Last week, the news paid open-ended attention to the loss at sea of the Titan submersible and its wealthy crew. Days earlier, the plight of 750 people, many of them children, on the sunken Adriana didn’t even make the top story on the bulletins I saw.

Ours can’t have been the only sofa in Britain on which the comparison was made with dismay.

On the LRB Blog, Michael Chessum suggests:

The mass drowning of migrants does not meet the media’s criteria for a human-interest story because the victims have been dehumanised. Centuries of racist conditioning have led us to this point, but there is a new strategy at work, too. Donald Trump and Suella Braverman have an air of performative stupidity, and it comforts the liberal commentariat to believe that the far right’s spell in power is a blip. But their project is deadly serious and for the long term. Trump’s ‘big, beautiful wall’ and the UK government’s plan to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda would have been unthinkable twenty years ago. The core narrative of the nationalist right, that migrants and foreigners are to blame for falling living standards, now dominates the mainstream. It feeds popular demand for the militarisation of our borders.

I’m not certain that I fully agree: I think there’s an element to which the loss of life of migrants has become normalised and ‘expected’, whereas the Titan story was unlike any story we’ve heard in recent years. Yet, the balance of coverage—not to mention the relative willingness of nation-states to spend money on each rescue effort—did feel like an upsetting new low to me.

Twenty years ago, Aaron Sorkin tried to shock us by including a ballsy line in the fourth season of The West Wing making the case that, from the President’s perspective, ‘a Kundunese life is worth less than an American life.’¹

These days, it’s no longer the shocking subtext: it’s beamed into each of our homes in full technicolour, so routine that it no longer attracts on-air comment.

1. Equatorial Kundu is one of Sorkin’s most successful fictional countries, originating in The West Wing, making a cameo in The Newsroom, escaping the Sorkin universe in iZombie, and turning up in any number of fictional exercises and assignments. Qumar never quite caught on in the same way. ↩

I’ve never ventured into a branch of Home Bargains (or ‘Home and Bargain’ as it was called when I was growing up in its home county). But this neat fact from Andrew O’Hagan’s latest in The LRB was startling nonetheless:

Sales at Home Bargains (‘Top Brands. Bottom Prices’) have increased by £3.4 billion. Home Bargains has nearly 600 stores throughout Britain and the company’s owner, Tom Morris, enjoys the excellent designation of being the richest Liverpudlian in history. For fans of Paul McCartney, it’s depressing to find that there’s a lot more money in disposable toilet wipes than there is in writing ‘Love Me Do’.

Well, then.

There’s a typically brilliant piece by Liam Shaw on the LRB blog right now about the recent use of an AI tool to assist in the discovery of an antibiotic: abaucin.

There is much important detail in Shaw’s blog which was missing from most of the media coverage on this topic. Most crucially from a health perspective, this antibiotic is likely to be useful only in topical applications (onto the skin) whereas the majority of harm from the single species the antibiotic treats—Acinetobacter baumannii—is from sepsis. It is a significant discovery, but mostly in the sense of being a staging post on the long road of development, rather than as an end in itself.

Shaw is also specific about the techniques used, and their limitations:

As well as powerful neural networks, the machine learning model depends on the existence of carefully collected data from thousands of experiments. It’s still a vast screening project, just not as vast as it would be without the AI component: it uses the data to find the best ‘ready to use’ molecule from the available options.

The discovery of abaucin shows that AI is helpful for the early stage of winnowing down the vast space of chemical possibility, but there’s still a lot to do from that point onwards.

This is useful because it feels like we are in a moment where ‘AI’ is used to refer to myriad things, and using the term on its own is not very helpful. It feels akin to the early 2000s, when a whole group of technologies and applications were referred to as ‘the Internet’ (always capitalised) as though they were a single entity.

It’s notable that the abaucin study didn’t refer even once to ‘artificial intelligence,’¹ but used the somewhat more specific term ‘deep learning.’

When so many technologies, from large language models to recommendation engines to deep learning algorithms to theoretical artificial general intelligence systems are all condensed into two letters—AI—it doesn’t aid understanding. I’ve spoken to people this week who have interpreted the headlines around this to mean that something akin to ChatGPT has synthesised a new antibiotic on request—an understandable misunderstanding.

When scientists are warning about AI threatening the future of humanity, they aren’t talking about chatbots—yet you’d be hard-pressed to discern that from breathless headlines that refer to anything and everything as simply ‘AI’. In just a handful of days, even the well-respected BBC News website has published articles with headlines referencing ‘AI’ about drone aircraft, machine learning, delivery robots and image generation: all entirely different applications of a very broad class of technology.

If we’re to have sensible conversations about the ethics and regulation of AI technologies, I think there’s much to be done to try to help the public understand what exactly is being discussed. That ought to be the job of the news. Currently, it feels like we’re stuck in a cycle of labelling things as ‘AI’ as a strategy to garner attention, leading to conflated ideas and complete misunderstanding.

The image at the top of this post was generated by Midjourney, whose idea of the appearance of a human brain seems sketchier that I might have imagined.

1. Though, in fairness, the press release did. ↩

Imagine that your bank has made an error and erased all records of your assets. Your life is—at least temporarily—devastated. You complain, trying to unravel exactly what’s happened. However, you hit a brick wall when the bank’s senior leaders reveal that they’re not entirely sure what transpired because the issue was discussed via WhatsApp with ‘disappearing messages’ turned on. No permanent records of the conversation were kept.

Imagine that your relative dies in hospital due to a rumoured policy that patients in their condition will not receive treatment. An investigation is launched. It reaches no firm conclusions: the discussions about your relative occurred via WhatsApp, intermingled with messages about children’s piano lessons, and it is deemed in appropriate to disclose those private conversations.

Imagine that you were arrested by the police and detained for 72 hours, without ever truly knowing why. You complain. You are informed that no-one is precisely clear why you were detained: the officers in charge raised concerns with their superiors via WhatsApp, but nobody can recall the specifics, and the phone with the messages on it has broken.

In all of these cases, I imagine you would be outraged. Your outrage would probably be directed at the lack of permanent, contemporaneous records of both the decisions and the processes through which they were made. You’d likely consider the fact that WhatsApp was used to make the decisions as strange and inappropriate, but perhaps a second-order issue.

In the context of the covid inquiry, there is a lot in the press about WhatsApp messages. Their use in Government is frequently defended based on ‘efficiency’. I am concerned that they are only really more efficient because they circumvent processes seen as bureaucratic but which are fundamental to good Government, like contemporaneous record-keeping.

I think the press underplays this issue because they don’t see it: WhatsApp is commonly used within journalism, and for communications between politicians and journalists, so journalists are hindered in being able to take a step back and see the bigger picture of how inappropriate this is.

Take a step even further back and there’s a failure that underlies scores of recent Government scandals, from Partygate, to Richard Sharp, to Matt Hancock’s resignation, to Suella Braverman’s speeding course: the pathological inability of senior politicians to separate their professional roles from their personal lives. I have some sympathy with this, given how all-consuming some senior roles can be, but this ought to lead to particular effort to impose professional boundaries: I see no evidence of this.

The image at the top of this post was generated by Midjourney.

Charlie Warzel argued this week that

Twitter has evolved into a platform that is indistinguishable from the wastelands of alternative social-media sites such as Truth Social and Parler. It is now a right-wing social network.

He points out that

In just a few months, Musk has actively worked to elevate a particular right-wing, anti-woke ideology. He has reinstated legions of accounts that were previously banned for violating Twitter’s rules and has emboldened trolls, white-nationalist accounts, and January 6 defendants.

I’m not on Twitter, and so have nothing to measure this up against. But I’d observe that we’ve seen lots of large media organisations exit the platform recently.

Hypothetically, I don’t think I could imagine a caption on the BBC’s flagship television news programme promoting their political editor’s Truth Social profile, if such a thing were to exist. Is it reasonable for them to continue to promote Twitter like that?

The image at the top of this post was generated by Midjourney.

The UK press is waiting with baited breath for publication of migration statistics at 09.30 today. Each outlet will then pick over the statistics and find a of presenting them which reinforces their pre-existing view of the world.

So, allow me to write preemptively about something completely different that’s due to be unveiled today, in a way which entirely reinforces my views.

Today, a major part of the work going into the restoration of Notre-Dame de Paris is being unveiled, as the triangular structures that make up the framework of the choir and apse begin to be unveiled. These have been made using techniques dating back to the 1200s.

We’re supposed to be awed by this, but I can’t help but feel a little depressed. In the great tradition of cathedrals, Notre-Dame included, the French could have chosen to blend spectacular history with spectacular modernism, to have explored and redefined the meaning of the cathedral for the modern age. This could have become a beacon, something to rival La Sagrada Família for demonstrating how ancient traditions apply to the twenty-first century.

Instead, the response was “put it back as it was,” using centuries-old techniques to reconstruct a centuries-old building, neither truly preserving anything (it’s newly built) nor connecting it to the modern world (it was designed to work in the 13th century). Through striving to avoid controversy, the project also avoids relevance.

Pretending things are preserved in aspic is very rarely the best way to conserve them.

This song, which is somehow more than two decades old, has been in my head while I’ve been writing this. It has northing to do with either of today’s revelations, and yet somehow feels like it connects the two:

The image at the top is by Ranopamas on Flickr, used under this licence.

I try not to rant about politics. It achieves nothing and it’s not great for my blood pressure. As I’m not willing to become a politician myself, what right do I have to throw mud from the sidelines?

But occasionally, the hypocrisy becomes too much.

The Conservative Party pushed voter ID laws through Parliament. One of the effects of this legislation was to disenfranchise millions of British citizens. The final number who were turned away from polling stations in the recent local elections hasn’t yet been collated.

Yet, yesterday’s right-leaning newspapers were inexplicably keen to celebrate that a Conservative MP who championed voter ID has written to ask the Leader of the Opposition—a man with no ability to change the law on voting before the next general election—

Why do you think it’s right to downgrade the ultimate privilege of British citizenship—the right to vote in a general election?

Huh?

The image is an unmodified version of an official Government portrait used under this licence.

Yesterday saw the World Health Organization declare the end of the global health emergency attributable to COVID-19. Today, for the UK at least, the focus shifts from a virus with a corona to, well, just the corōna.

Later, we’ll see the first United Kingdom Coronation of the century; of the millennium; of my lifetime. Or, as The Economist has it, ‘a man in London is about to be given a hat.’

Inevitably, this has made me reflect on my feelings about monarchy, which are not as straightforward as one might suppose.

Firstly—obviously—no-one would support the creation of a monarchy today. It’s absurdly anachronistic. It grants power and responsibility through birthright, it is the definition of antidemocratic, and symbolises limits on social mobility that hold us all back. Even with some elements of primogeniture having been removed, it is a system fundamentally rooted in gender inequality, perhaps never more obviously underlined than on a day when the wife of a son of a Prince Regent is crowned Queen.

Yet, I wouldn’t support an alternative. As long as the family are willing to continue to deliver the function, then having a head of state that none of us can choose, trapped in an endless stalemate of not being able to do anything meaningful without risking abolition, seems like a suitably British fudge. The system is obviously absurd and indefensible, and those—perversely—are its virtues. Instead of abolishing a symbol of inequality and suppression, let’s spend our effort on tackling inequality and suppression.

And yet, I do support disestablishment. It is absurd that monarchy gives us a state religion. It is profoundly wrong and demonstrably divisive that we have 26 English Bishops as automatic representatives of that religion in our legislature. This is the bit of monarchy that has a practical effect on all our lives, and if we’re going to abolish something, abolish that.

And this is the moment to do it. The 2021 census showed Christianity to be a minority religion in this country. Today, we anoint a King as Supreme Governor of the Church of England, alongside a Queen with whom he did not share the sacrament of marriage. Let him be the last. Let him call himself the ‘defender of faith’ rather than ‘the faith’ if it pleases him. Let’s finally separate church and state.

In 2022, more people resigned from the Government than were accused of voter fraud. More people resigned as Prime Minister than were convicted of voter fraud.

You may therefore conclude that voter fraud isn’t the biggest current threat to our democracy. Of course, though, looking only at current threats is foolhardy: we must always be looking ahead and preparing for threats that are on the horizon.

Perhaps, therefore, the Government’s decision to introduce a requirement to show photo identification when voting is a smart move.

Perhaps, too, there is a good reason why a long-expired over-60 photographic Oyster card is valid for this purpose, while a just-issued over-18 photographic Oyster card is not. It would be cynical to lazily assume that this is reflective of the typical voting patterns among card carriers in each age bracket.

Approximately two million eligible voters don’t possess photo identification, and something like 1.9 million of them have been disenfranchised from today’s election, as they didn’t apply for a voter ID card nor a postal ballot. Still more will not know the rules and be turned away when they attend a polling station, and many won’t return.

But, the Government argues, this is essential for keeping our democracy safe. And, as is little mentioned by critics, the Electoral Commission agrees.

So let’s not give into cynicism: let’s assume that there are indeed good reasons to carefully protect the process for voting for local councillors.

Let’s assume that the Government is acting in all our best interests, not the narrow electoral interests of the governing party.

Let’s agree to blithely ignore the fact that just months ago, the governing party’s internal election to select a Prime Minister was held mostly online, with no attempt to check photographic identification at any point in the voting process.

Let’s agree to see the logic that electing a Prime Minister requires less security and rigour than electing a local councillor. After all, the turnover of the former these days is much greater than the latter.

The picture at the top of this post is an AI-generated image created by OpenAI’s DALL-E 2.

Inflation is soaring,
Nations are warring,
But no issue’s more important
Than who gets to come to this country.

There’s industrial strife
And shortening spans of life,
But no issue’s more important
Than who gets to come to this country.

Our planet is burning,
Our children aren’t learning,
But no issue’s more important
Than who gets to come to this country.

We’re mining new coal
And missing key goals,
But no issue’s more important
Than who gets to come to this country.

We house people in squalor,
Tank versus the dollar,
But no issue’s more important
Than who gets to come to this country.

Hoards disenfranchised,
Leaders chastised,
But no issue’s more important
Than who gets to come to this country.

The number of people seeking asylum in the UK was 25% lower in 2022 than in 2002. Anyone saying that ‘tackling’ this is the UK’s top priority is having you on. And we obviously ought to treat people with kindness and compassion, not ship them to Rwanda.