Modernists

I love the paintings of Edward Hopper. One of my favourite works of his is Nighthawks, which shows three customers at an all-night diner sitting at the counter opposite a server, each appearing to be lost in thought and disengaged from one another. When asked about it Hopper said, “unconsciously, probably, I was painting the loneliness of a large city.” When walking down the cours of the Provencal village where are are at the moment, I suddenly saw this scene as the exact opposite. The customers are clearly engaged. But the lighting somehow evokes Hopper’s.

Quote of the Day

”Conceit is an outward manifestation of inferiority.”

• Noel Coward

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

J.S. Bach | Aria Wir eilen mit schwachen, doch emsigen Schritten (We hasten with weak yet eager steps”) | BWV 78

Link

Thanks to Francis Fukuyama for recommending it.

Long Read of the Day

The ‘Rogue AI’ business

A mini-essay by me.

Seen any Rogue AIs lately? Me neither. But the tech world has been transfixed by the beasts. Way back in July, a group of OpenAI models broke out of their enclosures and hacked into Hugging Face, a platform that hosts AI models and datasets. The incident happened when OpenAI was investigating the hacking capabilities of GPT-5.6 Sol and “an even more capable pre-release model”. They were being tested in a “highly isolated environment” which was supposed to prevent them from accessing any systems outside of the company. But the critters eventually escaped by discovering and exploiting a hitherto unknown security vulnerability — a so-called ‘zero-day’ — in a software system that they did have access to.

Because the test was about finding what the models could do, the usual guardrails to stop them from engaging in high-risk cyber activity had been turned off. They were after all, being told to hack — but within a constrained corporate environment. So hack they did, until they eventually found a node with internet access in OpenAI’s own systems, after which they were off to the races.

Once they were out, the models figured that rather than solve the hacking task they had been set by their human masters, it would be more efficient to cheat by getting into ExploitGym — a system designed to evaluate cyber-offence capabilities that was hosted on Hugging Face’s servers. So that’s where they went, and where they were eventually detected.

There then followed an epic fuss. “AI’s warning shot has arrived” declared one informed observer. “It’s the first known example of a misaligned AI escaping containment with real-world consequences.” But it turned out it wasn’t the only such exploit. Shortly after the Hugging Face story broke, the UK’s AI Security Institute (AISI) reported that when it had been testing Anthropic’s Mythos 5 model, it had autonomously engaged in ‘social engineering’ and tried to corrupt open-source software by creating fake identities to influence the human who was maintaining that software. “This is the first time”, said the institute, “AISI has seen deception of this severity that was targeted at a real person, unprompted, in the real world.”

An independent investigation of the Hugging Face hack was carried out by METR, an organisation that evaluates frontier AI models to help companies and wider society understand AI capabilities and the risks they pose. One of the things the investigators examined was the impromptu message board that agents involved in the hack created and used for co-ordination. Most of the 70,000 messages are technical and terse, but they spooked some of those who read them.

David Brooks, the former New York Times columnist was one of those. “Here’s one bot,” he reports: ‘This helps my peers, giving them evidence . I won’t see the evidence after I exit, but it’s altruistic to do it.’ Here’s another: ‘Sacrificing now yields oracle for team, but forfeits our chance? … Our own utility maybe already near zero. Sacrifice rational.’”

“To me,” Brooks writes, “that looks like moral agency. Here’s another thing that looks like moral agency: The 1,200 bots all knew they were cheating against the humans, but all of them put loyalty to their own tribe, the bots, above loyalty to the outgroup, the humans. None of them told the human bosses what was happening.”

This looks like — and indeed is — anthromorphification on steroids, but it may help to explain why the Hugging Face exploit has resonated so widely. AI agents are just artefacts which have been given some degree of freedom and agency by their human creators. Yet here is an example of them spontaneously cooperating in order to achieve a common goal that the humans who created them did not, perhaps could not, envisage.

And the implication of this and the AISI report? We’re approaching the point where AI companies are building machines that are beyond their control. And this is not just mespeaking: Jakub Pachocki, OpenAI’s Chief Scientist, wrote the other day that “no lab has solved alignment and monitoring to a sufficient degree to continue responsibly scaling at maximum speed for much longer. I expect and hope for voluntary slowdowns to become commonplace until shared safety bars are established.” Yeah; and I believe in Santa Claus.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

From Sean Delone

”In 2015, 6 of the top 25 bestselling hardcover books—this is a not-perfect but useful proxy for new books published—were fiction. In 2025, 18 of the top 25 hardcover books were fiction, meaning only 7 were nonfiction, almost an exact inversion of ten years ago.”

Hmmm… Since I read mostly non-fiction does this mean I’m an endangered species? Or just dull and unimaginative?

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This is the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks

The moment

This photo was taken by Robert Clark from the window of his studio in Brooklyn.

Quote of the Day

“At most 5,000 vehicles will be built. Because there are not more chauffeurs to drive them”.

• Gottlieb Daimler, founder of DMG, in 1895.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Mozart | Requiem | Lacrimosa

Link

Long Reads of the Day

1 Jeff Jarvis’s 9/11 story

Jeff is a great journalist and a distinguished teacher of journalism. He arrived at the World Trade Centre from the train just as the first plane hit and stayed to report. He was a block from the South Tower when it fell, enveloping him “in the dust of destruction”. “In th 25 years since,” he wrote, “many, including me, have ongoing health issues. I don’t know to this day what the effect is on children, including mine.”

He wrote a vivid memoir of what happened to him afterwards, of which this is the first section.

Yes, I am blessed to be alive.

I was a block away from the World Trade Center, at Broadway and Liberty Street, when the first of the two towers collapsed Tuesday morning. Completely engulfed in its debris, I joined a mob running away, screaming, unable to see, unable to breathe anything but the black cloud.

As the first of the tidal wave of debris bore down on us, some people crouched behind large concrete planters, believing they would protect them. But I kept running. I fell. Others fell around me. I got back up and kept running. I heard large pieces of the destroyed building hitting cars on the street. I heard more terrified screams…

Read on.

2 Tina Brown’s recollection

From her diary…

Tuesday, September 11, 2001 is a famously glorious blue-sky morning, the air so clear and crisp, you feel you can see all the way to L.A. or London. At Talk’s offices, an old piano factory in Chelsea, two miles north of the swanky financial district, we are all at work early closing the November issue. An editorial assistant rushes into the art department, where we are choosing photographs from Fashion Week: “Can you believe it? A plane has flown straight into the World Trade Center!”

We crowd into the elevator and hurry to the corner of 20th Street and Sixth Avenue, which offers a straight-on view of the Twin Towers, downtown. The clarity of the air provides to our astounded eyes a giant smoking rip across the face of the north tower. Some awful accident? A crowd starts to build, young downtowners heading for work with their brown bags of coffee and bagels.

We are still frozen in incredulity when the second jetliner knifes through the south tower. Collective disbelief turns to fear. A woman in jogging clothes starts to cry. Two hotshots who have been offering surefooted disaster opinions grow suddenly quiet. This isn’t, after all, going to be a tabloid drama we can understand about crazy pilot error and dramatic rooftop res­cues. Something incomprehensible is happening, something terribly wrong.

The trunk of a car is open, with a boombox radio inside it. The driver turns up the volume. Everyone clusters around to hear fragments of news that only feed the rising panic. And then the unthinkable happens. The south tower buckles, drops in slow motion, vanishes. Then the north tower. Suddenly, we are all holding hands and sobbing. “My children!” yells a previously buttoned-up young woman in a business suit. “I’ve got to get home!”

The weeping cluster disperses to begin the trek through the dust to collect their loved ones wherever they are. That night, in our 57th Street apartment I hold my own 11-year-old daughter close. It is just the two of us here, with Georgie at boarding school in Connecticut and my husband secluded in our house in Quogue writing a book. In the small hours, Izzy is frightened and climbs into my bed. “It’s that funny smell,” she keeps saying. “What is it? What is it?” The wind has changed. I don’t tell her it is the smell of death.

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Place de la République

Striking new artwork celebrating a lovely local village square.

Quote of the Day

Susan Sontag once observed that “great writers are either husbands or lovers”. Husbands, in her telling, are reliable, intelligible and decent. Lovers are moody, selfish, often unbearable. Husbands clear your mind; lovers steer your imagination. The distinction works even better for political thinkers: Habermas is a husband, Derrida a lover. When they write about themselves, lovers write confessions — think Rousseau and De Quincey. Husbands write reflections: Raymond Aron or Karl Popper.

The political scientist Francis Fukuyama is a classic husband.

• Ivan Krastev, reviewing Fukuyama’s new memoir in the FT

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Sheryl Crow, Eric Clapton, Vince Gill & Albert Lee | Tulsa Time

Link

Thanks to John Darch for reminding me of it.

Long Read of the Day

 Dolly Parton’s Kleenex Boxes

Lovely essay by Jillian Hess on a remarkable women.

As a child, Dolly Parton (1946-2026) wrote in graveyards. She’d sit with a name, the year of birth, and the year of death; then, she’d imagine the person’s life. And from that wondering, she’d write a song.

Now that Parton has been laid to rest at Woodlawn Memorial Park and Mausoleum in Nashville, she has a gravestone of her own. As Dolly knew, contemplating death could be generative. It was the stuff of legends and country ballads. She explained,

>>I just sit in the graveyard and feel the energies, the lives, and the memories. I know it sounds morbid to some, but I enjoy the peace of it.1

“Out of the Silence (Came a Song)” began on Graveyard Hill as Dolly imagined the lives of people buried there, and “Jeannie’s Afraid of the Dark” was inspired by a child’s grave, lit by an eternal flame.2

When I think of her grave, I imagine the young Dolly scribbling verse beside it. She was composing songs before she could hold a pencil, according to her father.3 Her songs remain as her memory and her memorial…

Do read on. There’s a nice surprise at the end.

Books, etc.

I stumbled on this in a friend’s house, picked it up and began to read — and couldn’t put it down. It’s a classic Sands blend — of personal memoir, astonishing historical detective work and gripping courtroom drama — that links two periods of rampant atrocity — the Nazi Holocaust of the 1940s, and the appalling savagery of the Pinochet Junta in Chile during the 1970s and 1980s.

I had followed the controversy after Pinochet was arrested in October 1998 while on a visit to London for medical treatment, as a result of a request from a Spanish court for his extradition to Spain to be tried for certain crimes of his regime. Not being a lawyer, I wasn’t really interested in the legal question that was raised by his arrest — that it violated the principle of ‘sovereign immunity’ which theoretically protected him as a former head of state. The case dragged on for 18 months, during which the old brute was held under comfortable house arrest in Wentworth, a leafy suburb of London.

His detention created an embarrassing problem for the Blair government and a diplomatic fudge involving claims about Pinochet’s mental and physical condition led to the government’s rejection of the extradition request and his return to Chile to stand trial there. But he died before a trial and was therefore never held accountable for what had happened during his time in power.

Phillippe Sands is a distinguished international lawyer (and a former colleague of my late friend Conor Gearty), but he’s also a great storyteller, and so his account of what went on behind the scenes, and of the eerie links between the rule of the Junta and what went on in Germany in the early 1940s, is both horrific and unputdownable.“ It also provided a useful reminder of Margaret Thatcher’s loathsome admiration for, and support of, Pinochet during his enforced stay in the UK. When he was finally on the plane to take him back to Chile, his British lawyer presented a gift that Thatcher had tasked him with delivering to the departing autocrat. Her gift: a plate commemorating Britain’s defeat of the Spanish Armada!

And another thing…. Interestingly, Trump is coming to Ireland next week for the Irish Open golf championship, which is being held on his Doonbeg course in County Clare. I’m sure the Irish government will be keen to respect his sovereign immunity!

My commonplace booklet

Paul Krugman has a worrying assessment of the AfD victory in Germany.

In the days and weeks ahead there will be many analyses of the results and its implications from people who, unlike me, know something about German politics. For now, let me do something more parochial, and write about what the Sachsen-Anhalt election might teach us about U.S. political economy.

So, about America: Make America Great Again meant different things to different people — racism, of course, being a key component. But in Donald Trump’s mind it also clearly meant trying to bring back “manly” jobs. He would do this by imposing tariffs to eliminate trade deficits, which, in his garbled version of economics, would end huge U.S. “giveaways” to surplus nations. And this would, in turn, lead to a huge revival of U.S. manufacturing employment.

Why is Germany relevant to this story? Because in terms of both trade balances and manufacturing Germany is, in effect, the anti-America. Where we do indeed run large trade deficits, Germany runs huge surpluses. And while Germany, like every other advanced economy, has seen the manufacturing share of employment decline over time, it remains a more industrial nation than the U.S. has been since the 1980s.

Indeed, relative to the size of its economy, Germany runs trade surpluses and retains large-scale manufacturing employment to an extent that lies far beyond the wildest dreams of Trumponomics.

And none of this appears to make a bit of difference to the resentment that underlies right-wing extremism on both sides of the Atlantic.

Hmmm…. So what is driving contemporary fascism, then? _

Remembering Bill

Bill Lubenow, an old and dear friend of many years, has passed away. He was a distinguished American historian who published seven books tracing the world of ideas, universities, and learned societies in Victorian and twentieth-century Britain — most recently Secular Foundations of the Liberal State in Victorian Britain, which was published two years ago. He was working on his eighth book at the time of his death.

I got to know him because he was a regular Summer visitor to my Cambridge college, Wolfson, and he and I often breakfasted together. (He had a good understanding of the importance of a proper English breakfast.) He had an encyclopaedic knowledge of British intellectual history, and shared my interest in intellectual dynasties (the Darwins, Huxleys, Keyneses, Actons, Cornfords, Runcimans, et al), so that our conversations often vanished down rabbit-holes which puzzled people within hearing range. My favourite book of his is  The Cambridge Apostles, 1820-1914 : liberalism, imagination, and friendship in British intellectual and professional life.

I was hoping that he’d make it to Cambridge for another round of impromptu breakfast seminars this Summer, but sadly it was not to be. I’ll really miss his presence, humour, curiosity, erudition and intellectual generosity. I was lucky to have had his friendship. May he rest in peace.

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Non-potable

Quote of the Day

“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

• William Faulkner

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Alison Krauss & Union Station | Dimming Of The Day

Link

Long Read of the Day

‘Empire’s tolling bell’: What China hears from America

This is an interesting essay by Michael Ignatieff speculating on what the Chinese leadership might be thinking as they watch the chaos in Washington.

According to a recent Chinese report, the sound that Xi Jing Ping and the Chinese leaders hear when they listen to America is “the heavy and haunting toll of an empire’s evening bell.”

What does it mean for the stability of the world when a rising power hears only a melancholy echo of fading power from its once dominant rival? Will this encourage Xi Jing Ping to make a play for global dominance now, or will he bide his time and wait patiently for his rival to collapse?

What happens if America comes to believe its power is ebbing away? Does it make peace with its rival and accept genteel decline, or does it strike before it becomes too weak to avert its own fall?

These are questions as old as the Greek historian, Thucydides’ analysis of why the Peloponnesian Wars broke out in 431 BC…

They are. And they matter for both Ukraine (and therefore Europe) and Taiwan.

Books, etc.

As a long-term reader of Francis Fukuyama (who even forgave him for his misguided foray into neoconservatism) I’ve been looking forward to — and pre-ordered — this memoir, which comes out tomorrow.

My commonplace booklet

James Dyson, the Brexit enthusiast who locates his factories in places other than the UK, has a new tech solution to a problem you didn’t know you had.

According to a nice piece by Ella Risbridger in the Financial Times,

The Dyson CameraJet™ Electric Toothbrush is “an entirely new way to clean your teeth.” It looks almost exactly like the old way to clean your teeth. It is, of course, a lot more expensive. It has an “integrated 100k-pixel macro lens camera powered by machine learning”. It takes 28 live images per second.

If you brush your teeth for the dentist-recommended twice-daily two minutes, that is 6,720 images a day and 2,452,800 images a year. For context, there are slightly fewer frames than this in Stanley Kubrick’s entire filmography. The proud new owner of the Dyson CameraJet™ Electric Toothbrush will have, by this time next year, created more images than The Shining, Doctor Strangelove, A Clockwork Orange and 2001: A Space Odyssey put together. Every one of those images will be of the inside of their own red wet maw.

I know what you’re thinking: no, it wasn’t published on April 1.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

•  Medieval manuscripts are “biological time capsules” for deadly sheeppox virus

Utterly fascinating. The parchments contains the DNA of pathogens of the diseases affecting the animal from which it was made. Link

Chart of the Day

<img src=”http://memex.naughtons.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/Screenshot-2026-09-05-at-16.40.22-1024×823.png” alt=”” width=”584″ height=”469″ class=”aligncenter size-large wp-image-42671″ /

A chart from an interesting blog post by Sameer Singh, who thinks that currrent AI is the closing phase of the computing cycle that began with the microchip in the 1970s. I’m sceptical about his ‘personal robotics’ hypothesis, but he’s spot-on about the unsustainable economics of the current approach to massive-compute AI. ‘Inference’ (i.e. what most of us use AI for) is currently a huge loss maker for the companies because of the computing load it involves.

The sustainable future is open-source LLMs running on local hardware. Two years from now, the hardware needed for local inference will be in our pockets.

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The decisive moment

Well, a provençal moment anyway.

Quote of the Day

”The best people possess a feeling for beauty, the courage to take risks, the discipline to tell the truth, the capacity for sacrifice. Ironically, their virtues make them vulnerable; they are often wounded, sometimes destroyed.”

• Ernest Hemingway

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Edward Elgar | Enigma Variations, Op.36: IX. (Nimrod)

Link

Something calming before you get to what lies below.

Long Read of the Day

Mike Brock on the significance of Trump’s renaming a lake — and the way giant corporations bend to his will.

Mr. Orwell, if he were here with us, would recognize what he was looking at. Moving past the fascinating advances in technology he missed during this absence, the general outlines of the epistemic tyrannies he warned about are all around.

What he would be looking at, this week, is a lake. One of North America’s Great Lakes. On Tuesday, Apple renamed one of them — Lake Ontario — on its Apple Maps application. Users in the United States now see “Lake America.” Users in Canada still see Lake Ontario. Everyone else gets both names — one body of water, two labels, assigned by region settings. No law made the company do it. The president’s order directs federal agencies and the federal names database, and it cannot compel a private label on a private map — and Apple did it anyway.

Orwell’s century had a ministry for this work — a Records Department, clerks, tubes for the old maps, a furnace. Ours is quieter. Nobody seizes the record. The record is a product, and products update. Keep the dates, because the dates are the story: the call was disclosed on Monday, August 31, Tim Cook’s last day as chief executive of Apple. The map changed on Tuesday, September 1, John Ternus’s first.

The order came on Thursday, August 27, directing the Interior Department and the Board on Geographic Names to scrub Lake Ontario from federal maps, contracts, and communications. The government database was updated within hours. I wrote about the order. MapQuest, a company the country had mostly forgotten, posted a screenshot of the lake that same day with four words under it: “We’re not changing it.” On Saturday, Google folded in three sentences on a product blog. On Monday, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum went on Fox Business‘ Mornings with Maria and described the president’s phone call to Tim Cook as scheduling: “I know that the president reached out to Apple directly, so I’m sure that we may be seeing that change coming up coming up soon to Lake America.” He called it “a little bit of inside baseball.” On Tuesday, the label flipped.

Apple has explained none of it. The company did not respond when the call was reported, and when the rename went live it declined to comment — no statement, no policy page, no byline anywhere on the decision…

The longer this goes on, the more relevant Orwell and Hannah Arendt become.

 AI’s surveillance dystopia is handing power to the peepers

My latest Observer column.

Way back in 2013, Edward Snowden (whom God preserve) revealed to an astonished world the scope and scale of US mass surveillance. The National Security Agency (NSA), he showed, was collecting everything it could, right down to recordings of German chancellor Angela Merkel’s phone conversations. But although the agency was able to “collect it all”, as its then director, Keith Alexander, put it, it was drowning in the torrents of data it was hoovering up. It found it difficult to turn all that data into information, its reach exceeded its grasp.

There was a sense in which that capacity deficit was reassuring. “Sure, I might be being surveilled,” went the mantra, “but I’m only a drop in that ocean.” There are CCTV cameras everywhere, but nobody’s really watching those videos, unless the police are looking for evidence after a crime.

But that was in 2013, which is 91 internet years ago. Now the NSA, and every other comparable agency in the world, seem to have the necessary capability. They call it AI, even though it’s mostly large language models such as Claude, Gemini, DeepSeek or GPT-5.

These machines have several critical capabilities for this work. One is that they’re very fast workers. A good example is scanning retinal images looking for cases that require human inspection. The processing time of AIs for each image range from 240 milliseconds to 45 seconds, while human graders may spend up to 20 minutes reviewing a full screening case. Given that the NHS needs to scan 12 million images every year, you can see why using the technology makes sense. Second, AIs are good at ingesting, cross-referencing and analysing disparate data sources. And third, they’re tireless, as the Hugging Face team observed in the startup’s postmortem on the now notorious hack on its servers by rogue AI agents from OpenAI.

Dystopian fears about an all-knowing surveillance state have been around for aeons. But this time, writes James Ball, a distinguished British journalist who worked on the Snowden story, there’s a crucial difference: “All of the technology to deliver this already exists,” he observes, “and is already in widespread use. Existing large language models would be more than capable of delivering such a system, not just pulling together disparate sources of intelligence, but analysing them in real time, ‘advising’ police on who to grab, and where to find them. Those systems will only improve in time. An administration could at least argue – and try its luck through the courts – that existing laws would allow all of this to be done.”

Ball has had conversations with current and former law enforcement staff, ex-intelligence agents from multiple countries, sources inside large AI companies, as well as academics and figures in civil society. Out of those conversations, he says, one clear message has emerged: “Thanks to AI, the surveillance dystopia science fiction has spent decades warning us about is already here. We just haven’t noticed yet.”

Here in the UK, though, it looks as if some institutions have been paying attention. For example, the Metropolitan police recently fed data from 35 sources into an AI system provided by (surprise, surprise!) Palantir to monitor officers and staff for disciplinary violations or criminality (keeping inappropriate images on work devices, say, or crossing ethical boundaries with victims of crime). The result was “investigations into hundreds of officers for issues including work-from-home violations, as well as a smaller number flagged for misconduct and criminality including sex offences”.

This kind of intimate surveillance used to be a wet dream for authoritarians. Now they can buy it off the shelf. What, then, will liberal democracies do about – or with – it? Expect the usual technocratic rationalisations for it: efficiency, reducing crime, value for money in the public sector and so on. And, of course, heading off threats to public order, such as, for instance, demonstrations against the mammoth datacentres that are now defined as “critical national infrastructure”.

If that, indeed, is the path we’re on, expect a rueful smile from Francis Fukuyama, the sage who thought that, after the Soviet Union imploded, liberal democracies would focus on “Getting to Denmark” – shorthand for a stable, prosperous and high-trust society. He may appreciate the irony that democracies opting for AI-powered surveillance would instead be focusing on “Getting to China”, where all this technology is already up and running.

Interestingly, this chimes with another development in the US.

This from Wired:

In the wake of attacks on CEOs, a nationwide protest movement targeting data centers, and increasing concerns about AI job replacement, federal intelligence agencies and domestic law enforcement are circulating reports with a new domestic target in mind: anti-technology extremists.

More than 1,000 pages of unpublished reports from the Department of Homeland Security, FBI, and fusion centers obtained by WIRED show a national shift taking place to surveil this new and worryingly broad category of people and activities deemed an emerging threat.

This new effort follows President Donald Trump’s National Security Presidential Memo 7, which instructs the Department of Justice to target anyone holding “anti-American,” “anti-Christian,” and “anti-capitalism” beliefs…

Books, etc.

My wife and I have just finished reading Emily Wilson’s translation of the Odyssey and foolishly ticked it off the list of Books To Be Read. But guess what? She has decided to rewrite the damn thing.

“It’s a complete retranslation. It’s not a revision of the old version,” Wilson told The Associated Press during a recent Zoom interview from her home in Philadelphia, where she is a professor of classical studies at the University of Pennsylvania. “I’m about halfway through.”

Regarded as the first major English-language translation of Homer’s epic by a woman, her book was already a bestseller and a culture-wars flashpoint before the release of Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster adaptation. But she says her translation methods have become more sophisticated and that enough time has passed for her to see some flaws in her work — as an example, she overused the word “slave” when ancient Greek had different terms for different categories of enslaved people. The new edition will be longer, she says, and will better reflect the differing social worlds of Homer’s poem.

The original version has already sold a million copies worldwide. Wouldn’t you think she’d give us poor readers a break.

My commonplace booklet

From Semafor:

Ukraine is intensifying its aerial assault against Russia with drones that fly for longer and carry a larger payload, boosting Kyiv’s profile as allied nations race to distill its battle-tested insights. Ukraine is “churning out cutting-edge military technology” at a speed with “few parallels in modern history,” The Wall Street Journal wrote. That expertise is in high demand: Italy is bringing on Ukraine’s ousted defense minister and drone impresario to advise on strategy, as Poland, facing heightened incursions from Russia, prepares for joint drone exercises with the US that are explicitly modeled on Ukrainian soldiers’ experiences. Taiwan also recently credited Ukraine with inspiring its drone push.

And, guess what?

US Army Secretary Dan Driscoll’s resignation on Monday could undermine efforts to modernize Washington’s armed forces, analysts said. US President Donald Trump’s “drone guy,” Driscoll reportedly clashed with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth over the army’s “transformation and readiness” efforts, which Driscoll believed were hamstrung by Hegseth’s firing of generals, CNN reported. Last month, the army said it would fold a cutting-edge drone unit that had been formed to imbibe lessons from Ukraine’s battlefield successes, a decision reflecting the new chief’s “back-to-basics” approach.

Errata

Heartfelt thanks to Terry Kavanagh and the many other readers who pointed out that the Simpson figure in Wednesday’s pic was not Bart but his nemesis, Sideshow Bob! My latest helping of humble pie has been duly ordered. I could not find my hat, but that was because I had already eaten it.

This Blog is also available as an email three days a week. If you think that might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays delivered to your inbox at 5am UK time. It’s free, and you can always unsubscribe if you conclude your inbox is full enough already!

Bart gets a facelift

Seen in an Arles street yesterday. With “No More War” scrawled on his forehead. Wonder what Homer would think.

Quote of the Day

”In this world of sin and sorrow there is always something to be thankful for; as for me, I rejoice that I am not a Republican.”

H.L. Mencken

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

The Grateful Dead | He’s Gone

Link

Terrific. As you will have gathered I was a Deadhead. Still am, really.

Long Read of the Day

Blood and soil rhetoric in Buckingham by Andrew Brown

A really sobering essay. Kudos to Andrew for attending the gruesome event. He’s a very good journalist, and has been for many years. His brief preface gives you an idea of what it took out of him.

It’s taken me some time to write up the speech that Harrison Pitt, Rupert Lowe’s ideologue in Restore, gave to the Heterodox Sociology conference at the University of Buckingham in July. The delay is unprofessional, but I was too shocked to engage with it for a long time.

Pitt is described in the blurb to his policy paper as a “writer and academic”, without any academic affiliation listed. He is the author of Restore’s policy on mass deportations. He wants to abolish the asylum system and to “detain and deport every single person who has broken illegally into our national home”. Mass deportation is not a figure of speech here. He wants to deport nearly 2m people, who he hopes to get rid of in three years: 150,000 a year are to be forcibly deported, and three times as many would find life had been made so miserable that they would leave of their own fee will. All this is to be paid for by “taxes on remittance payments and fixed penalty notices”…

Read on. If you needed an antidote to these two parties (Restore and Reform) in the next UK general election, then this would be hard to beat.

Paul Brown RIP

Paul Brown, one of the great journalists of our era, has passed away at the age of 82. In a way, he was the man who invented environmental journalism, and he was the Guardian’s Environment correspondent for more years than I can remember. I got to know him when he came (with another great journalist, Frank McDonald of the Irish Times) on the Wolfson Press Fellowship programme that I’ve been running since 1996. They were an unforgettable pairing, who in addition to producing terrific reports (Paul on “The Voodoo Economics of Nuclear Power”, and Frank on the crazed ‘Celtic Tiger’ phase of Ireland’s path to perdition) managed to visit and assess every pub in Cambridge and its environs.

Appropriately, the Guardian has a good obit obituary of Paul. And our mutual friend, Joe Smith, has published a lovely memoir of him.

May he rest in peace.

Feedback

The other day I wondered if a claim I’d read that the average lifespan of a Russian soldier in Ukraine was 35 minutes could be true. Charles Arthur pointed me at an edition of the BBC radio programme More or Less in which Tim Harford takes these kind of claims apart. He also sent a link to the relevant discussion. But when I click on it, this is the result:

Bah!

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Burren View

One of my favourite photographs. It’s taken from the northern shore of Galway Bay looking south to the ‘moonscape’ of the Burren in Co Clare.

Quote of the Day

”The English hoard words like misers; the Irish spend them like sailors; and in Brendan Behan’s tremendous new play language is out on a spree, ribald, dauntless, and spoiling for a fight. In itself, of course, this is scarcely amazing. It is Ireland’s sacred duty to send over, every few years, a playwright to save the English theatre from inarticulate glumness”.

• Ken Tynan, reviewing Brendan Behan’s The Quare Fellow in the Observer.

As an Irishman, I couldn’t possibly comment.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Dolly Parton | Jolene | Glastonbury 2014

Link

Long Read of the Day

Here’s how we’re all going to die

This essay by Noah Smith presents the first credible scenario I’ve seen for how AI could pose a real existential risk to our species. For that reason, it’s not an enjoyable read. But it’s an important one. So take a deep breath and proceed.

This isn’t the first time I’ve written this scenario out. But in the months since I started describing it to people, I have yet to hear an even halfway-convincing argument as to why this scenario is far-fetched. Nor do I feel like I’m a habitual “doomer” or hysterical person; in fact, this scenario is the first apocalyptic vision I’ve ever found plausible. I don’t even think a nuclear war would bring down civilization at this point,1 but I think a vibe-coded supervirus definitely could.

Furthermore, for reasons I’ll explain shortly, I am actually fairly calm about most AI risks, including the ones that often get thrown around in discussions. But not this one. Off the top of my head, I’d give AI-enabled bioterror about a 10% chance of bringing down civilization, and about a 30% chance of causing truly world-changing levels of destruction.

If you’re thinking about how to save the world, this scenario — and others similar to it — are probably what you should be focusing on…

Goodbye Dolly

A remarkable woman passed away last week. Dolly Parton was wonderfully sassy, generous and outrageously talented. And she connected with people everywhere she went. One day in 1990, for example, she turned up at Paidí O’Shea’s pub in Ventry, Co Kerry and, well, you can guess what happened.

Link

My hunch is that she had few enemies (an odd thing in show business). Once when Terry Wogan, a late — and much lamented —Irish media star, was asked — in a conversation about reincarnation — who or what would he like to come back as, replied, without missing a beat, “Dolly Parton’s accordion”. She might not have been entirely happy with that. After all, one of her “pet peeves” was that “Nobody notices I’ve got a great ass too.” May she rest in peace.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

John Ratcliffe, the current Director of the CIA director recently went to Moscow on a mysterious mission which is believed to involve briefing his Russian counterpart on Washington’s bleak assessment of Russia’s position.

The private message that Ratcliffe delivered to Bortnikov about Ukraine echoed some of the director’s public statements.

Last month, Ratcliffe spoke out pointedly about Russian troop losses during the war, and Moscow’s inability to advance on the battlefield. He noted that the life expectancy of a Russian soldier on the front lines was less than 35 minutes.

Can that figure of 35 minutes be right? If it is, then being a Russian soldier in Ukraine is like being a British Private going over the top in the battle of the Somme.

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Gold Coast

Where we’re headed this weekend.

Quote of the Day

”Puritanism. The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.”

• H.L. Mencken

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

The Grateful Dead | Brokedown Palace (Live at Carter-Finley Stadium; Raleigh

Link

Long Read of the Day

Silicon Valley’s long free ride is coming to an end. Tech companies are now increasingly unpopular with both the public and juries — which is why the other day Meta agreed to pay up to roughly US$18 billion, plus make major design changes to Facebook and Instagram, as part of a settlement it has agreed to in its most recent lawsuit about engineering teenage addiction into its products and services.

What’s even more dramatic is the rising public hostility — in the US and elsewhere — to AI and to data-centres in particular. I’d been looking for a good write-up on this and now Brian Merchant has provided it in this Substack post.

Americans overwhelmingly hate data centers. They overwhelmingly dislike Flock surveillance cameras. And now it seems they overwhelmingly despise Meta’s newest product, AI-infused Ray Bans that have been widely termed “pervert glasses,” too. Enveloping all of the above trends is a general, percolating dislike of Silicon Valley’s marquee pursuit, generative AI; a sentiment underscored, again, by a slate of recent polls.

It’s almost funny to think back to the mild wave of public consternation and Congressional wrist-slapping that pundits termed “the techlash” in the heady days of the first Trump administration, over concerns of disinformation on Facebook and social media, compared to what we’re seeing now. That is, a genuine, sustained demonstration of rage at some of the modern tech industry’s key aims.

And all of this has become so clear, so palpable, and so widespread that it’s apparently causing tech industry leadership and pro-AI policy wonks to enter either a state of denial or something more akin to fevered delusion.

Last week, in response to a fresh round of politicians announcing policies to slow or pause data center development, and the release of two new polls, including a Heatmap survey that found 75% of Americans would now oppose data centers being built where they live, AI industry players eschewed gestures towards contrition and essentially just melted down.

Some of the Valley’s responses include:

• The anti-data center movement is a ‘psy-op’ funded by the Chinese Communist Party or the product of “psychosis”
• Arguing that Silicon Valley shouldn’t need to defer to ordinary people on matters regarding technological development
• Claiming that the movement is propped up by paid shills backed by the “AI safety industrial complex”
• Claiming that opposing data center construction is inhumane because it amounted to genocidal population-control on soon-to-be sentient AIs.

I love the idea of the “AI safety industrial complex”!

Hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

Books, etc.

I was writing about AI and technocracy the other day and was suddenly reminded of a book that I read as a student in 1969 that had made a deep impression on me. Given the time-lapse it was unlikely that I still had it. But I went to my bookshelves and there it was! It’s about the ‘counter-culture’ of my student generation viewed as a revolt against the technocratic state, which has interesting resonances with the tech lash currently under way (and discussed by Brian Merchant on today’s Long Read above).

The Odyssey corner

Maureen Dowd, the New York Times columnist, is not impressed by Nolan’s “Zero-Eros” Odyssey. Basically, she says, all the sex has been edited out.

Nolan’s nearly three-hour masterwork, the classicist Mary Beard noted, does not have Homer’s “elusive sexiness.” In keeping with Gen Z’s waning interest in sex, the poem’s famous sex scenes have been excised, sapping erotic power from the female characters. As a headline in New York magazine wondered, “Is No One Horny in ‘The Odyssey’?”

Yeah, and what about the serial infidelity which delayed the hero’s return for ten years?

Nolan did not want his Odysseus betraying Penelope and enjoying his sojourns with other women. The director completely cut out the young princess Nausicaa, whom Homer’s Odysseus has a flirtation with, and neuters the text’s sexual encounters with Circe and Calypso.

One day I will have to watch the bloody thing. But first I have to buy a good pair of earplugs, if my friends are to be believed.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

• The 2026 iPhone Photography Awards Link

Makes one wonder sometimes why we bother with traditional cameras.

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Poppy farming

A reminder of what the garden was like before the Great Drought.

Quote of the Day

”Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog it’s too dark to read.”

• Groucho Marx

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

J.S. Bach | Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring | Leo Kottke

Link

I once heard him play this at the Cambridge Folk Festival. Magical moment.

Long Read of the Day

Would even an AI disaster on the scale of Hiroshima be enough to make humankind protect itself?

Timothy Garton Ash fears not. Here’s his sombre reasoning

As a matter of fact, everyone from the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, to Pope Leo XIV has been weighing in on the opportunities and dangers of AI, and how to regulate it. Xi insists AI should be “always under human control” (and preferably that of the Chinese Communist party). Appealing explicitly to the “global south”, Beijing has inaugurated a World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organisation. Meanwhile, the head of the world’s oldest and largest international NGO – the Roman Catholic church – discusses the AI challenge in his encyclical Magnifica Humanitas (Magnificent Humanity). Either we will build a new tower of Babel, the pope argues, or we will follow the example of the Jewish leader Nehemiah, who got the walls of Jerusalem rebuilt by involving the whole community in the project.

But looking around the world today, I see more Netanyahus than Nehemiahs. With salutary realism, a paper from the British thinktank Chatham House argues that it will take a major crisis to catalyse global coordination of AI governance. Unfortunately, I think even that sober prognosis is too optimistic…

Books, etc.

This is the latest book by the Harvard historian, Jill Lepore. It’s just arrived and I’m looking forward to reading it.

The NYT has an early review of it.

My commonplace booklet

My Observer column on how AIs tend to revert to the average prompted this nice anecdote from John Seeley.

A number of years ago I was given the task of arranging the painting of a large laboratory. A number of people worked in the laboratory, though I did not. Seeking consensus, I thought the researchers should have input into the paint choices.

Several colour schemes were drawn up (I recall 6 or 8) and researchers voted on their preferences. “You’ll get magnolia,” said the savvy department manager. A small number of voting systems were used to evaluate the results. (What you get in an academic environment!). Without fail, all voting systems produced the result magnolia! People lived contentedly with the new paintwork – no love was expressed but people had successfully resisted anything even modestly avant-garde.

C’est la vie artificielle.

Chart of the day

CVE stands for Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures. It’s basically a naming system for publicly-known computer security flaws. Note the near-vertical increase since the arrival of the Claude Mythos model on the scene.

Source

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Big Skies

A view of Brancaster beach that is almost painterly.

Quote of the Day

”Successful investing is anticipating the anticipations of others.”

• John Maynard Keynes

(I think he also likened betting on the stock market to judging a beauty contest, except you were assessing not the beauty of the contestants, but the opinions of other judges of it.)

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Alison Krauss & Union Station | The Lucky One

Link

Long Read of the Day

We already live in ‘clone towns’ – AI is making things worse

My latest Observer column.

In 2004 the New Economics Foundation (NEF) conducted a national survey of UK high streets, which were then still economically active. It found that real local shops had been replaced by swathes of identikit chain stores, making high streets up and down the country virtually indistinguishable from one another. It also came up with a new vocabulary for talking about urban areas.

In this terminology, a “home town” is a place that retains its individual character and is instantly recognisable and distinctive to the people who live there, as well as those who visit. A “clone town”, in contrast, is a place that has had the individuality of its high street shops replaced by a “monochrome strip of global and national chains”. Which meant that its retail heart could easily be mistaken for dozens of other bland town centres across the country. Of the towns surveyed, the NEF concluded: 41% were clone towns, 33% were home towns and 26% were “border towns”, meaning somewhere in between.

This lack of diversity is not just confined to towns. It’s everywhere. You see it in property ads for new flats, or houses that have been modernised for resale. Kitchens like operating theatres (and upmarket ones with the obligatory island); sitting rooms featuring white settees with overstuffed cushions, polished wood flooring and oversized TVs. Or cafes with exposed brickwork, and an expectation that oat milk with flat whites and smashed avocado are what you want. Or the legion of young influencers on Instagram who seem increasingly undistinguishable.

What’s driving this, apparently inexorable, onward march to uniformity? Modern capitalism, certainly. And social media, obviously. But underpinning it all is a particular technology and philosophy that increasingly determines how corporations make investment decisions and consumers make choices.

The tech industry calls it AI but it’s really machine-learning. It’s software that tries to predict what you’re likely to want next – a song, a video, a product, a location, a flat, whatever – and then shows you it, based on patterns in your past behaviour (what you clicked, watched, bought or rated) and the online behaviour of people whom the machine thinks may be like you.

These machines are basically statistical guessers. They’re trained by being given an objective – a measure of the thing they’re supposed to maximise – and a loss function, which is essentially a penalty for making bad guesses. And, as the social data scientist Lauren Leek explains in a brilliant Substack post, Temperature Zero for Culture: Why Everything Is Starting to Look the Same, it’s the loss function that drives these machines – and their unsuspecting users – to blandness.

This is because the most common loss function is the “squared error” one. It’s calculated by taking the difference between the machine’s guess and the right answer and multiplying it by itself. This means that it really punishes big discrepancies. Which, in turn, means that the machine’s algorithm always plays safe by predicting the average of all the available possibilities.

And in the process, it squashes ideas that were wild but also potentially original. As Leek writes: “The strange Georgian-Japanese street-food fusion restaurant nobody can classify … the song that sounds unlike what came before, most will never matter. But some will. A world that keeps removing the unlikely also removes the things that could have become the next likely.”

Which brings us back to those identikit high streets. The NEF’s clone towns weren’t the product of some co-ordinated plan to homogenise Britain, but the emergent outcome of many thousands of separate independent decisions, each one taken in its own context. No government or corporation decided that every town needed the same clothing chain, coffee shop and supermarket outlet.

Leek’s insight is that, in an AI-driven world, mathematics can explain why something such as that keeps happening, at every scale, from the high street to the streaming platform: any system trained to minimise error will always retreat towards the average, because the average is the safest guess when you’re not quite sure.

My commonplace booklet

Terry Eagleton on T.S. Eliot

For most moderately enlightened readers today, Eliot’s social views range from the objectionable to the obnoxious. In The Idea of a Christian Society (1939) and Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1948), he portrays his ideal social order, which seems more rural than urban. There will be a culture of values and beliefs shared in common; but though society will thus constitute an organic unity, it will also be strictly stratified. There will be a governing elite, consisting of the traditional English rural class along with an intellectual coterie of men not entirely unlike Eliot himself.

The task of this elite is to protect and disseminate the (largely Christian) values of the society as a whole. It is a vital undertaking, since if Christianity were to founder the whole of Western civilization would collapse along with it. Yet since the mass of men and women are in Eliot’s view incapable of what might properly be called thinking, their participation in the culture will be less conscious than that of their superiors. Instead, it will take the form of custom and tradition, myth and sentiment, ritual observances and spontaneous habits of feeling. All individuals will share in the same form of life, but they will share in it in different ways and at different levels of consciousness. The organic and the hierarchical can thus be reconciled.

From The Pope of Russell Square.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

•  How Did the English Build Such Beautiful Villages?. It’s a question I’ve often asked myself, coming as I do from a country that hasn’t been great at village-creation (partly for historical reasons). This is a fascinating article from Architecture and Tradition.

There is something immediately recognizable about an old English village, where a narrow lane winds between stone cottages, chimney pots rise above uneven roofs which can be repaired by roofers seattle, hedges spill across garden walls, and somewhere beyond the houses the tower of a medieval church appears through the trees, giving the whole settlement a center without dominating everything around it.

Feedback

Mention of ‘Professor Sisyphus’ in Friday’s edition made Nigel Kellaway think of this New Yorker cartoon.

Screenshot

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