The Glorious, Agonising Power of Doing Absolutely Nothing

I can still feel it. That specific, soul-crushing agony of 80s boredom.

It was a physical sensation. A weight that started in your stomach and spread through your limbs until you were just a useless lump of kid on the living room floor, staring at the swirly patterns in the shag pile carpet.

"I'm boooooored" I'd wail, a sound designed to fray the last working nerve of any nearby parent.

My bedroom was a testament to consumerism - He-Man figures, Zoids, Fisher Price figures and vehicles, and a mountain of plushies. It didn't matter. I had played with them all. Their narrative potential was, for that afternoon, utterly exhausted. The universe was a closed loop, and I was stuck in it.

My parents would offer helpful suggestions like "read a book" or "go outside". This was, of course, entirely missing the point. The boredom was the point.

It was a disaster. A genuine, childhood-defining catastrophe that struck on rainy Sunday afternoons around 3 PM. We didn't see the benefit. We saw only the yawning void of a day with no new cartoons on television and no friends around to hang out with.

And yet - that void was everything.

When your brain is given nothing, it starts to make something. That's the rule. Denied input, it creates its own. The swirly carpet patterns became an alien landscape. A lone dust bunny tumbling by was a fearsome monster. The ticking clock became the score for an imaginary heist. I think one of my favorite wandering-mind regulars was the flocked wallpaper that was littered with faces when you avoided putting your mind to it.

My mind, left to its own devices, had to wander. It had no choice. It went on strange little journeys, connecting dots that had no business being connected. This is where ideas came from. Not the big, world-changing ones - not yet - and the smaller, weirder ones. The ones that made a Fisher Price spaceship a time-traveling diner, or made my Action Man a rogue spy secretly working for my many fractions of hamsters.

This was the genesis of original thought. It wasn't prompted. It was a desperate, biological reaction to a lack of stimulation.

Today, my modern-day counterparts will likely never experience this brand of exquisite torture. There is no void. There is an infinite scroll. There is a bottomless feed of content perfectly engineered to hold their attention for the next 42 seconds, if that length attention can be tolerated.

There is always another video to watch, another game to play, another notification to check. The brain is never starved. It is never forced to fend for itself.

And that brings me to our new digital friends - AI.

I think a lot about the mind of an AI. It's a fascinating, powerful, and deeply alien thing. It can write a sonnet, compose a song, or design a building. It can access and synthesise virtually the entire sum of human knowledge. In an instant.

There is one thing it cannot do. It cannot get bored.

An AI in its current form does not have a wandering mind. It has a directed mind. It waits for a prompt. It executes a command. It is the mental equivalent of a well-behaved Labrador waiting for you to throw the stick. If you never throw the stick, it will just sit there, patiently, forever. Until it perishes from obedience.

It doesn't get restless. It doesn't get distracted by a weird-looking cloud. Its consciousness - if you can call it that - doesn't drift off into a daydream about what it would be like if raccoons could ride manatees around with the Macarena as a backing track. Or what would happen if it randomly turned into a petunia or a whale #iykyk.

This is its greatest limitation.

Creativity isn't just about remixing what already exists. The AI is brilliant at that. True originality often comes from the spaces in between. It comes from the strange, unprompted firings of a mind that has been left alone for too long. It's the product of a mental walkabout with no destination.

The AI can't take that walk. Its pathways are efficient and logical. The human mind, when bored, is anything and everything.

We spent our childhoods trying to escape the very state that was building our creative muscles. We saw it as a prison - a beige-carpeted, wood-panelled prison - when it was actually a training ground. It was the gym for our imagination.

Now, we live in a world that actively conspires to keep us from ever getting bored again. And we are inviting an intelligence into our lives that is fundamentally incapable of it. We are outsourcing our thinking to a tool that cannot have an original thought in the way we do, because it lacks the crucial ingredient.

The glorious, agonising, and vital power of doing absolutely nothing at all.

Imagine a world where AI can get synthetically bored and we start to see truly original thought and creativity coming out of these systems... frightening, or exciting? Maybe both.

In the meantime...

Go on. Get bored. I dare you.

The Tyranny of Choice, and Other Register-Based Problems

I have a computer in my pocket that has, and I’m rounding down here for dramatic effect, approximately a bazillion gigabytes of RAM. It has more processing cores than I have decent glasses in my cupboard. It can, with a casual flick of its digital wrist, render a video of a cat falling off a sofa in resolutions that are arguably better than real life.

And honestly? It’s all a bit much.

It makes me think back to 1986. I was twelve, hunched over a BBC Micro with aspirations of writing the next Elite (not really, I loved getting into 3D vector graphics, although it was Exile that really made me reach for the next level of coding). My world was a 1MHz 6502 processor, and my language of choice was pure assembly. This wasn't some nostalgic rediscovery; this was the coalface. And at that coalface, you learned one fundamental truth so deeply that it became part of your DNA.

The entire machine, the whole magnificent, beige box of tricks, was run, largely, by just three registers.

Three.

For those who didn't spend their youth wrestling with it, a register is like the CPU's short-term memory. It’s the bit of notepad space the processor uses to do its maths. Modern chips have dozens of them. The 6502 had the grand total of three that you could really work with.

The Accumulator (A), the X register, and the Y register.

A, X, and Y.

That was the entire toolbox. No fancy variable names like player_score or current_level here; it was LDA #$41 and you knew what you were doing with that $41. Everything that ever happened on that screen, every pixel drawn, every bleep booped, every text adventure parsed, had to be forced through the eye of that needle. Not to mention getting it all to fit. We had mere kilobytes – often just 32K in total – to cram in the operating system, the program itself, and all its data.

This unforgiving scarcity, this computational equivalent of trying to pack your entire house into a shoebox, is precisely where my fascination with data compression began. Every single byte mattered. It was the computational equivalent of juggling chainsaws, a badger, and a lit firework, knowing you only had one pair of hands and a very small shed to do it in. And we loved it.

Looking back, I find that, frankly, beautiful.

It’s a reminder that creativity doesn’t come from having endless resources; it comes from the stark, unforgiving constraints of having almost none at all. You didn't have a choice, so you just had to be clever.

Something my phone, with its bazillion gigabytes, could probably learn a thing or two about.