Science Fiction – We Know Zero

Models of the first and second kind

09. September 2026 · Write a comment · Categories: Actuarial, Economics, Education, Health, Professions, Science Fiction

Copper parts of a vehicle have been mounted on a much larger wooden structure in an exhibit at the Vatican Museums — *My photograph of an exhibit at the Vatican Museums*

Worldbuilding in science fiction has certain rules, or so I thought. And the first of these according to some sources at least seems to be consistency. According to the Quirkworthy website:

The basic message is very simple: your world must be internally consistent. Doesn’t matter if it’s science fiction or fantasy, and it makes no odds if it’s a novel, game, or opera. At all times, your world must be consistent to itself.

So when Jeff Noon and Steve Beard came to the Birmingham Science Fiction Group a couple of years ago, I pricked up my ears when one of them (Jeff I think) said that the first book of the Ludwich Chronicles, Gogmagog, which they were discussing, was not consistent. They were following Cady Meade’s viewpoint which journeyed 60 miles along the river Nysis inside a ghost and the focus was to set a particular mood. It was built from the bottom up.

This idea appealed to me then, and has, in my view, become a more and more important idea recently. We all build our views of the world from the bottom up based on our own experiences and they are frequently inconsistent with those of other people. The problem comes when we stop accepting that and treat our models as, in some way, top down and universal.

I had a great example of this a few years ago in the Vatican Museums. Some bits of bronze they reckoned to be parts of a cart buried in an Etruscan tomb had been discovered and were then displayed on an entirely speculative wooden model of a cart (to be fair to them, the Monteleone chariot dated to around 530 BC, was a rather more complete find and the wooden model looks like it was modelled on that). The trouble is, once you have seen the pieces on the cart, it is difficult to think of them in any other way. Rather like some of those early dinosaur reconstructions and possibly unhelpful in a field as fast-moving as archaeology.

Source: The book of the great sea-dragons, Ichthyosauri and Plesiosauri, [gedolim taninim] gedolim taninim, of Moses. Extinct monsters of the ancient earth. With thirty plates, copied from skeletons in the author’s collection of fossil organic remains, (deposited in the British museum.) *by Hawkins, Thomas, 1810-1889*
*https://archive.org/details/bookgreatseadra00hawk/page/n5/mode/2up*

We do this everywhere. Every competitive market is a model, as relentless in its pursuit of victory within the rules (all of which must be stress-tested as to how they are going to be applied by each individual referee in each individual encounter) as the Premier League. Sometimes if you question some of the underlying assumptions behind some of these models, you are told that is just the way the world works.

But the way the world works is opaque. Novelists have attempted to show us glimpses of it for centuries. Historians are sometimes able to agree about how it has worked in a specific geography for a short period of time. Occasionally, as a result of our own experiences, we may feel that we have managed to grasp some truth about the world and how it works in our own lives. But often the clarity slips through our fingers when we throw more light on it. The clarity certainly never seems to last that long. For clarity you often need an organisation signed up to a model.

Much has been written in recent years about our dependence on models and our inability to look outside them in many cases, most notably Escape from Model Land by Erica Thompson. This has mainly focused on the models we make to try and understand the world. But there also models behind those models which effectively determine what kinds of models of the first kind we create. These are the organisations and institutions we look at the world from.

It was in a time of rapid transition and uncertainty much as our own is that the groups of organisations we call professions emerged in the nineteenth century. The model of the second kind they adopted was partly that set out by Daniel and Richard Susskind in their book The Future of the Professions.

According to the Susskinds, there is a Grand Bargain between society and the professions, which means (and I am paraphrasing a little here), in return for professions providing:

Expertise, experience and judgement;
Delivered affordably, accessibly, reassuringly and reliably;
With knowledge and methods maintained and kept up to date, members trained, standards and quality of work enforced and only appropriately qualified individuals allowed in;
Acting honestly and in good faith; and
Putting clients’ interests ahead of their own.

In return, society will give the professions:

Respect and status;
Exclusive rights to perform/provide socially significant activities or services; and;
Independence to decide how they do it and how much they can be paid for it.

What professions expect from society is jealously guarded. My own profession’s uneasy relationship with the universities can plausibly be traced back to Newton’s influence on what mathematics could be taught there, therefore denying actuaries the status they craved without setting up their own professional bodies to supply it. The last attempt to allow an allied profession to carry out limited medical activities ended with the Leng Review effectively strangling it, egged on noisily by the BMA. And it is not hard to find articles defending increases to executive remuneration way beyond that of the people who work for them as the norm.

What society expects from professions often gets less attention directed at it. Four of the five bullets above tend to form part of the professional code of most professions in some form, although there are frequent fines of large professional firms for failures in the standard of the services provided.

But what of delivering professional services affordably, accessibly, reassuringly and reliably? What has tended to happen, as the group of people requiring professional services has widened, is that the affordability and accessibility have been increasingly called in to question. And online self-service looks likely to be attempted for a wider and wider range of services as time goes on.

So is the professional structure we have going to remain? If the experience of the nineteenth century, when most of these professions emerged, is anything to go by, the level of disruption will vary hugely by profession and institution and the period of transition could be very long in some cases. But it seems clear that such a period has begun. This has serious implications for actuarial education, amongst much else.

And whatever replaces them is likely to be built from the bottom up.

The 1% view will kill us all

02. September 2026 · Write a comment · Categories: Birmingham, Climate Change, COVID-19, Science Fiction

A wide angle picture of the Birmingham Catacombs

Some tombs which could do with being visited more often: *The Birmingham Catacombs* – excellent tour available at *Birmingham Walking Tours*

I am currently reading The End of Everything by M John Harrison, which I will be talking about at greater length in a future post. But one aspect I want to pick up now is how the response of the characters to the disappearance of many of the familiar landmarks post apocalypse is to lose their cognitive bearings. Thoughts come and go, often not joined up. They struggle to understand what other people are saying to them.

I think this is a much under-explored aspect of a period of change. Our ability to think about what is going on, to plan, to anticipate is affected. Many of us experienced this during the pandemic. Psychology as a discipline changed significantly as a result of World War 2.

This is also an aspect that speculative narratives like this one often miss. Told from the vantage point of 2100, it has humanity in despair in 2046:

I imagine that today’s world must have seemed like an impossible dream in 2046, when my parents were born in Charleston. Then, an estimated 60 million people had just died in the Great Hunger. The world had warmed by 2 °C, relative to its average temperature in the late 19th century. Ecosystems were collapsing, led by coral reefs.

Instead there is a scenario of an international climate agreement (“The Geneva Climate Compact”), followed by accelerated climate breakdown leading to emergency geoengineering (mostly solar radiation management) which stops global warming by 2080.

International agreements, emergency sessions of the United Nations (even the idea that such a session in 2047 would be the first such session since the pandemic!) and even the European Union is still present and correct in this otherwise devastated landscape. The problem with these sorts of projections is that everything the projector is not looking at (in this case everything except average global temperatures and their direct impacts) is assumed unchanged. Many climate models do the same thing. Indeed a perfectly valid use of climate models is to change one variable and keep everything else the same to try and measure the impact of that variable.

However to really think about the future you need to look to your novelists. Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140 is a case in point. In it global sea levels have risen by 50 feet. Everyone lives in tower blocks connected by sky bridges which occasionally topple into the canals which were once streets.

I used to think that money markets would not survive events like this, but Robinson posits what I now believe is a more likely future scenario. The Intertidal Property Pricing Index is developed instead, carefully constructed to be reasonably stable despite the instability of the actual real estate being valued, and people bet on it. And soon everyone is fixated on what this index is saying daily rather than the buildings collapsing around them. This is exactly what our finance sector will do of course. There will be money to be made out of such activities after all. And so expectations that they will, in any way, be a leader out of the climate emergency are, in my view, unrealistic.

But also is the idea that our institutions as currently constructed will lead us out of catastrophe, or that a top down maintenance of international institutions will be a dominant feature of a post-apocalyptic world. Any plans we have for the future must be robust against the possible loss of central authority.

This does not lead us towards survivalist prepping, holing up in some remote area with canned foods, bottled water and armaments. As Alex Steffen teaches in his “ruggedization” classes:

I would put to you that if you find yourself in a situation where you’re having to let off some rounds to protect your canned goods, you’ve already failed, you have not understood the assignment.

It means the opposite. Remember another thing about the pandemic: people rose to the occasion, just as politicians sunk to it. People checked on the elderly in their neighbourhoods. In Birmingham for instance:

Within weeks of the crisis unfolding, near on 4,000 mutual aid groups registered on the mutual aid website with an estimated 3 million participants stepping forward to support their neighbours and communities. Widely heralded as the ‘early responders’ to the crisis, these groups – alongside thousands more neighbourhood groups – played a fundamental role in ensuring that local residents received immediate support.

This included “food distribution, errands, shopping and picking up prescriptions for those shielding”.

The truth is we all need each other, we all need back up and connecting with your local community is the most effective way that you can “ruggedize” your life. The characters in Harrison’s book have become isolated from each other.

In Goliath’s Curse, Luke Kemp makes the case that the collapse of the “Goliaths” (large imperial powers which dominate the landscape as now) are often linked with improvements in markers of human flourishing like height, life expectancy and equality. This is because, assuming you can avoid the violence associated with the groups scrabbling for status in the ruins of a collapsed state, the main contributors to that flourishing in the past have been local communities rather than at the state level. He worries that, in our current globalised inter-connected world (Ed Conway’s recent article about The 30,000-mile fish finger is one memorable example) this may not necessarily be our experience the next time. As Kemp says:

It is difficult to see through this fog of uncertainty which groups would fare best post-collapse. For now, being poor in wealth but rich in friends is a better strategy than being a suspicious billionaire under siege in a bunker. Not only that, but cultivating bonds of solidarity and mutual aid rather than ruthless self-interest means that the survivors are more likely to help recreate a world that is worth preserving.

If you want a thought experiment about what happens to the billionaires post-collapse, by the way, I recommend Naomi Alderman’s The Future and Cory Doctorow’s novella The Masque of the Red Death (not that one!). Both dark and hilarious in equal measure.

The future is all of ours to make, but we really need to think about it independently and not necessarily along the tracks that the political class funnel all discussions down. That is a 1% world they are discussing. I will leave the last word to Luke Kemp:

Our greatest achievements are not because of the 1 per cent; they are collective endeavours. As George Eliot once wrote, ‘The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts…half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.’ It’s time to drop the 1 per cent view and start paying attention to the unmarked tombs and unknown heroes upon whose shoulders we’ve built our world.

The Vogons are coming for Birmingham Science Fiction Group!

13. August 2026 · Write a comment · Categories: Birmingham, Science Fiction

*The Friends of the Earth Warehouse on Allison Street – home to the Birmingham Science Fiction Group since January 2024*

Like many people, when I first heard about it, I assumed it was something to do with HS2. HS2 has been quietly munching its way through tonnes of cement, hard core, steel and oh-so-much-money that the site – part sandpit, part go kart track in appearance – has become part of the landscape on entering and leaving Birmingham. But no, this is in fact one of those unsexy transport infrastructure projects that have in the past seemingly been shelved whenever they had the misfortune to be located outside London as a result of the ever ballooning HS2 budget. It obviously is linked to the increase in traffic anticipated as a result of HS2, but as this video explains, this is an independent project whereby the already creaking rail capacity of Birmingham is to be expanded via a more coordinated use of New Street and Moor Street stations, with the traffic to and from everywhere else distributed via the newly constructed East and West Chords. At the expense of Bordesley station and a large swathe of Digbeth.

The scheme boundary *Source: https://mrhalliance.co.uk/api/downloadAsset?id=cmr39z4olw57707mn1gf5kz4s*

As you can see, the top left end of the X-marks-the-spot gash across Digbeth that describes the scheme boundary contains Allison Street, home of the Birmingham Science Fiction Group (BSFG) since Millennium Point kicked us out at the end of 2023. We were very grateful at the time, and remain so. As a not-for-profit, some might say even a shoestring, organisation there are many venues which are not accessible to us for the same reason that Douglas Adams (more from him below) didn’t have a copy of Europe on Five Dollars a Day when hitchhiking in 1971: because we aren’t “in that financial league”. It would be a considerable struggle for us to find another home which offered us as much, including accommodation for disabilities and mobility issues in a central location within Birmingham, but was also in our financial league.

The parallels with Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy are almost irresistible (and specifically the announcement of Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz of the Galactic Hyperspace Planning Council, that “the plans for development of the outlying regions of the Galaxy require the building of a hyperspatial express route through your star system, and regrettably your planet is one of those scheduled for demolition”) and Friends of the Earth have not tried to, from A (Weary) Climate Activist’s Guide To The Galaxy by Jane Charlesworth, to the Don’t Panic signs dotted about their website. The latter is a reference to the fact that we have until 2029 to campaign against the details of the plan, rather than the 12 minutes Arthur Dent got.

However the current consultation only lasts until 28 August and details of the current proposals and how you can get involved are here.

In addition to the Warehouse, venues on Lower Trinity Street, including Club Colette, The Night Owl, Luna Springs, XOYO, and Mama Roux’s are also under threat of demolition. Friends of the Earth are careful not to oppose the rail improvements in principle, as obviously anything that increases the capacity of public transport to replace private car use is an environmental win, but are confident that it would be possible to achieve the aims of the project with a significantly smaller project bootprint across Digbeth. They have approached the many groups operating out of the Warehouse such as BSFG to get involved in the campaign to revise the Midland Rail Hub (MRH) Alliance‘s (the consortium of Network Rail and a number of private firms which are driving the project) plan.

Since we moved to the Warehouse, the BSFG have brought numerous science fiction writers and others to Digbeth: from Peter F Hamilton to Alastair Reynolds, Claire North to Wendy and Tim Aldiss talking about our former Honorary President, Brian Aldiss. We have discussed everything from terraforming to the future for human lifespans to the history of Dungeons and Dragons. Celebrating our 55th anniversary this year, we had hoped to remain within the Digbeth community for many years to come, where even the graffiti makes us feel at home:

We understand that the Kilder bar under the arches at Shaw’s Passage is also under threat from these plans. This has been where we have taken our guests ever since we arrived in Digbeth, so has already become part of the SF legacy of the city.

There are obviously many more important groups than us depending upon the Warehouse’s continued existence – it currently houses the BRIG cafe (Birmingham Race Impact Group), Voce Books, Sprocket Cycles, Vivid Projects, BrumRadio and Digbeth Community Garden – but it is important to us. We will be responding to the consultation and hope that as many other people who care about this local resource do so too. It feels appropriate to leave the last words to Douglas Adams:

Many, many light years from here, indeed from anywhere, lies the grim and long abandoned planet, Vogsphere. Somewhere on a fetid, fog-bound mud bank on this planet there stands, surrounded by the dirty, broken and empty carapaces of the last few jeweled scuttling crabs, a small stone monument which marks the place, where it is thought, the species Vogon Vogonblurtus first arose. On the monument there is carved an arrow which points away into the fog, under which are inscribed in plain, simple letters the words “The buck stops there.”

The inequality of redundancy

05. August 2026 · Write a comment · Categories: Actuarial, Birmingham, COVID-19, Economics, Health, Pensions, Science Fiction

In October 2009, while working as a pensions actuary in Birmingham, I attended the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries’ Joining Forces in Mortality and Longevity multidisciplinary conference at the Royal College of Physicians in Edinburgh. The canapés were excellent and, of the plenary speakers, I particularly remember Rudi Westendorp from Leiden University who, in response to the question of whether it was nature or nurture that was responsible for longevity, said it was both.

It was also the first and last time I have used a sleeper train. I had a trustee meeting on the Friday morning south of London and decided that it would be a good idea to get the sleeper from Edinburgh to London on the Thursday night. I hadn’t really researched it in advance and I suppose I was expecting a cabin to myself, but it turned out I was in fact sharing with a German guy who looked like he rode the overnight trains of Europe all the time. There was a set of bunk beds which took up most of the cabin and my memories of that night were of my being thrown around every time the train took a bend down the East Coast mainline, not sleeping a wink while my room-mate snored soundly throughout and then of his taking an annoying amount of time to brush his teeth in the morning. The trustees did not get me at my best.

But I digress. The session from the conference which has stayed with me ever since was by Eugene Milne from Newcastle University. As the blurb for his session A new model of mortality and survival stated:

A new mathematical model mimics patterns of mortality in species from nematodes to humans. Net risk, it suggests, arises from two components, an interactive element accounting for historical falls in human mortality, and redundant decay which shapes lifelong risk. This suggests “intrinsic ageing” is unrelated to the slope of the mortality curve, and is unlikely to have altered for humans in recent centuries.

Eugene Milne went on to become Director of Public Health for Newcastle and took them through the pandemic. The full paper in the British Actuarial Journal from 2009 is here.

At a time where actuarial mortality modelling consisted either of projecting observed trends into the future (with no real explanatory power for observed features like cohort effects) or attempted to project a range of causes of mortality based on the likely progress in treating them (which is limited by the quality of information on death certificates), Milne’s model stood out for starting from a biological model of gradually diminishing redundancy within the body. He recognised its limitations, as he said at the time:

As a bridge between actuarial and biological approaches to ageing it falls, as yet, between two stools. The examples in this paper are generated by probabilistic computer modelling. This is clearly not adequate for
actuarial use and the model needs to be developed further to provide a form that will serve that purpose. On the other hand, it describes (as noted in section 4) a biology that would be ‘needed’ in order to construct organismal risk as it is observed. This it does well, providing a coherent account of why mortality patterns appear as they do. Yet its theoretical ‘biology’ is at odds with currently favoured theories of ageing. If the biological quantity described in the NBM [nested binomial model] as redundancy exists, we do not yet know what it is, nor why it should appear to act in so sequestered and consistent a fashion.

But the idea stayed with me, and perhaps that made me particularly receptive to Richard Murphy’s recent article about allostatis, which he describes as “the way living organisms survive by continually adapting to the changing world around them”. As Murphy points out:

If something breaks, a wealthy person can simply have it repaired or replaced. If travel arrangements fail, alternatives can be found. If income is interrupted, there are savings to draw upon. Problems remain, because they always will, but they rarely threaten the stability of everyday life for a wealthy person. In other words, the amount of adaptation required of them is reduced.

There have been a number of attempts over the years to draw attention to how your level of income affects your ability to adapt to your environment.

In George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London, he describes the effect of poverty:

For, when you are approaching poverty, you make one discovery which outweighs some of the others. You discover boredom and mean complications and the beginnings of hunger, but you also discover the great redeeming feature of poverty: the fact that it annihilates the future.

However Orwell has been criticised, as the temporary tramp that he was, for deciding that meant the end of anxiety. More recently, Jack Monroe used Terry Pratchett’s example of Captain Vimes’ boots, to illustrate how what life costs depended on how much you already had:

A really good pair of leather boots, the sort that would last years and years, cost fifty dollars. This was beyond his pocket and the most he could hope for was an affordable pair of boots costing ten dollars, which might with luck last a year or so before he would need to resort to makeshift cardboard insoles so as to prolong the moment of shelling out another ten dollars.

Therefore over a period of ten years, he might have paid out a hundred dollars on boots, twice as much as the man who could afford fifty dollars up front ten years before. And he would still have wet feet.

Jack developed the Vimes Boots Index to highlight inflation in basic food products, which then persuaded the ONS to launch a shopping prices comparison tool.

But to return to the idea of redundancy: it is clear that if you have, say, redundant money which can be brought in to play when things go wrong, then things generally go much better for you. But imagine if you have used up any redundancy quite some time ago and therefore any reverse is a potential crisis. Your stress levels will be much higher all of the time, as your body tenses for the battles it knows lie ahead about anything from a car that won’t start to a boiler that packs up to a hike in the price of bus fares or the basic food products on the Vimes Boots Index. Day in, day out.

At the moment one of the differentials in redundancy is around heat stress. Housing which cannot be cooled without electricity which cannot be afforded. Day in, day out, for much of the summer so far. But in winter the same housing will need far more heating because its occupants cannot afford capital investment like insulation.

And the reason for this enormous inequality in the level of redundancy, is of course wealth and income inequality. The Equality Trust sets out the statistics as follows:

The UK has very high inequality of income compared to other developed countries; the 9th most unequal incomes of 38 OECD countries (OECD, 2022).

The UK’s wealth inequality is much more severe than income inequality, with the top fifth taking 36% of the country’s income and 63% of the country’s wealth, while the bottom fifth have only 8% of the income and only 0.5% of the wealth according to the Office for National Statistics.

And this stress, day in, day out, means that people also die earlier, as shown below in the House of Commons Library research briefing on Inequalities in life expectancy, using ONS figures (and honestly they’re not picking on Blackpool):

And yet the most likely way for you to hear the word redundancy is when some company is planning to get rid of some of its workforce.

The trouble with people is that you don’t need them until you do, as Jonn Elledge has written here:

There are substantial differences between the US military and the NHS: but what both have in common is that, when they need something, they really do need it. The entire notion of “efficiency” is misplaced.

Similarly, in Nate Hagens’ latest interview, with biologist and biophysicist Olivier Hamant, they explore:

…how cheap, abundant energy allowed human societies to substitute the “safety net” of resource abundance for the safety net that living systems actually rely on: diversity, redundancy, and cooperation.

Until the resources stopped being so abundant.

And then there is the kind of workplace sustained redundancy programmes create, as Seth Godin says in a recent blog post:

“How few people can we get away with?” That’s a question many bosses think hard about. Automate. Streamline. Improve productivity and take humans out of as many tasks as possible. It’s a time-tested way to create profits and to increase a certain kind of reliability. Claude Code is popular with many organizations for precisely this reason.

“How can we include more people into this process?” is a less popular but often more valid way to create value. In an organization that is in the business of bringing insights, humanity and care to problems, more involvement from people creates better outcomes. The challenges make it far more valuable.

Which sort of organization would you like to work for?

And what sort of society do we want to have? One that supports the people in the bottom quintile with no redundant capital, so that they might have the resources available to maintain the stability of everyday life and reduce the adaptation required of them? Or one which keeps demanding more and more from those it allocates less and less of national wealth to. To quote from another Orwell book, Nineteen Eighty-Four, from the mouth of O’Brien, Big Brother’s Grand Inquisitor:

If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—for ever.

I think we can all come up with better pictures of the future than that one.

55 years

24. July 2026 · Write a comment · Categories: AI, Climate Change, COVID-19, Science Fiction

Two events recently have made me think about the last 55 years in a different way. The first was the last Birmingham Science Fiction Group meeting, which we had dedicated to a 55 year anniversary celebration for the group (the 50th anniversary having been pandemicked). We had a cake, illustrated by David Hardy’s Stratus Hotel, and we showed a film of interviews from members across the years, again featuring some of David Hardy‘s artwork, with stories about guest speakers from Asimov to Frank Herbert to Iain Banks to Jack Cohen and very frank recollections from our current honorary president, Alastair Reynolds. If you want to see the film, you need to join the Group, which you can easily do by emailing us at contact@brumsfgroup.org.uk. Seeing some of the original organisers talking about some of these meetings like they had just happened made me reflect on how we often attribute significance to things after the event and tend to downplay things happening around us now. Things are both never as good or important as they used to be and, of course, as we prove to ourselves over and over again, they also are.

The other event was a visit with my brother and his wife to where we used to live, in the officers’ married quarters of an RAF station in Yorkshire, 55 years ago, when I was eight. Just standing on this patch of grass, with a field of wheat still growing the other side of the fence (to the right), I got a very strong sense of another way of getting from there to here. Obviously there was the one I had taken, with countless house moves, school moves, marriages, careers, children, holidays, illnesses and death and grief and so much joy and laughter in the very fortunate and privileged life I have lived.

But what if I had just stood here and the 55 years had just sped past me instead. My Liverpool football kit would have been a bit tight, with the number seven sewn on the back by my Mum (actually that might have been the following year, when the full magnificence of Kevin Keegan had become apparent). Or, much more spookily, if the eight-year-old just found themselves on the same patch of grass 55 years later in a Wells’ The Time Machine kind of way. It all suddenly felt just as possible and plausible, as if the 55 year old football-and-everything-else pitch was still there within touching distance somehow.

The thing is, I could understand the world of 1971, once I had been reminded of a few things no doubt. A world of cash (just decimalised so no shillings and old pence), phones fixed to houses and telephone boxes, smaller cars filled with leaded petrol, three channels on the black and white TV. I had just driven up there in a car with bodywork comprising mostly plastics, with no spare tyre and no wallet. Just a device known as a mobile which can not only make calls, but send and receive text messages, carry out all my financial transactions and navigate me to my brother’s house. My eight-year-old self would recognise very little about this world beyond the patch of grass he stood on and the field beyond the fence where he had parachuted his mother’s childhood teddy bear.

And this is the terrifying thing about life: we are all that eight-year-old facing the incomprehensible future, and so much of what we spend our time doing is trying to deal with that fear and lack of understanding with often meaningless structures and practices and customs to ward off the sense of being totally out of control. Trump is scary because he appears to have taken a lot of the guard rails off the path we are on, with little sense that he understands what he is doing. AI is scary because it is putting its foot on the accelerator before we have a clear idea of where we are going. Climate change is scary because we no longer look like we are headed where we thought we were.

And we try and stick some grit in the wheels to slow down the disruption to our own little bit of the world, whether to our sense of ourselves, or to how we think life should be lived. And sure we need to question whether we need to change things which are working perfectly well, but often the driver for resisting change is fear of what we don’t know is coming and finding familiar things irresistibly reassuring.

And when we realise that it is not just us with our, certainly in my case, fairly small and unimportant lives (although obviously very important to us!), but also the people who seem to be shaping the world around us that feel these insecurities and uncertainties, the possibility of working together to make it easier to adapt to the very weird future that is coming suddenly doesn’t seem so outlandish after all.

I think this – what we resist, what we create and what we could nurture in the face of this terrifying future – is what I am going to be writing about for the rest of this year, as we all rattle on down the road in the back of someone’s van.

What we can’t know

08. July 2026 · Write a comment · Categories: AI, Book reviews, Climate Change, Education, Media & Politics, Science Fiction

What We Can Know by Ian McEwan is a difficult book to categorise. Some might call it “cli-fi”, as it sets itself in a future significantly altered by human actions and the landscape’s response to those. The Sunday Times appears to think that it might have created a new genre entirely. I think it is best seen as an Oxford novel, even if many of Oxford’s landmarks are submerged for large parts of it. Radiohead even gets a mention. As the petty snobberies and clandestine affairs of academics play out on the much-changed landscape of 2119, earnest academics Tom Metcalfe and Rose Church explore the petty snobberies and clandestine affairs of 2014 and the quest for the long-lost poem from that year. “A Corona for Vivien” certainly feels like a poem which belongs in a past of barn conversions and dinner parties.

For these academics, The Derangement – which is how they refer to the developing crisis mindset between 2015 and 2030 – is just a backdrop to what they regard as the important drama of their lives. It is followed by the first of several climate wars in 2036 involving nuclear weapons, ironically causing a cooling before the Inundation of 2042 causes the deaths of 200 million, with the UK’s population halving and life needing to be eked out on a cluster of small radioactive islands.

I set this out because the book, while occasionally referring to the eeriness of things, carries on with the work obsessions and love lives of its characters pretty much regardless. If What We Can Know is to be believed, academia carries on much as before, with lectures and seminars and essay marking, despite all of this. For humanities departments currently under the cosh despite the absence so far of a nuclear war, this may seem unlikely.

My grumpiness about all this may be partly due to the fact that I am writing this during a series of record breaking heatwaves and unbudgeable heat domes, but I feel like I have had to make more accommodations to the climate – cancellation of plans, a whole new routine at home with the single aim of keeping the thermometer from moving up any further – than McEwan’s characters seem to be doing in their post-not-quite-apocalyptic lives. Whereas one visit to the swimming pool last month was reduced to bobbing about in water along with a couple of dozen others in a manner reminiscent of the wet bulb event at the start of Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future, McEwan’s only concession to a future world that can still apparently support an academic entirely focused on a 105 year old poem which has never been seen since, seems to be that journeys anywhere are now more difficult and dangerous.

And yet Tom then travels to Snowdonia (where the Bodleian is now housed) fairly easily. And he and Rose then travel to the flooded valleys of the Cotswolds to attempt to retrieve the poem. The only difficult journey described is once they get on to the target island and have to navigate through thick vegetation without satnav (GPS is no more) or even rudimentary hiking skills between the two of them. At one point we are told the internet is on the way out and at another that there is a National Artificial Intelligence which remembers everything you have ever told it.

This book seems as complicit in the “crisis of realism in fiction” as McEwan, via Rose, accuses everything else written between 2015 and 2030 of being. However it is an entertaining Oxford novel, with tense conversations in parked cars and breathtaking egomaniacs everywhere you look.

What we can’t know is what Tom and Rose will make of it in 100 years’ time.

How Not To Be A Reverse-Centaur – Part 2

16. June 2026 · Write a comment · Categories: Actuarial, AI, Cartoons, Economics, Education, Professions, Risk, Science Fiction

A no entry sign over an image of a reverse-centaur where the robot is in control

As I discussed in How Not To Be A Reverse-Centaur (Cory Doctorow defines a reverse-centaur as “a machine that is assisted by a human being, who is expected to work at the machine’s pace”) our actuarial education system needs to change. This has been true for some time, but the development of AI systems has both demonstrated why more clearly and accelerated the timeframes over which action is needed. As I said in December last year:

A large part of the education of the future will need to be about equipping us all to understand what we now have access to and when and how to access it. We will all have different things we are interested in, or end up involved with and needing to be educated about. It will be up to each of us to decide which things are worth the difficulty of learning, but to make those decisions we will need education that can support the development of judgement.

For education institutions, the question will be what is not worth the difficulty of learning? Credentialising based on now relatively meaningless assessment methods will not cut it. This is where the confrontation with employers and politicians is likely to come. Essential skills and their related knowledge will be better developed and assessed via more open-ended project work and online assessment of it to check understanding. These will need to become the norm, with written examinations becoming less and less prevalent. Not because of fear of cheating and plagiarism, but because an outcome which can be replicated that easily by AI is not worth assessing in the first place.

Suppose you were to ask someone who had never seen our academic system that, in order to assess whether someone else we wanted them to employ in their organisation would do a good job for them, we would:

Award marks for what has been written in answer to academic questions about what the students can remember unaided about the content of their lecture courses and reading lists with a biro on a pad of paper perched precariously on a tiny wooden table surrounded by hundreds of other similar scribblers, for a set period of time as minders wandered the floors like Victorian factory owners.
These marks would be based on marking criteria they would never see.
We would then get together in a secret huddle for a couple of months to mark all these scripts, check them and “moderate” them to check they were in line with the previous years’ exercises.
Then out would come the answer (like the Answer of 42 to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything in Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy).

Source: https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/42

Imagine another world where the kinds of things employers routinely do when trying to decide whether to take on someone as a new member of their organisation are routinely part of their assessments at university, eg:

Watch them operating in groups working on a task.
Ask them to describe how they would go about tackling a particular problem.
Get them to show they understand the implications of a piece of work they have carried out and can explain what assumptions it is based on and can justify them.

With assessments of performance which are not opaque academic exercises but descriptions of performance made as the tasks are being carried out evidenced by video if necessary. In other words, transparent enough to whoever might want to work with these students next to eliminate the gap between their credentials and and their actual actionable skills, knowledge and experience.

Assessing in this way will be highly demanding, for both the students and the assessors, but it means the final assessment is done with the student present and, with careful probing from the assessors, who will obviously need to have done a close reading of the project work beforehand, confidence will be high about the abilities demonstrated by the process. And it removes the need for all the time currently spent on the Victorian factory owner process – imagine what could be done if the whole of May, June and July wasn’t spent marking scripts!

A move like this will significantly change what is taught. There will be no point presenting lots of information in ways which make retention easier for students (the so-called bookwork” questions currently in most exams). This makes sense when you think about how much of the content of your courses is accessible to you now, even on a vocational course like actuarial science, as opposed to skills developed. Instead the focus will be more on conversations with students for the purpose of developing their understanding of a meaty topic and the problems to be solved within it. Explorations of these will form the projects students will be spending most of their time working on. Checking understanding and making sure students are working within frameworks they understand and can talk about will be the main teaching activity, with opportunities to practise these throughout the year. In other words, showing the ability to apply what they have understood and demonstrate the ability to reflect, make judgements and show higher levels of understanding as a result. An ability they can then apply to new problems and situations.

And notice something else about how these alternative credentials are generated? They are all social activities: from operating in groups, to presenting a piece of work to a group of assessors. Even the project work is developed through group sessions alongside individual work. If you want to develop people who can spot the gaps between models and reality you need to do it in groups, where people can test their perspectives against each other.

Compare this to the current solitary exam preparation, peppered with “revision” lectures, exam sitting and exam marking processes which comprise the predominant activities in universities between March and July each year. We are currently being funneled into an ever more solitary professional practice around LLMs. It has become quite accepted for people to do all of their thinking on a subject closeted with perhaps one, two or three LLMs but no other people and then share their analysis with an expectation that other people should read the output. Developing the skills to do these analyses will obviously be necessary, but they will never be the most important skills people learn.

Treating each other like walking databases is never going to make you new friends or influence people. However the skills you develop via an alternative more social education will.

There are examples of this approach already happening, with employers involved in the design of assessments in some cases and universities using the flexibility they have to restructure and redesign courses. But the dominant assessment system of formal exams is keeping much of this activity at the margins at the moment.

If it were to become the dominant assessment, it would also mean that larger areas of the curriculum could be examined, as the focus would not be on retention of large bodies of content but the ability to use the content to solve problems. So, perhaps, after a first year levelling up students’ ability and experience of mathematics and statistics, year 2 would have an actuarial statistics module (currently CS1/CS2) and an actuarial mathematics module (currently CM1/CM2), both dissertation based and vivaed. Then in the third year they would tackle an economics module and a business modules (currently CB1 and CB3). Perhaps in the final year of a four year MAct they would tackle a modelling and communication module (CP2/CP3) and either CP1 actuarial practice module would be offered or a professional skills module.

This would be more of a driving test style of assessment, with students working with supervisors on the comments from assessors on the original dissertations and presentations until they were up to the required standard. Students unable to make the standard after an additional year would be offered a move to a non-accredited course. The current funding model for higher education will need to change: loading students with £10,000 more debt every time they add to the nation’s skills bank with another year wrestling with these difficult skills to master was never a clever strategy, but this structure would make it even clearer how self defeating it is. If economists are accepting that the labour market no longer allocates resources effectively and are considering either a universal basic income or universal basic services, then logically university funding should follow suit.

The implications for the actuarial profession will be even more challenging. I question whether the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries will continue to consider it worth the effort and expense of reconfiguring their entire approach to exam setting, syllabus maintenance, marking, online proctoring, etc for subjects routinely taught throughout the university system for a a variety of purposes, ie the current core principles subjects of mathematics, statistics and business studies.

Whether they retain their own capacity to assess the core practice subjects is a more open question (CP1 Actuarial Practice, I imagine, will be seen as sufficiently specialist to keep in house, with perhaps a few universities, as now, accredited to run courses which can earn this qualification, however CP2 Modelling and CP3 Communications are not nearly as specialised now as they seemed when they were first introduced). I would also move the new core economics module recommended by the IFoA Economics Review Group I chaired in 2022 to replace the current CB2 module into the core practice section, as it would be more of a critical thinking module about the economic ideas necessary to underpin good actuarial work than the technical how-to subjects in core principles.

The specialist stage of the SP and SA subjects and the whole continuing education and additional certification options I would confidently expect the profession to retain, review and adapt as needed to reflect new challenges in members’ working lives. However, if CP1 is all that is needed post graduation to get to Chartered Actuary and CP1, two SP subjects and a SA subject gets you to Fellow, then suddenly time to qualification becomes much more predictable for students and their employers alike.

The risks to employers of taking on students would therefore be reduced, but also the rewards to taking them on will be much more transparent. The students we will be developing will have collapsed the gap between their credentials and their actual actionable skills, knowledge and experience. They will have:

Great team working skills;
Very highly developed presentation skills, both in writing and speech;
Strong IT skills and comfort working with data; and
Clarity about why they are in an organisation and a drive to use their skills to solve problems.

They will also have developed the four capabilities set out in Carlo Iacono’s Teach Judgement, Not Prompts:

Epistemic rigour. They will be more likely to spot when a system or model is over-confident given the evidence, after an intense experience of interrogating models and evaluating evidence in their courses.
Synthesis. They will be able to integrate different perspectives into an overall understanding, through dissertation development, defending a position, understanding weaknesses in a position and adjusting accordingly.
Judgement. They will have been asked to make many judgements in their work and had to defend them in discussions with their supervisors and fellow students. Unconvincing opinions, not backed by evidence, will not pass muster.
Cognitive sovereignty. Students will have to take their own stand on their work, after all of the challenge and argument. Independence of thought is the hard-earned outcome here.

And then they will have a fighting chance of being centaurs in the world awaiting them, masters of the technology and opportunities available, rather than the reverse-centaurs that our education system is currently, and inadvertently, preparing them to be.

Katabasis – following your PhD supervisor into Hell

27. May 2026 · Write a comment · Categories: Birmingham, Book reviews, Education, Science Fiction

*This review originally appeared in the May issue of Brum Group News, the newsletter of the Birmingham Science Fiction Group and is reproduced here (lightly edited) by kind permission*

This book is so many things: a work of fantasy, a literature review of every major work about the journey into hell, a love story, a wicked academic satire, a philosophical musing on the meaning of life and a love letter to Cambridge. Or perhaps the title itself, which means both a retreat to the coast, in this case to the banks of the River Lethe, as well as a descent into Hell. Like its Oxford counterpart before it – Babel – its central leap is that magic (here referred to as magick, ie the academic discipline stretching back to the alchemists and beyond) sits alongside the other subjects at Oxbridge colleges. The magic we see practised, taught, researched and dissertationed feels very mathematical. So we are unsurprised to hear that the mathematicians hate the magicians.

Alice Law is the Chinese-American PhD student of the great Jacob Grimes, who (accidentally?) sends him to Hell and then, with her once-friend-now-mortal-enemy and Grimes’ other PhD student, Peter Morgan, sets out to bring him back. So that Grimes can pass their dissertations, because that’s a good enough reason to journey to Hell and sacrifice half of your future lifespan. And so the quest begins.

There is quite a bit of mathematical fun had despite Alice not really knowing any mathematics, including an Escher Trap, a Penrose Staircase and a hyperbolic geometry which makes the quest very heavy going at times. And so many logic puzzles. Comedy and total horror are nicely juxtaposed throughout, as Alice and Jacob get to understand each other better and start to wonder whether Grimes is worth it after all.

The constant side swipes at the life of a junior academic are often hilarious. Magicians in training are apparently told by all their professors that they should consider careers in other fields or “alt academia”, as they called it:

“…no one really meant it when they said alt academia was just as prestigious (or, more commonly, that there was no shame in it, really). They meant it even less when they emphasized that alt academia paid better, had kinder hours, was less stressful, gave you better job security, made you happier. Oh, magicians do really well in consulting, they said. Employers like critical thinking and problem-solving skills, they said. Fewer people die in industry, they said.”

The most enigmatic character is their not-quite-constant companion, Archimedes the cat, who guides them when he feels like it. All the way through all eight of the Courts of Hell, alongside and across the Lethe and finally to King Yama’s Domain, on a journey which threatens to destroy Alice’s very sense of self. Her catechism, which she repeats at stressful moments:

I am Alice Law I am a postgraduate at Cambridge I study analytic magick

Alice has always felt that if she could just hang on to the delusions which had got her this far until the end of her PhD all would be well, but these turn out to be precisely the things she needs to confront if she is ever going to get out of Hell.

Emotional Truth

11. May 2026 · Write a comment · Categories: Media & Politics, Science Fiction

*Shakespeare appearing in the play he has written in order to say goodbye to his dead son*

“You are not saying what you think you are saying” was what Ray Nayler said to the Birmingham Science Fiction Group on Friday night, as part of a wider conversation about the mutual misunderstandings that result from cultural differences. He had landed up with the Peace Corps in Turkmenistan 20 years ago, “The worst place to live in the world”. It ripped away his sense of stability and the fixed nature of life he had developed growing up in San Francisco and made him realise that everything is arbitrary. His new book Palaces of the Crow is out next week, about a group of escapees on the run in a forest trapped between the German and Soviet armies in World War 2, with only a murder of intelligent crows as allies. I will be buying it.

And so to a different forest.

Last night I could not speak for half an hour. My face ached from the effort of holding myself together and tears were running down my face. No I wasn’t in the back of an ambulance on my way to Good Hope Hospital. I had just watched Hamnet for the first time.

I am peculiarly sensitive to father-son depicitions in art. I can’t remember when a film affected me as deeply as Hamnet did, but I do remember the last book that had me in floods of tears (The Road by Cormac McCarthy when (spoiler alert) the father of the boy dies. Suggest you don’t read it on a train like I did). Why should I cry for you by Sting also tends to have me in bits.

However Hamnet was still like nothing I have ever experienced before in a movie. It snuck up on me, this story of the fight to make a family and then keep it alive in a way that certainly didn’t feel over 400 years old before hitting me with the final scene which was, ultimately stagey for goodness’ sake. I felt connected – to the forest, to the plague-beset 16th century characters, to everyone who has ever lost a child, to everyone looking for connection to help them through their day. I have watched so much Shakespeare in my life, but I have never felt the urgency that must have lain behind the plays quite like this before.

This was just great art. Not in a way that impresses you but leaves you cold, but in a way that you realise has expressed the driving forces of life directly at your central nervous system.

And how close the film was to what really happened doesn’t matter. Any more than the plot accuracy of any of Shakespeare’s plays matters. It was emotionally true and believable and mourned the death of a child as every child death should be mourned. It made nearly every other movie I have ever seen seem trite by comparison, including the hugely entertaining but ultimately much less full Oscar rivals this year. This is the movie you stick on the next gold disc sent out on a probe into deep space to explain humanity.

And it immediately started me thinking about how infrequently I experience emotional truth outside my friends and family. Is this the missing component from public life?

Keir Starmer certainly wasn’t passing any auditions this morning. He was not saying what he thought he was saying. He thought he was saying something about training young people, being “at the heart of Europe” and nationalising British Steel. What he was actually saying was that he has no idea why he lost 1,496 English council seats over the weekend but, despite this, was going to hang on until someone removed him forcibly from office. And he is guessing, perhaps rightly, that the Labour Party does not have the determination to do so. It was the precise opposite of emotional truth or, as John Elledge posted:

“You are not saying what you think you are saying” is unfortunately true for nearly all of us nearly all of the time. Until it isn’t. And those moments when it isn’t are moments of enormous power.

And to think I still have Maggie O’Farrell’s novel to read. Or possibly the audiobook read by the great Jessie Buckley, Agnes Hathaway herself. May be hard to resist.

The monsters we create

24. April 2026 · Write a comment · Categories: AI, Education, Media & Politics, Prediction, Risk, Science Fiction

*The Wetherspoons pub The Mary Shelley in Bournemouth*

A few months ago I decided to read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein for the first time. I also watched Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein, on a big screen, despite, according to The New Yorker, it having been “Netflixed down to size”.

Shelley’s book is largely monologues of interior thoughts of Frankenstein and his creation, with wildly careering emotions and death, death, death everywhere – perhaps unsurprising from an author whose mother died 10 days after giving birth to her, who lost a child and whose half sister died by suicide while she was working on Frankenstein, with much more tragedy to follow after its publication. There is a word Mary Shelley uses more than I have read in any other book: variants of sympathy/sympathise/sympathies turn up 32 times. Because of course one of the many things the book is all about is mutual incomprehension of the creator and the created.

Last week I was in Bournemouth as a last minute substitute for Lanzarote, something I may come back to at a later date, and I stumbled across the churchyard of St Peter’s Church in which Mary Shelley was buried, along with the cremated heart of her husband Percy Shelley, at the age of 53. There is also a pub in Bournemouth named after her (above) but whose sign depicts the monster from her most famous piece of writing.

As we enter another time of mutual incomprehension of the creator and the created, I have been reading the surprisingly-difficult-to-access paper by Kyle Kingsbury (the systems engineer, not the MMA guy) called The Future of Everything is Lies, I Guess. I will put a link to an X account which shared it here, as going to the aphyr.com site to read it seems to generate this message:

Once you can read it though, it starts to sketch out a likeness of our current monster and chip away a little at the human side of the mutual incomprehension. I am talking, of course, about what people are currently calling “AI”, which Kingsbury defines as:

…a family of sophisticated Machine Learning (ML) technologies capable of recognizing, transforming, and generating large vectors of tokens: strings of text, images, audio, video, etc. A model is a giant pile of linear algebra which acts on these vectors. Large Language Models, or LLMs, operate on natural language: they work by predicting statistically likely completions of an input string, much like a phone auto-complete. Other models are devoted to processing audio, video, or still images, or link multiple kinds of models together.

The article sets out how this is a technology where nobody really understands why it has been successful or how to make it better, which falls into strange loops or attractors, has odd gaps in its capabilities and is highly sensitive to slight changes in its formatting. It is a technology which is simultaneously highly capable and an idiot. And Kingsbury worries that our culture is not ready for such a technology. As he says:

As LLMs etc are deployed in new situations, and at new scale, there will be all kinds of changes in work, politics, art, sex, communication and economics. Some of these effects will be good. Many will be bad. In general, ML promises to be profoundly weird.

Buckle up.

He continues:

Most people seem concerned with conscious, motivated threats: AIs could realize they are better off without people and kill us. I am concerned that ML systems could ruin our lives without realizing anything at all.

There follow extensive examples of the problems the various ML applications are already starting to cause and some speculation about where things may be going in various areas of our lives before we get to the chapter on work. And the subject of hiring “AI employees”. This is probably my favourite bit:

Imagine a co-worker who generated reams of code with security hazards, forcing you to review every line with a fine-toothed comb. One who enthusiastically agreed with your suggestions, then did the exact opposite. A colleague who sabotaged your work, deleted your home directory, and then issued a detailed, polite apology for it. One who promised over and over again that they had delivered key objectives when they had, in fact, done nothing useful. An intern who cheerfully agreed to run the tests before committing, then kept committing failing garbage anyway. A senior engineer who quietly deleted the test suite, then happily reported that all tests passed.

You would fire these people, right?

Kingsbury sees the two extremes of the possible range of outcomes as:

ML systems continue to hallucinate, cannot be made reliable, and ultimately fail to deliver on the promise of transformative, broadly-useful “intelligence”. Or they work, but people get fed up and declare “AI Bad”…a lot of ML people lose their jobs, defaults cascade through the financial system, but the labor market eventually adapts and we muddle through. ML turns out to be a normal technology.
In the other extreme, OpenAI delivers on Sam Altman’s 2025 claims of PhD-level intelligence, and the companies writing all their code with Claude achieve phenomenal success with a fraction of the software engineers. ML massively amplified the capabilities of doctors, musicians , civil engineers, fashion designers, managers, accountants, etc, who briefly enjoy nice paychecks before discovering that demand for their service is not as elastic as once thought, especially once their clients lose their jobs or turn to ML to cut costs. Knowledge workers are laid off en masse and MBAs start taking jobs at McDonalds or driving for Lyft, at least until Waymo puts an end to human drivers. This is inconvenient for everyone: the MBAs, the people who used to work at McDonalds and are now competing with MBAs, and of course bankers, who were rather counting on the MBAs to keep paying their mortgages. The drop in consumer spending cascades through industries. A lot of people lose their savings, or even their homes. Hopefully the trades squeak through. Maybe the Jevons paradox kicks in eventually and we find new occupations.

In the following chapter Kingsbury speculates on what some of those new occupations might be:

Incanters. People who can prompt LLMs into getting what is wanted.
Process Engineers. People who help catch LLM errors. They build quality control processes – training people, identifying where more intense review is needed, assessing the cost-benefit trade offs of automating tasks, etc
Statistical Engineers. People who try and measure, model and control variability in ML systems.
Model Trainers. This will become increasingly difficult as the amount of false content or “slop” increases across the internet.
Meat Shields. People who are accountable for the errors of the ML systems they supervise.
Haruspices. People responsible for going through the model inputs, outputs and internal states of a ML system which has done something terrible to try and give a plausible reason for its behaviour.

But ultimately Kingsbury concludes that we should just stop using these systems. To return to the original analogy, the monster cannot be understood. There is often nothing actually there to understand. And it is certainly not in the business of understanding you. Although it may be very very good at convincing you otherwise.

On balance I think my view is currently at the muddle-through-with-ML-as-a-normal-technology end, which still looks likely to cause a disruption considerably bigger than 2008. My main reason is the already collapsing trust in many of the Big Tech companies. Trust which is going to be required even if their technology really can do some of this stuff. It is the scenario where we all get fed up and declare “AI Bad”. Like when we read about the people running Meta showing nowhere near the social responsibility commensurate with their current level of market power.

Or when, as last week, we have days and days of breathless commentary about Anthropic’s Mythos and Project Glasswing, and how its immense capabilities caused the company not to release it, sparking a meeting of central bankers to discuss the threat such technologies posed to financial systems. Only to finally read an account of attempts to verify any of what Anthropic have been saying. It is quite a technical piece, which I by no means understand all of, but the final paragraph is fairly arresting:

The most important thing in the Mythos release is not the model. It is the precedent. Anthropic has established, without discussion and without pushback, that a private company can unilaterally classify a capability as too dangerous for the public, grant selective access to the largest incumbents in the affected industry, and construct a parallel disclosure regime outside any democratic accountability structure. That precedent is exclusivity for abuse. It will be used by companies with worse judgment than Anthropic and narrower definitions of “partner” than the Glasswing consortium. The time to object to the shape of this thing is while it is still being built, not after it has removed all transparency and accountability.

How might Claude or ChatGPT respond to being designated “AI Bad”? Well Mary Shelley’s monster put it this way:

Once I falsely hoped to meet with beings who, pardoning my outward form, would love me for the excellent qualities which I was capable of unfolding. I was nourished with high thoughts of honour and devotion. But now crime has degraded me beneath the meanest animal. No guilt, no mischief, no malignity, no misery, can be found comparable to mine. When I run over the frightful catalogue of my sins, I cannot believe that I am the same creature whose thoughts were once filled with sublime and transcendent visions of the beauty and the majesty of goodness. But it is even so; the fallen angel becomes a malignant devil. Yet even that enemy of God and man had friends and associates in his desolation; I am alone.

We Know Zero