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In this heart-over-head time of year — an ideal we want to see honoured more often in its observance than breach — it is striking that the unlovable tech revolution underway treats us as if only our brains mattered. Our intelligence.

And then, a curious symmetry is playing out.

As machines try to get better at mimicking the ways people’s minds work, no one bats an eyelid at being asked by a fellow-human for time to process new information or even trauma or bereavement and grief — as if our minds had nearly become machines.

A Christmas Carol has no equal as the book of this day as it is all about punishing Scrooge for being ruled by icily remorseless head-over-heart logic. For being famous for snapping, in reply to a request for charity, ‘Are there no Prisons? … Are there no workhouses?’

‘“Ghost of the future!”’ cries Scrooge in the grip of the terror that finally converts him, ‘“I fear you more than any spectre I have seen.”’

Even those of us not dismissible as wind-up Doomsters, selectively technophiles even, can feel as if he speaks for us confronting our own future, there.

We can hope for but not expect the brothers-in-tech shrugging off widespread anxiety about AI putting millions and not inconceivably, most people, out of work — Progress is progress, it can’t be stopped! — to somehow experience a Scrooge-like reversal of perspective. A change of heart, you might say.

This is above all a day of hope.

H A P P Y   C H R I S T M A S