Pilgrim's Progress – Long Distance Walks in Europe and the UK

The point is, you see,” said Ford, “that there is no point in driving yourself mad trying to stop yourself going mad. You might just as well give in and save your sanity for later

Douglas Adams – Life, the Universe and Everything.

With my train from Saint Flour to Montauban not due to depart until mid afternoon (the only train all Saturday!) I had the best part of a day to wander around Saint Flour, take in the sights and sounds and think about Life, the Universe and Everything, including music….

I stayed the night in a small tower in the Hotel Le Vieux Pont. The plumbing in the bathroom was rather dodgy (the shower didn’t seem to drain properly and on closer inspection it seemed that the shower tray outlet can’t have been cleaned properly for donkeys years!) but the food in the hotel restaurant was superb – I treated myself to an Aubrac burger with Cantal cheese and fries for supper. Delicious!

As I crossed the 14th century Old Bridge (Le Vieux Pont) and headed up towards the Old Town, I read on a tourist info board that in the Middle Ages there had been a recluserie (a kind of hermit’s tower) on the bridge where select women had chosen to spend their lives locked away in solitary confinement.

The deal was simple – they chose to spend their lives locked  away in the recluserie, and in return they prayed for the safety of the town and its inhabitants. Somehow I felt that Saint Flour and its inhabitants got the better end of the deal!

The Old Town of Saint Flour was heaving. It was Saturday morning and it was market day. The narrow sidestreets were jam packed with stalls selling specialities from the Cantal and Auvergne. I was tempted by a boar’s head, but sadly it wasn’t for sale.

The produce in the local shops looked equally tempting, including a number of exotic liqueurs which I could see myself trying out back home over the long winter evenings!

The jams and confectionery in the same shop, looked equally tempting.

There was even a shop selling all sorts of fur clothing including some natty hats. Just the thing  for gardening in winter! I was sorely tempted, but on second thoughts, maybe it wasn’t quite me.

I found a brasserie , bustling with locals fresh from their market shopping, and ordered a Croque Monsieur au Cantal and a large beer. It was a time for reflection.

People sometimes ask me, “What do you think about when you are walking? Don’t you get bored?”

Because I’m naturally curious and I have a bad habit of disappearing down intellectual ‘rabbit holes’, the honest answer is that I never get bored on my walks although readers of this blog will know that I do get lost from time to time!

When I wasn’t trying to work out the route, I spent some of the last few weeks  thinking about, Life, the Universe and Everything.

Anybody who has read Douglas Adams’s classic novel of the same name, will remember Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect puzzling over that eternal question – what is the meaning of Life, the Universe and Everything?

If Douglas Adams was alive today he might have written a follow up parody of AI and large language models developed by the likes of Anthropic and OpenAI.

Joking apart, how, I wondered will societies change and adapt in the Age of AI?

If you believe in Elon Musk’s vision of the future, in a few years time most, if not all jobs, will be done by robotic AI agents working 24/7 at a fraction of the cost of their human counterparts. Most of us will be on UBI (universal benefits), paid by the State. We’ll live to 120 years old and enjoy a life of eternal leisure free from health concerns.

In some areas, the future is now. Robots can already run the 100m faster than Usain Bolt and do daily house chores. Agentic AI applications can personalise your language learning while the most complex mathematical problems that have baffled humans for centuries are solved in a few hours by AI LLMs. 2nd hand bookshops in the UK are reporting surging demand for obscure books. Are they being scanned and their data mined by AI models? What is the future for mankind?

More specifically, what is the future for Georges, my 11 year old Belgian godson in Brussels? What is the future for a language teacher or a personal coach specialising in the sciences? Can you protect your online personality from being mined, cloned and commercialised by AI agents? Can you harness the AI revolution and expand your own business by leveraging your skills, experience and personality into cyberspace?

Therein lies the existensial question posed by Philip.K.Dick in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, subsequently made into the film Blade Runner starring Harrison Ford as the sleuth, Rick Deckard. The book poses the existential questions, are all AI ’emotions’ ultimately fake and, in a world dominated by androids and robots, how do we preserve the essence of what makes us  human?

As a teenager I was a science fiction addict. Isaac Asimov, Arthur.C.Clark, Robert Heinlein. I lapped them all up. But perhaps my favourite author was Philip K. Dick, now acknowledged by many as a true visionary of a possible dystopian future that may accompany the Age of Agentic AI. Unlike other science fiction writers, Philip. K. Dick’s novels portrayed a dystopian future that seems remarkably similar to the AI dominated world that lies before us. If you want to understand some of the challenges facing humanity, then I recommend reading Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Blessed with continuous leisure and freed from the shackles of work, how will mankind occupy itself? Will we turn back to religion as we attempt to find a meaning to life? Will going on a pilgrimage become evermore popular? Will we revert to a hunter gatherer type of existence? Not foraging nuts and berries but collecting those experiences that AI can’t give us.

Or will the majority of people fall into an endless state of depression, lacking the means or inclination to gather real experiences and instead fall back on the world of virtual reality, glued to PCs and mobiles 24/7, lapping up the latest news about people they have never met and glued to the instagram feeds of celebrities and influencers? Who knows for sure.

Anyway, at the end of this year’s walk, now it’s time to face the music – sit down and memorise all the words and male bass parts for 15 songs, mostly in French, before next Tuesday evening in preparation for a concert that the Mélomagne choir of Beaumont-de-Lomagne will be giving in October. What could be simpler! At the moment all I have memorised is the first line to a song called ‘Vois sur ton chemin’ which until I looked at the musical score this morning thought was ‘Voici ton chemin’!

And the answer to Life, the Universe and Everything?  Well according to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy the answer is the number 42, as calculated by an enormous supercomputer named Deep Thought over a period of 7.5 million years! Unfortunately, no one knows what the question is until in the second book  of the series, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect work out it out. ‘What do you get when you multiply six by nine?’

With my train to Béziers due to arrive in a few minutes time, the only question on my mind is whether I will make the connection to Montauban. The train is running ten minutes late which makes the connection a bit tight. Three minutes to be precise. AI can’t solve this problem unfortunately!