Los Amigos

Had occasion yesterday to take a late breakfast in town, so off to 'Los Amigos' in East Street (http://www.losamigoscafeepsom.com/), an excellent establishment, but one which searching suggests I have not visited since 20th May last year.

Bacon sandwich well up to expectations. White bread unusual in that it seemed to have been thickly sliced by a machine while also seeming to be proper bread, the sort of bloomer that one might get from the baker at Cheam, who does, as it happens, have a slicer. Proper English bread served by proper (and friendly) continentals.

Which this morning, combined with Kurzweil on the kindle, 'The Singularity is Near', led onto futurological thoughts. I am on warfarin, a cheap and effective medicine, but one which works in mysterious ways and needs to be regularly monitored. It is likely that some of the mystery is to do with diet and that some warfarin wobbles could be explained by dietary wobbles.

So suppose we take a leaf out to the Kurzweil book and wire ourselves up so that detailed data about our diets are automatically uploaded to some central diet database. Far more voluminous and far more accurate than keeping diaries on paper, with the camera never lying about our substance consumption. One then plugs the warfarin readings into the database and the statistics will pop out the answer; the idea being that with lots of data from lots of people it will be easy to make the necessary connections, the same line of thought as that which led the public health people to analyse the incidence of disease by occupation at a population level, something which we have been doing for some time now. So, go easy on the peanuts, or whatever the wobble turns out to have been caused by.

Next thought is that if one has the (probably nano) technology to do that, one probably has the technology to take and upload the warfarin readings while one is at it and the central database will be able to adjust your medication in real time without your needing to bother about it at all. All you will get is some soothing voice, somewhere inside in your head, suggesting that you go easy on the peanuts every time that you are detected in the act of gazing at a packet of salted peanuts at the back of the bar in the boozer.

And do not laugh. I believe that the technology to do a good part of this last detection has been around for some time and has been deployed in clubs for some dubious purpose or other.

PS: but would you trust them to get inside you in this way?