room I was ever in, by anyone. The family did not name it, and they did not need to. They just had Noel. He was lovely, and he loved the Toon, and that was the whole of what was said.

In her old age Little Nana lived in Sandyford with two men — Jock, and my Granda John. I worked out, decades later, that Jock was probably her partner and Granda John her old husband, and that the three of them had arrived at some arrangement that suited them all. Granda John was ill in those years. We spent long hours in the front room with him. On the days he was up to it, we got to Whitley Bay somehow and they all walked me in the pools, plodging beside me, the three of them. I was six. None of it seemed strange. It was the shape of the world. The strangeness, looking back, is only the strangeness of a culture that would have called it strange.

Between Nana Sally, Uncle Charlie, and the grass at the top of the street, I was given the three pieces of the pattern this book is about. A grandmother who carried the knowledge inside the love. An uncle who went outside the fence and came back with something. A tribe that did not cast out the odd ones. And on the other side of the family, Little Nana and Noel and the household at Sandyford — quietly demonstrating, before I had the language for it, that a tribe could be made of whoever the tribe decided to keep.

Years later, some of us tried to put a name on this. A friend called us LinkyBrains, people who connect things other people cannot see. It caught, briefly, as these things do. We were naming the symptom. We did not yet have language for the container that produces the symptom. This book is my attempt, eight years later, to describe the container.

The next chapter is about what happened when I carried the pattern, without a name for it, into twenty years of working life.