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 […]
Poverty was once the norm. A quarter of babies died in their first year of life. In 1980, around 40% of the world’s population lived in extreme poverty. Today only 10% of people do. Much of this is thanks to fossil fuels. The burning of wood, then coal, gas and oil, enabled us to prosper. […]
Adam Smith attributed the ability of one man to do the work of many to the ‘invention of a great number of machines which facilitate and abridge labour’. Writing at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, Smith witnessed one of the most profound reorganisations of human capital in history: the transition to mechanised production. The […]
In this edition of Nimby Watch, we’re going everywhere and nowhere – we’re on the information superhighway, in cyberspace! Hang on, I was about to ask you where we were going this week, but I’ve read the intro and it sounds like we’re on a 1990s episode of Tomorrow’s World. In a way we are! […]
This is an edited version of Brendan McCord’s Adam Smith lecture, delivered at Panmure House earlier this month. You can watch the full lecture here. In ‘The Theory of Moral Sentiments’ Adam Smith identifies sympathy, propriety and resentment as the basic elements of moral judgment. His other great work, ‘The Wealth of Nations’, shows how […]
What would Margaret Thatcher say about politics today? Remarkably, as we mark the 100th anniversary of Mrs Thatcher’s birth, that question still mattersNow, thanks to AI, you can ask her yourself. Political technology firm Nostrada AI, founded by Leon Emirali, a former aide to Steve Barclay, has released an AI clone of Margaret Thatcher trained […]
In an autumn of government reshuffles, one change you may have missed stands out as revealing our failure of ambition in a critical area of innovation – AI. The UK talks a good game on leadership in AI but let’s be clear, we are not winning the race. The US leads the pack with not […]
Since 1944, humanity has been discovering mortal perils at a troubling rate. The Second World War, of course, was ended partly by the first offensive use of the nuclear bomb. Following the war, the US and the USSR amassed vast stockpiles of ever-more powerful warheads, with the Soviets also embarking on a massive biological weapons […]
When you think of the jobs most likely to be automated away, which do you think of? Those most at threat are those that are repetitive and rule-based, require minimal social or emotional intelligence – and don’t rely heavily on creativity or complex judgement. Customer service work is often being quoted as at threat, as […]
AI is an expensive enterprise, one that is as much about raw materials and energy as it is clever algorithms. You need to get hold of chips, stick them in a data centre somewhere and ask them to multiply matrices until the sand starts to think. This is the basic reality at the heart of […]
London Tech Week arrived with optimism and bold declarations. Prime Minister Keir Starmer promised £1 billion to scale the UK’s compute capacity for artificial intelligence. Meanwhile, Nvidia’s CEO, Jensen Huang, praised the UK’s research credentials and private investment, declaring our AI ecosystem ‘perfect for take-off’. His only concern? The absence of sufficient computing infrastructure. It […]
In the latest episode of our weekly podcast, The Capitalist: Microsoft’s Satya Nadella says it’s time to separate AI’s real impact from the noise: true success isn’t measured in viral demos but in global GDP growth. So, is AI delivering – or are we buying into a bubble? Meanwhile, Donald Trump’s approval ratings are slipping as […]
