AI eternal

September 30, 2025 by 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…

Filed under Blogging, Culture, Psychology Tagged with , , , ,

Pascal’s new wager

August 30, 2025 by 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?

Filed under Blogging, Culture, Psychology Tagged with , , , ,

Trump in town

July 26, 2025 by 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…

Filed under Culture, Politics, Psychology Tagged with , ,

LA aflame

January 11, 2025 by Leave a comment

Even though I’m thousands of miles away I’ve been feeling very disturbed by the news from Southern California; principally, of course, due to the appalling loss of life, property, and peace of mind being endured by the residents of LA County, but also because, even to my supposedly rational mind, it seems like a terrifying omen. A bastion of progressive values literally burning to the ground is the sort of unsubtle metaphor for the times we find ourselves living in that would normally be dismissed as ridiculously blunt in a work of fiction, yet, the way things are going at the moment, it feels, if anything, like an understatement.

Filed under Culture Tagged with , ,

New Year optimism: 2025 edition

January 1, 2025 by Leave a comment

Despite my generally curmudgeonly nature I’m not entirely immune to the cultural currents that identify this time of year, a few days after midwinter, with a new spring just about imaginable, as an opportunity for reinvention, both personal and societal, and a reason to believe that the world, and my life within it, can only get better.

I’m sure that this feeling won’t last the week, but I’ll enjoy it while I can…

Filed under Culture, Psychology Tagged with ,

Kurt Cobain RIP

April 7, 2024 by Leave a comment

It’s hard to believe that thirty years have passed since Kurt Cobain was found dead in Seattle. I recall that I heard the news via a tabloid headline stating, with the questionable taste characteristic of the time, something like “Rock Star blows his brains out”, which I initially assumed was a figurative reference to Cobain’s well-known drug use, before reading the story and finding out that it was horribly literal.

I like to think that I was one of the earlier fans of Nirvana, in the UK at least, having picked up an imported copy of Bleach, mainly on the strength of it being on Sub Pop. I was moderately impressed, enough anyway that I bought Nevermind in October 1991, before the hype really took off. I had recently acquired my first car, and for the next few months I had a tape of Smells Like Teen Spirit and the rest on more or less constantly as I drove around town, imagining myself a fine arbiter of alternative taste.

I saw Nirvana play live once, at the Reading Festival in 1992. Kurt came onstage in a wheelchair, wearing a hospital gown, a reference to rumours of a recent near-fatal overdose. I remember it as a great show, though at that point I had been continuously awake and high for around 72 hours, which may have influenced my critical judgment a little.

That appearance, their last in the UK, was probably the peak of my fandom; I liked In Utero well enough, but it wasn’t the ubiquitous soundtrack that Nevermind had been a couple of years earlier. Still, I was shaken up by Kurt’s untimely demise, which seemed like a dark reflection of Gen-X apathy. The following week the NME featured a sombre portrait of Cobain on the cover; I carefully cut it out and framed it, keeping it on my wall in numerous apartments, before it got lost during a move.

Looking back now, it all seems part of some previous life, though one that somehow feels simultaneously recent and distant. I guess it’s because I have no frame of reference for those events other than the experience of my younger self, and I haven’t remained 27 in the way that Kurt always will be. It’s bittersweet to be reminded of the relentless passage of time, but it’s good to have some things to look back on fondly.

Oh well, whatever. Nevermind.

Filed under Culture, Psychology Tagged with , , ,

Crypto justice

March 29, 2024 by Leave a comment

I’m not sure whether Sam Bankman-Fried will be feeling that his 25 year sentence for authoring the FTX debacle means he has got off relatively lightly; it was suggested at one point that he might be looking at something closer to a full century, but with time off for good behaviour he might yet be out before he turns 50.

Bleeding-heart liberal that I am, I can’t really see the point in locking him up at all; there must surely be some way he could be obliged to work in the service of the community, though I guess it would take a lot of highway litter-picking to pay off a debt to society that runs into the billions. Perhaps it is for the best that he serves as a cautionary example to those tempted to accumulate wealth by any means, but, given that the financial world is otherwise entirely organised to incentivise such behaviour, I suspect the only lesson aspiring SBFs may learn is “Don’t get caught”.

Filed under Culture, Economics, Psychology Tagged with , ,

Leap of meaning

February 29, 2024 by Leave a comment

I’ve noted before my affection for the extra day in February which comes around every four years, and my feeling that I should spend it doing something special. Alas, as seems to have been the case for the last few decades now, the dull reality of my quotidian existence has ensured that I have done nothing of the sort, instead passing the day in numbingly routine activity.

That said, as I’ve grown older I’ve become gradually more comfortable with the idea that, in cosmic terms, everything I do is essentially purposeless, so I guess that some day I may look back and count today as momentous as any other.

Filed under Psychology Tagged with

No crypto

November 5, 2023 by Leave a comment

In a development which won’t have surprised anyone who had paid even passing attention to the case laid out by the prosecution, a jury in Manhattan took only four hours to convict Sam Bankman-Fried, erstwhile CEO of collapsed crypto exchange FTX, on all seven charges he faced in connection with the scandal, encompassing wire fraud, money laundering, and, for good measure, securities and commodities fraud. Bankman-Fried reportedly faces more than 100 years in federal prison, and still has another trial on related charges to look forward to next year.

What’s interesting is that, despite his reputation as a DeFi genius, SBF’s crimes were spectacularly low-tech; he took the money entrusted to him by credulous depositors, and spent it on stuff. The crypto veneer added nothing, other than some distracting stardust, and a rationale for registering his company in the Bahamas, thus avoiding US regulatory purview. Even without such oversight it’s hard to see how SBF thought he could get away with it, unless he had become so intoxicated by his own publicity that he believed he really could spin gold out of digital straw.

The FTX debacle, along with various other blockchain-related fiascos, seems to have dealt a fatal blow to the NFT market, a development so predictable that even we managed to see it coming at the peak of the frenzy in 2021.

Despite all this Bitcoin is still doing relatively well, presumably because, unlike pictures of jaded simians, it actually has a use value, albeit one that appeals mainly to criminals looking to transfer funds clandestinely, though even that is not foolproof.

None of this is new of course, as we wrote way back in 2010, apropos of the blog-related scams prevalent in those days:

Persuading people to suspend their disbelief by invoking some magical new paradigm must go back to the days when enterprising cavemen extracted shiny pebbles from their gullible fellows by promising to share the secrets of how to generate revenue using that new “fire” thing that everyone was talking about.

So I think I’ll continue to pass on crypto, or whatever incomprehensible tech-based get-rich-quick scheme comes along next, and stick to old-school working for a living.

Filed under Culture, Economics, Psychology Tagged with , ,

July daze redux

July 30, 2023 by Leave a comment

If I wanted to excuse the infrequent nature of my posts since the start of the year by claiming that I’ve been paralysed by existential anxiety, I wouldn’t have to look too hard to find plausible reasons for despair; take your pick from accelerating climate breakdown, attritional wars on multiple continents, the predicted rise of killer AI, unaccountable oligarchs hoarding wealth while the young slide into financial precarity, the resurgence of Donald Trump, rumoured extraterrestrial incursions, general government mendacity and incompetence… and that’s just this week’s news.

In truth though, I’ve been largely silent for almost exactly the opposite reason; the last few months have found me in a state of unfocused contentment, which hasn’t exactly been unpleasant, but has left me with a nagging feeling that I should have some stronger opinions about what’s going on, and should be taking every opportunity to share them.

There’s only so much angst anyone can take though, and I reckon I’ve done my share of agitation over the years, so I’m going to forgive myself for lapsing into a period of blissful denial, until the end of the summer at least. Assuming that ever comes…

Filed under Blogging, Culture, Economics, Politics, Psychology Tagged with , , , ,

← Older posts