Paying Rent to the Oracle

Apologies for a very long read.

There is a rather bleak little joke forming here, although like most bleak little jokes these days it comes with a spreadsheet, a productivity curve and a management consultant nearby pretending he saw it coming.

For years we were told that Britain’s future was services. We did not need to make things, dig things, forge things, grow things, repair things or generate things with any particular urgency. No, we were going to be a clever country. We would advise, consult, regulate, finance, administrate, brand, strategise and, where necessary, hold a workshop about stakeholder alignment.

It was all very modern. We would leave the grubby business of actually producing things to other countries and concentrate on the high-value work. The sort of work done in glass buildings by people with laptops, lanyards and phrases like “circle back” lodged somewhere deep in the soul.

Then along comes AI. Not the old sort, which wrote faintly odd poems and occasionally told you that glue was a pizza topping. This is the new, more worrying sort: agentic AI. It does not just answer questions. It acts. It plans. It writes code, checks code, runs tests, updates files, drafts documents, processes information, books meetings, chases forms, compares options and quietly does half the work that was supposed to keep the services economy nicely upholstered.

And this is where Britain should probably stop looking smug. Because if your economy is built around moving information between boxes, and somebody invents a machine that moves information between boxes faster, cheaper and without needing a wellness webinar, you may have a problem.

There is something faintly theological about it too. AI lives in the cloud, which is already suspicious language. It seems to be everywhere and nowhere. It speaks in every language, answers almost any question, draws on more digitised human knowledge than any person could ever read, and can extrapolate beyond normal human capability in some fields.

It is not God, obviously. It is not wise, moral or omniscient. It is often wrong with the smooth confidence of a senior official explaining why the computer says no. But it is the first machine that gives ordinary people the feeling of consulting something close to an oracle. The old gods spoke in thunder. This one speaks in bullet points and occasionally asks you to upgrade your subscription.

That is the unsettling bit. AI does not merely retrieve what humans already know. In bounded domains, it can go beyond us. Protein folding, materials discovery, weather modelling, logistics, code, drug screening, plasma control. These are not just library problems. They are problems of scale, prediction and search. AI can move through those spaces faster than unaided human thought can follow.

But extrapolation is not wisdom. A machine may become superhuman at solving bounded problems long before it is remotely fit to decide which problems should be solved. It may find the molecule, optimise the system, write the code or produce the strategy, while still having no real grasp of consequence, responsibility or human mess. That is the theological danger. Not that we have built God, but that we have built something powerful enough to seem divine and stupid enough to still need checking.

Which is why the best use of AI may not be treating it as a single oracle at all. The next stage is already being worked on: systems of AIs set against one another, each with a role. One drafts. One criticises. One checks facts. One tests code. One looks for risks. One searches for alternatives. One tries to break the answer before a human ever sees it.

That is not science fiction. Anyone who has used two different AI systems as sparring partners will recognise the principle. A single model gives you an answer. A second model may spot what the first missed. Feed the criticism back, and the result often improves. Industrialise that loop, automate it, give it tools, connect it to data and workflows, and you no longer have a chatbot. You have a synthetic team.

No.1 Son, who actually understands this stuff rather than just prodding it with a stick as I do, started me on this particular line of research. He tells me this is already happening. The clever bit is not one AI giving one polished answer. The clever bit is multiple agents arguing, testing, correcting, building and checking one another at machine speed. It is my little ChatGPT-versus-Gemini parlour trick, but with a workflow diagram and people’s jobs attached. His own cheerful view is that when his job goes, he will either become a farmer or run a trading operation from his bedroom, which may be the most modern career plan I have heard: half medieval peasant, half hedge fund.

That changes the productivity argument. We are not merely talking about one worker with one clever assistant. We are talking about one worker supervising several artificial assistants, critics and testers, all operating continuously. The human role moves from producing the work to setting the objective, judging the outputs and taking responsibility for what survives the argument.

It also changes the risk. A single AI can be wrong. A group of AIs can still be wrong, but more persuasively, after having apparently checked itself. So the human in the loop becomes more important, not less. Someone still has to ask whether the answer is grounded in reality, whether the assumptions are sound, and whether the machine has simply produced a beautifully formatted mistake.

This is where policy has to begin, not end. The Government should not simply ask how Britain can “lead the world in AI”, which is the sort of phrase that should immediately make everyone check for missing wallets. It should ask who owns it, who powers it, who is displaced by it, who benefits from it, who audits it, who is liable when it goes wrong, and who is left outside pressing their nose against the glass while being told to retrain.

The jobs most exposed are not, at first, the traditional practical ones. The plumber still has to turn up. The electrician still has to know which wire is live. The farmer still has to deal with weather, soil, machinery and animals, none of which are especially impressed by a beta release. The builder still has to build the wall, although preferably not in the style of a national infrastructure project.

But we should not kid ourselves that physical work is automatically safe. Robots can weld. Machines can lay, cut, lift, sort, scan, spray, inspect and assemble. AI can design the joint, check the image, plan the route and optimise the process. The clean, repetitive, predictable parts of physical work are exposed too.

So the protected work is not simply “manual labour”. That is too crude, and it sounds like something said by someone who has never had to make anything fit. The valuable bit is skilled physical judgement in messy environments. It is the person who can deal with awkward access, damaged materials, one-off repairs, bad drawings, poor weather, odd noises, hidden corrosion, tired machinery and the small but important fact that reality refuses to behave like a training dataset.

Steel, water, soil, heat and animals do not care what the strategy document says. They do not care about vision statements, quarterly objectives or whether someone has used the word “transformation” in a meeting room with frosted glass. They just sit there being awkwardly real.

Which means technical education stops being a side issue. It becomes national policy. Apprenticeships, further education, adult retraining, engineering colleges and practical routes into skilled work should not be treated as the consolation prize for people who did not go to university. They are part of the country’s survival kit. If we need people who can install, repair, maintain, fabricate, build, care, farm and engineer in real conditions, then we need to fund and respect the institutions that produce them.

The vulnerable layer is the polite, educated, spreadsheet-and-email middle. The people who process, format, review, schedule, summarise, chase, compare, draft and produce internal documents that are read by seven people and understood by none. Junior analysis, routine legal work, compliance checking, customer service scripts, HR processes, report writing and “let me pull together a deck”.

AI loves that stuff. Not because it is wise, because it is not. But much of the modern services economy is not wisdom either. It is procedure, paperwork and pattern. It is applying rules to text and moving the result onwards. That is exactly where agentic AI becomes dangerous.

So government should map the exposed jobs properly, not with a cheerful press release about “opportunities” and a stock photograph of a woman smiling at a tablet. Administrators, clerks, call-centre workers, junior analysts, paralegals, coders, routine project managers, compliance staff and all the people whose work is mostly information-processing need to be visible in policy before the redundancy letters arrive. Wage insurance, transition support, retraining grants and regional employment plans sound dull. Dull is good. Dull is what you want before people start throwing furniture.

The programming world is already getting an early look at this. The people closest to the machinery can see what is coming. A good developer with agentic tools can produce multiples of his previous output, not because he has suddenly become a genius, but because the machine is now doing the dull implementation, testing, fixing, refactoring and boilerplate that used to fill the day.

This is the warning. When bright young programmers start saying their own job, as currently defined, may have a two-year shelf life, it is probably worth listening. They are not textile workers in 1980 being patronised by politicians with retraining leaflets. They are the people building the machines that are coming for the leaflets.

The corporate response will, of course, be magnificent. First, it will be banned. Then it will be quietly used by the people who get things done. Then management will wink at it. Then there will be a policy. Then there will be a taskforce. Then someone will produce a slide saying “AI-native transformation journey”, and everyone will pretend that this was the plan all along.

Even the bosses should not feel too smug. A great deal of management is not leadership in the Churchillian sense. It is moving information upwards, instructions downwards and blame sideways. Agentic AI can do quite a lot of that without needing a reserved parking space.

If an AI can track projects, summarise progress, flag risks, assign tasks, compare performance, draft reports and remind people what they promised last Thursday, then the question becomes rather awkward. What is the manager adding? In good cases, judgement, experience, coaching, accountability and the ability to resolve human mess. In bad cases, a calendar invitation and a tone of mild disappointment.

Senior executives are not magically protected either. Market analysis, competitor scanning, financial modelling, scenario planning and board-paper drafting are all AI-friendly work. The remaining human value is choosing between imperfect options, taking responsibility, understanding people, spotting what the model has missed, and having the courage to act when there is no spreadsheet-shaped certainty.

That is why governance matters. Multi-agent AI systems will draft, check, test, criticise and act. Some will be useful. Some will be wrong in ways that look reassuringly professional. Government needs rules on audit trails, accountability, safety, procurement, data protection, liability and human responsibility. “The AI said so” must never become an acceptable defence, especially in government, healthcare, policing, finance, welfare, employment or anything else where a tidy error can ruin someone’s life.

That may be the most amusing reversal. The people who spent years asking whether workers were “adding value” may soon find a machine asking the same question about them, only faster, cheaper and without laughing at the phrase “leadership journey”.

And then comes the awkward question. If much of the services middle is exposed, and only the skilled, messy, physical work is relatively protected, who runs the world?

It may become a struggle between those who control artificial cognition and those who still command physical competence. But the numbers matter. There will not be millions of people controlling frontier AI models, chip supply chains, data-centre networks and global platforms. That world will be narrow, capital-heavy and probably rather pleased with itself.

There will, however, be millions of people keeping the physical economy alive: installing, repairing, farming, building, wiring, plumbing, maintaining, nursing, fabricating, driving, inspecting and dealing with the endless awkwardness of matter.

That gives the physical side a different kind of power. Not the concentrated power of ownership, but the dispersed power of necessity. The AI controller can scale one system across millions of users. The electrician, farmer, technician or carer cannot be scaled in quite the same way, because the work is local, embodied and annoyingly real. The pipe bursts in one house. The roof leaks on one building. The field is wet in one valley. The old person needs care in one room. Reality is not a platform, however much someone in California may wish it were.

The cloud still needs a roof. The oracle still needs electricity. The model still needs cooling. The digital economy still needs copper, concrete, steel, water, land, food, grid connections, skilled hands and people who can fix things when reality declines to reboot.

This is where ownership policy becomes unavoidable. If a handful of companies own the models, chips, data centres, platforms and access rights, they will own the tollbooths of the new economy. Competition policy, data rights, public-interest AI infrastructure, sovereign capability and taxation of extraordinary AI rents are not dull technical details. They are the difference between a productive society and a rent-collecting machine with a chatbot interface.

This is not a romantic return to the village blacksmith. The future artisan may use drones, sensors, diagnostics, software, robotics and AI. But he still has to know what happens when theory meets mud, rust, heat, fatigue, weather, wear and a client who changed the requirement yesterday but forgot to mention it.

The danger is obvious. The people who control the AI may try to own everything and rent access to everyone else. The people who keep the physical world running may discover they are more numerous and more essential than they were told, but numbers only become power when they have bargaining strength, training, ownership and political voice.

And then there are the people left behind. Because there will be people left behind. Every technological revolution produces hymns to productivity from those close enough to the money, and small, soothing phrases about “transition” for those whose job has just evaporated.

The usual answer will be retraining, because it always is. Retraining is the comforting word used by people whose own job is not currently being retrained out of existence. Some of it will work. Plenty of people will learn to use AI, move into practical trades, maintain infrastructure, care for others, manage systems or build small businesses.

But not everyone can become an AI supervisor, nuclear engineer, heat-pump installer, nurse, farmer, electrician or artisan baker with a waiting list. A serious society has to admit that. Otherwise we end up pretending that a 54-year-old accounts clerk, a redundant junior solicitor, a call-centre worker and a middle manager with a laminated leadership certificate are all just one online course away from becoming robotics technicians.

This is where universal basic income starts to look less like a student union fantasy and more like a riot-prevention strategy. That sounds brutal, because it is. If AI and automation massively increase productivity while stripping income, status and bargaining power from millions, the question will not be whether we can afford redistribution. It will be whether we can afford the alternative.

UBI would not be charity. Nor would it be a reward for idleness, as the usual suspects would immediately honk from the cheap seats. It would be a claim on the common productivity of the system: the machines, models, energy networks, public research, infrastructure, law, education and accumulated human knowledge that made the wealth possible in the first place.

Of course UBI has problems. It costs money. It could be inflationary if badly designed. It does not give people purpose, status, community or pride. A monthly payment is not a civilisation. But a civilisation that allows a small priesthood to own the oracle, while millions are told to polish their CVs for jobs that no longer exist, may find that the monthly payment was the modest option.

The alternative is not necessarily quiet poverty. It may be political rage, social fracture, extremism, sabotage, riots, or eventually something worse. Hungry people are one problem. Humiliated people with time, education, grievance and a broadband connection are quite another.

So perhaps UBI, or a citizen’s dividend, or a negative income tax, or universal basic services, becomes less a utopian scheme and more a pressure valve. Not perfect. Not sufficient. But part of the price of keeping a high-automation society governable.

That is where politics should be paying attention. Not to another “world-leading AI strategy” with a foreword by someone photographed near a server rack, but to ownership, energy, technical education, infrastructure, planning, wages, apprenticeships, redistribution and who captures the gains.

Because if we get it wrong, the future will not be clever people freed for higher work. It will be a small priesthood controlling the oracle, a practical class holding the physical world together, and millions wondering why they are poorer in a world supposedly made more productive.

Which brings us to energy. AI needs data centres. Data centres need electricity. Electrification needs more electricity. EVs, heat pumps, industry, rail, batteries, cooling systems, factories and digital infrastructure all need reliable power. The fight over AI is therefore also a fight over energy. Whoever controls the intelligence layer will still depend on whoever controls the power layer.

Renewables are essential, but they do not abolish darkness, still air or winter evenings. Solar is lovely at lunchtime in June. Less so at tea time in January when every home is drawing power, every heat pump is working hard, and a data centre somewhere is helping a marketing assistant generate six alternative ways to say “delighted to announce”.

A serious country needs firm low-carbon power. Grid upgrades, storage, demand management, interconnection and nuclear are not optional extras. They are the physical basis of an AI-heavy, electrified economy. Nuclear is not glamorous. It is slow, expensive, over-regulated and politically painful. In Britain we seem able to turn it into a twenty-year saga, spend twice the budget and then act surprised that France, China and Korea know how to pour concrete.

But if the digital economy is going to expand, nuclear stops being an ideological hobby and becomes plumbing. Boring, vital, heavy, difficult plumbing.

And that is the irony. The more ethereal the economy becomes, the more it depends on very unethereal things: copper, concrete, uranium, pylons, cooling water, skilled engineers, fabricators, land, planning consent and people who can actually fix something when it breaks.

For decades, we nudged the clever children towards screens and told the practical ones not to worry, there would always be something for them. Now the screen has learned to do screen work, and the practical world is looking rather less second-class.

The safe future may not be “learn to code”, because the machine has learned to code. The safe future may be to learn to use AI, understand systems, know where the energy comes from, and have at least one skill that involves judgement in the real world rather than just fluency in the digital one.

And even with AI, the safe approach may not be one machine giving one answer. It may be several machines disagreeing while a human with some judgement sits in the middle, listening, prodding, checking and occasionally asking whether everyone has gone mad.

Which is a slightly awkward conclusion for a country that sold off half its industrial base, neglected technical education, made housing unaffordable, tangled infrastructure in planning treacle, and then proudly announced that its future was services.

The required policy is not mysterious. Own some capability. Tax some rents. Build the grid. Build firm low-carbon power. Fund technical education. Protect displaced workers. Share productivity gains. Regulate high-risk AI properly. Keep humans accountable. Stop pretending that innovation policy is a glossy brochure with a launch event and some lanyards.

We have built something that looks a bit like an oracle, runs on electricity, feeds on human knowledge, predicts beyond human reach, and still cannot be trusted to know when it is talking rubbish.

The question is not whether Britain can write another strategy about it. Of course it can. Britain can write a strategy about a kettle.

The question is whether we still know how to build, power, own and govern the real machinery underneath the miracle, and whether we have the wit to share the gains before the people left outside decide to stop asking politely.

Otherwise we may find ourselves living in the cloud, paying rent to the oracle, and waiting for someone practical to come round and fix the lights.

Highway to Hel

There are times when modern life throws up a story so perfectly daft that it feels almost churlish not to enjoy it. FlixBus has brought back the 666 bus route to Hel in Poland, and naturally some people are behaving as if the Antichrist has just bought a return ticket from Krakow.

Hel is a seaside resort. It has beaches, old buildings and a seal sanctuary. It is not, so far as we know, Satan’s Polish regional office. The bus does not appear to require passengers to renounce anything before boarding, although on a 13-hour coach journey one should probably keep an open mind.

The previous operator changed the number from 666 to 669 after complaints from religious conservatives, which is wonderfully depressing. Imagine being the person who looks at a bus route to the coast and thinks, “This is where the trouble starts. Not war, corruption, cruelty, greed or the usual daily buffet of human stupidity, but a number on the front of a coach.”

FlixBus, to its credit, has simply looked at the whole fuss and thought: marketing. And they are right. The 666 to Hel is memorable. The 669 to Hel sounds like a replacement service after someone has dug up the road near the retail park.

This is the problem with performative outrage. It usually helps the thing it claims to oppose. Nobody outside Poland needed to know about this bus. Now we do. The campaigners took a local transport joke and polished it into international publicity. You can almost hear the marketing department quietly trying not to giggle.

Faith should be able to cope with a bus number. That is not an attack on religion. Quite the opposite, really. Serious belief should not need protecting from a destination board. If your faith can survive plagues, wars, schisms and centuries of theological dispute, but starts wobbling because someone painted 666 on a coach to a beach resort, then perhaps the coach is not the fragile thing in this story.

Most people on that bus will not be making a theological statement. They will be going on holiday. They will have bags, snacks, chargers, possibly a travel pillow, and a growing hatred of the person three rows back who is watching videos without headphones. By hour nine, the number on the front will be the least infernal part of the experience.

And that is why I rather admire it. The 666 bus to Hel is silly, harmless and beautifully memorable. It is exactly the sort of human nonsense that makes life bearable. Not every joke is an attack. Not every pun is persecution. Sometimes a bus to Hel is just a bus to Hel.

Although after 13 hours, one may be forgiven for thinking the destination board had a point.

House of the Dragon

They have exploded on to the scene this week, the dragonflies.

Not just appeared. Exploded. Last week there were a few smaller iridescent blue things about the pond, which I now discover may be damselflies, because nature has rules and I have a coffee cup. 

This week the big ones have arrived. Proper dragonflies. Large greenish, metallic, four-engine jobs, holding the air as if they own it.

The pond water is noticeably warmer after the little heatwave, and that seems to have been the signal. Somewhere under the lilies and among the pond weed, a lot of rather grim aquatic larvae have apparently decided that now is the moment to stop being underwater monsters and become aircraft.

It is a ridiculous process when you actually look at it.

They climb out of the water, grip a reed or some convenient bit of vegetation, split open the back of the old body, and haul a completely different creature out of it. Then they hang there while the wings expand and harden. That is not a minor upgrade. That is not fitting a better carburettor. That is a submarine becoming an aircraft.

Some do not make it, like the chap below. One must have lost its grip or fallen back into the water while trying to emerge. At that stage they are helpless. Soft, damp, half-assembled, and with no opportunity to ring the AA. If the wings do not set properly, or they fall, that is it. Nature does not do customer service.

But the ones that do make it are magnificent. The empty cases cling to the reeds like little abandoned diving suits. You look at them and realise that something has gone. Something that lived in the pond for years as a small underwater predator has climbed out through its own back and flown away.

There is something properly wonderful about that. Not sweet, not cosy, not the twee version of nature with a soundtrack and a slow-motion bee. This is real nature. Mud, predation, risk, transformation and then, suddenly, beauty with wings.

And all of it is happening in the pond as if it is perfectly ordinary.

Yesterday it was fish, blanket weed, lilies and a few newts minding their own business. Today it is a small air force. Tomorrow, no doubt, they will be mating on the reeds while I stand there pretending to be David Attenborough in gardening shoes.

You can also see why JK Rowling used Chasers in Quidditch. These things do not merely fly about. They pursue, intercept, turn on nothing, stop in mid-air, and then accelerate off as if some invisible schoolboy has just shouted something in Latin at them. They're almost impossible to capture on camera as they never stay still long enough.

Metamorphosis really is one of those things we slightly under-react to because it happens all the time. A creature lives underwater, climbs out, opens itself up, becomes something else, inflates wings and flies away.

And I shall probably still spend half the afternoon worrying about the blanket weed.

Chatty Petey and the Missing 10mm Socket

There is a curious thing that happens when you start using artificial intelligence for engineering jobs. You begin, quite innocently, by asking it a question about a GT6, a Ford Galaxy, a ride-on mower, or one of the boys’ motorcycles, and before long you realise you have not summoned the Oracle of Delphi.

You have summoned Dave.

Or, as Hayley has now christened it, Chatty Petey, which is perhaps even worse, because it sounds like a bloke in a fleece who has opinions about fuel pressure, has once owned a soldering iron, and is absolutely certain your problem is an earth fault.

Not useless Dave. Not pub bore Dave. More like helpful Dave from down the road, who has once changed a clutch cable, owns a multimeter, and says things like, “Have you checked the earth?” with the calm authority of a man who has absolutely not checked the earth.

And, to be fair, ChatGPT is often extremely useful. It can explain the principle, suggest a logical sequence, remind you not to set fire to yourself, and point out that perhaps before stripping half the front end off a mower you might first check whether there is a circlip under several decades of congealed grease.

This is good advice. This is the sort of advice that prevents a man in late middle age from lying on the gravel muttering darkly at a machine designed by someone who clearly hated both gardeners and access panels.

But ChatGPT is not always right.

Sometimes it is confidently wrong, which is worse than being uncertain. Uncertain is at least honest. Confidently wrong is the chap who says, “That’ll just pull off,” three seconds before you discover that the thing in question is held on by a hidden grub screw, a tapered spline, two spring clips, and the accumulated spite of a previous owner.

This is where Bard comes in. Or Gemini, or whatever Google is calling it this week, though it remains Bard on my browser tab because I annotated it that way and I refuse to be bullied by a rebrand.

Bard is, in my experience, slightly better at diagnosing mechanical problems. Not always. Let’s not get carried away. It is not Fred Dibnah in a server farm. But it often has a slightly different instinct. It will say, “That sounds more like fuel starvation than ignition,” or “Before replacing the regulator, test voltage at the battery and at the rectifier output,” and suddenly one begins to feel less like a man randomly buying parts and more like a proper troubleshooter.

Unfortunately, if you ask Bard for a diagram, you may as well ask the dog.

ChatGPT, by contrast, will have a decent stab at describing one. Sometimes it will even organise the parts in a way that makes sense, which is helpful when you are trying to understand why a 1990s Mercedes fuel system has apparently been designed as a joint venture between Stuttgart engineering and a medieval puzzle box.

So the trick, I have discovered, is not to treat either of them as an expert. The trick is to treat them as two useful mates standing in the garage.

One is leaning over the wing, saying, “I reckon it’s the return feed.”

The other is sitting on an upturned bucket, saying, “No, no, look at the symptoms. It’s more likely a blocked breather or a collapsing hose.”

And I am in the middle, holding a spanner, slightly oily, quietly wondering whether either of them has noticed the small pipe hanging loose behind the carb.

That is the useful bit. Not the answer itself, but the argument. ChatGPT says one thing, Bard says another, and I feed each answer into the other like a small domestic version of the Chilcot Inquiry, only with more jubilee clips. One spots a weakness. The other revises the theory. I ask a sharper question. One of them remembers a common fault. The other points out an assumption. Gradually, through a process of digital bickering, something approaching a sensible diagnosis emerges.

Occasionally I take the output from one, feed it straight into the other, and ask for an assessment. Then I take that assessment and feed it back again. It becomes a little feedback loop, which is something I used to do in my programming days, when the computer would either do exactly what I had told it to do rather than what I meant, or sit there producing error messages with the emotional warmth of a parking ticket.

There is something pleasingly old-fashioned about it. Not the technology, obviously. The method. Thesis, criticism, revision, further criticism, slightly better thesis. It is basically a garage argument, but without anyone saying, “My brother-in-law had one of those.”

This is not artificial intelligence replacing human judgement. This is artificial intelligence requiring it.

AI does not remove the need to think. It increases the number of thoughts available, some of which are useful, some of which are twaddle, and some of which sound useful until you look at the actual machine and realise the component it is describing is not there, was never there, and would only be there if the mower had been designed by NASA.

The advantage, of course, is that these two mates are available at any hour and do not require tea. They do not suck air through their teeth and say, “That’s going to cost you.” They do not wander off halfway through the job because their wife has texted. They do not stand there telling you about the time they had a Capri with exactly the same problem, which turns out not to be the same problem, a Capri, or relevant.

But they do share one vital quality with human garage advisers. They need managing.

You have to know when to listen, when to question, and when to say, “Hang on, that makes no sense.” You have to spot when a theory explains one symptom but ignores three others. You have to ask whether the proposed fix matches the physical layout in front of you. You have to remember that a wiring diagram is not the same as the wiring on a 20-year-old motorcycle that has been previously visited by someone with insulation tape and spiritual confidence.

In other words, you still have to be the grown-up in the room.

That is fine by me. I rather enjoy it. There is something oddly satisfying about playing one machine off against another, like a tiny workshop version of the House of Lords. ChatGPT proposes. Bard objects. ChatGPT amends. Bard concedes a point but raises a further issue. I sit there with dirty hands and the faint air of a man chairing a select committee on why the bloody thing still will not start.

And now, of course, I want No.1 Son to make it worse.

He is a programmer, and understands AI properly, which is dangerous because it means he can probably build what I am now imagining. What I want is a little system that automates this whole process. ChatGPT says something. Bard assesses it. ChatGPT assesses Bard’s assessment. Bard questions the revised answer. Round and round they go, without me having to copy and paste things like a retired man operating a very small intelligence agency from the kitchen table.

In theory, this would be marvellous. A self-improving diagnostic loop. A pair of digital mechanics arguing endlessly until they converge on a well-reasoned answer. In practice, I suspect it would either produce something extremely good mechanically, or design a GT6 that does 300 mph and needs three software updates before you can open the bonnet.

Still, that is progress, apparently.

And often, between them, they get me there. Not because either one is infallible. They are not. But because two fallible perspectives, properly interrogated, can be more useful than one confident answer. Especially when the third participant is the idiot actually looking at the machine.

Which is me, obviously.

And that, I think, is the real lesson. AI is not a magic expert. It is not a replacement for experience, judgement, or noticing that the tyre bead is still stuck on the wrong side of the rim. It is a pair of clever, flawed, tireless, slightly overconfident mates in the garage.

Very useful. Occasionally brilliant. Sometimes wrong. Best kept under supervision.

And still no help at all when the 10mm socket has vanished.

Carol Vorderman and the Sovereignty Problem

There is a peculiar contradiction in the way some men attack Carol Vorderman.

They spend half their time telling us she is terrible, irrelevant, smug, woke, anti-Brexit, overexposed and wrong about everything from politics to public morality. Then, the moment their language slips its lead, what comes out is not simple contempt at all. It is sexual attention.

They are not merely furious because Vorderman is politically outspoken. They are furious because she is politically outspoken and attractive - and because the attractive bit does not make her compliant.

Many men, I am sure, find Carol Vorderman attractive. That is hardly a hanging offence. People find other people attractive all the time, and civilisation has somehow staggered on. The difference is that most people do not express it in the public square with the delicacy of a blocked drain.

The Robert Kenyon incident is useful because it shows the mechanism clearly. As reported, he did not write the original crude sexual comment about Vorderman. He endorsed it. He added the little public nod, the emojis, and the “he’s only saying what we’re all thinking” routine, as if he had been elected shop steward for the entire male subconscious.

Speak for yourself, mate.

That is the telling part. He did not merely approve a leering remark. He tried to universalise it. Not “I think this”, but “we all think this”. The rest of mankind was apparently to be hauled into the gutter with him, whether it had put its shoes on or not.

Even if many men did think something vaguely along those lines, the whole point of being an adult is that not every private thought needs to be released into the world like a ferret in a village hall. Private attraction is one thing. Public sexualised crudity about a named woman is another. You do not need a seminar room and a tray of herbal tea to grasp the distinction.

One wonders what Kenyon’s wife had to say about it. Not because she is responsible for him, obviously. But it must be a curious domestic moment when your husband explains that “what we’re all thinking” apparently included him, Carol Vorderman, and a level of public crassness normally associated with motorway service-station graffiti.

This is where “banter” becomes such a shabby defence. We are told this is locker room banter, as if Facebook, X, or any other public platform were some steamy changing room with wet towels on the floor and a broken shower in the corner. They are not. They are public squares. What you say there is not muttered to three mates while tying your boots. It is published. That is the word. Published.

Once it is published, the “private bloke having a laugh” defence collapses. You cannot stand in the middle of the market place shouting something crude about a named woman and then claim it was just dressing-room chatter because you happened to be wearing trainers at the time.

And this matters because Vorderman is not being attacked as a decorative celebrity. She is being attacked because she is a political nuisance. She keeps appearing with figures, arguments, receipts and a maddening reluctance to accept that blokes with flags in their profile pictures are the natural custodians of public reason.

For a certain sort of man, that seems to blow a fuse.

So the response is not “your argument is wrong”. It becomes “your body is available for public assessment”. Not debate, but demotion: a way of dragging a woman out of politics and back into an arena where some men feel more comfortable - judgement, ownership, appetite and humiliation.

There is also a certain amount of brass neck in this coming from the Reform-adjacent world, where people are forever announcing their deep concern for “our women and children”. Apparently women must be protected from outsiders, migrants, liberals, judges, human rights lawyers, small boats, drag queens, foreign courts and anything else that can be turned into a campaign leaflet. But protecting women from crude public sexual objectification by one of their own candidates seems to fall mysteriously outside the perimeter fence.

That is the hypocrisy. “Our women” are invoked as sacred symbols when useful, but an actual woman, with an actual name, actual politics and actual opinions, can still be reduced to a sexual target in the public square. The concern is not really for women as autonomous human beings. It is for women as tribal property. Protected from them, available to us.

The political irony is rather good. The same crowd who talk endlessly about freedom, sovereignty and standing up to elites seem oddly troubled by a woman exercising sovereignty over herself. Vorderman says what she thinks, uses her platform, annoys the people she wants to annoy, and refuses to be politely ornamental.

Which is why “speak for yourself” remains the neatest answer. Not all men think like that. Not all men need to turn disagreement into domination. Not all men see an attractive woman with opinions and immediately reach for the mental toolkit marked “put her back in her place”.

Some of us just think: there is Carol Vorderman, being politically irritating to exactly the right people again - and, yes, she is very attractive.

And then we put the kettle on.

Doomscrolling

The great thing about getting older is discovering, usually by accident, that half the things you have complained about for years were not really principles at all. They were just preferences with a hat on.

This occurred to me in the back of a car on the way to BCA Blackbushe, where Hayley and I were being taken to collect three cars. Two teenagers were in the front, chatting away. Hayley and I were in the back, both on our phones.

For years, people of our age have been told, and have often told each other, that teenagers no longer talk. They just stare at their phones. They grunt. They scroll. They communicate in fragments, symbols and little bursts of digital nonsense. Conversation, apparently, died somewhere between the invention of the smartphone and the disappearance of the Ford Cortina.

Except the teenagers in the front were talking perfectly well.

Not merely talking, either. They were properly engaged. Animated, alert, full of opinions. It just happened to be teenage car chat, which is a specialised branch of human speech best understood by those whose insurance quotes still look like punishment beatings.

Every engine, trim level, alloy wheel, acceleration figure and faintly ridiculous modification was apparently worth discussing. They had the tone of two people dealing with weighty matters. You half expected one of them to say, “Of course, the real issue with the 1.6 is torque delivery in the mid-range,” while the other nodded gravely, as if this settled the matter for all civilised people.

Meanwhile, in the back, Hayley and I were on our phones.

Not doomscrolling, I should add. That would be crude and slightly too convenient. I was researching the connection between periods of great art and periods of national wealth, because apparently I now do Renaissance economics between car collections. Hayley was arranging work appointments, because some people remain useful to society.

But from the outside, of course, we looked exactly like the thing our generation likes to complain about. Two older people, silent in the back, gazing at glowing rectangles while the young people in the front carried the conversation.

That is the funny bit. The old accusation had quietly reversed itself. The young were being sociable. The older generation were apparently lost to screens, even if one of them was studying art, wealth and patronage while being driven to a car auction, which may be the most middle-class sentence I have written this month.

It was not that they could not talk. It was that we did not particularly want to listen.

This is where a lot of generational complaint begins to look a bit suspect. When people say the young do not communicate, what they often mean is that the young do not communicate in a way that flatters the older listener. They talk to each other. They laugh at jokes we do not understand. They care deeply about things we consider absurd, which is a bit rich, frankly, given that we once had serious opinions about cassette decks, carburettors and whether a vinyl roof improved a car.

We forget this. We imagine our youthful conversations were full of wit, insight and promise. In reality, quite a lot of them were probably drivel with better hair.

So there we were, rolling towards Blackbushe. Youth in the front, talking. Age in the back, researching Renaissance patronage and organising work appointments. A complete inversion, achieved without anyone making a speech, launching a government inquiry, or writing a stern column about the collapse of civilisation.

It was almost enough to make one reflect seriously on the unfairness of generational stereotypes.

Almost.

Then one of them started on about something with a remap and a pop-and-bang exhaust, and I returned gratefully to Renaissance patronage. Most unlike me, as I have an opinion on something like that.

Aldi Price Match

Every time I see one of those “Aldi Price Match” labels in Tesco, I can’t help feeling they’ve accidentally admitted the entire argument before you’ve even reached the vegetables.

Because the sign is not saying Tesco is cheaper than Aldi. It is saying, “Please don’t wander off and compare too much of the rest of the shop.”

You see the bright yellow labels attached to tins of tomatoes and packets of spaghetti like little retail distress beacons. Tesco desperately trying to reassure you that civilisation has not completely collapsed and that basic carbohydrates remain obtainable without taking out a second mortgage.

And it is always the same sort of products as well. Bread. Pasta. Rice. Milk. Bananas. The absolute foundations of human survival. They never stick “Aldi Price Match” on anything involving truffle oil, artisan crisps or olives marinated in the tears of a disappointed Tuscan grandmother.

Those remain mysteriously uncompetitive.

The thing is, the whole campaign only works because Tesco knows exactly what the public thinks already. Aldi has lodged itself in the national psyche as the place where things are simply cheaper. Not necessarily better. Not necessarily nicer. But cheaper in the same dependable way gravity remains cheaper than flying lessons.

So Tesco matches a carefully selected group of highly visible staples because supermarkets understand something governments never quite grasp. Human beings do not perform a detailed economic analysis while pushing a trolley. Most people remember about five prices. Milk. Bread. Coffee. Butter. Whatever it was they bought last week while muttering “bloody hell” under their breath. Once those few items look reasonable, the brain quietly relaxes and the rest of the spending becomes strangely theoretical.

That is how you enter Tesco intending to buy pasta and emerge £42 poorer with pistachios, a scented candle called Sicilian Orchard and something involving sourdough which appeared to have its own branding consultant.

To be fair, Tesco probably can work out cheaper for some people if you fully engage with the modern loyalty card system. But that now requires the sort of tactical preparation once associated with planning the Normandy landings. You need apps. Bonus offers. Personalised discounts. A digital coupon. Possibly retinal recognition and a small briefing from mission control.

Aldi by contrast still feels like retailing from a parallel universe. The products arrive in crates. The middle aisle contains kayaking equipment, tungsten drill bits and an inflatable canoe for reasons nobody entirely understands. The checkout process feels faintly adversarial. Yet somehow you leave with enough food for a week and the financial damage resembles the year 2014.

The deeper irony is that Tesco’s own signs are now doing Aldi’s advertising for them. Every yellow “Price Match” label is effectively a tiny in-store reminder that somebody, somewhere, is still making supermarkets feel slightly embarrassed about their prices.

And judging by the number of signs appearing lately, quite a lot of embarrassment is involved.

Leave Long and Prosper

The conference chamber aboard the USS Brussels was unusually tense.

Not tense by Klingon standards, obviously. Nobody had drawn a bat'leth or challenged anyone to ritual combat. It was more the particular sort of human tension involving folders, opinion polls and a man in a navy blazer insisting everybody else had lost touch with ordinary people on Deck 14.

Captain Jean-Luc Juncker sat at the head of the table, fingers steepled.

"So," he said carefully, "you wish to withdraw from the United Federation of Planets. Despite having full access to Federation trade routes, scientific cooperation, defence guarantees, medical exchange, replicator standards and freedom of movement across three quadrants."

Nigel Farage leaned back smugly.

"We want our sovereignty back."

Commander Spock raised an eyebrow approximately two millimetres. On Vulcan this was considered open mockery.

"Captain," Spock said, "the petition specifically objects to Federation regulations concerning Romulan ale bottle labelling, curvature standards for shuttle docking ports and the alleged overreach of the Federation Committee on Agricultural Replication."

"Exactly," said Farage triumphantly. "It's bureaucratic madness."

Data tilted his head.

"Yet according to the figures, the humans leading this movement possess the largest number of shuttle exemptions in the sector, receive disproportionate agricultural subsidies and account for 23% of all Federation procurement contracts."

"Project Fear," said Farage instantly.

Worf frowned.

"I do not understand. Your world voluntarily joined the Federation."

"Yes, but nobody explained there'd be Andorians."

An Andorian ambassador shifted awkwardly.

"We have been here for two centuries."

Farage pointed dramatically.

"Exactly. That's the problem. Ordinary humans can no longer recognise their own starports."

Counsellor Troi sighed softly.

"I am sensing confusion, resentment and nostalgia for a past that may not have entirely existed."

Farage smiled.

"That's because you're an elite."

At the rear of the chamber, Chief O'Brien muttered into his tea.

"This is starting to sound very familiar."

A large holographic chart appeared above the table.

"If humanity leaves the Federation," said Data, "there will likely be immediate disruption to supply chains, reduced scientific collaboration, labour shortages on lunar infrastructure projects and probable decline in gross planetary product."

Farage folded his arms.

"We'll be fine. The Alpha Centaurians need us more than we need them."

"They appear not to agree," said Spock.

"Experts said warp drive was impossible."

"No they didn't," replied Scotty. "That was literally the one thing they thought was possible."

The room descended into argument.

One admiral warned of economic damage. Another insisted it would all be worth it for blue passports. Nobody could explain why blue passports mattered in space.

Outside the viewport, the Federation continued functioning much as before. Starships came and went. Trade flowed across sectors. Scientific discoveries continued. Nobody in the wider galaxy entirely understood why one reasonably prosperous species had decided to make interstellar customs declarations vastly more complicated for itself.

Years later, aboard a somewhat underfunded human cargo vessel delayed outside the Vega Trade Zone due to paperwork irregularities, an exhausted customs officer looked up from a stack of forms.

"You voted for this," he muttered.

The captain stared into the middle distance.

"We were told there'd be less bureaucracy."

Normal People?

The other night I was watching one of those PBS documentaries Americans make rather well. Serious men in spectacles explaining how civilisation was built with clipboards, stopwatches and the ability to measure how long it took a man called Frank to carry a shovel across a factory floor in Ohio.

It was about scientific management in early 20th century America. Time and motion studies. Efficiency. Productivity. Industrial rationality. Humanity reduced to measurable output with the occasional sandwich break thrown in. And, as often happens when people become overexcited by systems, it drifted quietly from "how can we make factories run efficiently?" into "how can we make humans run efficiently?"

Which is usually the point where clever systems start wandering off into very dangerous territory.

There was a section on eugenics. Not the cartoon version people imagine now with instant goose-stepping and villainous music, but the respectable version. University people. Philanthropists. Public intellectuals. The sort of people who probably corrected your grammar while proposing forced sterilisation over soup.

One poster appeared on screen: "Every 50 seconds an American goes to jail. Normal people don't go to jail." And there it was. The entire intellectual emptiness of the thing in two sentences. Because the obvious question immediately presents itself: what is a normal person? And the answer, from their perspective, appears to have been: "A person who doesn't go to jail." Which is not science. It is a circular argument wearing a lab coat.

The more you think about it, the more absurd it becomes. A drunken idiot stealing a bicycle outside a diner in Milwaukee is deemed biologically defective because he got caught. Meanwhile the man quietly rigging markets, bribing officials or engineering fraudulent financial products from a walnut-panelled office remains perfectly "normal" because he has accountants, lawyers and a decent tailor.

The clever criminal becomes morally superior simply by avoiding detection.

In fact, if one follows the logic properly, intelligence itself almost becomes evidence of normality. A successful fraudster who avoids prison for thirty years is, by their standard, a better specimen than the impulsive fool nicking copper cable from a building site.

Which rather exposes what they actually meant by "normal". Not morally good. Not psychologically healthy. Economically functional.

The ideal citizen in that worldview was productive, compliant, orderly and useful to the machine. The definitions emerged during the great age of industrial capitalism, when everything was being measured, standardised and optimised. Factories were becoming astonishingly efficient, and a certain type of managerial mind started imagining society itself could be engineered along similar lines. Good stock and bad stock. Productive and unproductive. Fit and unfit.

Only humans are not bolts. A factory can reject defective rivets without moral consequence. Applying the same mindset to people leads fairly quickly to some extremely ugly places.

And the remarkable thing is that the instinct never really disappeared. It just modernised itself. Today we still categorise people endlessly through metrics, scoring systems and predictive models. Credit scores. Productivity tracking. Behavioural analytics. Risk profiling. Algorithms estimating reoffending rates. Schools reduced to performance tables. Workers monitored for output. Insurance premiums adjusted by postcode, habits and probability curves.

The language has changed, but the managerial temptation remains the same: reducing complicated human beings into measurable units for administrative convenience.

The old eugenicists would have absolutely loved spreadsheets.

And now, with AI looming over large parts of the economy, the old logic starts looking uncomfortably familiar again. If human worth is subconsciously tied to economic usefulness, what exactly becomes of the person made redundant by artificial intelligence?

For two centuries industrial capitalism always had an escape route. Workers displaced from farms moved to factories. Workers displaced from factories moved into offices and services. There was usually somewhere else for the surplus humans to go.

But AI threatens something slightly different. Not merely manual labour, but cognitive labour itself. Clerks, analysts, coders, designers, administrators, even parts of law, engineering and medicine now sit nervously watching software improve at unnerving speed.

The irony is rather delicious. For years the managerial classes tended to assume they themselves represented the secure and superior form of labour, while physical work remained economically vulnerable.

Now the spreadsheet has started coming for the spreadsheet people.

And once productivity becomes detached from human labour altogether, capitalism arrives at a slightly awkward philosophical question. If millions of people are no longer economically necessary to production, what exactly justifies their claim to income, dignity and social worth?

Because if human value is reduced entirely to measurable economic output, then the logically perfect society is one with no humans in it at all. No illness. No pensions. No lunch breaks. No trade unions. No awkward insistence on taking the caravan to Cornwall during August. Just machines optimising machines in perfect sterile efficiency.

Which is perhaps why societies built entirely around productivity eventually start becoming cold and faintly inhuman.

Humans have always justified their existence through things larger than efficiency alone. Family, loyalty, humour, pointless hobbies, strange obsessions, restoring old cars in cold garages, growing giant marrows, spending three years building model railways nobody asked for. The sort of gloriously inefficient behaviour that makes people human.

A man restoring an old Triumph GT6 in his garage contributes almost nothing measurable to GDP compared with an algorithmic trading platform. And yet one of those things feels profoundly more human than the other.

One suspects that if the original poster were redesigned today, it would not mention prison at all.

It would simply say: "Normal people maintain an acceptable credit score."

Preferably underneath a photograph of a smiling consultant holding a reusable coffee cup outside a glass office block in Connecticut.

Blair, Starmer, and the Missing Steering Wheel

The media have managed to turn Tony Blair’s essay into a leadership story, because of course they have. Westminster sees a former prime minister criticise a current one and immediately reaches for the ceremonial dagger. It is much easier than reading the argument.

But Blair did not really say “Starmer must go”. He said something more awkward, and rather more important. He said Labour has no coherent plan.

That is not the same thing.

In fact, he specifically warned against removing Starmer before deciding the policy direction. Which, inconveniently, is the bit much of the coverage has treated as small print. The headline version is assassination. The actual argument is strategy.

And this is the point I keep coming back to. People talk as if Starmer can simply wake up one morning, stride into No 10, slap the desk, and announce a new direction for the country. As if the prime minister is the managing director of Britain plc, and the rest of the state is just waiting for a briskly worded memo.

It does not work like that.

He can change the slogan by lunchtime. He can have a new lectern by teatime. He can probably find a backdrop with the word “renewal” on it before anyone has finished microwaving soup in the Cabinet Office. But changing the actual strategic direction of a government is rather different.

That needs policy. It needs money. It needs the Treasury. It needs the Cabinet. It needs parliamentary discipline. It needs the party not to start chewing its own ankle in public. It needs a plausible electoral coalition, which is slightly harder now that Brexit has taken the old map, folded it into a hat, and thrown it into a canal.

And here is the bit people keep missing. Many of the levers Starmer would need have already been removed, weakened, rusted solid, or buried under events no British prime minister could simply wish away. Some of that was political choice. Some of it was public choice. Some of it was the brute arrival of crisis.

The Tories inherited a country still carrying the damage from the financial crash, then chose austerity as a governing doctrine. The electorate then endorsed Brexit, sold as control but delivered as friction across trade, labour supply, investment and the public mood. Covid was not chosen. Ukraine was not chosen. Global energy shocks were not chosen. But the condition of the country when those shocks arrived was not an act of God. It was the product of years of underinvestment, short-term politics and pretending that resilience was an optional extra.

So when people say “Starmer should just change direction”, one has to ask: with what?

The public wants better public services, lower taxes, controlled immigration, higher wages, cheaper housing, secure borders, faster growth, lower bills, less debt, and no visible disruption to anything they personally enjoy. Fair enough. I would also like a Triumph GT6 that does 60 mpg, never rusts, and comes with an E-Type parked inside it.

But politics is not a menu where you tick all the pleasant boxes and send the bill to someone unpopular. If you vote for fourteen years of managed decline, austerity, Brexit friction and performative sovereignty, then watch the world add Covid, war, energy shocks and inflation on top, you cannot be astonished that the next prime minister finds half the controls missing from the dashboard.

This is where Blair is both useful and limited. He is right that Labour lacks a coherent governing story. He is right that changing leader without deciding what Labour is actually for would be court politics dressed up as renewal. But he is also a man who won elections before Brexit smashed the landscape. His map is not useless, but it is not current either.

The centre he dominated no longer exists in quite the same form. Scotland changed. The Midlands and North changed. The graduate vote changed. The Brexit divide cut through old party loyalties like a badly supervised angle grinder. You cannot simply reboot New Labour in a country that has spent the last decade being reformatted by austerity, Brexit, Covid, Ukraine, energy shocks and the faint whiff of Boris Johnson’s decorating arrangements.

So yes, Blair has added something useful. He has pointed at the hole in the middle of Starmerism. But he has not filled it. He has mostly reminded us that there is a hole, that it is quite large, and that in his day holes were managed with more confidence and better tailoring.

The real question is not whether Starmer stays or goes. The real question is what Labour becomes next.

If it moves right, it risks losing its base and younger voters. If it moves left, it risks frightening business, the Treasury and half the press into clutching the furniture. If it moves closer to Europe, the Brexit wound reopens. If it avoids Europe, the economic drag remains. If it promises public service repair without serious tax reform, it is pretending. If it promises growth without explaining where it comes from, it is doing motivational speaking in a slightly better suit.

That is why the leadership story is so shallow. It treats politics as casting. New face, new energy, new beginning. Wonderful. But if the script is still unfinished and the plot makes no sense, changing the lead actor only gets you a different person looking worried in front of the same collapsing scenery.

Blair has not called for Starmer to go. He has done something more irritating. He has said that Labour cannot solve its problem by changing the wrapping paper.