What happens when the AI is plugged in to observe our lives and sees the destructive patterns we create for ourselves that we deny we are acting out?

Will we listen?

How progress ends: technology, innovation, and the fate of nations Podcast Episode · LSE: Public lectures and events · 21/10/2025 · 1h 25m

How progress ends: technology, innovation, and the fate of nations podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/l... [These LSE lectures-as-podcasts are always great. This one fascinating for anyone in tech or patents interested in the mechanics of innovation.]

One for social media.

I enjoyed the Emma Talbot exhibition at the Arnolfini.

Many stories: flawed but normal human has quirks & foibles but nothing out of distribution; they are then in a serious car crash; their personality then changes subtly, becomes more extreme & unravels over decades.

Why do we not see the brain as an organ that can be damaged?

I very much enjoyed Dan Lie’s Sleeping Methodologies at Spike Island gallery.

This is me on a Sunday with an extra hour to play with.

Finiteness & scale. We think we are capable of anything. Yet we run on computing matter; the most complex thing we know, but obeying laws of physics & computation. It computes based on signals & chemicals & body states. On legacy code written long ago in the oceans & seashores.

I’m always amused that people assume that a brain that can cope with small local causality and groups of 50-100, mostly kin, can then cope with a statistical scale of millions or billions. That is why the news and social media is harmful. It short circuits our mental hardware.

Writing "assistants" will try to get you to cut out the "quite" in your writing. In that "quite pleased" > "pleased". More direct and punchy they say. Only problem is I'm British. I'm not "pleased", I don't care that much. I have a modicum of pleasure.

The age of social AI Podcast Episode · Many Minds · 08/10/2025 · 1h 24m

The age of social AI podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/m... [These Many Minds podcasts are always excellent. This is a great one about the social use of AI. You hear a lot of doomerism but less on the possibility of relieving loneliness for the elderly or marginalised.]

“Perhaps it is only at times when the certainty of your perceptions - certainty being a concept applied by the conscious mind - is lessened, that you experience the world as it is, and not as you think it is.”

Glastonbury Tor image found preserved in log near Bath Stuart Loak was collecting wood when he spotted an image of his hometown in the grain of a log.

Glastonbury Tor image found preserved in log near Bath - BBC News www.bbc.co.uk/news/article... [Somerset news cycle is the best news cycle.]

Often I don't think people really understand the scale of the "large" in Large Language Models.

The most powerful models have a number of weight values that are 10-20x the number of humans that have ever lived or died.

Warren Ellis wears yellow Lidl shorts.

He is such a legend.

One of my most unifying experiences of joy over the whole of my (longish) life?

Riding at the front of the top a double decker bus.

Never loses its magic.

Does agency slip away the more we know and the more there is to know?

Does ignorance make it easier to act and affect the world?

Did Spinoza and Einstein struggle with these questions?

I (we?) forget that trade and the markets arose from social networks, to support and strengthen those networks. Now it seems that trade and the markets often undermine our social networks?

(Supermarkets, cheap Asian goods, commodity products lacking perceived value, BS jobs…)

I’ve long had this feeling that psychotherapy and psychiatry (for many but not all) mental health issues were the wrong answer to the wrong question.

Studies like this - onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/... - show an average standard mean difference of 0.3 (small, near placebo benefit).

Dario Amodei is the CEO of Anthropic. He joins Big Technology Podcast for a raw, unfiltered conversation about AI's potential, its stakes, and the source of his outspokenness. The interview is part… Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei: AI's Potential, OpenAI Rivalry, GenAI Business, Doomerism

I do think we'd be in a much worse position v-a-v AI if we didn't have folk like Dario and Demis leading. This is a great interview. youtu.be/mYDSSRS-B5U?...

Meta have the issue that even though they are throwing money at ML/AI engineers, reports of their internal culture are bad. And I think the two are related. Recruitment isn’t just about compensation, especially for already wealthy (on previous company stock) SF-ites.

Watching Dario Amodei speak about AI with great mannerisms and gestures and passion and information density, is probably fairly close to watching what others probably experience when I talk about AI...

From the Neolithic mind to Abigail Shrier’s Bad Therapy. A bit of a conceptual leap? Maybe not - hasn’t medicalised psychology become our new Western religion? Isn’t the “science” often a bit dodgy, based on armchair pronouncements? Isn’t it all a language to give life meaning?

Grime’s Graves near Norfolk.

Not graves but a 5000 year old flint mining system. Each crater was a don’t mining pit ~9m deep. Kept going for ~800 years. Red deer antlers were the main mining tools. Amazing.

Pilgrimages reflect how our brains store spiritual or psychological changes in the self using the same neural hardware as many animals use for navigating space. The physical journey mirrors the soul journey. You exit changed, bigger somehow.

The tomb at Newgrange has a “roof box” above the entrance doorway that on or around 21 December, for 20 minutes around 8:45am, lets light into the long entrance passage illuminating the inner chamber. It illuminates a motif of three interlinked spiral circles. 🌀. Trinity?

Thinking about the Irish immigrants in America - the Irish as a distinct people are “younger” than Native Americans (8-10ka vs 13-15ka).

It looks like Neolithic man was just like modern man - tombs and barrows are often found with quartz pebbles - those glittery glass like pebbles kids always gravitate to on the beach.

Neolithic tombs / ceremonial structures in West Atlantic often (25%+?) have a cruciform design for the inner chambers (e.g., Barclodiad y Gawres). Funny how Christianity “recycled” this 2000-3000 years later.

It’s funny to think that the deep history of local and national “continuity” was mainly built from a repeated arrival of new-comers, lucky with power, asserting themselves over & within local spiritually significant areas. Seeming to be a continuous link in an unending chain.