And, yes, I’ve forgotten where I found this. Do an image serach if you are keen.

I think I’ve got most events covered (been searching for oil hits $150 a barrel but could only find $40 and $200). But then what’s the point? I suppose if a government had any sense, they would have built up strategic reserves (like China and some others).
But then again what happens when you wait and wait, and nothing happens?

I attended some Cabinet Office workshops on X-risks in 2015. The group agreed that a pandemic was the most probable high impact event from a very long list. This was modelled but fell apart partly because they modelled the wrong kind of virus and partly because the Treasury – having been stung by stock piling Tamiflu many years before – refused to pay. Moreover, unlike farmers who plan for a bad year or hold some seed back, organisations tend to prioritise profits or costs savings in the short-term (jam today). Honestly, if we have trouble getting people to remember to buy flowers on Feb 13 for Feb 14, what hope have we got getting people to prepare for likely power cuts by buying candles and matches?

I wrote this 10 years ago. Feels worth repeating.

A while ago, I stumbled upon the world’s smallest music venue, dreamt up gloriously by musicians Emily Barker and Dom Coyote. Inside a small wooden box is one musician and, 30 centimetres away, one audience member, who listens to one song in the ethereal darkness. The idea is both illogical and visceral. As one person observed, the tiny box is disorientating: it blurs the line between what’s weird and what’s wonderful. The shadowy darkness makes some people laugh. Others are reduced to tears.

In an age of demeaning and diminishing machines and downloadable digital delights, it proves that human intimacy still matters and that the answer we’re all searching for has to do with human contact. It proves that realness and authenticity are what you, me, and we (if you’ll excuse the grammar) must fight to preserve.Mathematicians, engineers, physicists, and financiers are all desperately needed to solve the world’s problems. But it is only poets, painters, novelists, filmmakers, and musicians who can reach out and touch the human heart. It is only they who can travel deep inside our heads and look outwards. It is only they who can answer the biggest question of all, which is us.This is a question that no computer seeking a logical or specific end point will ever be able to answer, because being human is not a logical problem and the answer will be different every time the question is asked.

We are, whether we like it or not, on the cusp of developing technologies that will give us godlike powers.The simple question is what to do with this power. Who do we want to be?

The top left corner of my 2017 map is becomning scary re the removal of real human connection. Fancy spending a date night with an AI anyone? Hey, it is Valentines Day!

https://www.wired.com/story/inside-the-new-york-city-date-night-for-ai-lovers/

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/13/dining/ai-dinner-date-restaurant.html

Thanks to Lynda K for spotting this.

https://www.vbs.admin.ch/dam/en/sd-web/K489QrrPSDvt/vbs-ddps-ndb-handbuch-kognitive-%20verzerrung-en.pdf