We Know Zero

This is one adolescent we don’t want to grow up

03. February 2026 · Write a comment · Categories: AI, Economics, Media & Politics, Regulation, Risk, Science Fiction

*In ordering #5, self-driving cars will happily drive you around, but if you tell them to drive to a car dealership, they just lock the doors and politely ask how long humans take to starve to death.* *Source: https://m.xkcd.com/1613/*

To be read to the soundtrack of Bruce Springsteen singing Streets of Minneapolis.

My attention was drawn this week to an article by Dario Amodei, co-founder of Anthropic (a spin off from OpenAI, which was co-founded by Elon Musk and heavily invested in by Microsoft so very much part of the Magnificent 7 architecture), the creator of the large language model Claude, called The Adolescence of Technology. It is hard to overemphasise how much I disagree with everything Dario has written here, but also useful in that it is a long article, which covers a lot of ground, and allows me to define my views in opposition to it.

The irritations start pretty much straight away. So Dario quotes from a science fiction classic (Carl Sagan’s First Contact), but then follows this up under the heading of “Avoid doomerism” with this:

…but it’s my impression that during the peak of worries about AI risk in 2023–2024, some of the least sensible voices rose to the top, often through sensationalistic social media accounts. These voices used off-putting language reminiscent of religion or science fiction, and called for extreme actions without having the evidence that would justify them.

Notice the word “sensible” doing the heavy lifting there. Only science fiction endorsed by Dario will be considered. Dario wants us to consider the risks of AI in “a careful and well-considered manner”, which sounds reasonable, but then his 3rd and final bullet under this (after “avoid doomerism” and “acknowledge uncertainty”) goes as follows:

Intervene as surgically as possible. Addressing the risks of AI will require a mix of voluntary actions taken by companies (and private third-party actors) and actions taken by governments that bind everyone. The voluntary actions—both taking them and encouraging other companies to follow suit—are a no-brainer for me. I firmly believe that government actions will also be required to some extent, but these interventions are different in character because they can potentially destroy economic value or coerce unwilling actors who are skeptical of these risks (and there is some chance they are right!).

So reflexively anti regulation of his own industry, of course. And voluntary actions by corporations, an approach to solving problems which has been demonstrated not to work repeatedly, is apparently “a no-brainer”. Also it is automatically assumed that government actions will destroy value. Only market solutions will be endorsed by Dario, pretty much until they have messed up so badly you are forced to bring governments in:

To be clear, I think there’s a decent chance we eventually reach a point where much more significant action is warranted, but that will depend on stronger evidence of imminent, concrete danger than we have today, as well as enough specificity about the danger to formulate rules that have a chance of addressing it. The most constructive thing we can do today is advocate for limited rules while we learn whether or not there is evidence to support stronger ones.

There is then the expected sales pitch about what he has seen within Anthropic about the relentless “increase in AI’s cognitive capabilities”. And then the man who warned about sensationalist science fiction is off:

I think the best way to get a handle on the risks of AI is to ask the following question: suppose a literal “country of geniuses” were to materialize somewhere in the world in ~2027. Imagine, say, 50 million people, all of whom are much more capable than any Nobel Prize winner, statesman, or technologist.

And the rest of the article is then off solving this imaginary problem in all its facets, rather than the wealth and power concentration problem that we actually have. The only legislation he seems to be in favour of seems to be something called “transparency legislation”, legislation which of course Anthropic would help to write.

However, after suggesting everything from isolating China and using “AI to empower democracies to resist autocracies” to private philanthropy as the solutions to his imagined problems, Dario finally and reluctantly concludes government intervention might after all be necessary as follows:

…ultimately a macroeconomic problem this large will require government intervention. The natural policy response to an enormous economic pie coupled with high inequality (due to a lack of jobs, or poorly paid jobs, for many) is progressive taxation. The tax could be general or could be targeted against AI companies in particular. Obviously tax design is complicated, and there are many ways for it to go wrong. I don’t support poorly designed tax policies. I think the extreme levels of inequality predicted in this essay justify a more robust tax policy on basic moral grounds, but I can also make a pragmatic argument to the world’s billionaires that it’s in their interest to support a good version of it: if they don’t support a good version, they’ll inevitably get a bad version designed by a mob.

That, by the way, is what Dario thinks of democracy: “a bad version designed by a mob” rather than the “good version” that he and his fellow billionaires could come up with in their own self interest. The mask has really slipped by this point. And the following section, on “Economic concentration of power”, just demonstrates that he has no effective answers at all that he deems acceptable on this. It’s just an inevitability for him.

This is what Luke Kemp’s excellent Goliath’s Curse refers to as a “Silicon Goliath”. Goliaths are dominance hierarchies which spread by dominating the areas around them. They need three conditions (which Luke calls “Goliath fuel”): lootable resources (ie resources which can be easily stolen off someone else), caged land (ie land difficult to escape from) and monopolizable weapons (ie ones which require processes which can be developed to give one society an edge over another). We are all Goliath-dwellers in “The West” now, looting resources from other countries in unequal exchanges which impoverish the Global South, with weapons (eg nuclear weapons) available only to the elite few countries and operating within the cages of heavily-policed national boundaries. The Silicon Goliath which is developing will have data as its lootable resource, mass surveillance systems providing its cages and monopolizable weapons such as killer drones. The resultant killbot hellscapes which people like Dario Amodei laughably imagine they have defences against through things like their Claude’s Constitution are almost pitiful in their inadequacy.

Nate Hagens takes Dario’s claims for AI’s cognitive capabilities much more seriously than me, and then considers the risks in a less adolescent way here. As he says:

And here’s what his essay has almost nothing about. Energy, water, materials, or ecological limits.

And also nowhere does Dario talk about the 99% of people who are just spectators in his world, other than to describe them as “the mob”. This is quite a blind spot, as Luke Kemp points out in his exhaustive study of the collapses of “Goliaths” over the last 5,000 years. “The extreme levels of inequality” predicted by Amodei in his essay are not just things we have to put up with, but the reasons the world he predicts is likely to be hugely unstable. Not created by AI, but accelerated by it. Kemp describes it as “diminishing returns on extraction”:

We see a pattern re-emerging across case studies. Societies grow more fragile over time and more prone to collapse. Threats that they had always faced such as invaders, disease and drought seem to take a heavier toll.

As societies grew bigger:

They still faced the underlying (and ongoing) problem of rising inequality creating societies where and institutions more extractive power was more concentrated.

And eventually:

The result is more extractive institutions creating growing instability, internal conflict, a drain of resources away from government, state capture by private elites, and worse decision-making. Society – especially the state – becomes more fragile. Private elites tend to take a larger share of extractive benefits. The state, and many of the power structures it helps prop up, then usually falls apart once a shock hits: for Rome it was climate change, disease, and rebelling Germanic mercenaries; for China it was often floods, droughts, disease and horseback raiders; for the west African kingdoms it was invaders and a loss of trade; for the Maya it was drought and a loss of trade; and for the Bronze Age it was drought, a disruption of trade and an earthquake storm.

The only real answer to combatting existential risks in the hands of adolescents like the Tech Bros is more democracy: over control of decision-making, over control of resources, over control of the threat of violence and over control of information. We are a long way from achieving these within our own particular Goliath at the moment, and indeed there is no sign at all that our elites are interested in achieving them. The Magnificent 7 are propping up the US stock exchange. The promise of perpetual economic growth is the progress myth of our time and leaders who do not provide it will lose the “Mandate of Heaven” in just the same way as Chinese rulers did when they were unable to prevent floods and droughts. Adam Tooze sees the signs of the inner demons of our elites starting to detach them from reality in the latest disclosures from the Epstein files:

Are we, like [Larry] Summers, fantasizing about stabilizing our desires and needs in an inherently dangerous and uncertain world? Are we kidding ourselves?

But, without those controls in place, we would need a lot more than Dario’s Anthropic playing nicely to allow this particular adolescent to grow up. And this is where I am forced to take Nate Hagens’ assessment more seriously. Because if our rulers’ Mandates of Heaven are dependent on eternal economic growth on their watch and they, rightly, think that this is not possible in our current non-AI-enhanced world but, wrongly, think it is possible in a future AI-enhanced world, then that is the way they are going to demand we go. And, if the Larry Summers fantasists really are kidding themselves, it may be very hard to talk them out of it.

Snow Globes and signs in the window

27. January 2026 · Write a comment · Categories: Economics, Media & Politics

Things have been moving quickly after weeks of just listening to Trump. Last week it was Davos and the other world leaders suddenly had something to say. Carlo Iacono rather neatly skewered them in advance with his Snow Globe of the Reasonable piece. As he says:

I keep returning to a phrase from the coverage: “globalization triage.” It captures something true. The old story, the one that said integration and openness would lift all boats, has been bleeding out for years. What is happening at Davos is not a recommitment to that story. It is an attempt to stabilise the patient long enough to extract remaining value before the next configuration emerges. The conversations about chips and data centres and export controls are not about innovation in any innocent sense. They are about who will control the commanding heights of the next economy, and the language of cooperation is the anaesthetic administered while the surgery proceeds.

And then, lo and behold, was Mark Carney, equally at home leading central bankers in 2008, appearing in thick jumpers on election night in Canada and now presenting Canada to the WEF as the enlightened way forward in the wake of Trump, without mentioning him once. He signalled Canada’s break with the rules-based order with a story told by Vaclav Havel about a greengrocer who put out a sign saying “Workers of the world unite” without believing a word of it. He says:

The system’s power comes not from its truth, but from everyone’s willingness to perform as if it were true, and its fragility comes from the same source. When even one person stops performing, when the greengrocer removes his sign, the illusion begins to crack. Friends, it is time for companies and countries to take their signs down.

He argued against the impulse for every country to look after itself, while finding it understandable:

A country that can’t feed itself, fuel itself or defend itself, has few options. When the rules no longer protect you, you must protect yourself.

Instead he argued for what he calls “variable geometry”:

…different coalitions for different issues based on common values and interests.

And in what, for me, was the most eye-catching part:

We are taking the sign out of the window. We know the old order is not coming back. We shouldn’t mourn it. Nostalgia is not a strategy, but we believe that from the fracture, we can build something bigger, better, stronger, more just. This is the task of the middle powers, the countries that have the most to lose from a world of fortresses and most to gain from genuine cooperation.

This was Carney staking a claim to leadership in a world working around the United States. And he sounds so reasonable within his snow globe that you can almost forget the impact of his last attempt at global leadership. Ann Pettifor, in her excellent review of the 2008 crisis 10 years after and its aftermath, quoted Professor Vogl of Princeton University:

the crisis has proved itself as a way to solidify the existing economic order…One can thus argue that the financial and economic state of emergency in recent years has given rise to …action that resembles a continuous coup d’Etat.” (INET Berlin, 2012.)

And as Iacono concluded his article:

The room in Davos is warm. The rooms beyond it are getting colder. The spirit of dialogue, whatever it once meant, now means the management of decline through the performance of concern. This is not a conspiracy. It is an emergent property of a system that has learned to stabilise itself by absorbing its critics and converting their language into its own. The only dialogue that would matter is the one that questions the room itself. That conversation is not scheduled.

The solutions proposed from within the Snow Globe will always sound measured and reasonable. The actors were mainly polished and impressive, all the better to contrast with the ramblings of Trump. The lines were well known. After all, as Samuel Miller McDonald’s Progress tells us, they have been delivered in one form or another for 5,000 years, when Mesopotamian cities came together to form the world’ first empires. McDonald describes the new approach as “parasitic energy capture”, both concrete in terms of resources required to survive and abstract in terms of the power structures within these new types of societies. As McDonald notes:

When the limits to their extraction of resources are exceeded, the parasitic systems must either suffer a crash or must invade and take the energy of a more distant ecology or society.

This type of parasitism was both justified and celebrated by the progress myths which accompanied each society: The Epic of Gilgamesh for the Babylonians, Zoroastrianism for the ancient Iranian kingdoms and empires, the creation myth of Judaism where, as McDonald puts it:

The book of Genesis provides the theological basis for dominion, but it also contains the promise of progress, which takes the shape of frontiers, or living space set aside for God’s chosen people, to be found in new land.

And on to the Greeks, with Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian Wars seeing Athenian civilisation as the pinnacle of human achievements. Sure enough, Carney was quoting him last week:

Right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.

Then on to the Roman Empire, legitimised by Virgil’s Aeneid, in which Jupiter says:

To the Romans I assign limits neither to the extent nor to the duration of their empire; dominion have I given them without end.

Then Rome embraced Christianity, with Constantine reasoning, according to McDonald, “that a monotheistic empire would be more effective at both unity and continued expansion than a more pluralistic or polytheistic one”.

Alongside Christianity, a new progress narrative was born in the 7th century to power an Islamic empire. As McDonald says:

Perhaps more than any that came before, the Islamic society that arose during this period mixed mythic forms of the progress narrative formula with secular ideas…that presaged those that would follow in the European Enlightenment.

And of course the European Enlightenment followed the expansion of parasitism from around 1400 from “a primarily regional, contiguous form to a global, disparate form”. As McDonald goes on to say:

This change was made possible first by the large oceanic vessels that could move goods, weapons, messages and colonists rapidly across large waterways, and then again by the deployment of fossilised energy in machines that could speed up extraction, communication, transportation and manufacturing even more.

What we are talking about here is global capitalism. And this brings me to one of the great mysteries, often referred to by Steve Keen, which I think I now have an answer to, of why economists have failed to properly incorporate the role of energy in production for so long. If mainstream economics now performs the role of the progress narratives of the past in justifying our continued parasitic expansion beyond all boundaries in pursuit of economic growth (which is now even acknowledged in official UK government documents like this one), then it needs to hide the role of parasitic energy capture from us in order to keep us doing it.

Which brings us back to the Snow Globe. I will leave the last word to Carlo Iacono:

The problems are structural, and I am not in a position to restructure them. The powerful will keep meeting, and the meetings will keep producing the facsimile of progress that forestalls the real thing. What I can do, what any of us can do, is refuse to be fooled by the snow globe. To name what is happening even when the naming has no immediate effect. To remember that legitimacy is not conferred by eloquence or venue, that a room full of billionaires discussing inequality is not the same as addressing inequality, that dialogue without the possibility of transformation is just noise arranged pleasingly.

Parasol Lost: new mindset needed

20. January 2026 · Write a comment · Categories: Actuarial, Climate Change, Economics, Media & Politics, Pensions, Professions, Regulation, Risk

I have spent many days in rooms with groups of men (always men) anxious about their future income, where I advised them on how much to ask their companies for. Most of my clients as a scheme actuary were trustees of pension schemes of companies which had seen better days, and who were struggling to make the necessary payments to secure the benefits already promised, let alone those to come. One by one, those schemes stopped offering those future benefits and just concentrated on meeting the bill for benefits already promised. If an opportunity came to buy those benefits out with an insurance company (which normally cost quite a bit more than the kind of “technical provisions” target the Pensions Regulator would accept), I lobbied hard to get it to happen. In many cases we were too late though, the company went bust and we moved it into the Pension Protection Fund instead. That was the life of a pensions actuary in the West Midlands in the noughties. I was often “Mr Good News” in those meetings, the ironic reference to the man constantly moving the goalposts for how much money the scheme needed to meet those benefits bills. I saw my role as pushing the companies to buy out funding if at all possible. None of the schemes I advised had a company behind them which could sustain ongoing pension costs long term. I would listen to the wishful thinking and the corporate optimism, smile and push for the “realistic” option of working towards buy out.

Then I went to work at a university, and found myself, for the first time since 2003, a member of an open defined benefit pension scheme. It was (and still is) a generous scheme, but was constantly complained about by the university lecturers who comprised most of its membership. I didn’t see any way that it was affordable for employers which seemed to struggle to employ enough lecturers, were very reluctant to award anything other than fixed term contracts, and had an almost feudal relationship with their PhD students and post docs. Staff went on strike about plans to close the scheme to future accrual and replace it with the most generous money purchase scheme I had ever seen. I demurred and wrote an article called Why I Won’t Strike. I watched in wonder when even actuarial lecturers at other universities enthusiastically supported the strike. However, over 10 years later, that scheme – the UK’s biggest – is still open. And I gained personally from continued active membership until 2024.

Now don’t get me wrong, I still think the UK university sector is wrong to maintain, unique amongst its peers, a defined benefit scheme. The funding requirement for it has been inflated by continued accrual over the last 8 years and therefore so has the risk it will spike at just the time when it is least affordable, a time which may soon be approaching with 45% of universities already reporting deficits. However the strike demonstrated how important the pension scheme was to staff, something the constant grumbling before the strike had led university managers to doubt. And, once the decision had been made to keep the scheme open to future accrual, I had no more to add as an actuary. Other actuaries had the responsibility for advising on funding, in fact quite a lot of others as the UCU was getting its own actuarial advice alongside that the USS was getting, but my involvement was now just that of a member, just one with a heightened awareness of the risks the employers were taking.

The reason I bring this up is because I detected something of the same position as my lonely one from the noughties amongst the group of actuaries involved in the latest joint report from the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries and the University of Exeter about the fight to maintain planetary climate solvency.

It very neatly sets out the problem, that the whole system of climate modelling and policy recommendations to date has been almost certainly underestimating how much warming is likely to result from a given increase in the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Therefore all the “carbon budgets” (amount we can emit before we hit particular temperature levels) have been assumed to be higher than they actually are and estimates for when we exhaust them have given us longer than we actually have. This is due to the masking effects of particulate pollution in the air, which has resulted in around 0.5C less warming than we would otherwise have had by now. However, efforts to remove sulphur from oil and coal fuels (themselves important for human health) have acted to reduce this aerosol cooling effect. The goalposts have moved.

An additional reference I would add to the excellent references in the report is Hansen’s Seeing the Forest for the Trees, which concisely summarises all the evidence to suggest the generally accepted range for climate sensitivity is too low.

So far, so “Mr Good News”. And for those who say this is not something actuaries should be doing because they are not climate experts, this is exactly what actuaries have always done. We started the profession by advising on the intersection between money and mortality, despite not being experts in any of the conditions which affected either the buying power of money or the conditions which affected people’s mortality. We could however use statistics to indicate how things were likely to go in general, and early instances of governments wasting quite a lot of money without a steer from people who understood statistics got us that gig, and a succession of other related gigs over the years ahead.

The difficult bit is always deciding what course of action you want to encourage once you have done the analysis. This was much easier in pensions, as there was a regulatory framework to work to. It is much harder when, as in this case, it involves proposing changes in behaviour which are ingrained into our societies. If university lecturers can oppose something that is clearly not in the long term financial interests of their employers and push for something which makes their individual employers less secure, then how much more will the general public resist change when they can see no good reason for it.

And in this regard this feels like a report mostly focused on the finance industry. The analogies it makes with the 2008 financial crash, constant comparisons with the solvency regulatory regimes of insurers in particular and even the framing of the need to mitigate climate change in order to support economic growth are all couched in terms familiar to people working in the finance sector. This has, perhaps predictably, meant that the press coverage to date has mostly been concentrated in the pension, insurance and investment areas:

However in the case of the 2008 crash, the causes were able to be addressed by restricting practices amongst the financial institutions which had just been bailed out and were therefore in no position to argue. Many of those restrictions have been loosened since, and I think many amongst the general public would question whether the decision to bail out the banks and impose austerity on everyone else is really a model to follow for other crises.

The next stage will therefore need to involve breaking out of the finance sector to communicate the message more widely, perhaps focusing on the first point in the proposed Recovery Plan: developing a different mindset. As the report says:

This challenge demands a shift in perspective, recognising that humanity is not separate from nature but embedded in it, reliant on it and, furthermore, now required to actively steward the Earth system.
To maintain Planetary Solvency, we need to put in place mechanisms to ensure our social, economic, and political systems respect the planet’s biophysical limits, thus preserving or restoring sufficient natural capital for future generations to continue receiving ecosystem services…

…The prevailing economic system is a risk driver and requires reform, as economic dependency on nature is unrecognised in dominant economic theory which incorrectly assumes that natural capital is substitutable by manufactured capital. A particular barrier to climate action has been lobbying from incumbents and misinformation which has contributed to slower than required policy implementation.

By which I assume they mean this type of lobbying:

And this is where it gets very difficult, because actuaries really do not have anything to add at this point. We are just citizens with no particular expertise about how to proceed, just a heightened awareness of the dangers we are facing if we don’t act.

But we can also, as the report does, point out that we still have agency:

Although this is daunting, it means we have agency – we can choose to manage human activity to minimise the risk of societal disruption from the loss of critical support services from nature.

This point chimes with something else I have been reading recently (and which I will be writing more about in the coming weeks): Samuel Miller McDonald’s Progress. As he says “never before have so many lives, human and otherwise, depended on the decisions of human beings in this moment of history”. You may argue the toss on that with me, which is fine, but, in view of the other things you may be scrolling through either side of reading this, how about this for a paragraph putting the whole question of when to change how we do things in context:

We are caught in a difficult trap. If everything that is familiar is torn down and all the structures that govern our day-to-day disintegrated, we risk terrible disorder. We court famines and wars. We invite power vacuums to be filled by even more brutal psychopaths than those who haunt the halls of power now. But if we don’t, if we continue on the current path and simply follow inertia, there is a good chance that the outcome will be far worse than the disruption of upending everything today. Maintaining status-quo trajectories in carbon emissions, habitat destruction and pollution, there is a high likelihood of collapse in the existing structure anyway. It will just occur under far worse ecological conditions than if it were to happen sooner, in a more controlled way. At least, that is what all the best science suggests. To believe otherwise requires rejecting science and knowledge itself, which some find to be a worthwhile trade-off. But reality can only be denied for so long. Dream at night we may, the day will ensnare us anyway.

One thing I never did in one of those rooms full of anxious men was to stand up and loudly denounce the pensions system we were all working within. Actuaries do not behave like that generally. However we have a senior group of actuaries, with the endorsement of their profession, publishing a report that says things like this (bold emphasis added by me):

Planetary Solvency is threatened and a recovery plan is needed: a fundamental, policy-led change of direction, informed by realistic risk assessments that recognise our current market-led approach is failing, accompanied by an action plan that considers broad, radical and effective options.

This is not a normal situation. We should act accordingly.

Football’s coming home in the worst way

14. January 2026 · Write a comment · Categories: Birmingham, Health, Media & Politics

*The Sun attempts to get a new song going on the terraces. Still not going to be selling newspapers in Liverpool though*

Disclaimer: I support Liverpool FC, so it is entirely possible that the following may be a slightly skewed account of recent football history and its implications.

Last week Manchester United sacked their manager after 14 months. Since Alex Ferguson left in the summer of 2013, United have now had 10 different managers (it was announced this week that Michael Carrick was coming back for a second bash at caretaker manager).

This is despite the fact that it is very difficult to establish whether changing managers helps, with most studies citing how many different factors are at play. One masters dissertation concludes that, although it may produce a short term boost, it is generally not enough to save a club from relegation from the Premier League. So why do it?

Surprisingly this leads us into something called Ritual Scapegoating Theory, first cited at least 60 years ago as a possible explanation for managerial succession in baseball. So changing manager may or may not make much difference to performance, but it does make everyone feel better.

And it may be that the catharsis of sacking a Special One every season or so is making Manchester United supporters feel better than the two FA Cups, two League Cups and a Europa League win (that they have managed in the 13 years since Ferguson left) have. In that time Liverpool, with just three managers, have won two Premier League titles and a Champions League, UEFA Super Cup and Club World Cup as well as an FA Cup and two League Cups. Manchester City, with just two managers in that time, have won seven Premier League titles, a Champions League, UEFA Super Cup and Club World Cup as well as two FA Cups and six League Cups.

In the previous 27 years when Manchester United had just one manager, they won 13 League titles, two Champions Leagues, five FA Cups, four League Cups, and the UEFA Europa League, Super Cup and Cup Winners’ Cup, and the FIFA Club World Cup and the Intercontinental Cup. The lesson Manchester United have learned from this apparently is not that they need to minimise manager turnover.

Chelsea are even worse. They have had 13 different managers over the same period. They sacked the current England manager Thomas Tuchel after just 20 months despite him winning them the UEFA Champions League, Super Cup and Club World Cup. They sacked Enzo Maresca after just 18 months despite him winning them the UEFA Conference League and the Club World Cup. That appears to be catharsis on steroids.

Now this doesn’t matter very much when it is just about baseball or football. Despite what Bill Shankly said, life and death and our politics more generally are much more important than football. My fear is that the view that we need to sack someone whenever we don’t get the result we want immediately is leaching out of football into everything else.

Nigel Farage’s favourite phrase appears to be that “Heads must roll”. He has deployed it about the head of children’s services in Rotherham over three children being removed from their foster families in 2012, the whole of the NatWest board when he was refused a Coutts account in 2023, unspecified individuals from Essex Police managing the demonstrations outside an Epping hotel last year, and also last year again feeling that some head rolling was in order in response to the Government’s national inquiry into grooming gangs.

Meanwhile Kemi Badenoch said in 2024 of civil servants “There is about 5 per cent to 10 per cent of them who are very, very bad. You know, ‘should be in prison’ bad”. Last week she called for the Chief Constable of West Midlands Police to go over the decision to ban fans of Maccabi Tel Aviv from the Aston Villa ground for their Champions League match in November (which, hilariously, now appears to have been, at least partly, influenced by how badly Maccabi Tel Aviv supporters behaved at an entirely fictional game against West Ham United). Also in November, she called for the people involved in making the Panorama documentary about the Capitol Riots, to be sacked (another “heads should roll” headline). Also in November, she decided other BBC “heads must roll” over the decision to uphold complaints and reprimand a newsreader for altering her script from “pregnant people” to “pregnant women” on camera in a piece about groups most at risk during UK heatwaves.

It feels like the footballisation of public life. Farage and Badenoch are routinely reported as furious about something or other, in addition to the frequent demands for sackings, nearly always of public servants. They can clearly see there are votes in it, but the effects of this continuous vilification of public services and the people running them go way beyond that.

The immediate effect is often to make someone’s job untenable. So both the NatWest and Coutts CEOs left after the Farage complaint. The BBC’s Director General and BBC News Chief Executive both left soon after the Badenoch complaint. Now these are all comfortably off individuals who will no doubt be fine, but the impact on an organisation of the idea that any of its leaders could be hounded out at any moment, not through any regulatory process or indeed any process at all, but by someone in politics with a big mouth can be seen increasingly in our public institutions.

One example would be in the NHS. The HSJ recently published an article on the distribution of tenure of trust chief executives (it required four screenshots to show you just how long a tail can be!). Notice how it is not until half way up the 3rd screenshot (counting up from the bottom) that you find a CEO who has been in post for 50 months, and four of them are about to leave.

Source: https://www.hsj.co.uk/leadership/trust-ceos-time-in-post/7040645.article?storyCode=7040645

As Roy Lilley says:

Public reporting over the last eighteen months points to exits by:

NHS England CEO, plus
a cluster of senior national directors exiting.
At least 10 ICB chief executives stepping down or being replaced.
Trust CEO turnover approaching a quarter of posts;
implying 50 or more trust-level departures, including permanent and unplanned exits.

Taken together, a guesstimate is between 60 and 80 chief executives and equivalent senior leaders have left their roles across the NHS in the last eighteen months.

As he goes on to say:

High turnover at the top tells the rest of the system that leadership is temporary. Risk is unrewarded and survival matters more than stewardship.

Authority is put at question.

That encourages short-term-ism, compliance and caution. Precisely the opposite of what complex service reform needs.

For those fans of Manchester United’s way of running things who seem to be running things at the moment, that is a hell of a lot of catharsis. Evidence suggests that it is unlikely to achieve much else.

The catharsis never lasts, as at some point the music has to stop, and someone needs to actually be sitting in actual chairs, actually managing the thing. Just ask Chelsea and Manchester United.

Why the traditional exam is finished

06. January 2026 · Write a comment · Categories: Actuarial, AI, Cartoons, Education, Professions, Regulation

*Source: https://xkcd.com/2415/ licence at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.5/*

Happy new year all! New year, new banner, courtesy of my brilliant daughter who presented me with a plausible 3-D model of my very primitive cartoon of a reverse-centaur over Christmas. And I thought I would kick off with a relatively uncontentious subject: examinations!

“Back to normal!” That was the cry throughout education when the pandemic had finally ended enough for us to start cramming students into rooms again. The universities had all leveraged themselves to the maximum, and perhaps beyond, to add to the built estate, so as to entice students in both the overseas and the uncapped domestic market to their campuses, and one by-product of this was they had plenty of potential examination halls. So let’s get away from all of that electronic remote nonsense and get everyone in a room together where you can keep an eye on them and stop them cheating. This united the purists who yearned for the days of 10% of the cohort turning up for elite education via chalk and talk rather than the 50% we have today, senior management needing to justify the size of the built estate and politicians who kept referring to traditional exams in an exam hall as the “gold standard”.

So, in a time when students have access to information, tools, how to videos of everything imaginable, the entire output of the greatest minds of thousands of years of human history, as well as many of the less than great minds, in short anything which has ever caught anyone’s attention and been committed to some form of media: in this of all times, we want to sort the students into categories for the existing job market based on how they answer academic questions about what they 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 wander the floors like Victorian factory owners.

And for institutions that thought the technology we fast-tracked for education delivery and assessment in the pandemic would surely be part of education’s future? Or perhaps they just can’t afford to borrow half a billion or have the the land available to construct more cathedrals of glass and brick to house more examination halls? Simple! We just create the conditions for that gold standard examination right there in the student’s own bedroom or the company they work for!

There are 54 pages to the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries’ (IFoA’s) guidance for remotely invigilated candidates. It covers everything from the minimum specification of equipment you need, including the video camera to watch your every movement and the microphone to pick up every sound you make, to the proprietary spying software (called “Guardian Browser”) you will need to download onto your own computer, how to prove who you are to the system, what you are allowed to have in your bedroom with you and even how you need to sit for the duration of the exam (with a maximum of two 5 minute breaks) to ensure the system has sufficient visibility of you at all times:

These closed book remote arrangements replaced the previous open book online exams which most institutions operated during the pandemic. The reason given was that the exam results shot up so much that widespread cheating was suspected and the integrity of the qualifications was at risk. The IFoA’s latest assessment regulations can be found here.

The belief in examinations is very widespread. A couple of months ago I was discussing the teacher assessments which replaced them briefly during the pandemic with a secondary business studies teacher. He took great pride in the fact that he based his assessments solely on mock results, ie an assessment carried out before all of the syllabus had been covered and when students were unaware it would be the final assessment. But still in his mind more “objective” than any opinion he might have of his own students.

If a large language model can perform enormously better in an examination than your students can without it, what it actually demonstrates is that the traditional examination is woefully unprepared for the future. As Carlo Iacono puts it:

The machines learned from us.

They learned what we actually valued and it turned out to be different from what we said we valued.

We said we valued originality. We rewarded conformity to genre. We said we valued depth. We measured surface features. We said we valued critical thinking. We gave higher marks to confident assertion than to honest uncertainty.

So now the machines produce what the world trained them to produce: fluent, confident, passable output that fits the shapes we reward.

And we’re horrified. Not because they stole something from us. Because they showed us what the systems were selecting for all along.

The scandal isn’t that a model can imitate student writing. The scandal is that we built an educational and professional culture where imitation passes as competence, and then acted shocked when a machine learned to imitate faster.

We trained the incentives. We trained the rubrics. We trained the career ladders.

The pattern recognition which gets you through most formal examinations is just too cheap and easy to automate now. It is no longer a useful skill, even by proxy. It might as well be Hogwarts’ sorting hat for all the use it is in a post scarcity education world. If the machines have worked out how to unlock the elaborate captcha system we have placed around our gold standard assessments, an arms race of security measures protecting a range of tests which look increasingly narrow compared to the capabilities which matter does not seem like the way to go.

What instead we are doing is identifying which students are prepared to put themselves through literally anything to get the qualification. Companies like students like that. They will make ideal reverse-centaurs. The description of life as a reverse-centaur even sounds like the experience of a proctored exam:

Like an Amazon delivery driver, who sits in a cabin surrounded by AI cameras, that monitor the driver’s eyes and take points off if the driver looks in a proscribed direction, and monitors the driver’s mouth because singing isn’t allowed on the job, and rats the driver out to the boss if they don’t make quota.

The driver is in that van because the van can’t drive itself and can’t get a parcel from the curb to your porch. The driver is a peripheral for a van, and the van drives the driver, at superhuman speed, demanding superhuman endurance. But the driver is human, so the van doesn’t just use the driver. The van uses the driver up.

Source: Cory Doctorow, Enshittification

And, even if you are OK with all of that, all of these privacy intrusions don’t even work to prevent cheating! The ACCA, the world’s largest accounting professional body, has just announced it is stopping all remote exams after giving up the arms race against the cheats, facilitated in some cases seemingly by their Big Four employers lying about what had gone on.

Actuarial exams started in 1850, only 2 years after the Institute of Actuaries was established (Dermot Grenham wrote about them recently here). This pre-dated the establishment of the first examination boards by a few years (1856 Society of Arts, the Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, later the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (Royal Society of Arts); 1857: University of Oxford Delegacy of Local Examinations (founded by the University of Oxford); and 1858: University of Cambridge Local Examinations Syndicate (UCLES, founded by the University of Cambridge)), so keen were actuaries to institute examinations. However it was the massive expansion of the middle classes as the Industrial Revolution disrupted society in so many ways that led to the need for a new sorting hat beyond the capacity of the oral examinations that had previously been the norm.

Now people seem to be lining up to drag everyone back into the examination hall. Any suggestion of a retreat from traditional exams is met by howls of outrage from people like Sam Leith at The Spectator about lack of “rigour”. However, in my view, they are wrong.

Yes of course you can isolate students from every intellectual aid they would normally use, as a centaur, to augment their performance, limit the sources they can access, force them to rely on their own memories entirely, and put them under significant time pressure. You will definitely reduce marks by doing that. So that has made it harder and therefore more rigorous and more objective, right?

Well according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, rigorous is a synonym of rigid, strict or stringent. However, while all these words mean extremely severe or stern, rigorous implies the imposition of hardship and difficulty. So promoting exams above all as an exercise in rigour reveals their true nature as a kind of punishment beating in written form, for which the prize for undergoing it is whatever it qualifies you for. Suddenly the sorting hat looks relatively less arbitrary.

The problems of traditional exams are well known, but the most important ones in my view are that they measure a limited range of abilities and therefore are unlikely to show what students can really achieve. Harder does not mean more objective. It is like deciding who can act by throwing students out, one at a time, in front of a baying mob of, let’s say for argument, readers of The Spectator. Sure, some of the students might be able to calm the crowd, some may even be able to redirect their anger towards a different target. But are the people who can play Mark Antony for real necessarily the best all-round actors? And has someone who can only stand frozen on the spot under those circumstances really proved that they could never act well?

It also means that education ends a month or more before the exams, to allow the appropriate cramming, followed by engaging all of the teaching staff in the extended exercise of marking, checking and moderating 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 wander the floors like Victorian factory owners. But what if instead the assessment was part of the teaching process? What if students felt that their assessment had been a meaningful part of their educational experience? What if, instead of arguing the toss over whether they scored 68% or 70% on an assessment, students could see for themselves whether they had demonstrated mastery of their subject.

One model of assessment which is getting a lot of attention at the moment, one I am a big fan of having used it at the University of Leicester on some modules, is something called interactive oral assessment, where students meet with a lecturer or tutor, individually or in a small group, and answer questions about work they have already submitted. It is a highly demanding form of assessment, 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, you can be highly confident of the degree to which the student understands the work they have submitted. It also allows the student to submit a piece of work of more complexity and ambition than can be accommodated by a traditional exam. And it needn’t take any more time if the interviews are carried out online when set against the exam marking time of the traditional exam. Something which all the technology we developed through the pandemic allows us to do, without the need for spyware.

There are other models which also assess the technological centaurs we wish our students to become rather than the reverse-centaurs we are currently dooming too many to become. It is looking like it may be time to start telling students to stop writing and to put down their pens on the traditional exam. And perhaps the actuarial profession, who led us into the era of professional written examinations so enthusiastically 175 years ago, might now want to take the lead in navigating our way out of them?

tl;dr

23. December 2025 · Write a comment · Categories: Science Fiction

So, as a way of signing off until next year, I thought I would write something short about length.

My first job was with De La Rue and, specifically, within their print division which was still named after the original founder, sometime straw hat and playing card manufacturer and Guernseyman, Thomas De La Rue. Or TDLR for short. As a result of which I can never see tl;dr written anywhere (and it does seem to be everywhere on social media these days as the amount of written material to work our way through becomes ever more overwhelming) without thinking of my first years of employment, which momentary distraction, I assume, is the complete opposite of what tl;dr is often designed for, which is to help you understand something you don’t have time to read.

It feels like there is a shift happening in the etiquette of social media on this. Only recently I saw a response to a piece which was not particularly long which started “Don’t have time to read but probably agree as follows…”. This seemed rude to me but perhaps I am being old-fashioned about this. Because there are a lot of writers now where I am regularly skimming them or only reading the first halves of their articles. Writers who often have a really good point, but appear to want to say it in as many different ways as possible, nailing every single example imaginable for completeness. But really, who values completeness? I think what we are looking for is careful selection from someone who knows something we don’t about the terrain and who can therefore guide us through at least a swamp or two before leaving us to the next writer. If we wanted completeness, we could stumble into every sink hole for ourselves.

I did a mini review for Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky as a blog post recently which got the following response from the author which I was very chuffed about:

Fascinating (and spot on) little essay on Service Model and how it relates to the real world.

My wife (the one who calls me Swampy Dave sometimes) said “aren’t you a little insulted by the reference to a ‘little essay’?” and I realised that I wasn’t at all. Quite the reverse. I had managed to say something which had a point to it and which others could understand and all within 850 words. If I had to encapsulate why I blog in a sentence that would be it.

Returning to Tchaikovsky, he arranges his books on his website between novels, novellas, shorts and free. People appear to differ about how long each form should be, but Tchaikovsky described a novella as having a beginning and an end but no middle (section 6 of the interview here), which tended to pursue one idea to its logical conclusion. A short story took him a week to write. Everything else is a novel.

Definitions vary, this source defined the different forms as follows:

Flash fiction: under 1000 words (although a lot of competitions stipulate maximum 500 words)
Short stories: 3,500-7,500 words
Novelette (yes I know! I hadn’t heard of this before either!): 7,500-17,000 words
Novella: 17,000-40,000 words
Novel: 40,000 words plus

And then this other source helpfully listed the word count for 175 famous books.

Growing up I regarded War and Peace (finally slogged through it in the late 80s) as the ultimate long book but, at 561,304 words, it is not even close to being the longest, which appears to be Proust’s In Search of Lost Time or A la recherche du temps perdu (1,267,069 in English or slightly fewer in the original French), although it was published in 7 volumes originally. Meanwhile HG Wells’ The Time Machine, Orwell’s Animal Farm and Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men are officially defined as novellas, despite being, in the view of many, some of the most important books ever written.

I am quite a slow reader, which is perhaps why the question of book length seems to be bothering me so much. I have therefore decided to try and restrict myself to novellas and shorter fiction for 2026 (although the non-fiction is likely to be as long as ever, until the concept of non-fictionella is embraced if ever!) in order to read a wider range of writers. Might also mean there are more book reviews here next year!

Have a great Christmas everyone! See you in 2026!

Dr Strangelove’s Voting System

16. December 2025 · Write a comment · Categories: Media & Politics, Prediction, Risk

*The War Room with the Big Board from Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 film, ”Dr. Strangelove” Source=”Dr. Strangelove” trailer from 40th Anniversary Special Edition DVD, 2004*

This is a piece about risk management. To be read to the soundtrack of The Beatles singing Revolution (the slow version from The White Album).

Dr Strangelove is a movie which can be described in many ways, but one way to think of it is as a movie where governance arrangements made in a different time are no longer adequate to the task at hand. General Ripper can only order a nuclear strike as a retaliatory nuclear attack on the Soviets if all of his superior officers have been killed in a first strike on the United States. However the aircraft crew’s knowledge of whether there has been a first strike is dependent upon a communication system which has been set to only accept messages preceded by a secret three-letter code known only to the same General Ripper. The Soviet Union has a Doomsday Machine of cobalt bombs, which would be automatically triggered as a nuclear deterrent if attacked, which would make the Earth uninhabitable for 93 years and only had a point if the United States were aware that it existed. However the Soviet leadership had delayed the announcement of its existence so that it could be a surprise for the following week’s Party Congress.

Our first past the post voting system can be described in many ways, but one way to think of it is as a set of governance arrangements made in a different time which are no longer adequate to the task at hand.

In July 2024, the UK General Election result looked like this:

Labour won 63% of the seats with 34% of the vote. The Government have therefore been reluctant to change the voting system. Despite a conference vote demanding it, it didn’t make it into their election manifesto. However fast forward 17 months and the polls look like this:

With one conversion into projected seats (by Electoral Calculus) looking like this:

So this time, Reform are predicted to have 48% of the seats based on 29% of the vote. This is no way to run a railroad. We need proportional representation now. Join the campaign here.

We have an example playing out across the Atlantic of a government taking on powers they don’t have to enact policies that noone voted for. And that is when they do have a constitution which they could use if they had the will, whereas, as David Allen Green said in October:

Our current constitutional arrangements are our Doomsday Machine. As The Institute for Government have found in their Review of the UK Constitution:

Weaknesses in the system of checks and balances have been exposed – the UK system is in theory self-regulating. It relies on those within it being willing to exercise restraint, adhering to largely unwritten rules of behaviour, and, when they fail to do so, facing political consequences. In recent years, various political actors have shown an increased willingness to test constitutional boundaries – seen most brazenly in proposals to break international law and by the executive repeatedly passing legislation on devolved matters without consent from their respective legislatures – with such political checks providing little impediment to them doing so. Debates over constitutional principle have increasingly been considered secondary to other political goals, and MPs, the media and the public have lacked sufficient understanding of the constitution to hold decision makers to account.

The problem with The Institute for Government in my view is their earnestness. It is the reason we can all remember Dr Strangelove from over 60 years ago when we have forgotten the almost identical subject matter of the far more po-faced Fail Safe (that, and the fact that Kubrick had their release date postponed by launching a lawsuit) and long after I expect us to have forgotten Bigelow’s recent A House of Dynamite. The thing is that, for me, the characters in Dr Strangelove remind me of the general ridiculousness of humanity and I don’t want them to die, even the mad ones. Whereas I find myself fairly indifferent to the fate of the relatively very serious cast of Dynamite. The Institute for Government‘s problem is that I feel the same way about some of their characters. Like Citizen Assembly for instance. Whenever this character is mentioned I find myself thinking of the Lennon line from The Beatles‘ Revolution:

“If you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao, you ain’t gonna make it with anyone anyhow.”

We badly need a campaign capable of energising people about how we are governed. Something that, in my view, The Institute for Government are not currently providing.

And then there is the money. As Democracy for Sale have revealed, 75% of donations, totalling £23 million, to the likely ruling party at our next election have come from just three people. If you think there should be a cap on political donations you can sign the petition here. Think of the country owned by three people (and all for £23 million) and it starts to make Blackadder‘s Dunny-on-the-Wold, with its constituency of “three rather mangy cows, a dachshund named `Colin’, and a small hen in its late forties”, look positively democratic. You might as well put General Ripper in charge.

Our governance arrangements are satirising themselves at the moment. Let’s do something about it this year.

Three little questions

10. December 2025 · Write a comment · Categories: AI, Education, Media & Politics

The rear view mirror isn’t going to help us any more *Source: Wikimedia Commons: Shattered right-hand side mirror on a 5-series BMW in Durham, North Carolina by Ildar Sagdejev*

I would like to start this week’s post with a quote from Carlo Iacono, from a Substack piece he did a couple of weeks ago called The Questions Nobody Is Funding:

What is a human being for? What do we owe the future? What remains worth the difficulty of learning?

These are not questions you will find in the OECD’s AI Literacy Framework. They are not addressed in the World Economic Forum’s Education 4.0 agenda. They do not appear in the competency matrices cascading through national education systems. Instead, we get learning objectives and assessment criteria. Employability outcomes and digital capabilities. The language of preparation, as if the future were already decided and our job were simply to ready people for it.

I think this articulates well the central challenge of AI for education. Whether you think this is the beginning of a future where augmented humans move into a different type of existence to any we have known before; or you believe very little will be left behind in the rubble from the inevitable burst of the AI bubble when it comes and will be, at least temporarily, forgotten in the most devastating stock market crash and depression for a century; or you hold both these beliefs at the same time; or you are somewhere in between, it is difficult to see how the orderly world of competency matrices, learning objectives, assessment criteria, employability outcomes and digital capabilities can easily survive the period of technological, cultural, economic and political disruption which we appear to have entered. Looking in the rear view mirror and trying to extrapolate what you see into the future is not going to work for us any more.

Whether you think, like Cory Doctorow, in his recent speech at the University of Washington called The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Criticizing AI, that:

AI is the asbestos in the walls of our technological society, stuffed there with wild abandon by a finance sector and tech monopolists run amok. We will be excavating it for a generation or more.

Or you think, as Henry Farrell has suggested in another article called Large Language Models As The Tales That Are Sung:

Technologies such as LLMs are neither going to transcend humanity as the holdouts on one side still hope, nor disappear, as other holdouts might like. We’re going to have to figure out ways to talk about them better and more clearly.

We are certainly going to have to figure out ways to talk about LLMs and other forms of AI more clearly, so that the decisions we need to make about how to accommodate them into society can be made with the maximum level of participation and consensus. And this seems to be the key for me with respect to education too. We do need people graduating from our education system understanding clearly what LLMs can and cannot do, which is a tricky path to navigate at the moment as a lot of money is being concentrated on persuading you that it can do pretty much anything. One example here has created a writers’ room of four LLMs where they are asked to critique each other by pushing the output from one into the prompts for the others, reminiscent of The Human Centipede. Which immediatel reminded me of this take from later in that Cory Doctorow speech:

And I’ll never forget when one writer turned to me and said, “You know, you prompt an LLM exactly the same way an exec gives shitty notes to a writers’ room. You know: ‘Make me ET, except it’s about a dog, and put a love interest in there, and a car chase in the second act.’ The difference is, you say that to a writers’ room and they all make fun of you and call you a fucking idiot suit. But you say it to an LLM and it will cheerfully shit out a terrible script that conforms exactly to that spec (you know, Air Bud).”

So, back to Carlo’s little questions:

What is a human being for?

A lofty question certainly, and not one I am going to tackle in a blog post. But perhaps I can say a bit about what a human being is not for. This is the key to Henry Farrell’s piece which is his take on the humanist critique of AI. We are presumably primarily designing the future for humans. All humans. Not just Tech Bros. And the design needs to bear that in mind. For example, a human being is not, in my opinion, for this (from the Cory Doctorow link):

The first task of the education establishment, I think, is to attempt to protect the graduate from becoming the reverse-centaur described above, whether a deliver driver, a coder (where additionally the human-in-the-loop becomes the accountability sink for everything the AI gets wrong) or a radiologist. This will often be resisted by the employers you are currently very sensitive to the needs of as educators (many of who are senior enough to get to use the new technologies as a centaur rather than be used by them as a reverse-centaur, tend to struggle to put themselves in anyone else’s shoes and, frankly, can’t see what all the fuss is about) but, remember, the cosy world of employability outcomes is over. The employers are not sticking to the implicit agreement to employ your graduates if you delivered the outcomes and therefore neither should you. Your responsibility in education is to the students, not their potential future employers, now their interests no longer appear to be aligned.

What do we owe the future?

This depends on what you mean by “the future” of course. If it is some technological dystopia of diminished opportunities for most (even for making friends as seemingly envisioned by some of the top Tech Bros), then nothing at all. But if it is the future which is going to support your children and their children, you obviously owe it a lot. But what do you owe it? What is owed is often converted into money by the political right, and used to justify not running up public debt in the present so as not to “impoverish” future generations. What that approach generally achieves is to impoverish both the current and future generations.

But if you think of owing resources, institutions and infrastructure to the next generation, then that is a responsibility that we should take seriously. And part of that is to produce an educated generation with tools, systems, institutions and infrastructure. The education institutions must take steps to make sure they survive in a relevant way, embedded in systems which support individuals and proselytising the value of education for all. They must ensure that their graduates understand and have facility with the essential tools they will need, and have developed the ability to learn new skills as they need them, and realise when that is. This is about developing individuals who leave no longer dependent on the institutions, able to work things out for themselves rather than requiring never-ending education inside an institution.

What remains worth the difficulty of learning?

The skills already mentioned will be the core ones for everyone, and these will need to be hammered out in terms everyone can understand. But in the world of post scarcity education, which is here but which we have not yet fully embraced, the rest will be up to us. 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.

As William Gibson apparently said at some point in 1992:

“The future has arrived — it’s just not evenly distributed yet.”

The future of education will be the distribution problem.

Enshittification and Cory Doctorow

04. December 2025 · Write a comment · Categories: AI, Cartoons, Economics, Health, Legal, Media & Politics, Professions, Regulation, Science Fiction

So this is my 42nd blog post of the year and the 8th where I have referenced Cory Doctorow. Thought it was more to be honest, so influential has he been on my thought, particularly as I have delved deeper into what, how and why the AI Rush is proceeding and what it means for the people exiting universities over the next few years.

Yesterday Cory published a reminder of his book reviews this year. He is an amazing book reviewer. There are 24 on the list this year, and I want to read every one of them on the strength of his reviews alone.

I would like to repay the compliment by reviewing his latest book: Enshittification (the other publication this year – Picks and Shovels – is also well worth your time by the way). Can’t believe this wasn’t the word of the year rather than rage bait, as it explains considerably more about the times we are living in.

I have been a fan of Doctorow for a couple of years now. I had had Walkaway sat on my shelves for a few years before I read it and was immediately enthralled by his tale of a post scarcity future which had still somehow descended into an inter-generational power struggle hellscape. I moved on to the Little Brother books, now being reenacted by Trump with his ICE force in one major US city after another. Followed those up with The Lost Cause, where the teenagers try desperately to bridge the gap across the generations with MAGA people, with tragic results along the way but a grim determination at the end “the surest way to lose is to stop running”. From there I migrated to the Marty Hench thrillers, his non-fiction The Internet Con (which details the argument for interoperability, ie the ability of any platform to interact with another) and his short fiction (I loved Radicalised, not just for the grimly prophetic Radicalised novella in the collection, but also the gleeful insanity of Unauthorised Bread). I highly recommend them all.

I came to Enshittification after reading his Pluralistic blog most days for the last year and a half, so was initially disappointed to find very little new as I started working my way through it. However what the first two parts – The Natural History and The Pathology – are is a patient explanation of the concept of enshittification and how it operates assuming no previous engagement with the term, all in one place.

Enshittifcation, as defined by Cory Doctorow, proceeds as follows:

First, platforms are good to their users.
Then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers.
Next, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves.
Finally, they have become a giant pile of shit.

So far, so familiar. But then I got to Part Three, explaining The Epidemiology of enshittification, and the book took off for me. The erosion of antitrust (what we would call competition) law since Carter. “Antitrust’s Vietnam” (how Robert Bork described the 12 years IBM fought and outspent the US Department of Justice year after year defending their monopolisation case) until Reagan became President. How this led to an opening to develop the operating system for IBM when it entered the personal computer market. How this led to Microsoft, etc. Then how the death of competition also killed Big Tech regulation ( regulating a competitive market which acts against collusion is much easier than regulating one with a small number of big players which absolutely will collude with each other).

And then we get to my favourite chapter of the book “Reverse-Centaurs and Chickenisation”. Any regular reader of this blog will already be familiar with what a reverse centaur is, although Cory has developed a snappy definition in the process of writing this book:

A reverse-centaur is a machine that uses a human to accomplish more than the machine could manage on its own.

And if that isn’t chilling enough for you, the description of the practices of poultry packers and how they control the lives of the nominally self-employed chicken farmers of the US, and how these have now been exported to companies like Amazon and Arise and Uber, should certainly be. The prankster who collected up the bottled piss of the Amazon drivers who weren’t allowed a loo break and resold it on Amazon‘s own platform as “a bitter lemon drink” called Release Energy, which Amazon then recategorised as a beverage without asking for any documentation to prove it was fit to drink and then, when it was so successful it topped their sales chart, rang the prankster up to discuss using Amazon for shipping and fulfillment – this was a rare moment of hilarity in a generally sordid tale of utter exploitation. My favourite bit is when he gets on to the production of his own digital rights management (DRM) free audio versions of his own books.

The central point of the DRM issue is, as Cory puts it, “how perverse DMCA 1201 is”:

If I, as the author, narrator, and investor in an audiobook, allow Amazon to sell you that book and later want to provide you with a tool so you can take your book to a rival platform, I will be committing a felony punishable by a five-year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine.

To put this in perspective: If you were to simply locate this book on a pirate torrent site and download it without paying for it, your penalty under copyright law is substantially less punitive than the penalty I would face for helping you remove the audiobook I made from Amazon’s walled garden. What’s more, if you were to visit a truck stop and shoplift my audiobook on CD from a spinner rack, you would face a significantly lighter penalty for stealing a physical item than I would for providing you with the means to take a copyrighted work that I created and financed out of the Amazon ecosystem. Finally, if you were to hijack the truck that delivers that CD to the truck stop and steal an entire fifty-three-foot trailer full of audiobooks, you would likely face a shorter prison sentence than I would for helping you break the DRM on a title I own.

DMCA1201 is the big break on interoperability. It is the reason, if you have a HP printer, you have to pay $10,000 a gallon for ink or risk committing a criminal offence by “circumventing an access control” (which is the software HP have installed on their printers to stop you using anyone else’s printer cartridges). And the reason for the increasing insistence on computer chips in everything from toasters (see “Unauthorised Bread” for where this could lead) to wheelchairs – so that using them in ways the manufacturer and its shareholders disapprove of becomes illegal.

The one last bastion against enshittification by Big Tech was the tech workers themselves. Then the US tech sector laid off 260,000 workers in 2023 and a further 100,000 in the first half of 2024.

In case you are feeling a little depressed (and hopefully very angry too) at this stage, Part 4 is called The Cure. This details the four forces that can discipline Big Tech and how they can all be revived, namely:

Competition
Regulation
Interoperability
Tech worker power

As Cory concludes the book:

Martin Luther King Jr once said, “It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can stop him lynching me, and I think that’s pretty important, also.”

And it may be true that the law can’t force corporate sociopaths to conceive of you as a human being entitled to dignity and fair treatment, and not just an ambulatory wallet, a supply of gut bacteria for the immortal colony organism that is a limited liability corporation.

But it can make that exec fear you enough to treat you fairly and afford you dignity, even if he doesn’t think you deserve it.

And I think that’s pretty important.

I was reading Enshittification on the train journey back from Hereford after visiting the Hay Winter Weekend, where I had listened to, amongst others, the oh-I’m-totally-not-working-for-Meta-any-more-but-somehow-haven’t-got-a-single-critical-word-to-say-about-them former Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg. While I was on the train, a man across the aisle had taken the decision to conduct a conversation with first Google and then Apple on speaker phone. A particular highlight was him just shouting “no, no, no!” at Google‘s bot trying to give him options. He had already been to the Vodaphone shop that morning and was on his way to an appointment which he couldn’t get at the Apple Store on New Street in Birmingham. He spotted the title of my book and, when I told him what enshittification meant, and how it might make some sense out of the predicament he found himself in, took a photo of the cover.

My feeling is that enshittification goes beyond Big Tech. It is the defining industrial battle of our times. We shouldn’t primarily worry about whether it is coming from the private or the public sector, as enshittification can happen in both places: from hollowing out justice to “paying more for medicines… at the exact moment we can’t afford to pay enough doctors to prescribe them” in the public sector, where we already reside within the Government’s walled garden, to all of the outrages mentioned above and more in the private sector.

The PFI local health hubs set out in last week’s budget take us back to perhaps the ultimate enshittificatory contracts the Government ever entered into, certainly before the pandemic. The Government got locked into 40 year contracts, took all the risk, and all the profit was privatised. The turbo-charging of the original PFI came out of the Blair-Brown government’s mania for keeping capital spending off the balance sheet in defence of Gordon Brown’s “Golden Rule” which has now been replaced by Rachel Reeves’ equally enshittifying fiscal rules. All the profits (or, increasingly, rents, as Doctorow discusses in the chapter on Varoufakis’ concept of Technofeudalism) from turning the offer to shit always seem to end up in the private sector. The battle is against enshittification from both private and, by proxy, via public monopolies.

Enshittification is, ultimately, a positive and empowering book which I strongly recommend you buy, avoiding Amazon if you can. We can have a better internet than this. We can strike a better deal with Big Tech over how we run our lives. But the surest way to lose is to stop running.

And next time a dead-eyed Amazon driver turns up at your door, be nice, they are probably having a worse day than you are.

Again and again and again

27. November 2025 · Write a comment · Categories: Economics, Health, Media & Politics

On 20 November, the UK Covid-19 Inquiry published its second report and recommendations following its investigation into ‘Core decision-making and political governance’. The following day these were the headlines:

This contrasts with the Inquiry’s first report and recommendations following its investigation into the UK’s ‘Resilience and preparedness (Module 1)’ on Thursday 18 July 2024. Then the following day’s headlines looked like this:

Whereas the first report had recommended a radical simplification of the civil emergency preparedness and resilience systems, including:

A new approach to risk assessment;
A new UK-wide approach to the development of strategy, which learns lessons from the past;
Better systems of data collection and sharing in advance of future pandemics;
Holding a UK-wide pandemic response exercise at least every three years and publishing the outcome; and
The creation of a single, independent statutory body responsible for whole system preparedness and response.

The second report on the other hand merely reran the pandemic, pointing out where we went wrong on:

The emergence of Covid-19;
The first UK-wide lockdown;
Exiting the first lockdown;
The second wave; and
The vaccination rollout and Delta and Omicron variants.

And crucially who to blame for it. Its recommendations were far less specific and actionable in my view than those from the first report. And yet it got all the headlines, with glowering images of Baroness Hallett and pictures of Boris Johnson with head bowed.

The first report dealt with what we could do better next time and was virtually ignored (only The Daily Mirror and The Independent carried “They failed us all” headlines about the Covid Inquiry first report). The second dealt with who to blame and it dominated the headlines. I think this neatly encapsulates what is wrong with us as a country and why we never seem to be able to learn from our own past mistakes or the examples of other countries.

This is not about defending Boris Johnson or any of his ministers. It is about realising that they are much less important than our own ability to sort out our problems and study any evidence we can to help us do that.

The NHS suffers from the same problem, as Roy Lilley has described here, too many inquiries and most of their recommendations ignored. Again and again and again. We choose to focus on the minor and irrelevant at the expenses of the major and important. Again and again and again. As Lilley says:

Until we make it OK for people to say… I made a mistake… we will forever be trapped in a Kafka world of inquiries coming to the same conclusions…

…If inquiries worked, we’d have the safest healthcare system in the world.

Instead, we have a system addicted to investigating itself and forgetting the answers.

It is part of a pattern repeated yesterday, focusing on the micro when our problems are macro. Rachel Reeves increased taxes by £26 billion in yesterday’s budget, which was much less than the £40 billion in her first budget, and yet still led to the BBC reporting “Reeves chooses to tax big and spend big” and the FT leading with “Rachel Reeves’ Budget raises UK tax take to all-time high“, and with this graph:

This is hilariously at odds with the message of what it was reporting last week:

The latter was obviously an attempt to head off a wealth tax, which appears to have been largely successful. Our averageness when it comes to tax, though, is supported by this graph using OECD data from Tax Policy Associates:

Our position in the middle of the pack will be little affected by what happened yesterday. And that and all the chatter about the OBR leaking it all an hour in advance rather drowned out the fact that there was relatively little additional spending (around £12 billion overall, a quarter of which was on the welcome removal of the two-child limit). The main point was to increase our “fiscal headroom” to £22 billion, ie the amount the Government can spend before they breach their own fiscal rules.

It looks like we are going to do what we are going to do, with fiscal headroom management masquerading as economic policy, and otherwise just sit around waiting for the next disaster. Which we will then have a big inquiry about to tell us that we weren’t remotely prepared for it. Which we will then ignore…and so it continues. Again and again and again.