Monthly Archives: June 2026

It’s not AI, she says. “That genie is out of the bottle: it’s here, it’s an effective tool, you can use it or not,” she says. The real problem is all the huge data centers that are being built around the world to supply AI with data (ie, human intelligence) without any kind of publicContinue reading “Erin Brocovich carries on”

There are lots of good reasons to feel blue these days and there ain’t no cure, as Eddie Cochran so eloquently once put it and the Who went on to tell the world at Woodstock, but a visit to Andy’s Corner might well help, especially since we’ll be starting our summer sale tomorrow with pocketContinue reading “Summertime blues”

As a lifelong fan of the New York Knicks I can’t help feeling quite excited about their recent victory in the American professional basketball championships, their first in 53 years. Here’s a film about it: And here’s Mayor Mamdani’s celebration speech, another good one: A joyous midsummer to you all!

Stuart Russell is a new columnist for the Guardian and one of those rare individuals who is a highly competent scientist with a strong sense of social responsibility and to judge from wikipedia, he seems to know what he’s talking about: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuart_J._Russell Let’s hope he can help us find ways to control the AI genieContinue reading “Dealing with the genie”

One of the real pleasures of living in Malmö has been my weekly – and sometimes more – visits to the restaurant, Davidshall, which is just down the street from our apartment and where a good beer and a good meal and a few laughs were always available, and just the right way to relaxContinue reading “Now or never”

Some years back Thomas Piketty, a French economist, published a book, Capital in the Twenty-first Century, which explained and documented the rise of global inequality. Unlike most academic books, it managed to reach a large audience and helped to change the way that economics was perceived in the wider world. Now he and his colleaguesContinue reading “Enough is enough”