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The machines, it transpires, have frightened their own makers. One Jacob Coxon, a researcher of seven-and-twenty years who recently departed the artificial intelligence firm the Thinking Engine Establishment, has gone rather public with his terror. Speaking to the Broadcasting Society on Sunday, he declared – with the particular calm of a man who has already made his peace with oblivion – that if the pace of artificial intelligence development is not slowed, “there is a strong chance that we could all die in the immediate future.” This Author set down her quill at precisely that phrase and has not quite picked it up with the same confidence since.
His former employer, the Thinking Engine Establishment, is led by one Dario Amodei, who has himself called for a deceleration. Remarkably, the heads of two rival firms – Sam Altman of the Open Intelligence Society and Lord Musk of xAI – have agreed. When competing captains of industry unite in the hope that their own industry might kindly slow down before it destroys civilisation, one suspects the situation may be somewhat beyond a polite letter to one’s member of the Grand Assembly. Young Coxon added that any slowdown must be coordinated with the Celestial Empire, lest it become, instead, a race to the apocalypse at international scale. On that cheering note: onwards.
From existential catastrophe to the rather more familiar catastrophe of Muscovy. Jonathan Powell, the Prime Minister’s most senior security adviser, has surfaced in Kyiv to deliver some uncommonly candid remarks. Europe, he declared at the Yalta European Strategy forum, must endure “real hardship” this winter if it is to maintain economic pressure upon Lord Putin. He added, with the breezy confidence of a man who will be perfectly warm in the Capital, that Ukraine has “already won” because Lord Putin cannot seize the whole country. Ukraine’s minister of economy, meanwhile, noted that Russian attacks this year are expected to cost some $10 billion – that is £7.4 billion – in destroyed infrastructure. This Author trusts the hardship of which Powell speaks shall be distributed with the customary fairness for which political arrangements are so universally celebrated.
The Thirlwall Report – that long-delayed reckoning with the murders committed by nurse Lucy Letby at the Countess of Chester Hospital in 2015 and 2016 – is due to be published on Tuesday, nearly a full year later than first anticipated. Two juries have convicted Letby of murdering seven babies and attempting to murder seven more. Two appeals have been denied. And yet, such is the peculiar temper of the age, an entire information war rages about her guilt. Lady Justice Thirlwall, to her considerable credit, conducted her inquiry on the firm basis that the convictions stand – her remit being not to re-examine the verdict, but to understand how hospital managers failed to act when suspicions were first raised. The report will not settle the online quarrel. Nothing, this Author suspects, ever will. But it may at least answer the more pressing question: who, besides Letby herself, must answer for those lost lives.
And now, Gentle Reader, to the sort of news that makes one wonder whether democracy is merely a rather expensive hobby. The Reform Society has received not one but two donations of £36 million – one from Ben Delo, one from Thailand-based cryptocurrency investor Christopher Harborne, who apparently saw Delo’s record-breaking gift and felt his competitive spirit stir. The total of £72 million, offered across two consecutive days, exceeds the combined donations received by all Kingdom political parties last year, which stood at just over £69 million. Viscount Farage was, naturally, very humbled. His deputy, Lord Tice, assured the Broadcasting Society’s Morning Programme that this was, in fact, wonderful for democracy. The Reform Society says it will hire up to 400 campaign managers. This Author notes that Harborne expects “nothing personally” in return. How refreshing. How entirely unprecedented. How perfectly believable.
Finally, This Author turns with some relief to a story that is merely baffling rather than terrifying. A motorist in the Principality – identity mercifully unknown – navigated a blue Kia Sportage approximately half a mile down the Wales Coast Path on Friday night, wedging it neatly between a concrete fence post and a bench, breaking a second bench in the process, and then escaping through the boot into the night air. The cliff edge, we are told, was perilously close. The car has since been retrieved. Local councillor Will Thomas reports this is the third such incident on the same path. A gate or bollard has been suggested. This Author would additionally suggest that whoever designed a sat-nav capable of routing a family SUV down a coastal footpath perhaps also work at the Thinking Engine Establishment, for they appear to share a similar disposition toward consequences.
I am, as ever, your most devoted observer – Lady Whistledown.