They could fly away.

Owls kept turning up during my London trip.

A fluffy stuffed toy I randomly picked up from the shelf for my daughter in a castle gift shop. A logo on the mattress of a hotel bed. A bronze one in the British Museum, three thousand years old.

Probably nothing. But there was also a real one, and that one stayed with me.

During our team offsite, we visited a small falconry centre and got to meet a few very fluffy ones. Then we tried a flying session.

You put a glove on one arm and hold it out. Then the volunteer places a piece of raw chicken on the glove, calls out, after a while the bird flies over and lands on you.

The volunteers who look after them clearly adore them. They told us the birds are not tied down.

"They could fly away," one of the volunteers said, "but they don't."

Comfortable, I suppose. They are well fed, someone takes good care of them, the shelter is safe and they never have to worry about food.

Someone will provide, people say.

Would personal agents do the same thing to us? AGI is here, or close, as a lot of people claimed. And one day the machines will do the work for us. Less work, more time. Time to play, to make things, to enjoy the day.

Then a question came to me a few days later. What if one day nobody brings the food to these birds, could they still hunt? Or is hunting something you only learn when no one is bringing it?

I never thought to ask. Perhaps these birds have never had to find out.

P.S. Recently I was sitting in a café, going through the photos I had taken in that second-hand bookshop in London. I was looking for the picture of "a place to live" when I noticed the book sitting right next to it: Owls & Artificers.

I had not noticed it at all when I took the photo.

I sat there laughing for a good minute or two.

Probably nothing. Still. But I noticed. And once I noticed, it became part of the story. =)