Rufus Rock

UK government simultaneously replaced expert advice on technology with tech company “consultants” and displaced their civil servants’ experience and expertise into AI models… It’s a disaster & an absolute gift to the tech vendors…

I wonder if he trusts plumbers, electricians, civil engineers, etc, who build and maintain all the infrastructure he needs to survive…

Public Sector Capabilities Index IIPP, with support from Bloomberg Philanthropies, has launched an initiative to establish a Public Sector Capabilities Index – the first global measure of city governments’ capacity to solve problems.

Public Sector Capabilities Index ➡️ www.ucl.ac.uk/bartlett/res...
Council on Urban Initiatives ➡️ www.ucl.ac.uk/bartlett/res... 3/3

Hope, Climate Change and Technological Solutionism On the 20th of September, 2023, Rishi Sunak delivered an update on the UK’s approach to Net Zero, bringing technological solutions once again to the forefront of climate policy. The “new approach”…

I wrote a thing about this in the context of climate change a while ago medium.com/@rufus.p.roc...

To be fair, complexity is hard to work with. Humans sort of have to break problems down in order to structure them such that we can work on them. Very hard to sit down and write an entire book.

I like “technological solutionism” as discussed in Evgeny Morosov’s wonderfully titled “To Save Everything, Click Here”

Do you think that separation of state and establishment is likely shift ever? E.g., if certain places continue to feel neglected over time through different political regimes …

Interesting. So the establishment is not equated with the state? Makes sense through the lens of US libertarianism now I’m thinking about it. Harder to do in the UK with royals, Thatcher, etc.

I wonder why. Plenty of US cities/regions - like the Rust Belt - might rightfully feel aggrieved or left behind. The “coastal elites” vs everyone else narrative feels like a real thing too, yet national identity holds firm everywhere?

Are there parts of the US where people don’t strongly identify with “American”? Like how some in Liverpool reject being called “English”?

Wimbledon 2025: Play stopped in Sonay Kartal's match against Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova after electronic line calling fails Play is stopped in Sonay Kartal's last-16 match at Wimbledon as the electronic line calling system fails to call a ball out.

Another classic case of “let’s automate everything don’t worry it’ll be fine” www.bbc.co.uk/sport/tennis...

YouTube video by vlogbrothers You’re Not Addicted to Content, You’re Starving for Information

Great thoughts on information over abundance from @hankgreen.bsky.social — though calling a lot of the AI slop on TikTok “information” feels generous.
youtu.be/9euKCrTyMEc

When I worked in UK academia I recall hearing of a Japanese man who was baffled at how Britain had decided to run its universities like firms. “Why? Your universities are excellent and your firms are terrible.”

Europe’s dependence on US tech is a critical weakness | Opinion In order to protect their sovereignty, the continent’s leaders must invest in a digital ecosystem independent of America

Europe’s dependence on US tech is a critical weakness | Opinion

https://www.ft.com/content/30d6f79f-d1ee-49dc-bff5-719f18c1a9e5

Open letter to the President of the Royal Society – time to stand up for your values If you wish to show your support for the letter below regarding apparent inaction by the Royal Society in the face of breaches of its code of conduct by Elon Musk FRS, please sign below. I invite anyo...

Signature tally now closing in on 3000. Please keep discussing, sharing and signing to put as much pressure on the Royal Society to respond as possible. forms.gle/AuYvuWqytx8K...

The End of Programming as We Know It

I just wrote a piece on why I think the chatter about AI putting programmers out of work is wrong. Every time it gets easier to tell computers what we want them to do, it brings more people into the fold and unleashes a wave of creativity and creative destruction. That reads like opportunity to me.

'Scaling laws' are not laws. They are an industrial strategy. Like Moore's Law. Peter Thiel, Reid Hoffman et al's airport books lay it out - Blitzscaling as a way to crush competition and earn monopoly rents. So the story has to be that bigger is better.

Thanks to @timoreilly.bsky.social for sending me the article!

An Interview with Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross About the Human Component of AI An interview with Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross about the human component of AI, OpenAI drama, Nvidia, Goole, Apple, and predictions for 2024.

I really enjoyed tinyurl.com/4xupv5kt - “the penultimate goal with AI is to, if you believe them, summon a kind of God… it very much feels like… what I imagine walking through Los Alamos must have felt like during the Manhattan Project, there’s a real searching for a sense of belonging and meaning”

Genuinely wild how much the internet 15 years ago felt like a frontier and now feels like those terminals you get in video games with a couple of pages to give you the illusion of an explorable internet, like in cyberpunk 77. Just fully fucked the whole thing up

how hard can it possibly be to understand that LLMs are not good for information retrieval

LLMs only seem good for info retrieval because search engines have been ruined by ads—a very accurate take. My question is what happens when advertising starts being inserted into the LLMs? Will our information environment ever recover?

Easy solution: never connect your pc to the internet.

Preventing Digital Feudalism | by Mariana Mazzucato - Project Syndicate Mariana Mazzucato calls reform of the platform-dominated market for personal data the main economic challenge of our time.

Not enough to complain about tech bros. Must look at their feudalistic renter practices. In 2019 I wrote on “digital feudalism” www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/p... (based on theory in my book The Value of Everything). In 2023 ran a project on “Algorithmic Rents” www.ucl.ac.uk/bartlett/pub....

Thanks Jack!!

Brilliant analysis from one of our @stsucl.bsky.social alumni

Just published: my new paper on how Big Tech profits from our attention. Ever wondered how platforms turn clicks into cash? Find out here: doi.org/10.1016/j.in...

Looks great, but how’s the airflow? The fractal era was pretty too - until it turned into a furnace.

Why does #bluesky take so long to open?

The Economist’s graphs remain undefeated