What do Richard Tice, Kevin Hollinrake and Peter Kyle all have in common? I wish I had a wittier answer to what sounds the set-up to a poor joke, but unfortunately I only have one answer – they all own an electric vehicle (EV). If three men, who have wildly diverging political views, lifestyles and […]
Few people enjoy gazing into the crystal ball more than economists. Attempting to divine the future, otherwise known as forecasting, is a numerically intensive pastime of many people in the profession. It is also a common mandate of many state institutions. For instance, the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) produces aggregate forecasts of government receipts, […]
One doesn’t like to be a disappointment to one’s parents. But in (at least) one crucial regard, I’ve let my dad down. He is a steam train enthusiast, and I’ve never shown a blind bit of interest. So it was more with filial duty than pleasure that I took the old man to the Didcot […]
How do you know this wasn’t written by an AI? If you’re reading CapX, you are presumably interested in free speech, critical thinking and originality. So you should care that what you’re reading was written by a person with a mind. But public life is becoming colonised with ‘copy’ generated by AI. It’s become so […]
There are certain things I expect very few people to care about. For example, if someone found a counterexample to an obscure mathematical conjecture from 1939, I would expect approximately three people in my group of friends (all three maths academics) to even pretend to care. And that is a very niche and self-selected group […]
Nigel Farage, the Member of Parliament for Clacton and leader of Reform UK, has resigned, triggering a by-election in the constituency. This follows weeks of speculation regarding an undeclared £5 million gift Farage received before he became an MP, as well as other gifts he allegedly should have declared. Farage intends to stand in the […]
Andy Burnham is not a forward-looking man. His musical interests stop at around 1998, his approach to industry is straight out of the 1970s and his favourite football team hasn’t won a trophy for over thirty years. It’s little surprise then that he takes a dim view of the ongoing tech revolution. It was reported […]
Last Friday, the most capable AI model in the world went dark. Anthropic had released Fable 5 three days earlier; on June 12, a U.S. executive order cut off access for foreign nationals. With no clean way to wall Americans off from the rest of us inside a global system used by hundreds of millions […]
Artificial intelligence is already reshaping policing, and the recent row over the Metropolitan Police’s blocked deal with Palantir shows how far politics is lagging behind operational reality. If we are serious about protecting frontline officers and visible neighbourhood policing, we should embrace carefully regulated AI as a force multiplier that releases cops from analogue bureaucracy […]
Can you imagine anything worse than a foreign company whose software saved lives, cut NHS waiting lists, put more police on the beat and reduced crime? It’s appalling, isn’t it? No British government or public sector body should have any dealings with such a company. Obviously. Much better to let patients die, cut police jobs […]
Elon Musk’s SpaceX has launched the largest ever public offering of stock today, selling $75 billion worth of shares. SpaceX emphasised its remarkable achievements in its IPO filing: ‘We are the primary launch provider for the US government. In 2025, we launched 11 of 12 National Security Space Launch (‘NSSL’) medium and heavy lift missions […]
Admired for his reformist approach to the NHS, Wes Streeting is generally seen as the most market-friendly figure on the British Left. Yet his call for social media companies to be treated like tobacco businesses reminds us that even the best of a bad bunch can still be pretty awful. After resigning as Health Secretary, […]
I walked the dog recently along the Thames Path, around the source (or one of the sources, so as not to cause a fight) of the River Thames. This time of year, much of it is all dried up, and you can walk along the bed of what in the winter is full-flowing river. Wondering […]
Britain stands at a rare strategic inflection point, embrace AI or continue on a path of sluggish economic growth for the foreseeable future. The International Monetary Fund recently forecasted that the energy shocks from the Iran war will hit the UK the hardest of the world’s advanced economies, cutting its estimates for UK growth this […]
Can a robot write a symphony? Can it turn a canvas into a beautiful masterpiece?” Can you? This exchange from the film ‘I, Robot’ (and later parodied in a million memes) captures human fears and concerns about coexisting with robots, and what it means to be human. Fast forward 20 years, and artificial intelligence is […]
You will all know this experience. Sitting in a job interview, you are asked your biggest weakness. Desperate to impress, you used a humble brag; I’m a bit of a perfectionist, I get so invested in success. Something similar may have happened in the world of artificial intelligence. Anthropic, the company behind the large language […]
This short story is a product of the Creative Futures Research Project, a partnership between Coventry University and the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory, the MoD’s research arm at Porton Down. The aim of Creative Futures is to explore how emerging technologies might impact society and geopolitics. Discussions between science fiction writers and defence experts […]
If you’re under the age of 53, no human being has ever left low Earth orbit in your lifetime. Just nine spaceflights, all under the Apollo Program, took human beings beyond Earth orbit at all. And they all took place in a four-year burst between December 1968 and December 1972. Tonight, NASA attempts to change […]
‘How good is our military?’ Donald Trump asked rhetorically when he addressed a group of Republican members of Congress recently. The answer – judging from the first 10 days of Operation Epic Fury – is, in many ways, exceptionally good. The joint American and Israeli air and missile strikes which began on 28 February have […]
Earlier this year, I left London, for all the reasons you’d imagine an evil right-winger like me would. One of the few (and there are only a few) pangs of regret I had was when I was driving my wife and dog out along the Westway for the final time. Coming the other way was […]
Despite reviving economic growth being an avowed priority for every government since the Covid-19 era, the record has been lacklustre. The obvious question is why? What are the constraints that hold back ministers who want to support investment, innovation and growth? Of course, there are some fundamental limitations that any government has to operate within. […]
Christmas may now be a distant memory, but I finally got to watch Frank Capra’s classic ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’. It really is a wondrous film, and not even my tipsy uncle talking all the way through it could dent it. One lovely line came back to me this week, where James Stewart’s George Bailey […]
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