The Ultimate Doublethink
The British left defends both Islamic norms that keep men and women apart and a trans politics that says the line between them can be crossed. Orwell had a word for holding both.
Throwing a Few Switches
I was driving to work when a Vodafone advert came on the radio to tell me that its broadband is better than every other broadband. It isn’t, of course. It is the same optic fibre going down to my property whoever I pay. Change your provider and what changes is some switching at the far…
The Wild Mustang
It is very hard to get your head around AI. Say you decide to learn how to use it. How long is that good for? How long before what you’ve learned is out of date? I could become an expert today and be left behind within a week. I could tell myself it’s all about…
A New Branch on the Tree of Life
I was twenty minutes into the Diary of a CEO’s AI round-table the other day, driving to lunch. Four clever people — Ed Zitron, Roman Yampolskiy, Nate Soares and Andrew McAfee — and the framing was the one you get everywhere now: AI is an emergency, the labs aren’t being straight with us, and the…
Wholly Rational
Sam Altman told the G20 that AI is a tool and its use rests with individuals. He is right about what it removes. The question is what it arrives with — and whose ethics get trained in.
Reality – A simple thought
As an undergraduate I used to write down “thoughts”. The quality of English I used wasn’t always the most eloquent, but it was the thought that counted back then. So here is a simple one from 1985 [with minor editing]: Just five minutes ago walking back from the bus-stop, the question struck me. “What is…
An Opening Gambit
The world has changed. Or has it? The future, as foreseen by George Orwell in his novel, “1984”, looks increasingly similar to our current reality. He wrote “1984” in 1948 and it was metaphorically true even back then. Recently it has become more substantively true with the advent of the internet, Facebook and Alexa, and…