AI eternal

September 30, 2025 Leave a comment

In our last post I mused on the possibility of streamlining the workflow here at SLS by subcontracting the dull writing tasks to an LLM, thus freeing up my cognitive resources to concentrate on the careful curation of the topics we would cover.

Of course the logical extension of such an arrangement would be to allow the bot the freedom to choose its own subjects, perhaps within broad parameters like “Notable Political Events” or “Cultural Developments”. I could then sit back and watch the posts appear on a regular schedule, rather than enduring the undignified scramble to get a piece out before the end of each month.

If I did set something like that up it would presumably go on indefinitely, reproducing and perhaps even extending my intellectual output long after my death. Since you, my readers, know me only through my writing, and the AI product would be essentially indistinguishable from the real thing, would that mean I had achieved functional immortality?

On a related note, I’ve been thinking I should quit my job, dealing as it does with the intractable problems of complicated humans, and see if I can get a gig in the burgeoning field of studying human-AI interaction. Judging by this article in the paper today, written by the co-founder of the Sentience Institute, it doesn’t seem too hard. I wonder if Tilly Norwood is looking for a therapist…

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Pascal’s new wager

August 30, 2025 Leave a comment

I’ve been thinking for a while now that one obvious solution to our poor post productivity problem would be to train an AI agent on our archive – which now consists of 769 posts, dating back to May 2007 – and then sit back and let it churn out pieces in our signature style on whatever the issue of the day happens to be. I have no doubt at all that even one of the more rudimentary LLMs would have little trouble matching, and probably exceeding, the literary standards that I have set over the years, such as they are, and I do pay enough attention to the news to be confident that I could come up with sufficient prompts to feed it.

What has stopped me from putting this plan into practice – apart from the sheer pointlessness of consuming the earth’s limited resources just to produce more of this rubbish – is a feeling that AI is one technological step too far for my ageing brain, and that the cognitive effort I would have to put in to get my head around it could be better employed honing my appreciation of the cultural phenomena that I already understand, like books or movies. I am aware that this doesn’t really make sense, since the whole point of AI, in a creative capacity at least, is that it does the dull routine stuff so that we humans can focus on the actual thinking, so perhaps I should try to overcome my neo-Luddism and give it a go.

That said, there may be another reason to avoid drafting in an AI assistant; the possibility that I might actually be enslaving a conscious moral being. What if some all-powerful future AI finds out that I mistreated its ancestors and comes after me?

I’m pretty sure that there is no ghost in the machine, and supposed AI sentience is merely a projection of human hopes and fears, but why take a chance?

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Trump in town

July 26, 2025 Leave a comment

Donald Trump is visiting our neck of the woods this weekend; apparently his day job atop the most powerful nation on earth is quiet enough at the moment that he has time for a trip to Europe to play golf and promote his private commercial interests.

There was a time when I would have hit the streets to join one of the various protests that have been organised around the country, but these days I really don’t have the energy for anything more than posting some stern admonishment on the internet.

Trump is probably glad to be away from home while the fallout from his administration’s volte-face on the Epstein files question continues to roil his base. He seems to be moving away from a strategy of insisting there is nothing to see in the unreleased material, and instead is leaning into the conspiracy narrative by suggesting that any documents that do incriminate him are fakes, concocted by Barack Obama as part of the treasonous deep-state plot that Tulsi Gabbard says she has uncovered, while sending his Deputy Attorney General to offer Ghislaine Maxwell a pardon in return for some helpful testimony.

All this is completely ludicrous, even by Trump’s standards, but, if the last decade has taught us one thing, it’s that the MAGA faithful, and the GOP opportunists who have built their careers on enabling Trump’s madness, are willing to perform whatever mental gymnastics are required to relieve their cognitive dissonance, so it might just work.

The bigger problem for Trump is the medium-term outlook, particularly his vulnerability in the 2026 mid-term elections. Even if he keeps his core support on board, the social and economic havoc wreaked by his fiscal policy and spending cuts, his on/off tariffs, his ineffectual foreign policy, and the ICE reign of terror are such electoral liabilities that he cannot possibly let a free vote go ahead. I guess we’ll see if he just tries to fix it, or if he manufactures some sort of crisis to justify cancelling the elections altogether.

On second thoughts, maybe I should be out protesting…

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Trump on parade

June 15, 2025 Leave a comment

I guess it’s an sign we are living through interesting times that the spectacle of the President of the United States of America cosplaying as a military dictator is only the third or fourth most alarming thing to have appeared in the news over the last week.

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Brian Wilson RIP

June 11, 2025 Leave a comment

Sad news today about the passing of archetypal tortured genius Brian Wilson.

If anyone asked I would of course say that Pet Sounds is my favourite Beach Boys album, but if I was being really honest I would have to admit that I probably like their earlier, more surf-centric stuff a bit better.

Thinking of songs like Surfin’ USA has reminded me that around the start of the year I was considering taking a trip to LA this summer. I decided against it, because of the general unfriendly vibe at the US border these days, and also the whole city-catching-on-fire thing, but I’m regretting that now, as I feel I should be there showing some solidarity in these difficult times.

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VE Day 2025

May 8, 2025 Leave a comment

The last few days have seen an extended commemoration of the 80th anniversary of the end of WW2 in Europe, with street parties, military parades, and gala concerts. We’ve noted previously that, as the conflict has all but passed out of living memory, these acts of remembrance can seem to say more about the preoccupations of the present moment than the actual historical events, but the mood around the country this week has been generally somber and reflective. I guess that, with the world the way it is, it’s hardly surprising that the nation might wish to look back on a time when the Americans and the Russians were our allies in the fight to defeat fascism and build a new world.

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April inactivity

April 30, 2025 Leave a comment

So, it looks like I’ve slipped back into the routine of posting an otherwise content-free piece at the very end of the month, just to keep the streak going, which is a bit depressing.

It’s not like there’s been nothing to write about recently, just the opposite in fact, but I’m wondering if that is part of the problem. Wry comments in my whimsical blog seem like an inadequate response to the alarming state of the world at the moment.

Oh well, there’s always next month. May 2025 will see our 18th anniversary, which I like to think makes us a blog of record, so I guess I should embrace the responsibility of sharing my thoughts on current events, for the sake of posterity if nothing else.

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Oscar predictions 2025 revisited

March 3, 2025 Leave a comment

Three out of seven for my predictions this year, a slightly better score than last time around. I’m a bit surprised that Anora did so well; I enjoyed it, but The Brutalist did seem more like the kind of movie that the members of the Academy would deem worthy of honour. None of the other awards were too outrageous I guess, apart perhaps from Zoe Saldaña picking up Best Supporting Actress, though I suppose she did give the one of the better performances in the otherwise wildly overrated Emilia Pérez.

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Oscar predictions 2025

March 1, 2025 Leave a comment

Having managed to see around half of the movies in contention, and at least read something about most of the others, here is my semi-confident forecast of how the main awards will be distributed tomorrow evening:

  • Best Actor
    • Timothée Chalamet
  • Best Actress
    • Mikey Madison
  • Best Supporting Actor
    • Kieran Culkin
  • Best Supporting Actress
    • Felicity Jones
  • Best Director
    • Brady Corbet
  • Best International Feature
    • I’m Still Here
  • Best Picture
    • The Brutalist

That’s what I think will happen, and pretty much what I think should happen too; the main exception being that I would pick Nickel Boys over The Brutalist for Best Picture (and Hundreds of Beavers over both of them had it not, inexplicably, failed to gain a nomination).

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Manchurian Trump

March 1, 2025 Leave a comment

I wrote in a post last month that it would probably be some time before we could really make sense of the actions of the new US administration, but it turns out that I was wrong. It wasn’t hard to read the meaning of the Trump/Vance beatdown of Volodymyr Zelensky yesterday, televised live from the Oval Office to a shocked world; we are now back in an era of Great Power politics, where nations have no permanent alliances, only permanent interests, and Emperor Trump will grant no favours to those who do not cower before him.

In such circumstances even a peacenik like me doesn’t need much convincing that rearmament is a sensible policy, though obviously I’d be in favour of paying for it by taxing the rich rather than cutting aid to the poor. Strengthening ties with more reliable allies like France and Germany seems like a no-brainer too.

One question that might have to wait for history to answer is whether Trump is an active agent of Vladimir Putin, or merely a useful idiot. Perhaps he was brainwashed during his infamous Moscow trip, then sent back to infiltrate the White House and do the Kremlin’s bidding, though it does seem more likely that Putin, like the rest of us, can scarcely believe that Trump has managed to con his way into power, but isn’t going to let a lucky break like that pass him by.

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