TOM EATON | Who glitched harder this weekend: the robots in Beijing or the ANC?

I’m not saying that the humanoid robot championships in Beijing over the weekend were exactly like the ANC’s manifesto launch . After all, one featured hundreds of expensive, mindless automata running around in circles while the other involved robots.

Robots and ANC politicians also experience very different consequences when they fail. It’s not even close.

For example, when humanoids fall over or shake themselves into bits, their handlers often rush out and drape the wreckage in a little black shroud, or pull a curtain across the scene to spare the share price from further embarrassment.

In the ANC, however, there is no such respect for dignity, or, indeed, investors’ money. When someone like Fikile Mbalula glitches, running into the same ideological and economic wall over and over again, his colleagues merely blink slowly and reappoint him for another five years.

Then again, what else what can they do? The black cloths and curtains at the robot exhibitions are a tacit appeal for faith in progress, a promise that the problem will be identified and corrected; but everyone in the ANC ― hell, everyone in the whole country ― knows that the party can neither self-diagnose nor self-correct. All it can do is dust off the collapsed automaton, lubricate its joints with another few million rands of our taxes, and set it loose to trundle straight back into the same wall.

There are also striking similarities between Silicon Valley and our own experience down here in Silly Con Valley when it comes to destroying human capital and hope: evidence is mounting that using AI degrades cognitive function, especially in children, but I don’t think it’s controversial to suggest that, when it comes to crippling children intellectually and scholastically, the ANC is still a world leader.

In fairness, though, we must concede that there are a couple of ways in which the ANC is keeping pace with cutting-edge technology, and I don’t just mean the fact that both are fantastically costly and seem to attract people who actively dislike humanity.

The ANC’s manifesto launch, for one, was an almost perfect analogue replica of those oleaginous, sociopathic AI agents that delete your business’s servers and then tell you how sorry they are and how right you are to be angry and how they’re looking forward to doing better next time.

There are also striking similarities between Silicon Valley and our own experience down here in Silly Con Valley when it comes to destroying human capital and hope: evidence is mounting that using AI degrades cognitive function, especially in children, but I don’t think it’s controversial to suggest that, when it comes to crippling children intellectually and scholastically, the ANC is still a world leader.

(Aside: some readers might be expecting a second part to that grim joke, namely, a suggestion that AI and the ANC might be equally good at destroying jobs. Last week, however, I read something so ghoulish that I’m not going to finish that punchline.