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Five days in July – the bizarre paradox of an obedient AI

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By now most people have seen the media reports of an unauthorised hack by a swarm of OpenAI-created AI agents into an external site called Hugging Face. The details of how this hack happened are technical and gnarly and multilayered (the tech post-mortems started coming out last week).

A cancer breakthrough and the second coming of mRNA

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There can be few technologies in modern history that have travelled so quickly from scientific triumph to political tribalism as mRNA.

Monty Python and the great energy marketplace

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If we ignore fossil fuels (and we really shouldn’t – they are still the dominant energy source and will be for some time) and try to cut through the extraordinary amount of energy-tech hype spewed out by various true believers, it is easy for confusion to reign. Solar will save us! Biowaste! Power plants in space! Sodium-ion batteries! Wind, waves, geothermal, hydropower, fusion, natural gas! Drill, baby, drill!

The great AI data centre allergy of 2026

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Last week a popular local radio station was looking around for someone who might defend the proposed construction and operation of an AI data centre in the city in which I live (as a counterpoint to previous guests who were apparently vocal data-centre resisters).

This column was written by AI… wait, no, it wasn’t, was it?

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I have been writing professionally for 15 years, starting with a novel in 2011. AI-assisted writing only arrived somewhere around 2023, but it took off in 2025 as the LLMs got pretty good at it. I was not interested in using it; I have been writing (and enjoying the process) without AI for so long that I have no desire to hand off what is an energising and creative activity. It is rarely drudgery and I never suffer from writer’s block.

Living for all eternity – the tech barons and their obsession with longevity science

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I remember a film from decades ago, when I was young enough to have had few worries about ageing. It was called Zardoz, and it starred Sean Connery. The plot swirled around a glass-domed city in some future world, peopled by those wealthy enough to have purchased eternal youth and health.

AI – The Chinese are coming! The Chinese are coming!

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Even people with only a light interest (or even disinterest) in AI know that there is a leaderboard. Sometimes OpenAI is on top. Then Anthropic releases a new model and they grab the lead. Somewhere behind them SpaceXAI and Meta and Google, all huffing and puffing to stay in the race.

Why does everyone hate billionaires?

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It’s easy to hate billionaires. Although “hate” may be a bit strong, let’s rather say that most people are less than well disposed towards them. The narrative goes like this – to accumulate that much money is a mark of greed, or moral turpitude, or worse. It seems to violate some unwritten law of civil society. And there are indeed a great many odious representatives of the mega-rich class, and many who became billionaires by accident – they inherited it.

What happens to left-wing politics when AI decimates the working class?

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Every political party of the left, everywhere, has the same word around which much of its messaging emerges. Workers. The British Labour Party is named for them. The Democratic Party invokes “working families” with regularity. The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), enjoying their moment in the American sun, promise to fight for the working class against the billionaire class. It is the left’s founding iconography – the calloused hand, the picket line, the lunch pail. The worker.

The inevitable left-wing tilt of the Democratic party

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Some readers who follow US elections might remember a backroom political strategist named James Carville, who is credited with having almost singlehandedly rejuvenated the Democratic