Hillary - a short story by Adam Carlton

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I remembered, of course, how dreary London could be in December. Walking the streets in the late afternoon brought an oddly jarring immediacy: headlights reflecting off the wet road dazzled me; the sudden horn of a taxi startled me; pedestrians crowded me, hunched like rats as they scuttled between department stores. 

Eventually I discovered the doorway. Inside it looked very like a department store. High white walls vanished into ceilings I couldn't quite make out. One vacant step followed another, but soon I found the committee room.

Inside, the candidate was already seated at the head of a table surrounded by junior versions of herself. More senior officials were seated at the back of the room; one of them silently pointed me to the foot of the table. 

The candidate's name was Hillary, a strongly-featured patrician woman in her early fifties exuding an effortless poise. I pictured her résumé: educated at St. Paul's then Oxford, then the serried ranks of quangos and civic institutions, an arc she had segued to baroness.

The interview seemed to be going well. She was talking confidently about the committees on which she had served, the trusts to which she had contributed, her extensive charity work. Hillary was being considered to chair a new state board to promote advanced software in the UK - no doubt with a budget of hundreds of millions of pounds.

I listened for a while to the many good things that she had done and the many influential connections she had with those, like herself, closely adjacent to the cabinet. 

The scene shifted now; the chairs were arranged in an arc of a circle. Hillary again occupied the central place with her younger acolytes clustered around. I sat opposite, about ten feet away. For the first time I raised my voice: “You're being considered for the leadership of software development in the UK. Perhaps you could say something about artificial intelligence?”

A flicker of annoyance crossed her face: “I haven't worked in that area at all.”

No-one else seemed bothered.

I said, “I'm not talking about technical details such as infrastructure for the training of foundation models. I just mean a general discussion about where AI is going and the priorities that this country should have.” 

An aristocratic frown; the chairman to my right looked warningly at me.

I said, “I'm not trying to be aggressive. It just seems that if we're considering a candidate to promote the development of software in this country - which really means predominantly AI today - they ought to know something about it, and to have some views which we could discuss here?” 

He shook his head as if to say: Leave it: you just don't get it. 

Time shifted. I left the room, baffled how to navigate this strange, elaborate environment. Eventually I chanced upon a narrow, single-person escalator which took me down to street level and I escaped into the now-darkened evening. As I turned right towards the tube station, a sudden squall of rain slapped me in the face.