The Daily Telegraph - 27.08.2019

Charlotte Lytton

Tobacco is bad,

but that doesn’t

make vaping good

t requires only recent

memory to recall how

cigarettes were once

woven into the fabric of

British life: the friends

who would routinely

dart out into the wet night, crumpling

soggy fag packets into jacket pockets

on sheepishly returning to the dinner

table; pubs a permanent, stale-

smelling paean to Marlboro Lights; the

suitcases full to bursting with enough

duty-free gift boxes to see puff-happy

friends and family through Christmas.

Now, the smoking-only carts and

carriages that once submerged the

devoted behind the mist, Stars in Their

Eyes-style, have all but disappeared.

Cigarette butts wedged into the cracks

of broken pavements feel like relics,

their owners even more so.

Among an increasingly health-

conscious public, cigarettes have fast

lost ground to vaping, now a habit for

2.8 million British adults (six million

still smoke tobacco). But the speed with

which we have adopted a device with

only short-term research to its name

has become more alarming since news

of the first e-cigarette-linked death last

week. A patient in Illinois was admitted

to hospital “with unexplained illness

after reported vaping” and is thought

to have died of injuries caused by the

lungs’ reaction to a caustic substance;

193 potential cases of similar serious

respiratory disease have been

identified across 22 more US states.

The health implications of vaping

remain obscured beneath the wisps of

its own cherry-flavoured fog. Beyond

the capsules containing a liquid

mixture of nicotine, chemicals and

flavourings that are exhaled as a

vapour, there is little information of

the meaningful, medical kind known

about e-cigs whatsoever.

This is the problem with the

direction medicine is taking: we know

more about what kills us, but in our bid

to constantly upgrade ourselves we are

willing to ignore the potential pitfalls

built into our shiny new model – or

even to ask what they might be.

The fact tobacco has become passé

is undoubtedly a good thing: the

smoking ban, for example, led to a 40

per cent fall in heart attacks in Britain.

But the race to replace it has led to an

increasingly competitive market in

which products need not demonstrate

robust data to support their use, but

just enough to edge them above rivals.

We are told that e-cigarettes contain

nicotine but no tar or carbon

monoxide; that they comprise fewer

than the 7,000 toxic chemicals in the

regular kind, but how many, we do not

know. A 200-page report produced by

the National College of Physicians in

2016 surmised that they are “not

currently made to medicine’s

standards”, but still concluded that “in

the interests of public health it is

important to promote the use of

I

Laughable views: US television host Lara Spencer apologised for mocking the Prince’s love of ballet

Online telegraph.co.uk/opinion Email [email protected] Twitter @charlottelytton (Celia Walden is away)

T

he end of a week off

often results in a faint

hint of the back-to-

work scaries. Never more so,

however, than when you’ve

taken “the book of the

summer” away with you – for

which you waited patiently in

a seven-strong queue of

colleagues to borrow – only to

have to admit, on your return,

that your trip has apparently

put an ocean between you

and the zeitgeist.

This has been my

experience with Fleishman is

in Trouble, an incredibly

well-written debut novel by

Taffy Brodesser-Akner (who,

to make matters worse, is

both an excellent journalist

and very nice, it appeared to

me, when we crossed paths

years ago). The book has

ridden a wave of riotous

praise since its release last

month – think Hamilton or La

La Land for the desk-bound

crowd, who have found

themselves so rapt by the

post-marital activities of Toby

Fleishman, its protagonist, as

to propel his creator to the

forefront of water-cooler

conversation, critical

round-ups and bestseller lists.

Is there a word to denote

the dread one feels on

disagreeing with the masses?

Or better yet, one to describe

that feeling being made

worse still by knowing you’ll

have to show your dissenting

hand, when questioned, from

now until the end of time?

“Wrong” could be it, I

suppose, though I’m hopeful

for an alternative.

You can’t like everything,

certainly. But there is a

slightly miserable quality to

not liking something

everybody else does. So to

avoid similar infractions in

future, I will continue to stay

away from The Sopranos, The

Wire and Game of Thrones.

And the Lord of the Rings

books, too. I can defend

myself against failing to share

universal appreciation for a

single novel, but I don’t fancy

my chances where sequels

involving beloved hairy-toed

hobbits are concerned.

e-cigarettes”. A study last year found

that vaping can damage the immune

system’s lung-clearing function.

All of which is still better,

researchers say, than using tobacco,

which remains the leading cause of

preventable death in the UK. But as

more intricate understanding of our

health develops, so too should clarity

over credible alternatives to existing

issues and unsubstantiated fads, the

latter of which run the risk of being

more injurious than what we set out to

counter in the first place.

Some of the vaping-induced disease

cases under investigation in the US

concern THC or tetrahydrocannabinol,

the main psychoactive component in

cannabis. Drugs are now far more

commonly used than drinking and

smoking among young people, who

believe they are safer. Meanwhile,

veganism has seen such a groundswell

of support that a third of us have either

reduced or done away with meat in our

diets – even though evidence to

suggest what we’re replacing it with is

better for us, or the planet, remains

scarce. Is a vegan sausage roll from

Greggs a signifier of enlightened times,

or just a more palatable distraction?

Yes, tackling problems once we

realise the scale of them is important,

but replacing current headaches with

newer ones, about which we know

less, is surely a pointless pursuit. High

intensity interval classes may seem

more appealing than going for a jog;

swapping cows’ milk for a fashionable

non-dairy alternative the same – add

this to an ever-stretched NHS, with

start-ups popping up like bloodhounds

on the scent for a new moneymaking

“health” opportunity, and you have

the perfect misinformed storm.

A few years ago, e-cigarettes seemed

like an unfortunate-smelling thought

experiment of what you might get if

you crossed a computer hardware store

with Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory.

Now, it is an industry worth £18 billion,

ubiquitous on every high street,

outside every pub, inside restaurants,

theatres and cafés. There will always be

people willing to cash in on our desire

to part with something bad, but an

alternative that is simply less bad than

its predecessor does not make it good.

Let George, and all boys, dance to their own beat

T

here is once more the

pitter-patter of little

feet at Kensington

Palace – not thanks to a new

royal sprog joining the

increasingly long line for the

throne, but because Prince

George has taken up ballet,

which his father says he

“absolutely loves”. His new

pastime attracted mockery on

US daytime television last

week, after which Lara

Spencer, the co-host of Good

Morning America, posted an

apology urging the six-year-

old to “GO FOR IT,” adding: “I

fully believe we should all be

free to pursue our passions.”

Passions, however, can feel

harder to pursue when people

are laughing at you for doing

so, and Spencer’s initial

reaction spoke volumes.

What’s childhood about if not

a little experimentation?

Over the weekend, Chris

O’Dowd, the actor, spoke of

his belief that the patriarchy

has been “damaging” to his

gender, leaving little boys like

him to grow up thinking “we

are there to protect, not to

feel, and to be aggressive...

[it] isn’t healthy,” he said.

I don’t know whether a pas

de chat is the answer to the

masculinity crisis, but it’s

likely closer to it than

reinforcing tired assumptions

about what little boys can and

can’t do.

THE DUCHESS OF CAMBRIDGE/PA

Fads run the risk of

being more injurious

than what we first

set out to counter

I could be in

trouble for

disagreeing

Is your job safe in

the new industrial

revolution?

I

n 2013, Carl Frey, a willowy

young economist who grew up

in the southern Swedish

university town of Lund, sat

down with Michael Osborne, a

colleague of his at Oxford

University. Frey wanted to understand

how automation might affect current

careers: will we all be enhanced and

supercharged by technology, or

demoralised and made redundant?

It is the $64,000, twist or bust

question of our age. For while today’s

advances – artificial intelligence,

robotics, autonomous vehicles – are

widely accepted as transformational,

no one can say for sure whether that

transformation will be for good or ill.

Frey tried to find out. And, ironically,

the reason he recruited Osborne, a

professor of machine learning, was to

develop an algorithm to partially

automate the task. The results were

startling. In a list of 702 occupations,

47 per cent were deemed at high risk of

disappearing in the next few years.

The paper was a sensation. And now

Frey, 35, is back with a new book, The

Technolog y Trap, which aims to

diagnose the consequences of our

own industrial revolution still

further. Will we be richer,

poorer, happier, sadder, more

fulfilled or less, politically more

or less stable? And if we don’t

like it, can we do anything?

Predictions from his

2013 paper, outlandish at

the time, have begun to

come true. “We found that

fashion models were

exposed to automation,”

he says, at a table in the

Oxford Martin School,

sheltered from the

summer tourist hubbub.

“That seemed slightly

ridiculous.” But the

mockers then had

never met Imma or

Shudu, beautiful yet

uncanny computer-

generated mannequins who

This time around it’s artificial intelligence vs the middle

classes, economist Carl Frey tells Harry de Quetteville

now have huge followings on

Instagram and are used in mainstream

advertising campaigns. “It’s

happening at a rapid pace,” he shrugs.

The sweeping effect of today’s

innovative industrial processes

certainly merit the term “revolution”.

What Frey thinks is more important is

to determine what kind of revolution.

Will it be the archetype – the

Industrial Revolution that began in

1769, when Richard Arkwright, a

Preston-born inventor, patented his

spinning frame, which automated the

process of cotton spinning and

destroyed the lock that middle-income

artisans had on weaving?

Or will it be the consumer-driven,

wage-accelerating, emancipating

revolution of 20th-century America,

where men in the workplace were paid

better wages as automation helped

them become immensely more

productive, and women at home

found time spent on domestic

chores was halved by the likes of

dishwashers, fridges and

washing machines?

Not that the original

Industrial Revolution did

not immeasurably improve

lives. It did. Just not, Frey

points out, at the

beginning. Or for a long

time after. Indeed, Frey

says, “three generations of

Englishmen were made

worse off ” while a tiny

number became impossibly

rich. Only from the 1840s

did the wider workforce feel

the rich glow of greater health

and wealth. For 70 years until

then, “those who lost out [to

ALAMY; EPA/REX

automation] did not live to see the day

of the great enrichment”.

So, Frey asks, is today’s technological

disruption more like the 70-year

whirlwind of 1770-1840, or the largely

benevolent turbulence of the 20th

century? And, as a result, can we expect

popular resistance to automation, as

with the former, or almost none at all,

as with the latter? And if popular

resistance occurs, will governments

make concessions to it, or crack down?

All of us stand at a fork in the road,

he says, and the question we must all

ask is whether modern technology is

“enabling” or “replacing”?

Ultimately, he says, the first

industrial revolution had unhappy

beginnings because, on the whole, it

replaced workers. But the 20th

century’s leap forward enabled them.

Automation allowed them to move

from “sweat and drudgery to well-paid

jobs that were less physically

demanding”. Wages rose in line with

productivity, and the poorest benefited

most. Inequality flattened, “laying the

foundations for a growing and

increasingly prosperous middle class”.

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Automatic service: androids at work,

main; Carl Frey, left; computer-generated

model Imma from Japan, right

For 70 years ‘those

who lost out to

automation didn’t live

to see enrichment’

18 ***^ Tuesday 27 August 2019 The Daily Telegraph
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