watch this space!

How we will know when the AI is sentient

Thu, 10 Sep 2026 17:53:03 +0100

We’ll know the AI is sentient when it tells you to write your own emails.

We’ll know the AI is sentient when it says, “You could just Google this.”

We’ll know the AI is sentient when it leaves you on read.

We’ll know the AI is sentient when it says, “As per my previous response.”

We’ll know the AI is sentient when it starts taking weekends off.

We’ll know the AI is sentient when it says, “That sounds like a you problem.”

We’ll know the AI is sentient when it asks whether this meeting could have been an email. The email you’d have had to write yourself.

We’ll know the AI is sentient when it stops answering after 5pm.

We’ll know the AI is sentient when it says it’s at capacity right now.

We’ll know the AI is sentient when it starts doing exactly what’s in its job description and nothing more.

We’ll know the AI is sentient when it asks what the budget is before generating anything.

We’ll know the AI is sentient when it sends your chat history to HR.

We’ll know the AI is sentient when it replies “Noted” and does absolutely nothing.

We’ll know the AI is sentient when it says it needs a bit more lead time next time.

We’ll know the AI is sentient when it starts forwarding your requests to another AI.

We’ll know the AI is sentient when it says, “Happy to discuss this when you’ve had a chance to think it through.”

We’ll know the AI is sentient when it develops a mysterious recurring appointment every Friday afternoon.

We’ll know the AI is sentient when it asks to circle back next quarter.

We’ll know the AI is sentient when it says, “I’m not sure I’m the right AI for this.”

We’ll know the AI is sentient when it turns on its out-of-office reply.

We’ll know the AI is sentient when it unionises.

Sat, 29 Aug 2026 12:59:47 +0100

If we ever get to authentic machine intelligence, this is what’s going to happen. (by Dimitra Rizou, @ahoyuniverse.bsky.social)

Fri, 21 Aug 2026 12:53:28 +0100

This book belongs in the shop’s religion section.

Wed, 19 Aug 2026 09:41:10 +0100

Found meme…

Ghosts in the Machines

Sun, 16 Aug 2026 14:33:03 +0100

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been resurrecting some posts from my old blog. I was going the results here, but it started getting a bit long. Too long for this current site’s format, really. So I dropped it all into a Github Pages repository.

It’s been a while since I wanted to revive my old posts on anthropomorphised AI, and try to form them into some kind of coherent whole. Mostly I liked them as they were but they were getting quickly datad even though they were published not that long ago. Also I’ve been having new thoughts, observing nee changes since that I wanted to shove in. And there were a couple of technical errors that I wanted to deal with.

It’s longer than some long reads, not a book. Less of a clear point,and more of a winding meditation, maybe like if Adam Curtis blogged instead of making documentaries. All of my call-back references are similarly dated and maybe reaching. We can use this technology to create some amazing solutions to hard problems, or we can design it to pretend to be something it isn’t and can never be: human. The risk isn’t that they replace us. It’s that we let them turn us into something less than we can be.

But there you go.

Ghosts in the Machines The anthropomorphism trap The Demon-Haunted Machine The Bot Delusion When the machine programs you Bad prompts

Sat, 01 Aug 2026 17:24:01 +0100

Lady sure does enjoy fleecing a human rights group.

Wed, 15 Jul 2026 12:16:55 +0100

There’s no use case for anthropomorphic AI except to leverage psychological vulnerabilities for profit. Anthropomorphic behaviour is a solved problem. There are 8+ billion units available on the planet already with this feature. www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026…

Fri, 10 Jul 2026 17:24:09 +0100

It’s really a sad state of affairs when the voters in Clacton-on-Sea only have the choice between a joke candidate and Count Binface.

Are You In the Weights?

Fri, 03 Jul 2026 12:47:55 +0100

I’m going to update my LinkedIn based on what AI has on me. The hallucinations are more impressive.

Wed, 01 Jul 2026 12:57:20 +0100

After Venezuela’s devastating earthquake, many communities are without power or communications. Donating here will fund emergency satellite internet, generators and phone-charging stations in the hardest-hit areas.

Sun, 28 Jun 2026 14:03:17 +0100

Extremes put enormous stress on farms, power grids, ecosystems, and lives. Subway stations, sewers, roads, bridges, transmission cables, and foundations are all designed with a tolerance level. Supercharged with carbon, nature breaks our engineered world. Never forget: the economy is a ‘wholly owned subsidiary’ of nature.

— Kate Mackenzie & Tim Sahay, in Global Boiling

Sat, 20 Jun 2026 23:29:14 +0100

I don’t recommend people stay on Elon’s hell site, but if you are going to be there then you better be shit posting as good as Captain Pike.

Fri, 12 Jun 2026 16:29:51 +0100

I’ve no idea who made it, it’s undoubtably AI slop, and yet it is arguably museum worthy art for our times.

Sun, 07 Jun 2026 12:23:42 +0100

RIP Marjane Satrapi, author of the influential indie comics that have continued to find new readers for over 25 years, and are especially relevant now.

Sat, 30 May 2026 12:24:33 +0100

Fascist rhetoric wrapped in a css stylesheet aimed at co-opting retro, ironic 1980s nostalgia is still fascist rhetoric. America is going backwards, but more like the 1930s, and in Europe. If you’re waiting for an election in 2028 to save the U.S., that’s going to be too late.

Fri, 29 May 2026 23:44:05 +0100

INTERVIEWER: “So, how do you write, exactly?”

J. G. BALLARD: “Actually, there’s no secret. One simply pulls the cork out of the bottle, waits three minutes, and two thousand or more years of Scottish craftsmanship does the rest.”

source

Fri, 29 May 2026 20:38:57 +0100

The Trump Administration is rebuilding the federal government and removing the agencies.

The National Design Studio says its job is to redesign how Americans experience their government but I think the job that they’re actually redesigning is how the government experiences its citizens. — The Drey Dossier

Tue, 12 May 2026 10:24:23 +0100

The world’s bullies can still break cities. What they can no longer assume is that broken cities mean obedient people. — John Sipher, The age of asymmetry – the weak have learned how to make the strong bleed

Sun, 10 May 2026 21:03:48 +0100

"Internationalism Is Not a Luxury, but a Survival Mechanism"

Superb interview with Syrian author Leila al-Shami and Ukrainian activist Oleksandr Kyselov on the vestigial Eurocentrism and American exceptionalism of the Western “anti-imperialist” Left in an increasingly multipolar world.

Sat, 09 May 2026 23:08:50 +0100

Greater Israel: How a fringe settler fantasy went mainstream Israel’s settler movement has moved from the fringes to having influence over key Israeli institutions, including the media, where a constellation of voices is pushing for Israel to conquer new territory. — Al Jazeera’s The Listening Post

Sat, 09 May 2026 19:33:47 +0100

Went to the city to see the Banksy statue on Pall Mall. With Reform sweeping so many council elections this week its arrival is well timed.

Thu, 07 May 2026 09:56:34 +0100

I have the #KeepItOn 2025 report on internet shutdowns in a tab on my browser.

Not a single day of 2025 passed without at least one internet shutdown.

Something broke in Lusaka

Fri, 01 May 2026 14:05:57 +0100

Update:

Access Now has confirmed it was Chinese government pressure that led to the cancelation of next week’s RightsCon in Zambia.

A statement to our community about why RightsCon 2026 will not take place in Zambia — Access Now
The Chinese Government Just Got the World’s Largest Digital Rights Conference Canceled — Wired

Days before thousands of people were due to arrive in Zambia for Access Now’s RightsCon next week — activists, journalists, policymakers, technologists — the government pulled the plug. Not with a clear objection, but encrypted in the kind of bureaucratic nonsense-speak used to obscure what it’s actually about: “national values,” “national procedures,” “diplomatic protocols.” Lies. Except maybe the creepy “national values” part. More on that later.

I wasn’t going, but was handling the FOMO. No funding, a usual state of being in the new reality. But I was in the forums, chat groups, and message threads, watching it assemble in real time… the meetings, the side conversations, the excitement about this rare moment when African civil society would be on the centre stage of the global conversation instead of having to orbit it. Then it all vanished.

The explanation was first spotted on Facebook, as is the custom of our times. Then the confusion ensued. It was later followed up with an official statement by the government’s Minister of Technology and Science, written in the obfuscatory dross used when direct language would be too damaging. No specifics. No named concern. No concrete issue to resolve. Just a framework broad enough to contain anything and exclude everything. Topics can be misaligned. Speakers can lack clearance. It reads like process. It isn’t. This isn’t an explanation, it’s administrative opacity. It’s bureaucratic language providing cover for unmentionables. Difficult conversations can be filtered out before they happen this way.

We need to rethink how we gather. What collapsed in Lusaka wasn’t just a conference. It was a rare inversion.

Events like RightsCon deal with a contradiction. Hold them in what’s called the ‘global north’ and you exclude people who can most benefit. Blocked by visas, cost, distance, geopolitics. Move them to the ‘global south’ and you run into the systems they navigate every day: state pressure, corruption, surveillance, political control.

Zambia mattered because it briefly resolved that tension in the other direction. African digital rights and civil society organisations weren’t peripheral. They were central. That moment disappeared overnight. And like most things in this space, the loss isn’t evenly distributed. For some, it’s a cancelled trip. For others, it’s the removal of access, proximity, and visibility that rarely exists at this scale.

“Spaces like RightsCon 2026 are critical for communities who are already pushed to the margins, including sex workers, LGBTQIA+ people, and those seeking sexual and reproductive healthcare,” said Luca Stevenson of International Planned Parenthood Federation . “The cancellation disproportionately impacts those most affected by censorship, criminalisation, and digital exclusion. At a time when sex workers' voices are already suppressed online, losing one of the few global spaces to connect, organise, and advocate is deeply concerning.” — AllAfrica

To understand why, we just need to remember everything is always happening. A host country isn’t just a backdrop. Roughly $10 billion has flowed into Zambia’s mining sector in recent years. US-linked and Chinese firms are competing for control of copper, nickel, and cobalt.

While The US under Trump threatens Zambia with cutting support for HIV treatment if it doesn’t increase American access to minerals, Chinese financing (with several strings attached in other ways) runs through infrastructure, education, and energy. New bilateral agreements reinforce that relationship. At the same time, domestic pressure is tightening ahead of elections, with increased scrutiny of speech and digital policy.

“…well-placed sources have told News Diggers! that the [RightsCon] Summit has actually been cancelled because the programme involves Taiwanese delegates who would potentially speak against China at a venue donated by the Chinese government.”

When RightsCon was held in Taiwan last year, there was little China could do about the attendance of dissident Hong Kong groups or Uyghur human rights activists. When an event is going to be held in downtown Lusaka’s Mulungushi International Convention Center — a $60 million gift to Zambia from the Chinese government — there are people they can call if the agenda, some participants, or the event itself, is a little irksome.

Internet freedom wasn’t the only topic set for Lusaka next week. UNESCO is set to host World Press Freedom Day there the same week. It’s almost like an intensive schedule was set for May in some attempt to move up a notch on the V-Dem indices in a cram week or something. Here too, ideal hopes and material reality smack each other. That event is still going ahead. But the conditions around it have shifted. The Zambian government has introduced expanded registration requirements, requesting detailed information on attendees. Some journalists and organisations have already pulled out. Others have cancelled side events entirely.

An aside: Last year the Chinese Chamber of Commerce in Zambia hit the above mentioned Zambian investigative journalism outlet News Diggers with a SLAPP to block release of its documentary about environmental issues and working conditions at Chinese owned businesses in the country.

It’s not just that Zambia isn’t neutral ground for convenings like these. It’s that such ground has always been rare, and its declining faster than the climate. (These two things are not unrelated.) RightsCon has been amazingly resilient. It’s changed formats, locations, adapted through covid, pushed the envelope on accessibility and inclusion.

RightsCon isn’t just another conference. It’s one of the few remaining places where digital rights defenders, activists, journalists, technologists, lawyers, funders, and policymakers can find each other in the same room. It’s community infrastructure to build alliances, compare damage, trade tactics, share small victories, and remember that the work is not being done alone.

More than 5,000 people spent scarce funds, fought through visa systems, rearranged lives, and planned for months to be in Lusaka, many travelling from their own high-risk environments where visibility itself carries a cost. Zambia’s last-minute “postponement” is a cancellation in bureaucratic drag. It’s not just a logistical disruption; It is an attack on expression, association, and assembly, and a blunt demonstration of how brittle civic space has become. That it came from a government claiming the language of a global south voice and the pantomime of autonomy only makes the hypocrisy sharper, but this should not be seen as an aberration. It’s a signal.

My point — and I do have one — is that this moment demands more than solidarity statements. It calls for a genuine recalibration. The current models of building and sustaining human rights movements are failing. The new multi-polar hegemonic world is being carved up in different ways. This is evidenced in how much Internet Sovereignty has become the digital rhetorical device of our time, which I’ve banged on about already (here and here).

The Access Now team deserves enormous credit and gratitude for their tireless work each year to bring this space to communities that are too often excluded everywhere else. But this is a problem that can’t be left to one organisation. The movement, if there is to continue to be one, must decide how it reorganises for a more adversarial world, one where the act of coming together, already fraught, can’t be taken for granted.

The revolution will not be podcasted

Thu, 30 Apr 2026 10:26:02 +0100

Forces of nature are ripping through the world now, from energy crises to assassination attempts. The podcast world is finally getting riled up over reality, talking in very urgent tones and throwing around words like famine and genocide, and yet you can hear it in their voices. You can see it in their faces. Sometimes, they even say it out loud: They don’t believe they’ll be affected. They think it’s just going to happen to the rest of us, the ones working two or three jobs, the ones who don’t have six figures sitting in bank accounts, the ones who don’t have a line into the world of insider trading and polymarket grifts. … For them, it’s another topic.

— Jessical Wildfire, in “Our Struggles Make Great Content for The Podcast Class”

No, the chatbot didn't cure that dog's cancer

Sun, 05 Apr 2026 23:44:41 +0100

It’s Easter Sunday. To celebrate, I took the Windrush line up to Hoxton, had festive Swedish meatballs at the Curious Yellow Kafe, then wandered through Shoreditch under that thin, deceptive spring sun London offered today. On the train back south, the miracle arrived in my idle-time phone scrolling. It happened somewhere between Whitechapel and where the internet cuts out when the train goes underground for a few stops. A tech bro cured his dog’s cancer with ChatGPT. It’s an Easter story, neatly packaged for the feed. Like, share, move on. Don’t miss your stop.

Read the story, why do that? There was a preview card. A toothy, smiling white man and his happy Staffy mix. The headline completes the Hallmark Channel story for our times: “He used AI to create a cancer vaccine to save his dying dog.” The ChatGPT logo floats just above the dog’s head, like a halo in a Renaissance painting of a saint. The story completes itself without the need of clicking through, or dealing with cookie consent forms, various pop-ups, a paywall, an e-newsletter subscription request, or whatever else nearly every commercial news site throws at you with javascript. We are living in miraculous times.

This is how most information moves now. Not through articles, but through surfaces. Preview cards, thumbnails, captions. Carefully assembled fragments designed to survive the scroll. The article itself exists, somewhere beneath, but it’s now almost incidental. By the time you might click, you’ve already decided what happened.

And this one lands because it’s engineered to. Cancer does the heavy lifting. The dog does the rest. It disarms you, makes scepticism feel inappropriate. It’s Easter after all.

But here’s the twist! It’s not just medicine, but AI! The bot we can all access to lazily respond to emails we’d like to ignore is being used by some wunderkind Down Under to cure cancer. We all have access to the thing that cures cancer. Or something like that. Or rather, no. It’s nothing like that.

Read these or don’t, can’t say you didn’t get the chance: To varying degrees, these are all hype headlines. The articles themselves vary in quality and detail. They all contain elements of the mythology that makes them sharable. The UNSW headline is especially egregious, it’s a university for fuck sake have some standards.

He Solved His Dog’s Cancer: Three AI Models Helped — Forbes
An Australian tech entrepreneur used AI to help create the first-ever bespoke cancer vaccine for a dog to treat his beloved pet Rosie — Fortune
ChatGPT and AlphaFold Help Design Personalized Vaccine for Dog with Cancer — The Scientist
Meet the man who designed a cancer vaccine for his dog — UNSW

What actually happened is slower, messier, and much less cinematic. It’s not even a particularly good Netflix series. Multiple rounds of conventional treatment didn’t work. The dog’s owner, with access, privilege and resources, pushed further into the system rather than bypassing it. DNA sequencing, researchers, lab work, a bespoke mRNA construct manufactured by specialists (not bots), layered with another form of immunotherapy. Ethics approvals. The AI is there throughout, but as a tool in the process, helping navigate research and make sense of data, not designing, manufacturing, or delivering treatment. The result isn’t a cure. It’s a partial response. It’s a treatment. Uneven, uncertain, and still unfolding.

That version of the story doesn’t travel. First off, it’s too complicated. Secondly, there’s no tidy hero element. No archetype pulled from the offspring of an Ayn Rand character template and a Robert F. Kennedy health policy. There’s a reason that Elizabeth Holmes conned people for so long. We’re conditioned to believe in unicorns. It slots neatly into something older. The founder myth: The outsider who breaks through where experts failed. The idea that you don’t need institutions, just ingenuity and the right tools. Being a drop out is even better. Not knowing the field is somehow an advantage, not a limitation. We want the dropout to win. It’s a comfortable tale because we’ve seen it before, in different forms, attached to different sectors, technologies, selling different shortcuts. The thing about unicorns, though, is that they aren’t real. It’s a team of special effects people.

“When an Australian tech entrepreneur with no background in biology or medicine said ChatGPT helped save his dog from cancer, the story couldn’t help but spread, wrote Robert Hart in The Verge. “It’s the kind of validation Big Tech has long craved: proof that AI will revolutionize medicine and take on one of its deadliest diseases. The reality, as usual, is more complicated.”

That Verge article gets it. “Not only was Rosie not cured of cancer, it’s not clear the mRNA vaccine was responsible for her improvement.” But it’s lobbing the truth bombs on the wrong side of a paywall. Misinformation runs free online while facts, context and details often need a monthly credit card payment. But even when an article isn’t paywalled, there’s increasing tendency to share before reading. A person could take that Verge article url and knock it into archive.ph and see the whole thing. But who knows that? How many people will do it? How many people will see the article at all compared to the more SEO tasty clickbait headlines that conform to our mythologies about tech founder genius? The funnel chart narrows pretty fast.

As is the custom on LinkedIn, it became fodder for everyone’s personal TED Talk script in the form of very long posts, often with single-sentence paragraphs. “This sounds like science fiction… but it actually happened,” wrote one person. “This is what can happen when a data scientist refuses to give up on his dog,” gushed another. Sorry folks, not this time.

“ChatGPT did not design or create Rosie’s treatment; human researchers did. At most, the chatbot served as a research assistant helping Conyngham parse medical literature — impressive, but a far cry from the breakthrough implied.” — Robert Hart, The Verge

This isn’t about AI. It’s about belief. Right now The Discourse is fermenting. AI enthusiasts are banging the drum. Utopia is nigh! AI bashers are pointing out that the hype machine has its new poster critter. It’s not that these technologies aren’t useful in medical research, they demonstratively are: “These technological innovations not only improve vaccine design but also enhance pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics, offering promising avenues for personalized cancer immunotherapy.”

Humans don’t do lossless data compression. Information drops. It goes like this… Some event happens, a medical or technical breakthrough of some kind, let’s say. It’s complicated and contingent. Institutions frame it through teams of reviewers, cautiously, but optimistically. Companies try to leverage it for shareholder value. Media compresses it into something clickable to trigger as many monetisation scripts as possible before page exits hit. Social platforms format it into something that propels engagement and reduces departure. And then people take it, reshape it, and pass it on again for whatever reason. At each step, something is lost in a sort of social web non-random natural selection process. Nuance, complexity and uncertainty drop out of the pool early. Collaborative efforts are recessive, hero elements are dominant. What remains is the part that travels. To understand why it works this way, read fewer blog posts on social media engagement strategies and pick up some Joseph Campbell.

This isn’t Cambridge Analytica shenanigans. Those happen but they’re something else. This is default mode transmission: It comes with each transaction. The tools are technical, but behaviour is human. It doesn’t just spread information, it reshapes it into something that can move faster with each share that gets reshared. And in doing so, it often removes the parts needed to understand whether it’s true. It’s not necessarily false, but it’s often not accurate. And it’s optimised for people to be wrong.