The first ever stage adaptation of Barbara Pim's novel Quartet in Autumn will be showing at the Arcola Theatre in Dahlston from the 7th of May to the 13th of June.

With a script by Samantha Harvey who won the Booker Prize for her novel Orbital, Quartet in Autumn is, as Penelope Fitzgerald wrote of the book in the LRB, a deeply touching story

of aging, friendship and the poetry of everyday life. Book now at our cola theatre.com. Tickets start

from £12.00. You're listening to the London Review of Books podcast. I'm Thomas Jones, and today I'm talking to Paul Taylor, a professor of health informatics at

University College London, who has been writing for the LRB since 2013, and in particular has

been writing for us on so-called artificial intelligence or machine learning as it was known

back then since 2016. His piece in the last issue of the paper is a diary which looks back to the relatively

early days of computer programming in the 1970s and ahead to a brave new world in which

human computer programmers and perhaps the rest of us too are potentially obsolete.

Hello Paul and thank you for joining me.

I'm yeah 60 so I think it'll see me out,

but I'm not quite sure what happens next, but we'll find out, I guess. Yeah. But if we look

backwards first, nostalgically, to the sepia-tinted 1970s, what was your, what was your first encounter with a computer? I do have a very

early memory of seeing a kind of wardrobe-sized computer in the office of one of my father's

colleagues. But the first time I saw a computer program was when I was taken into my dad's office one half term

because they couldn't find anything better to do with me.

And I was sat down in front of a terminal and allowed to play a computer game,

the computer game being Star Trek.

I tell this story quite a lot because people can't understand the idea of a computer game that's played without a screen.

But in those days, computers didn't have screens. So the terminal was an enormous typewriter type thing.

So the game basically generated a sort of a fictional world, a very, very, very basic world of kind of 16 quadrants.

And you could get a printout of it by, I give you a particular command.

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