Between school and college I decided to take a ‘year off’ (what they now call a ‘gap year’). I didn’t have much of a plan, except that I wanted to travel, but not really to earn money (a difficult combination to pull off, frankly, and not one I would recommend). My dad had a brilliant idea, resisting which is something about which I have lifelong regrets, which was to go and live with Harry Ree for a few weeks/months and be his factotum. [1]

But, I did go and work for CND helping prepare for the big October 24th demonstration in 1981. I had two duties that autumn.

One was as an itinerant speaker. Some organization would contact CND and ask for someone to come and explain the case for disarmament, or debate with a Tory, or something like that, and make the case for people attending the march. Obviously, all invitations went to Bruce Kent, by then an unlikely semi-celebrity. But he couldn’t do everything, and someone, absurdly, decided that a grungy kid who had just turned 18, lived in a squat in Kentish town without hot running water, and was afflicted by an awkward shyness, should sometimes substitute for him.

I probably did 10 such events, mainly in London, and no audience was delighted when I turned up instead of Bruce, except at a youth club in Bromley of all places. It was getting close to the demonstration when I did the Bromley debate, so I already had quite a bit of experience. The youth of Bromley were very ungracious to my Tory opponent, a very straightforward, well-dressed, chap connected in some way to the United Nations Organisation, who was on his way, just a few months later, to becoming a Tory MP (in, actually, the constituency from which my family had moved to Oxford: he succeeded the truly awful Sir Ronald Bell, a man who would, today, feel that Restore is a bunch of namby-pamby liberals and whom, during the 1979 General Election, my just-turned 12 year old sister pursued down the street of our otherwise very welcoming village shouting “Ronald Bell is a fascist”).

He was a skilled debater, and my main assets for Bromley’s youth were that I was so poorly dressed, seemed like an unemployed yob, but had a relatively posh voice, was pretty articulate, and wasn’t this (ultimately ill-fated, though none of us knew it at the time) future Tory MP. Afterwards he was appalled to learn that I was planning to take the train back to my squat in Kentish Town, and insisted that I let him drive me back. I had no desire for his company, not because I didn’t like posh Tories but because I was intensely socially awkward with strangers. That said, declining seemed churlish in the extreme. When I pointed out that CND would pocket the fare they would have paid me, he cheerfully said “consider it a donation!”, and, to make matters worse, actually gave me a fiver (“for the cause, or for a good meal if that’s what you fancy”) which of course, I did give to the cause. I’m almost sure that his girlfriend lived in Berkeley Square. I rather liked him and was pleased when he became an MP and sad when he had to resign.

The other duty was a response to this perennial problem: How do you police the messaging on a demonstration of 250,000 people that will be broadcast round the world? You know you are going to attract all sorts of weirdos, grungies, plus thousands of activists who are taking advantage of your efforts to advertise their own wares. And you know that one left wing political party in particular (the SWP) has a rather wonderful commercial printing outfit, some really topnotch designers, and pockets deep enough that you can expect at least 5000 signs making it look as if the SWP is running the show, dominating the messaging.

I had a small budget, and was given a spot at the Pax Christi national headquarters in a Roman Catholic church in Hampstead, to get 25,000 placards made, all with CND signs and approved slogans, to be distributed to key stations very early on morning of the march (I was in central London by 5.30 am on October 24th, god knows how). I had a group of around 8 people volunteering regularly, and we had to get the posters made, cut the sticks (I couldn’t get 3ft sticks anywhere, so had to buy 9ft lengths to be cut with a buzzsaw), staple them together, and bundle them ready to go.

It went against my un-controlling nature about messaging (remember “Satan’s Bombs”?). And honestly, even now, giving me responsibility to get something like that done wouldn’t be the height of wisdom. But, thanks to the volunteers, it did happen.

Our location doubled as a quiet, off the beat, place for meeting with delicate people. Several Labour MPs not known for their support of CND cycled through, meeting with Bruce, or Dave Wainwright, or others, to chat about the campaign. Because we were the HQ for march logistics it was at our church that we met with the management and leadership of a band called the Jam, which had offered to play for free on the back of a lorry for us. The management was Paul Weller’s dad, and the leadership was Weller himself. I’ve read, since, that Weller is supposed to be something of a diva, but on this occasion, at least, he was anything but. When I asked who wanted what kind of tea and what kind of biscuits, Weller insisted on he helping me in the kitchen, and spent the entire time chatting as if he was really interested in what I was doing for CND. He was as quiet as I was during the meeting. When it finished, he and his dad didn’t, as I’d expected, leave immediately: his dad helped me bring the crockery back to the kitchen, and Paul dried the cups while I washed up.

Making 25,000 placards is probably easier than I remember it being. We’d have failed, though, except for a mysterious Australian chap called Peter Morris (who awed the New Zealanders I was living with) who turned up out of nowhere. He was probably in his late twenties, and just seemed grounded, calm, someone without ego issues. He brought along a bloke called John, who buggered off to a teaching job in the Seychelles straight after the demonstration. He also found a chap called George, from a local mental home, with cognitive impairments that were severe enough that I was always worried he’d hurt himself, and felt rather conflicted about whether he understood the cause and hence whether we were exploiting him. I worried about this especially because George always seemed so happy to be with us, and radiated a cheerfulness that even now I sometimes try to tap into when I am feeling low. He introduced himself to everyone in every situation, with “I’m George, ba tha way”, as if it was something they’d probably been wondering about for days. We worked from 10 am till… well, I rarely left work to walk back to the squat until 10 pm. But I did take weekends off.

It was during one of my forays into public speaking that someone did actually hurt themselves. It wasn’t George (thank god); it was a trade union official called Ron, who cut off his thumb with the buzz saw and was immediately whisked by the excellent Peter Morris to the Royal Free Hospital. They didn’t save the thumb. He didn’t ever come back to the project (fair enough), but a few years later I noticed him at Victoria station talking with a couple of eminent Labour MPs, with one thumb too few. I don’t know what happened to him. (Some people from around that time in CND have names sufficiently unusual, or profiles sufficiently prominent, that google helps – I have a rough idea what happened to AnnaJoy David, whom I always found a little annoying, and to Jenny Edwards, who was, as far as I could tell, gracious to everyone, and I’ve found one picture of Dave Wainwright, but there are quite a few people like Ron whom I don’t know what happened to them at all).

My final memory of George was the day of the demonstration. At 5.30ish we started unloading the placards in bundles. I’m not, and never have been, a morning person so was lagging even more than anyone else, until George turned up was utterly thrilled, introducing himself to everyone and giving us the energy we needed. He was at the party we held in the evening at the church, which was an appropriately relaxed affair. I left early, saying goodbye to him, and never saw him again.

The demonstration on October 24th was huge – maybe 250,000, certainly the largest demonstration London had seen for years. Looking at photographs now, I can see our placards everywhere. For once, we’d actually succeeded. The television cameras saw our message rather than half a dozen competing ones. Some of you may have carried one of my placards.

[1] Harry was a friend, and mentor, of dad’s, a school teacher turned SOE operative, turned education professor turned comprehensive school head, who also had a son who became a philosopher (Jonathan, whose work I’ve read but whom I regret never yet having met).

Some quick thoughts below the cut.



So I’ve recently become much more aware of the Discourse about air conditioning that is common to much of northern Europe.  There’s a lot of weirdness generally, but there are certain strains that pop up regularly.

One is Left / green concern about emissions.  Unlike a lot of Left / green concerns, this one doesn’t stop at hand-wringing.  It tends to go straight to moral condemnation and direct action.  A surprising lot of northern European greens view aircon as somewhere between “acceptable only in the direst of needs” and “just inherently very wicked”.

Another is a strain of what I can only call machismo.   Find an online discussion about aircon, and within a few comments you’ll find the guy — it’s always a guy — who wants you to know that he was with British Forces Arabian Penninsula at Aden back in the day, and nobody had ever heard of this aircon nonsense, and they were just fine, damn your eyes.  Or the guy — it’s always a guy — who is living in a house his great-grandfather built with his own two hands, insulated proper-like and with real brass fittings, warm in winter and cool in summer, add a ceiling fan and that’s all a man should ever need. 

Related to that last one is Anything But Aircon.  You see, if you just install a geothermal heat pump, and get better insulation, and plant trees around the house and ivy on outer walls, and add awnings and external shading, and paint your roof white, and get double- glazed windows with louvers, and a ceiling fan in every room, and fill your living spaces with large house plants, and also sleep with a mattress topper and 100% breathable linen or high-thread-count Egyptian cotton sheets, then you should be completely fine.

Yet another is, not exactly anti-Americanism, but defining-us-against-Americanism.  Those huge malls — icy cold, I needed a sweater!  Have you heard they have stadiums that are air-conditioned?  And ice in their beer!

Apropos of that last point.  Here’s a temporal heat map of London:

and one for New York City:


— But NYC has a relatively mild climate by North American standards.  Here’s Kansas City:



In Kansas City, nature is actively trying to kill you quite a lot of the time.  There’s literally no place in Europe, from Cornwall to the Urals, that has a climate as extreme as Kansas City.

And these are the temperate parts of the USA — the bits where average temperatures are comparable to much of Europe.  I’m not even going to bother with maps from Houston or New Orleans or Los Angeles.  

Do Americans overuse aircon?  Oh yes, we absolutely do.  But do we need aircon?  Also yes.  Most of us do, at least some of the time.   There are a couple of corners of the country where it rarely gets that warm — upper New England, a strip along the Pacific coast, the airier bits of the mountain West.  But around 80 percent of the US population lives in places where summers without aircon are not just unpleasant, but actively bad for mental and physical health.   99% of homes in Houston have aircon.  And if you’ve ever spent a summer in Houston, that statistic will leave you wondering how there can possibly be 1% that don’t.

On the positive side, the US has built about all the aircon it’s going to.   

This is very much not the case around the world! Here’s a projection of the growth of aircon worldwide.

However fitting it may be to be glum, a country cannot move forward if it has no hope. So I offer the following hopeful thoughts about the U.S., starting with a speech made some years ago.

A man wrote me and said: “You can go to live in France, but you cannot become a Frenchman. You can go to live in Germany or Turkey or Japan, but you cannot become a German, a Turk, or a Japanese. But anyone, from any corner of the Earth, can come to live in America and become an American.”

Yes, the torch of Lady Liberty symbolizes our freedom and represents our heritage, the compact with our parents, our grandparents, and our ancestors. It is that lady who gives us our great and special place in the world. For it’s the great life force of each generation of new Americans that guarantees that America’s triumph shall continue unsurpassed into the next century and beyond. Other countries may seek to compete with us; but in one vital area, as a beacon of freedom and opportunity that draws the people of the world, no country on Earth comes close.

This, I believe, is one of the most important sources of America’s greatness. We lead the world because, unique among nations, we draw our people — our strength — from every country and every corner of the world. And by doing so we continuously renew and enrich our nation. While other countries cling to the stale past, here in America we breathe life into dreams. We create the future, and the world follows us into tomorrow. Thanks to each wave of new arrivals to this land of opportunity, we’re a nation forever young, forever bursting with energy and new ideas, and always on the cutting edge, always leading the world to the next frontier. This quality is vital to our future as a nation. If we ever closed the door to new Americans, our leadership in the world would soon be lost. . . .

It is bold men and women, yearning for freedom and opportunity, who leave their homelands and come to a new country to start their lives over. They believe in the American dream. And over and over, they make it come true for themselves, for their children, and for others. They give more than they receive. They labor and succeed. And often they are entrepreneurs. But their greatest contribution is more than economic, because they understand in a special way how glorious it is to be an American.

These words were spoken by Ronald Reagan, in his last address as President.

I know many immigrants and first-generation Americans for whom Reagan’s words ring true even today. Many are my current or former students. One is my son-in-law, who is first-generation American and ethnically Chinese-Dominican. How could that even be?! His family’s story perfectly exemplifies what Reagan was talking about. His grandmother was a teenage peasant in a small Chinese village during Mao’s famine. She wanted to leave the country to avoid starvation. She lied about her age so she could marry a young man in the village and plan their exit together. In those days, China prevented emigration to non-Communist countries. But it allowed them to emigrate to Cuba, which had recently undergone its Communist revolution. Cuba offered them visas on condition of spending some years of virtual slave labor in its sugar plantations. That was better than starving, so they agreed. But they wanted freedom. After serving the requisite years, they were allowed to leave Cuba for the Dominican Republic. They still had to live under a dictatorship. But they enjoyed more freedom and opportunity. They set up a small grocery store and restaurant in a remote village, attained modest prosperity, and raised a daughter there. Still seeking more freedom, the family immigrated to the U.S. Their daughter gave birth to my son-in-law in New York City. Contra J.D. Vance, and in line with Reagan’s perspective, he’s a more patriotic American than many of my students whose families trace their American ancestry further back. Birthright citizenship truly is a great thing.

The share of immigrants in the U.S. population reached a local demographic peak (15-16%) under the Biden administration. (ICE brutality under Trump 2 has pushed it down slightly.) Every time this has happened in U.S. history with people entering from new corners of the world, an immigration backlash has occurred. But every time, the U.S. has gotten over the backlash. If Americans are true to our history, we will do so this time as well.

So far, this commitment has produced only one final investment decision, for two reactors at Sizewell C in the UK. Construction is expected to start in 2027, with commercial operation in the late 2030s at best. After that, there are no large plants even on the drawing boards in the UK. A few sites have been identified, and there’s a proposal for some half-size reactors (called SMRs but not actually modular or very small) to be built by Rolls-Royce. These don’t even have a prototype yet.

France is a few steps behind. Three sites have been identified, each with two reactors, but none has reached final investment decision yet. The most likely to happen is at Penly, but even that is doubtful. And once Macron’s term finishes in 2027, the political push is likely to dissipate.

Nothing at all is happening with large-scale new nuclear in the US. Proposals to complete the half-finished VC Summer plant in South Carolina have gone nowhere, and even the planned restart of the Palisades plant has missed multiple deadlines. The Trump Administration recently announced an $18.7 billion loan program with the aim of building ten AP1000 reactors, but this is just theatre. There are a few pilot small reactors with construction underway, but all such efforts have failed until now.

Looking at the world as a whole, the first half of 2026 has seen

• two (2) new reactors connected to the grid, both in China

• three (3) construction projects reaching first nuclear concrete, all in China

• zero (0) new final investment decisions outside China

• one (1) new/revised export contract, probably just symbolic, between Rosatom and Uzbekistan

Generously assuming a 4:1 capacity ratio, the two new reactors would be equivalent to around 8 GW of firmed solar. That’s what China installs every week or so, and the world as a whole every four or five days.

In summary, nuclear power isn’t a vital source of energy, obstructed by politics. Outside China, it’s a zombie, animated by political imperatives. In China, it’s an afterthought, running far behind solar and wind, as well as (regrettably) new coal and gas, and about level with new hydro.

Humphreys opacity is in the news because the ideal to generate a so-called ‘glassbox’ AI — in which AI systems and machine learning models where the internal processes are fully visible, transparent, and interpretable to humans — seems so hard to achieve. In fact, Humphreys opacity is a design feature of contemporary LLMs that are rapidly being deployed in all kinds of organizations. At the moment neither end-users nor engineers can survey the steps that lead to an LLMs output in real time. It is by no means obvious that they could do so even after the fact in all salient contexts. Interestingly enough, at the moment such Humphreys opacity also seems a feature of any (say) Opus 4.8 token (in the sense of the token/type distinction) one may be interacting with as an end-user. Such tokens lack luminosity about the inner workings of ‘their own’ underlying machinery, too. This much is familiar enough in public debate and also the scholarly secondary literature.

As LLMs are incorporated in all kinds of social practices they (predictably) generate new sources of Humphreys opacity and will intensify at least some existing ones. On the latter (intensification), as LLMs are inserted in administrative, design, and production processes (etc.) they will actively displace surveyable steps; and as various kinds of social organizations and corporations learn to use LLMs at scale, they predictably, induce the redesign of a process around the advantageous use of LLMs.2 The reason why I call these an example of intensification is because the bureaucratic processes that will be rejigged in light of the uptake of LLMs are, inter alia, themselves attempts or instruments at managing the effects of Humphreys opacity.

As Rousseau noted (recall this post) in the Third Discourse one reason bureaucracies are introduced and maintained at often great cost is because an executive cannot be in all places and times at once. Now it’s familiar from scholarship inspired by James C. Scott and/or Foucault that state bureaucracies both make populations ‘legible.’ But bureaucracies also generate new forms of Humphreys opacity. In fact, generalizing a bit, bureaucratically-induced Humphreys opacity has meant the recruitment of skilled specialists (in the management of information/technology and people) and the development of all kinds of institutions that secure, monitor, and audit the reliability and quality control of the bureaucratic processes as well as the people staffing these, and so on. In fact, what we may call ‘the management of Humphreys’ opacity’ is constitutive of the art of government since the eighteenth century. Or to restate that a bit more cautiously, one feature of skill in governance is being good at the management of forms of ignorance, including the ignorance generated or made worse by government itself.

This ratcheting up and intensification of epistemic opacity is also one of the main engines for the enormously widening scope of the state as (Nick Cowen and I emphasize) a machinery of record and, (recall) to use Tom Pink’s felicitous phrase, witnesser of truth. In both the state certifies many social facts. In so doing these certified facts function both as traditional public goods as well as constitutive principles or conditions of many social practices. For example, emission trading practices presuppose a structure of property rights, the conceptualization and monitoring of emissions across the economy, and a system of converting units of emission to (say) tax credits/debits (and so on).

Crucially, the state also helps provide the infrastructure (and is often a party to) necessary adjudications of what the facts really are. The modern state often maintains an infrastructure for this alongside the bureaucracy, and, as Hannah Arendt emphasizes in her essays, this is why law and science have a special status among the many public institutions. These are the relatively costly and relatively slow-moving institutions that are made authoritative on the facts. And this is also the underlying reason why the uptake of LLMs within the law and the universities has generated controversy and even push-back.

Whatever one’s attitude toward the law is, one of the court systems’ main functions in the modern state is to certify the (fallible) truth on some bone of contention (e.g., which property deed is authoritative, etc.), including ones that are themselves the effect of managing Humphreys opacity. Of course, that very legal process itself has sites of Humphreys opacity. And this helps explain why judges have been so critical of LLM induced mistakes. They undermine the quasi-auditing aspect of the adjudicating role of the institutions.

The upshot of my attenuated example is that institutional density and adjudication practices inevitably grow as processes that manage and generate/intensify such opacity, and this will only be accelerated by the uptakes of LLMs (in light of their own thus far ineliminable Humphreys opacity features). Of course, that’s not unconstrained: diminishing marginal returns, interaction effects, political and social priorities, and rents all play a role. (As my posts on the anthropological work on civilizational collapse by Tainter have suggested, we’re not the first civilization to encounter these dynamics.)

Here’s a diagram made by Claude’s Opus 4.8 of the dynamic I have in mind (but without all the implied marginal returns and cost benefit analysis not to say political and technological pathways—if you unpack each box in this diagram you find a Russian doll scenario of more such boxes). I call this dynamic, ‘the recursive Humphreys engine:’

As an aside, part of the social problem this engine generates is that the skills needed to keep all the processes running and to deal with the inevitable failures of implementation are themselves at risk of becoming scarce or non-renewable as de-skilling occurs. This makes the timing of the contemporary assault on higher education in the US and UK especially baffling.

But, leaving that aside, the governance problem of LLMs themselves is also challenging. As I learned from Socrates (see here) in the Phaedrus those that invent a product tend not to be very good at foreseeing and understanding the social externalities they may generate. It’s not that Silicon Valley and its intellectual enablers may be overselling the possible benefits of LLMs, although surely that is also happening, but that they do not have much incentive to think about the drawbacks.

Now, the reader may object to the last sentence of the previous paragraph by pointing to the literature on ‘existential risk’ associated with AGI. Fair enough. But the focus on existential risk occludes all kinds of less dramatic implementation challenges associated with the uptake of LLMs. And I want to close this post with a more general reflection on a feature that may make the externalities more challenging than usual. That is, my general view is that LLMs do not generate a new kind of governance problem, but they do generate risks that I gestured at by using the language of ‘intensification.’

Now that LLMs are being embedded in all kinds of processes, a familiar social externality is becoming visible. For one of the more unfortunate side-effects of processes in which LLMs are embedded is that when they fail, they also make one of the best known strategies in learning from disaster, reverse engineering, also less fruitful. For, while one can figure out how the output of LLMs contributed to an error or disaster, it is not entirely clear that one can be wholly confident what set of instructions/prompts or, more subtly, internal states caused the unexpected output of the LLM. The Humphreys opacity inside the LLMs makes reverse engineering very difficult if not impossible sometimes. So, the feedback loop between error and learning becomes much more attenuated. Let me make this a bit more tangible below.

Reverse engineering as a tool for discovery is a common thread in the work of my teachers, the philosophers, George E. Smith, Dan Dennett, and Bill Wimsatt. They have taught how reverse engineering reconstructs a hidden structure from visible traces or effects. Reverse engineering is incredibly widely used in institutions dense with engineers, and an important tool in biology and anthropology.

So, for example, I learned from George Smith, who remained a turbine failure specialist throughout his philosophical career, airplanes are partially designed with black boxes that record many of the plane’s self-monitoring devices to facilitate such reverse engineering. Those are by no means decisive; often all the recoverable parts of the crashed plane also need to be reassembled painstakingly in giant hangars. Crashed planes have more than a little bit in common with giant fossils. Smith once noted that “in the case of aircraft failures, for example, even the total absence of evidence that some particular factor did not cause an airplane to crash–in other
words, a total inability to eliminate that factor–can be sufficient reason to warrant doing something to safeguard against its causing a future crash.” (p. 549) As he and Jed Buchwald note in the review from which I quoted, this demanding attitude toward risk-factors is sensible in the context of the possibility of catastrophic crashes.

The governance structure of airplane safety is quite complex and evolving even Stateside alone, and I do not mean to suggest it is the right model for LLM safety. But at the moment no airplane-black-box equivalents exists for LLMs; I sometimes wonder if self-monitoring devices at reasonable cost are even possible for these artifacts. This makes it all the more remarkable that so far no institutional infrastructure is implemented or on the horizon that can promote the management of the social externalities of the incredibly rapid uptake of LLMs. Expect turbulence ahead.

• An earlier version of this post as published at D&I (here).

The weather presenters here have done a good job in explaining the relation to climate change. Some right-wing politicians keep downplaying these explanations, saying we should enjoy the lovely weather with a cool beer by the pool, but I think reality is hitting too hard for that kind of ideological nonsense to have much influence very longer.

One friend sent me a message saying that he has started to suffer from climate anxiety; if this is the beginning [for us!], where will it end?

I’m trying to remain hopeful, and am hoping (and pleading) that this experience will make more people realise that we need to massively step up our efforts on climate action. We need to scale up climate change adaptation immediately to protect those most at risk of the harms of climate change. Most of those people are not in Europe but in the Global South, and given a widespread lack of care of what happens to people in poor countries, I’m more worried about them (and have been wondering for a long time how we can make the biggest emitters – which in fact are not Europeans but Americans, Canadians, and others – care about the effects on the most vulnerable in the Global South. Let me know if you know, because I don’t.)

But we must also redouble our efforts on climate mitigation. Some people are still trying to downplay the need for this. I saw a Dutch commentator on social media say that even if we were to put out all the fires today, the world would still get warmer. Yes, that’s true, but it’s also beside the point. If we carry on as we currently do, the world will warm up much more and we will suffer far more serious harms from climate change than if we step up our climate mitigation efforts. It is the choice we face between a slightly warmer world and a much warmer world with far more unpredictable weather and other climate risks.

All of this reminded me of the The Ministry of the Future, Kim Stanley Robinson’s unrivalled science fiction novel, which anyone who hasn’t read yet really ought to read. In that novel, after the situation had deteriorated to unimaginable extremes, humanity – with a little help from climate rebels – finally found the courage and the political strategies to tackle the climate crisis. A great deal of political action and persuasion is still needed on numerous fronts, but we can only hope that the current heatwave in Europe will make a contribution to turn the situation around for the better.

In short, if you look at actual electricity demand needed for current AI use, it’s small. And that doesn’t change if demand grows at high but plausible rates. On the other hand, if you look at what is needed to justify the current valuations of AI and its competitors, the implied growth is staggering.

Starting with demand, the OpenAI accounts break out current revenue (what people are paying to use ChatGPT etc) and the cost of revenue (the costs of the data centres used to answer queries)

The cost of revenue is about $8 billion (rounded for simplicity). A conveniently scaled measure of electricity output is a Terawatt hours (TWh). Roughly equal to the annual output of a typical 1GW coal-fired or nuclear power station operating 24/7 is about 10 TW

If 25 per cent of that is electricity, and electricity costs 10 cents/kWh, the implied production electricity use is:

(0.25× 8 * 10^9) / (0.10* 10^9) =20 TWh

or the output of two large power plants running full time (I’ve previously derived the same estimates from reported cost per token)

That is about 0.5 per cent of U.S. electricity demand. Doubling this to cover the broader U.S. generative-AI industry gives a convenient round estimate of 1 per cent of U.S. electricity demand in 2025.

The US Energy Information Authority estimates demand growth of 15 per cent year, which implies doubling over five years

So the U.S. AI sector would rise from about 1 per cent to about 2 per cent of U.S. electricity demand by 2030.

It’s important to remember that this is growth in electricity demand. If AI becomes more efficient in converting electricity into tokens and tokens into useful answers, say doubling every two years, the number of answers would grow tenfold.

A new load equal to 1 per cent of current US demand would be quite manageable in aggregate, requiring the output of perhaps four of five 1GW power stations. The problems would be of the kind we are already seeing – data centers clustered into a few locations and pricing structures where the costs are shifted onto existing consumers. These are fixable problems.

The problem is that this is nowhere enough to make OpenAI and others sustainably profitable, let alone to justify the market valuations we are seeing. It’s harder to analyse these valuations than to measure current demand, but I’ll give it a go.

Assuming a price earnings ratio of 30, a trillion dollar valuation requires profits of around $30 billion a year. Assuming that profit margins can be maintained at 30 per cent, that requires revenue of $100 billion a year, and costs of $70 billion a year, around 10 times the current level for OpenAI alone. Taking account of Anthropic and the AI-boosted valuations of Meta, Alphabet (Google) and Space X, it would be more like 50 times . And, indeed, these numbers are conservative compared to the projections were seeing.

That gives growth equal to 50 per cent of current US demand, which is utterly impossible. Even with data centers spread across the developed world the growth in demand would be unfeasible and any attempt to deliver it would be catastrophic.

I’m going to call BS on this. There is simply no way that demand can grow enough.

OpenAI already has 900 million weekly active users, so there’s not much room for growth on the extensive margin. As for growth in revenue per users, I’m going to appeal to a combination of introspection and casual observation.

As regards introspection, I’m a heavy user mainly for enhanced search and testing ideas. I’m using OpenAi’s $20/month plan, as well as playing with other options like Mistral and Copilot. If OpenAI doubled their price, I’d switch to one of the others. If they all raised prices to (say) $100/month, I’d buy a high-powered computer with Nvidia chips and switch to local hosting.

Most people I know are not massively online, and use the free version of ChatGPT. They are unlikely to pay for it. A lot will be satisfied with Google’s (awful) Gemini which is “free”, that is, funded by advertising. Google already dominates the advertising market, so there’s no potential for growth there.

That leaves business uses. The short-lived fad for “tokenmaxxing” suggested the possibility of huge growth in demand. However, the disappointing results have brought that back to ground. Both at the firm level and at the aggregate economy level, there’s no indication that AI is delivering the productivity gains required to justify massive new expenditure.

Still, this yawning gap helps to explain the ferocity of the debate over AI and LLMs. I think stoclk market valuations are crazy, and don’t treat them as reflecting reality. I follow the EIA and expect that the hyperscaling boom will go the way of tokenmaxxing. On this view, electricity use for LLMs will remain modest.

Those most hostile to AI assume that the hyperscalers will deliver on their promises at least as far as making massive investments in data centres. That gives you the disaster scenario.

On the other hand, many critics point to the huge volume of useless slop produced by AI. These two criticisms contradict each other. There’s a partial reconciliation with Sturgeon’s Law (90 per cent of science fiction is crud. But 90 per cent of everything is crud).

Both viewpoints lead to the conclusion that we should not have rapid growth in data centres. The disaster scenario suggests a need for urgent action. The sceptical version suggests that building power stations to support data centres will rapidly prove non-viable, leaving a legacy of stranded assets, mostly gas-fired power plants that will be an obstacle to a clean energy transition

For the moment, the hype about AI and data centers has not produced a comparable boom in power plant construction. Indeed some projects have been canceled or delayed. Others like the Trump-branded Fermi project appear to be nothing more than vaporware.

From a range of social, economic and environmental viewpoints, the best thing to do regarding AI would be to abandon massive expenditure on hyperscaling and focus on learning how to use and manage AI to yield the best ratio of benefits to cost.

Probably not ordinarily the most collegiate of petty capitalists, the gold buyers gathered to debate the role of the local branch of the Union Bank of Australia in undercutting their business.

The bank had begin purchasing gold at a slightly higher rate than individual gold buyers could do, bringing diggers in from the gold fields to Bathurst where they would get a better deal – and (so rejoiced the local storekeepers) use some of their earnings to buy some Fancy Goods.

Some gold buyers thought this was fair of the bank, which added gentlemanly respectability to what was recently a frontier townships.

Others noticed that the bank was cutting out the middleman. And since they were the middlemen, that was pretty uncool.

Mr Samuel, certainly one or the other of the Messrs L & S Samuel, gold buyers of Bathurst, reminded those gathered that gold was not actually money. Banks have no more business trading in gold, he told his comrades, than they had trading in wool, tallow or sheepskins (which tells you what other business was in in Bathurst in those days).

Image: Australian Joint Stock Bank Gulgong, Holtermann Collection SLNSW. Coloured by AI.

Gold buyers came in many shapes and sizes. Some were buyers only, many were metallurgists who assayed the gold as well. We know about them because they were sometimes called into court to act as witnesses. Their extensive experience with gold meant that they could identify where gold came from.

For example, Joseph Aarons (OK lets admit I start with him because he comes up in the As of gold buyers) was in court to identify a piece of gold that someone or other was accused of stealing and then selling onwards to a bank – such accusations were really common. It seems that banks were not always all that fussed about how gold had been acquired. Their job was just to buy it. In fact, a story from Gulgong’s Pioneer Museum, which I visited last weekend, told of the police entering the Australian Joint Stock Bank to chase down a gold thief. The bank manager not only refused to allow the police officer to search behind the bar (Ok I know that’s not what it is called in a bank, but surely in this case…), but they also pulled out a pistol, prepared to take action to prevent the police search.

Anyway, Joseph Aarons, clearly a more upstanding fella than he Gulgong bank manager, testified in court about the gold under question. I’ve bought SO MUCH gold he said. And this gold is definitely from Wentworth.

Nathan Wilson, a jeweller from Sydney, also said. Yeeah, I’ve bought gold from Wentworth before too. It isn’t great gold, I didn’t like it. This gold is just like that.

Aside – did you know there were differences in gold like this? Not me!

So a whole lot of these gold experts are running around buying gold. It is transported (under guard…more about this in the future) to the Treasury in Sydney, which we know because they published long lists of gold buyers and quantities of gold they received from each.

From this (and also advertising by gold buyers in the newspapers) we know that lots of gold buyers were women.

Not all gold buyers were all that expert. Some were just buying and selling gold alongside their other buying and selling of stuff.

Richard Binnie was one of these. He left school at 14 like most other people and began an apprenticeship that he pursued for a year before realising he had an entrepreneurial itch. His diaries tell us about the contracts he had with government stores in New South Wales and Melbourne to supply goods. In his 30s, Binnie went on a whirlwind trip to San Fransisco in 1850 where he was very impressed with the stores selling neatly packaged goods that were easy for diggers to purchase and transport. He made a long list of goods that could be sent from New South Wales, and what prices they would fetch in California. He later audited the local Australian Joint Stock Bank where, amongst all the cash, he found $11,733 worth of gold dust. Richard Binnie just bought gold sometimes as part of his diverse set of business activities.

Money brokers were part of this world of folk finance. Before the gold rushes, banks in Australia didn’t normally deal with small stuff. They didn’t really do small loans so people couldn’t borrow what they needed for their quartz-crushing gold extracting start up, to buy their beloved a carving knife (one of the things on Binnie’s list of things to buy for his ‘Lizzie’) or even to purchase property. Banks were there mainly to discount bills of exchange, which made them a pretty minor industry on the edge of international shipping rather than the utility that they later became.

So money brokers were where people went when they needed a loan. Like lots of businesses that one could do on one’s own account, by the 1890s when demand for small amounts of credit grew to significant proportions, lots of these money brokers were women. Now the 1890s was not a great time for banks (in fact, lots of them crashed in that decade). But we can see from the graph that by the 1910s, money broking is not really a thing. Fortunately (or something) the Great War was about to break out, so that the very rapidly growing occupation of bank clerks would soon experience a man shortage, opening up many opportunities for young women to enter banking. But that is another story.

Data source: Australian and Australian colonial censuses

Data source: Australian and Australian colonial censuses

The system also cracked down on the gold buyers. Endless rumours of dodgy deals between gold buyers and folk sneaking into mines in Bendigo to snaffle the gold encouraged the Bendigo newspaper to advocate for registration and regulation of Gold Buyers.I haven’t yet read the 1901 gold buyers act, but I did read the 1907 one that replaced it. It required Gold Buyers to only purchase gold from a clearly marked place of business. And insisted that gold sellers must walk through the front door, in daylight hours.

But by then the issue that the gold buyers raised in Mrs Black’s Royal Hotel in Bathurst in 1852 was pretty much resolved in favour of the banks. Sure, banks were not likely to deal much in tallow or sheepskins, but gold was definitely their business. So too were loans, for that matter. Much easier to regulate, to be sure. But it also meant that the generations of women (and men) who profited by making money from money were now more likely to work as a bank clerk in exchange for wages.

It amounts to a kind of industrialisation of finance work. By 1919, bank workers in Sydney formed a union. Working conditions in banks were bleak enough that union membership grew at a rate of around 50-60 members a day just in Sydney.

But that too is another story.

This post is part of my Fellowship at the State Library of NSW. The project is entitled ‘what happened to the gold?’

Among other things I’ve been writing a little bit about what it was like for me being a teenager involved in left wing politics at the beginning of the 80’s. This is the first (and far the longest) of a series of reminiscences that were prompted by a casual conversation with one of my excellent graduate students. Feel free to ignore! I’ll also be posting them on a substack which, if you like, you can subscribe to (free, but god knows how you subscribe!).

Here goes:

We moved to Oxford in the wake of the 1979 general election. Dad had become Chief Education Officer in Oxfordshire a year earlier, but we’d waited to move till I finished my O’Levels and my sister finished primary school, to minimize disruption (because Oxford, itself, then still had a system of middle schools, my sister was more disrupted than I was, having to spend a year in a middle school before going to an ‘upper’ school.

I did the sixth form at Peers School, an inaptly named comprehensive which served two council estates (Blackbird Leys and Rose Hill; like Lord’s Cricket Ground it was named after a person, not a Peer or a Lord) plus some quite distant rural areas outside the city. The demographics were as you’d expect: mainly poor and working class kids, but with a smattering of middle class children like me who whose parents were left-ish, educated, professionals – teachers, vicars, nurses, etc, one or two academics, and the chief education officer (dad was shocked when he started in Oxfordshire just how many of his colleagues in the LEA leadership sent their kids private and I am sure he was not unduly diplomatic about it).

Peers was quite progressive – indeed, the Graunida had an article about how it had once been a school of the future when it was finally closed. It had a School Council, to which I was, I now realise rather surprisingly, elected by other 6th formers (maybe no-one else wanted to do it?). Mr. B, my rather posh Maoist [1] history teacher once told me that the School Council was supposed to be like a parliamentary democracy but that in practice it didn’t work that way, because it mainly endorsed what the head teacher wanted. This, I pointed out, was exactly how he thought a parliamentary democracy worked, so I couldn’t figure out what his complaint was. My role (again, I don’t quite understand how this happened) was to serve on the PTA, the main job of which seemed to be to organize dog shows to raise funds for the school, dog shows being the special enthusiasm of the couple who led the PTA, a policeman and his wife. I remember at the first meeting being kind of awestruck both by the whole scene and, especially, by a rather disheveled woman called Meg who turned up a late, clearly had no time either for the policeman or for dog shows, and yet equally clearly had more organizational sense than any of the other parents. (The dog show experts were manifestly annoyed by her, probably thinking that she was the kind of person who lived on Stratford Street, had probably been a member of the International Socialists who had left when Cliff took them in a Leninist direction, and drove a green 2CV with a “Nuclear Power: No Thanks” sticker on it. If they did think that, I’m pretty certain they were right on all counts; but they also accepted all her suggestions none of which, nearly 50 years later, I can remember).

A few days later I got a phone call at home from Meg.

She told me that Mr. Lewis (more on him in a minute) had given her my phone number because he thought I’d be interested in attending the next meeting of an organization she was in which was going to protest against nuclear weapons that were probably going to be deployed in Oxfordshire. It was next Tuesday at 7.30 at the East Oxford Community Centre, so I’d better figure out where that was and she’d meet me there.

Ok, a word about Mr. Lewis. He was the deputy head (vice-principal) and as such the liaison to the PTA. My dad rarely misjudged people but when, much later, I told him this story, he realized he had gotten Mr. Lewis quite wrong. I believe that Lewis had been head of Maths at the grammar school that merged with the secondary modern to form Peers comprehensive in 1968, and dad believed to be a conservative grammar school man. In fact he’d grown up in the valleys– a left-wing socialist who was naturally a doer and a diplomat and, actually, a fierce supporter of the comprehensive ideal – the fact that he didn’t leave should probably have been a clue. And someone who thought nothing of taking the risk of handing my home number to a left-wing activist whom he thought should try to recruit me. Much later, in the middle of A’ levels, Lewis sat me down in his office and talked to me about what it meant to pursue political ends, the many ways one does that, advising me to take a long view, and not to be unduly depressed by setbacks, of which he thought there would be many. He was right about that.

I arrived early on Tuesday at the East Oxford Community Center, a redbrick building which I would guess was from the 1930s and already, then, grungy and tired. The meeting was in a tiny room and, of course, when I found it, there were only a handful of people there. A very short fierce-looking woman around 40 with cropped hair and a small dog; a very good looking couple in their mid-twenties; two very earnest looking young men who turned out to be Oxford undergraduates (one of whom you can see at a subsequent demonstration reading the demand to a bemused RAF officer at Upper Heyford, here), and a short cheerful man with a slightly reddish beard and a brown corduroy jacket who broke the ice by asking me, after I had already sat on the floor, “Are you the masses? Meg told us that she was bringing the masses to this meeting, are you them?”. This was Mark Levene. It turned out that he, like Meg, was a PhD student in History, and they were connected (in ways that are now a little mysterious to me) to E.P. Thompson who was absolutely central to the rebirth of the anti-weapons movement, and will turn up again later. [Most of the people in this story I only remember, or only ever knew, their first names; others are ungoogleable anyway, and still others (eg, some of the IMGers I didn’t get along well with, the weirdest of whom was sharing a house with someone I gotten to know well since, at the time) I will render ungoogleable, but you can have Mark, Meg and a couple of others for free.]

I still, not infrequently, ask, in my head, whether some newcomer to some meeting I’m at is the masses. They never are.

Shortly after we’d established that I was not, in fact, the promised masses, Meg turned up, and the meeting started. An old comrade who cut his teeth in the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley told me, when Mario Savio died, that Savio was a great leader not because he was a great orator or because he was a great strategist, or even because he was good at managing people, but because everyone knew, intuitively and without doubt, that he was utterly sincere and utterly incorruptible. In it for the cause, never for himself. I’ve met a very few people like that, and I’m not sure whether it has been a blessing or a curse that the first political leader I ever knew, Meg, was one of them.[2] She brimmed with energy and confidence, seeming to lack self-doubt, but also lacking self-importance despite sort of seeming like the head girl. Everyone in the room deferred to her leadership willingly and admiringly.

The decision had already been made to hold a protest, starting at the Plain, and ending up at Oxpens, on March 15th, and the whole meeting was about logistics. Who who was going to get the posters made, and where, who would we ask to speak at the rally, what was Olive Gibbs’s role going to be (Olive Gibbs was a prominent local Labour politician who had been a central leader of CND in Oxford in the early 1960s which, to me, seemed like several lifetimes ago, but was, in fact, barely the other day); what were the leaflets going to say and who was going to hand them out on Saturdays in Cornmarket; who was going to liaise with the police; would we have our own placards (a very important question about which more in a subsequent story); how were we going to deal with the inevitable interest of the Trots?

This last question was from Georgina, the woman with the dog and the short haircut. I never really figured her out (well, the truth is there were a lot of them that I never really figured out – like Steve, the fiercely evangelical Christian undergraduate whose determination to have a placard saying “Ban Satan’s Bombs” I firmly defended in an argument within the informal leadership which, I guess, I was part of pretty quickly). In my head I remember her having recently moved from Surrey but I suspect that is something I made because she was (I think) Oxford’s only member of the New Communist Party. [3]
I’m an unusually law-abiding person (slightly ironic that I’m saying that on Justice for Janitors day, having been arrested and beaten up on the original Justice for Janitors day, video of which you can see here). But the one crime I have committed (not the one I have been convicted of, which I did not commit) was flyposting. In the evenings we’d go out in pairs with a bucket of wallpaper paste, reems of posters advertising the march (or whatever – I once did this with a set of day-glo/neon posters advertising a fundraising benefit for Campaign ATOM by the Thompson Twins [4]), and pasting them to walls of various descriptions in Cowley and East Oxford. We knew it wasn’t allowed, and once in a while some coppers would notice that we were doing it (maybe having been given a ring by a responsible citizen) and would give chase, absurdly, by car. Absurd, because East Oxford already had a quite odd one way system, has a number of alleyways, and I already knew where all the gaps were better than the coppers from the Cowley Road station. If they’d chased us by foot they’d have caught us every time.

Mark Levene was kind of amazing. He was clever, thoughtful, always cheerful, funny, irreverent, and dedicated. I dutifully turned up at Carfax the next Saturday morning at 10 am to find him with a massive pile of leaflets advertising our demonstration, which we had to hand out. I was very reserved with strangers (still am, basically) and my natural attitude toward anyone I am trying to sell something to is apologetic. Mark would approach shoppers with a huge grin on his face as if he was doing them a favour, put the leaflet in their hands and say “Here, have a leaflet!” with a lovely chuckle. I followed suit, mimicking him (not very well, I admit!). When people would stop to argue he was never the slightest bit rude, listening carefully and attentively, seeking the common ground, acknowledging their good points, countering the others – always cooperative, always friendly, as if he really cared about changing their hearts and minds and was willing to let them change his – which, I think, he was. He approached the whole operation not as if he was trying to get out the vote, but was trying to make the world a better place, by getting rid of nuclear weapons if he could, and by creating better political relationships whether he could get rid of nuclear weapons or not. I had no idea how lucky I was to be influenced, so early, by him and Meg. As far as I knew, they were completely normal!

I was so excited on the day of the demonstration. My job, at which I failed spectacularly, was to help some minor unpaid T&G official, who had no great interest in the cause, to find the march so that he could speak at rally. As it turned out he drove to the Plain, and didn’t want to walk as far as Oxpens. So I had to help him, in his car, find parking in Oxford, which for someone who was new to Oxford, 16 years old, who didn’t drive for another 16 years (and never in the UK) was not a good task. He was irritated by dealing with an earnest middle-class child (fair enough), and I was terrified of failing in my job (which I did); in the end, defeated by the town centre’s one-way system and lack of parking he just told me to get out and went home to watch Grandstand. I ran to the Plain in time to catch the tail end of the march leaving, and joined the thousand or so people ambling up the High Street and down St Aldates, replete with magnificent Trades Union banners, newspapers being hawked across the full spectrum of Trotskyist opinion (Socialist Challenge, Socialist Worker, Newsline, even Socialist Press and Militant were on sale that day), and lots of hippy-ish looking characters in their 30s and 40s.

At Oxpens were the speakers. My T&G official was awol, but the speakers included EP Thompson, Olive Gibbs, and the General Secretary of CND, Bruce Kent. More on him later, too. Altogether the whole thing felt magical. I’d never seen, let alone contributed to organizing, anything like it. I was sure that nuclear weapons would be abandoned by the UK within a couple of years.

What was the point of the demonstration? We believed there was the basis for a real large-membership, movement (a belief which was true as it turned out but for which I, at least, had no warrant at all). So we had hired the Friends Meeting House and gave every single marcher a leaflet advertising a meeting there the following week. Instead of`10-ish oddballs meeting in a closet at the EOCC, we wanted to be 70 or maybe 200 oddballs, making the case for nuclear disarmament throughout the city. And, indeed, about 70 new people turned up the following week at the Friends Meeting House meeting, to plan our next demonstration, a march from Oxford to Upper Heyford, the airbase where we (wrongly) expected the cruise missiles to be deployed (the East Anglian airbase where we expected them to be deployed was Lakenheath; in the end they were located at Greenham Common in Berkshire, and the marvelously-named RAF Molesworth in Cambridgeshire).

One thing I didn’t understand at the time was why we weren’t really part of CND in any formal sense. Everyone was aware of CND, and of course everyone used the CND symbol, but many organisations, including our own, did not call themselves CND, and only became branches sometime after they were established. We were the Campaign against the Oxfordshire Missiles, and I think the Lakenheath-oriented group was called East Anglia Against the Missiles.[5] European Nuclear Disarmament, a sort of loosely affiliated group of mainly academics that opposed nuclear weapons throughout Europe and had strong connections with Eastern European dissidents (so was very openly anti-Stalinist: it’s leaders included E.P. Thompson and Mary Kaldor, who may turn up again later if I tell you about my first real job, as her live-in nanny!) provided a lot of momentum for us. CND, as I’ll observe in another post, was not driving the movement, but was desperately trying to keep up with it, at least at this early stage.

What happens when a small tight group suddenly grows? A rapid turnover of personnel. About 10 people with particular experiences had organized the March demonstration and the subsequent meeting; but suddenly there was a flood of people, many of whom had a lot more experience, and with more diverse contacts across the city. Rip Bulkeley, sometimes of the SWP, but with an extreme independent streak (he basically did whatever he wanted, and they either tolerated him or expelled him depending on the prevailing mood of the leadership) came on board, as did a guy called Dave Wainwright who I think had recently graduated from Oxford, and was energetic and dynamic. Chris and Lorraine, a couple who had sort of adopted me as a mascot, increasingly took a back seat, as did Georgina of the NCP. The IMG sent some comrades into the mix, including a bloke who worked at Oxford Poly who, everyone complained, never washed, and who was utterly and, I’m sorry to say, unwarrantedly, full of himself (google shows that he’s still active for the cause) and a chess-playing genius who seems latterly to have taken to running for parliament: in 2019 for Labour under Corbyn, and in 2024 for George Galloway’s latest outfit. But two of the original people remained at the helm – Mark Levene, and our leader Meg.

Obviously, when you’re involved with something like this, and you’re essentially still a child, you’re learning at an incredible pace, but you also miss a lot. I’m sure there were all sorts of rivalries I had no idea about, and probably also sexual tensions I would have been completely oblivious to. But one thing that I did notice, and that has probably affected me quite a lot, was the attitudes that Mark and Rip (and others, but they were the striking ones) took toward Meg. Mark evidently knew Meg as a fellow graduate student: he was the more committed to academia (he recently retired from the University of Southampton), and despite the slightly mocking comment with which he greeted me at the first meeting, he seemed to recognize right from the start that she had extraordinary abilities, and was completely loyal to her. Rip came into the campaign later: he was a physically big man with a deep strong voice, enormous self-confidence, and someone who, if I’d had more experience of the world, I might have misjudged as a potential disrupter. It seemed to me, though, that in that first post-March March meeting he immediately understood what Mark already knew: that if the group was going to work, she had to be its leader, and that his efforts should be devoted to ensuring that her leadership went smoothly. I had a probably unusual-at-the-time experience of learning politics in a movement led by a woman whose authority very able men accepted without hesitation.

[1] Communist Party of Britain (Marxist-Leninist), the group which Alexei Sayle joined in a failed attempt to escape his mother, who just went ahead and joined too. I attended a branch meeting once – the fact that my teacher felt ok inviting me to a branch meeting of his Maoist organization despite my dad being the Chief Education Officer, and very soon after invited me, my dad and my mum to a Christmas drinks do (which we attended), says something about something, but I am not sure exactly what. The meeting was addressed by Reg Birch who was, probably quite deservedly, revered by the comrades. But it was all a bit odd.

[2] The second, Bruce Kent or, as Meg always called him, “Brucey”, was the same. He once, during a very stressful period, exhibited the very slightest — almost imperceptible — moment of shortness with me; and the next day sought me out to apologize without offering any excuse at all. He did not need to do that.

[3] The NCP (which shared its initials with National Car Parks, something I still find bemusing) was ultra-Stalinist party which had been formed a few years earlier by former members of a (or perhaps the) Surrey branch of the Communist Party of Great Britain. (In case you care: at the time the Communist Party of Great Britain was divided between two main factions, one of which was broadly speaking Eurocommunist, and controlled the genuinely interesting and influential-on-the-left weekly magazine, Marxism Today, and the the other of which was utterly pro-Soviet and controlled the, we now know USSR-subsidized, daily newspaper the Morning Star. The New Communist Party found the tankie side of the CPGB divide insufficiently Stalinist, but was not Maoist. The Trots who became involved in Campaign ATOM were, in fact, mainly from the International Marxist Group, with a couple of SWPers, although I doubt either group was what she had in mind. My guess is that the problem group for her, as for most of the Stalinists I knew in Oxford, was the Workers Socialist League (a small, mainly working-class, organization with a peculiarly large presence in Oxford) which in fact never seemed very interested in the peace movement. Militant was buried sufficiently deeply inside the Labour Party that it, too, was uninterested, and actually denigrated CND. Anyway, more on various kinds of Trots another time.

[4] It’s a regrettable, almost tragic, fact about the world that the Thompson Twins were not named after E.P. Thompson and his late brother Frank (they weren’t twins of course), but the fact that they were named after Thompson and Thompson (who also weren’t twins!) is something to salvage.

[5] There was definitely a small amount of rivalry between us and initial distrust which was allayed by Meg determinedly meeting their leaders as soon as possible. We trivially achieved the aim set out in our name when the location of the missiles was announced, and someone who wasn’t me did, wryly, point this out. If only they’d called themselves the Campaign Against the Suffolk Missiles they, too, could have enjoyed an early victory.

So they’d leave, say, twenty guys on Sable Island or the Avalon Peninsula or on the upper St. Lawrence River with some building materials and tools and food, and in late September they would sail back to France.

Why?

Well basically it just took Europeans a *long* time to grasp just how horrific Canadian winters could be. There were a couple of reasons for this. One was, they looked at the locals and said, look Gaston, these half-naked savages can survive here! How hard can it be?  And nobody asked why these half-naked savages had such *very* large collections of thick animal furs, nor why they seemed to spend so much of the summer curing meat and smoking fish.

— Okay, that’s not entirely correct.  Samuel Champlain talked to the locals, and paid attention to what they said.  Unfortunately Champlain, while a very smart and perceptive guy, was not born an aristocrat, and also was probably half Huguenot. 


[come on, that’s a Huguenot beard if I ever saw one]

So there’s a long generation of early Canadian history that can be viewed as a debate between “It seems like Champlain has some really good ideas?” and “Pffft, Champlain is a woke girly-man who thinks we should waste our time talking to savages, what a loser”.  Team Champlain did eventually win, which is why Canada is a thing that exists.  But it took a bunch of people dying first.

 

The Middlemen

So in the years around 1700 there was this one group of Innu Indians in what’s now northeast Quebec, where the Saguenay River flows into the St. Lawrence. The Saguenay drains a huge area of central Quebec that was, back in the day, particularly rich in valuable furs — beaver, marten, fox, you name it.  And these particular Innu started trading furs with the French pretty early on. So they became the middlemen for a huge region.


[that little lake in the middle is where Maria Chapdelaine is set, if you know you know, and if you’re Canadian you probably know.]

Now, I viewed that announcement by Paul Alivisatos (the University President) the way I interpret many of that university’s public announcements during the last two decades: as a cynical, branding ploy aiming to keep the university in the eyes of influencers who may alert full tuition paying parents that they should send their kids to the UofC. In my view, in its public communication, the university has stopped trying to be the academy for would-be-academics and those closely adjacent to it.

Anyway, when I first participated in howling about Alivisatos’ announcement, the fate of skill was far from my mind. I viewed the UofC as vice-signaling its path away from all that is noble and beautiful about higher education. (I explain my position on that near the end of this post.) But I was interpreted as a techno-luddite about the role of AI. I ruminated a bit on Carlo’s essay. In response, I focus more on governance than de-skilling.

I was never an undergraduate at The UofC. But on my second day of graduate school there, I remember walking through the undergraduate library (yes, there was an undergrad library!) surrounded by kids who clearly had pulled an all-nighter mostly with Homer, but a smattering of other thick books—some were asleep with the books on the desks, while others were engaged in intense discussions with each other. The most popular T-Shirt in my time there, was ‘Where Fun Goes to Die’ (and closely followed ‘Hell Freezes Over.’) The place had an ethos centered on its undergraduate core that involved reading, discussion, and writing and that permeated it. (Graduate students often taught in The Core so it wasn’t just for the kidz.)

While I was contemplating a response to Carlo’s essay, I decided to got back to a familiar passage in the Phaedrus. I read it with fresh eyes.[1] I quote the full paragraph:

I heard, then, that at Naucratis, in Egypt, was one of the ancient gods of that country, the one whose sacred bird is called the ibis, and the name of the god himself was Theuth. He it was who invented numbers and arithmetic and geometry and astronomy, also draughts and dice, and, most important of all, letters. Now the king of all Egypt at that time was the god Thamus, who lived in the great city of the upper region, which the Greeks call the Egyptian Thebes, and they call the god himself Ammon. To him came Theuth to show his inventions, saying that they ought to be imparted to the other Egyptians. But Thamus asked what use there was in each, and as Theuth enumerated their uses, expressed praise or blame, according as he approved or disapproved. The story goes that Thamus said many things to Theuth in praise or blame of the various arts, which it would take too long to repeat; but when they came to the letters, “This invention, O king,” said Theuth, “will make the Egyptians wiser and will improve their memories; for it is an elixir of memory and wisdom that I have discovered.” But Thamus replied, “Most ingenious Theuth, one man has the ability to beget arts, but the ability to judge of their usefulness or harmfulness to their users belongs to another; and now you, who are the father of letters, have been led by your affection to ascribe to them a power the opposite of that which they really possess. For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise.—Phaedrus, 274-275, translated by Harold N. Fowler.

Naucratis was an open commercial port on the Nile that was the unique point of entry into Egypt. By  Socrates’ time had, somewhat unusually, been populated, as Herodotus attests, by Greeks for several generations. So, it is fascinating that Socrates makes the God of the Underworld, and patron of scribes, Thoth/Theuth, dwell there in that cosmopolitan port. One is made to wonder whether this God didn’t pick up the use of letters from some travelers (say Phoenicians), or invented it to mediate or judge a commercial dispute.

As an aside, I would be amazed if Socrates (or Plato) were not alluding to Herodotus in this narrative. For, according to Herodotus, Cadmus brought the Phoenician alphabet to Greece and founded Boeotian Thebes. And the fact that there are two Thebes means one must presuppose a wider world to keep them apart. That is to be distinguished, of course, from entities with multiple names.

Now, while it is tempting to rush ahead to the part of the story where deskilling is discussed, I want to pause for a second at the division of labor between Theuth and Thamus/Ammon. Theuth invents, but Ammon is the regulator who decides whether an invention can be circulated and to what extent. Wisely, these ancient Egyptians don’t let the inventor himself decide on issues of public safety and public utility. This part of the myth is usually skipped because governance is nowhere near as sexy as debating the possible deskilling effects of a new technology. Carlo’s piece nicely illustrates this, all the hard social and political challenges get solved magically in it.2

What is most notable about Ammon in his dealing with Theuth is that he focuses on two features of an invention before he gives permission to circulate it: first, its practical use. And here he is quite clearly guided by the inventor’s views. And, second, the potential harms (or, let’s be cheeky, inductive risks) involved. And notably, when it comes to foreseeing harms Ammon’s own views are more decisive than any inventors not even a God. And the reason for this is explicitly spelled out: would be inventors tend to misperceive the true nature of their inventions, primarily seeing the benefits only. I return to this below.

Obviously, Socrates is simplifying the division of labor a bit by using Ammon. Most kings may (if they know their Hobbes) wish to overawe all the citizens in a godlike fashion, but they will not be in the same epistemically advantageous decision situation as (let’s stipulate) Ammon. So, how they will judge the possible harms of new technology will be, in fact, a rather challenging governance question. And it is by no means obvious that one can foresee the harms antecedently, or that one will evaluate them with the same measures after the fact. If the technology transforms the users’ or community’s identity this becomes a serious issue. Below I suggest that Socrates points toward this possibility.

My point here is not that Socrates presents us with the right informal governance model. But importantly, he presents such a model that will allow us to think about the various considerations involved. In fact, lurking here is a more important point: the existence of art of governance is itself the effect of the invention of the very writing-technology that we are discussing here. For writing makes bureaucracy possible. (It is helpful for my interpretation that Theuth is the God of scribes.) And this raises new problems, as Plato’s Socrates alerts us.

Conveniently enough (for my new debate with Carlo), the harms Ammon is alert to in the invention of writing do involve, alongside the acquisition of a new skill (writing), some de-skilling, including the art of memory. Now, in light of the contemporary debate, one might have thought that Ammon would have made a simple cost-benefit analysis to the individual or to the population of the gaining of one skill (writing) and the loss of another (worse memory). Is writing more efficient than relying on memory? Could we create performance standards? (etc.)

But what’s interesting about Ammon’s stance is that he diagnoses an externality, actually two externalities, that are especially important to a King-Ruler. And the externality has everything to do, I think, with the fact that writing is the tool of bureaucracy. As a close reader of Plato, Rousseau (recall here), reminds us (in the Third Discourse) bureaucracies are invented when the domain to be managed cannot be surveilled by single person or family. A bureaucracy is a division of labor that is spatially and temporarily extended, and relies on proper record-keeping to manage socially complex affairs. It is introduced because a ruler cannot surveil his/her domain all at once.

But this bureaucratic managing also introduces a useful fiction: that the recorded ‘data’ convey the facts, and that the person reading the report on the data understands what they signify (up the bureaucratic chain of command). Writing makes a form of impersonal acquaintance possible. But the risk that Ammon (correctly) identifies is that the bureaucrats and those they serve (governors like Ammon himself) will “read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant.” The reader of the report will end up with knowledge of the reported reality, but not (without further instruction) with its connection to the underlying facts. And if they forget this distinction, as the written world takes on its own reality, they will seem wise when they may not be so. How to manage a bureaucracy that systematically generates this kind of vulnerability, is a central problem in the art of governance. When things remain on the rails, this challenge is usually invisible to most. But when it goes off the rails — public infrastructure is not repaired, corruption goes unpunished, etc. — it is often too late for minor fixes (not the least in circumstances of emergency that Carlo acknowledges).

The written word, when used as a technology of governance, inevitably creates legibility (of the population and society) and simultaneously all kinds of new opacities. As I have noted before (recall here), this is a design feature of modern LLMs, whose internal architecture and the process by way which they convey content, remains largely opaque to end-users (especially in real time). This is especially important because the error rates of LLMs remains non-trivial. This output externality is only visible if you look, expert enough, and care to notice.

I could stop here. But I promised a second externality as noted by Ammon. And this is a more important social externality: the users of a new technology will feel more confident. And, let’s stipulate, their confidence is not misplaced. Like Carlo’s ‘off-loaders’ they get more important things done in less time. Unfortunately, human nature being what it is, it will encourage boasting and self-aggrandizement. And, even if this self-satisfaction were fully merited, as Ammon recognizes this is a dynamic that predictably generates social instability. Not the least because off-loading boasters refuse to be bothered by the real challenges new technology introduces. The ethos of a polity may change for the worse with new technology—and it doesn’t take much imagination to discern that Ammon is worried about new idols and new modes. This may be inevitable, and some communities are willing to pay the price.

Now, Carlo treats the university as a site of skill-transference, and in which Claude is one tool of many. And this is no surprise, because if you return to the press release of Alivisatos’ statement, you will see that the key word in it is ‘tool’ which is repeated over and over. Tools are used. And that’s how President Alivisatos sells his message.

But he doesn’t convey at all that he has evaluated the risks (a word he does not use which is notable for a modern executive) and externalities a new tool predictably generates for the ‘community’ (his word) that he has been charged to lead. All he notes are the “astonishing and inspiring ways” of the new tool. He sounds more like enthusiastic Theuth than prudent Ammon. Hence my complaint that he is vice-signaling.

In fairness, to Alivisatos (who was an undergraduate at the UofC): when you read the full press release, he is setting up a quite elaborate governance structure for new AI. So, it is quite possible that he has assimilated the first lesson I wished to derive from Socrates’ myth. But I don’t think a fair reading of his text suggests he is signaling concern over or apt care about what might be lost in the process (which is what motivated my original lament).

Even so, I used the language of governance throughout this post, because I was most struck by his message to his students:

To our students: Many of you already are reflecting on how a skeptical, ethical, and ambitious approach to AI applies to your education. Your faculty and instructors are developing practices in the classroom within a philosophical framework to support you in opening and sharpening your mind during your journey here. That framework will prepare you well to meet the opportunities of a changing world. You can understand more about how your faculty are thinking about helping you to learn by reading about a recent series of workshops sponsored by the Center for Teaching and Learning. Policies vary by course, and you are required to follow them closely; but the sum across your full curriculum will give you diverse learning experiences with and without AI assistance. Instructors at all levels are navigating a fast-evolving landscape, and the University has a duty of care to ensure that the education offered to you is responsive to these technological developments by teaching you how to think with machines, how to think without them, and how to think about them.

There are a lot of action words in this paragraph (e.g., reflecting, developing, reading, navigating, and teaching not to least how to think) and a few technocratic terms (e.g., framework, opportunities, policies, diverse learning experiences, landscape)), including a few commands (required). What’s notably absent in this message are reading, interpretation, and (most notably) discussion. That’s not just a matter of vocabulary. Something has gone off the rails here, and by this I don’t mean the total absence of reference to the world of books and intellectual culture in his message.

Back in the day (and I amplified with some twists), Agnes Callard argued that “A university is a place devoted to the problem of how to make serious use of free time.” It would be wrong to suggest that the proper use of intellectual tools has no place in this vision of the academy. But as Callard notes such a university presupposes what she calls ‘inquisitive leadership.’ President Alivisatos’ rhetoric is very far from it. He leads not by teaching and learning here, but by cheerleading and commanding.3 And this is why I called it, vice-signaling.

• An earlier version of this post was first published at D&I.