Need to Know?

          “Going for a spin in the car” used to be a sort of leisure activity. I don’t know anyone who does it now, but a rush of nostalgia for it came over me the other day. The sky was blue, the ground was covered in hoar frost and we were bowling along a ‘B’ road through the New Forest (a landscape that is neither new nor a forest, in case you thought otherwise). We were not driving aimlessly but, nevertheless, were sufficiently ‘in the moment’ to appreciate the pretty landscape, with its the freely-grazing animals chomping their way through what remains of its foliage. The heritage of the place is cherished to the extent that I noticed the crash barriers at a bend in the road, though made of bog-standard galvanised steel, had been clad in logs sawn in half down their length, creating an olde rustic effect in keeping with the character of the place.

          I didn’t choose the route. I’m in the habit of allowing Google Maps to navigate for me these days. Ye olde paper maps may have their uses, but balancing one on your lap while finding your way around England’s byways is no longer one of them. However, impressive as Google is, I hear that it is about to meet its nemesis in the form of a chatbot called ChatGPT, a product of artificial intelligence (AI) that can process all the knowledge available on the internet in an instant. That’s one thing that differentiates it from a person. Another is that, despite its ability to impersonate a human response to any query or question, it lacks curiosity on its own account. Leave it to its own devices and it will just hover, awaiting instructions. I mean, a question that occurred to me recently was, “Who first discovered that everyone’s fingerprints are unique?” I don’t need to know – I could summon the answer in seconds, if I did – but I choose simply to be curious and, when I feel like finding out, I will take some time to savour the process and the answer.

          There’s enjoyment to be had in being nosey just for the sake of it. You never know what you might find. The journey through the New Forest was partly aimed at getting to Southampton, where I was at liberty for a day to look around. It’s not a beautiful city – though it was at its best in the bright, winter sun – and it lacks structural coherence but, to be fair, its focus has always been the deep seaport, the no-nonsense trading complex it serves. Still, treasures may be found in any vibrant metropolis and this one has its share – such as the wall that was built around the medieval city after the French tried to take it, parts of which survive, though only just. Not all of Southampton’s messy infrastructure can be blamed on medieval street layouts and subsequent waves of insensitive, profit-hungry development: the Nazis peppered the place with bombs during WW II. Fortunately, they didn’t hit the magnificent Civic Centre that had just been built. Here, I lingered in elegant modernist galleries admiring art of a quality I had not expected to see in the provinces, thanks to individual beneficiaries and the Contemporary Art Fund.

          And it was in these galleries that I learned something that surprised me: the famous Geographers’ A to Z of London was researched, designed and produced in 1936 by an artist called Phyllis Pearsall, who claimed to have walked all the streets in the process. (I had always assumed it to be the product of a large company employing a team of cartographers.) My question is, to what extent was she able to recall them to order, as in, “Hey Phyllis, can you get me from Acacia Avenue, NW3 to the nearest pub.”? By all accounts, ChatGPT could give me an answer for each year since 1936, though it wouldn’t care to know why I’m asking. Phyllis might.