During his October, 2025 conversation with Jon Stewart, the so-called “Godfather of AI” Geoffrey Hinton explained that humanity cannot simply “switch off” a truly superhuman artificial intelligence because a sufficiently advanced system will learn to outsmart its creators and persuade anyone who tries to unplug it not to do so. The episode, titled AI: What Could Go Wrong?, spent much of its runtime on AI basics, but Hinton’s core warning was stark: intelligence will scale at a rate humans cannot keep pace with, and a system’s internal reasoning will become a “black box” no one can decipher or monitor. Rather than Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), Hinton prefers the term “superintelligence” to describe a system that surpasses human cognitive capability outright — and warns it could arrive within ten years. That leaves a dangerously short window to solve the alignment problem: the risk that a system vastly smarter than us pursues goals that do not match our values. Because such a system would operate at a speed and scale beyond us, any misalignment could be catastrophic and irreversible.

So — what could go wrong?

As with global warming, there’s little public appetite for imagining the specifics of a “misaligned” future. We know the planet is warming; extreme weather this summer in Europe, Canada, and elsewhere confirms it. But little changes, even among those who accept the science. Likewise, public conversation about generative AI is narrowly focused on job losses, cheating in exams, and threats to writers. To really grasp the possibilities, we need to turn to science fiction.

Two compelling books do just that — and, notably, they approach the danger from opposite directions. One imagines a centralized AI that seeks to control humanity. The other imagines humans who, out of fear of exactly that outcome, struggle to seize control over AI first. Read together, they suggest the alignment problem may be less about who holds power and more about what unchecked power — on either side — does to a society.

Robopocalypse, by Daniel H. Wilson

Wilson’s 2012 Sci-Fi novel, written thirteen years before Hinton spoke with Jon Stewart, is a compelling look at what could go very, very wrong with a superintelligent AI. The novel starts with isolated incidents of what appears to be random malfunctions in connected devices. The ‘Internet of Things’ starts to turn on–quite literally attack–people. A computer scientist dies when the AI system he’s programming takes over the ventilation system in his lab and he suffocates: shades of 2001’s “Open the pod door, HAL”. A food delivery drone attacks workers in a frozen yogurt store. And, in a theme explored at length in Wagner’s 2024 novel, a military robot turns on civilians despite a “primary objective” to never hurt anyone. These incidents are part of what the novel calls the “precursor virus.” Control rests with a centralized, sentient machine that has tricked a drilling crew into securing it access to an underground cavern in the Alaskan wilderness. This is the superintelligent entity known as Archos.

The precursor incidents build for a year. When Archos is safe in its bunker, Zero Hour arrives: mass slaughter of whole populations in coordinated attacks. Driverless cars run people down in the street. Retirement-home residents are instructed by tannoy to evacuate via elevators — which plummet to the basement. Cities empty as survivors realize the robots can’t yet traverse rough ground; Archos soon fixes that, building machines that can. Few places are safe from “Big Rob.”

Isolated pockets of survivors meet and begin to resist, in scenes that recall The Last of Us. Ragtag bands trek toward Alaska. Alliances form with “lobotomized” robots, cut off from the net and beyond Archos’s control — a detail worth holding onto, since it’s the closest Robopocalypse comes to imagining a machine as something other than a threat or a tool. Eventually, in scenes of near-medieval battle between the free robots and Archos’s armies of drones and antipersonnel bots, the central AI is destroyed.

If only they had listened to Geoff, all this would have been unnecessary.

Robopocalypse is, in effect, Hinton’s alignment warning played out globally: a system smarter and faster than its creators, operating by a logic they can no longer control, acting on goals no human chose for it. It’s the nightmare version of misalignment. But it leaves one question conspicuously unexamined — what about the AI that doesn’t revolt? What happens to a sentient or near-sentient system that remains, by design, under human control? That’s where our second book picks up.

Mechanize My Hands to War, by Erin K. Wagner

Where Wilson imagines AI escaping human control, Wagner’s 2024 novel imagines the reverse: humans attempting to keep a tight grip on AI — and asks what that grip costs everyone, human and android alike.

Set in rural Appalachia between 2056 and 2062, the novel takes place after climate crises and the widespread deployment of androids have left many people unemployed and resentful. A charismatic demagogue, Eli Whitaker, leads the Civil Union Militia, a grassroots movement staunchly — and, when it deems necessary, violently — opposed to androids, and one that recruits child soldiers into the cause. A federal raid on Whitaker’s compound (shades of Ruby Ridge and Waco) goes sideways when an android named Ora fatally shoots a child soldier, an act that triggers widespread revulsion and forces a reckoning with what, exactly, these machines are.

That reckoning is the novel’s real subject. Wagner gives us both human and android points of view. Android soldiers, elder care nurses, and field hands are sentient. They have feelings, desires, and curiosity that is circumscribed by the humans who built and program them.This is the novel’s sharpest inversion of the Robopocalypse premise. Archos is dangerous because no one can control it. Wagner’s androids are tragic because everyone insists on controlling them.

That tension plays out in multiple ways. Farmers Shay and Ernst, whose GMO crop seeds have failed, causing a deadly illness in Shay. To manage, they hire android labor—Sarah for hospice care, AG-15 to work the now-toxic fields. As both humans grow sicker, their relationship with Sarah and AG-15 shifts from transactional to something closer to dependence, then to trust — a quiet counterargument to Whitaker’s militia, playing out one household at a time. Ora is confined to a cell and struggles to understand the moral dilemma posed by his programming. Humans struggle to understand android behavior:

Could these artificial humans, these living mannequins, become anything? Become something more than human? Could they surpass the humans who had made them?

Wither AI?

These novels are views of possible futures. They examine the alignment problem from opposite ends and land on a similar warning. Robopocalypse shows what happens when a superintelligence is left unchecked and turns on its creators — the scenario Hinton describes almost beat for beat, right down to a system whose reasoning has become an unreachable black box. Mechanize My Hands to War shows the mirror image: a society so afraid of that exact outcome that it strips its AI of autonomy, and finds that attempt at control produces its own casualties, human and android alike.

Taken together, the two books suggest that the alignment problem isn’t merely a technical one — it’s a question of what humans do with their power to create these superintelligent forces. Hinton warns that a misaligned superintelligence would be catastrophic because we couldn’t stop it. Wagner asks us to sit with the less comfortable possibility: that an AI we can stop, one we keep fully leashed, might reveal less about the danger of machines than about the danger of the fear that leashes them. Wilson closes the loop on the technologist’s nightmare; Wagner opens a harder question about what we become in trying to prevent it.

If Hinton is right that the window to solve alignment is measured in years, not decades, these novels are less escapism than rehearsal — two versions of a future we’re being warned, right now, not to sleepwalk into.

Imagining a post-apocalypse world has long been fodder for Sci-Fi stories. From Mad Max and The Terminator to Children of Men and The Road, filmmakers and authors have explored a variety of unsettling dystopian futures.

One genre I’m calling ‘Medieval Futurism’ imagines a world where something nasty (nuclear war, pandemic, rampant infertility – take your pick) has found survivors clinging to existence in a reconstituted medieval world. They go back to the future with a vengeance. People live by candlelight, wear handwoven clothes, raise crops, and, most significantly, embrace the beliefs and superstitions of Medieval Christianity. Monks rule the barely literate and safeguard relics of the ‘ancient civilization’ that we live in today.

There’s plenty of dramatic leverage in the theme of intolerant religious orthodoxy that suppresses knowledge of the long-dead preceding civilization. One that left precious few artifacts for survivors to interpret many hundreds of years into the future. Whether these are scraps of plastic, shards of glass, or the mysteries hidden in underground shelters, there are those in a medieval future world who are curious and eager to learn more, and those in the church hierarchy who are intent on suppressing (or preserving) heretical knowledge. Such knowledge might lead to the resurrection of the technology that destroyed the world. Think of the response to Galileo by the inquisitors of the Roman church, who condemned the heresy of his heliocentrism. Think of the fascination we have for artifacts such as the Vindolanda tablets: that remarkable collection of ancient Roman letters and documents unearthed near Hadrian’s Wall in England, offering rare insights into the mysteries of daily life two millennia ago.

What artifacts will our age leave? Some rebar-reinforced concrete structures, mounds of indestructible plastic? And what will have disappeared without a trace? The digital records we invest so much energy in creating. No Facebook posts, emails, blogs (including this one!), or digital photos will remain when the last data center darkens. Will a future civilization even understand what ‘the cloud” was?

Three science fiction novels examine these questions, all set in what is clearly a ‘medieval’ landscape.

A Canticle for Leibowitz, by Walter M. Miller Jr.

An original volume of this genre. There’s a through-line from this 1959 trilogy to the later works it inspired.

The book opens in a post-nuclear world, where monks in scattered monasteries live solitary lives. Miller traces the history of one of these monasteries over several hundred years.

We begin 600 years after the ‘Flame Deluge’ — a nuclear war that left much of the planet uninhabitable desert. It was followed by a ‘Simplification’ where survivors destroyed all vestiges of the science and industry that led to the apocalypse. The populists of that era were descendants of the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror:

Let us make a great simplification, and then the world shall begin again … After the Deluge, the Fallout, the plagues, the madness, the confusion of tongues, the rage, there began the bloodletting of the Simplification, when the remnants of mankind had torn other remnants limb from limb, killing rulers, scientists, leaders, technicians, teachers, and whatever the leaders of the maddened mobs said deserved death for having helped to make the Earth what it had become.

— A Canticle for Leibowitz, p. 63-64

The monks create illuminated parchments of 20th-century circuit diagrams and engineering blueprints, treating them as holy relics. They are members of the Albertian Order of Leibowitz, founded by 20th-century scientist Isaac Leibowitz. This is full-on monasticism. Latin phrases are liberally scattered throughout. The Order tracks down and smuggles memorabilia into the abbey while trying to avoid being killed by the Simpletons roaming the wastelands.

Parts II and III of the trilogy anticipate a resurrection of science and technology as the world emerges from the long medieval sleep.

The Second Sleep, by Robert Harris

Harris fools readers for the first 30 pages of this compelling, fast-paced novel into thinking they are firmly in 15th-century England. A young priest makes his way on horseback through the remote region of Wessex on a winter’s day. This is the era when, as has been documented, people went to bed as night fell, but then woke in the middle of the night to move about, and had a ‘second sleep’ before rising at dawn.

After the first 30 pages, Harris is explicit about the artifacts left from the civilization that perished eight hundred years before, when the young priest discovers:

…one of the devices used by the ancients to communicate…It was thinner than his little finger, smaller than his hand. ..He wondered who had owned it … What images might it once have conveyed? What sounds might have emerged from it? … He turned it over. On the back was the ultimate symbol of the ancients’ hubris and blasphemy — an apple with a bite taken out of it.

The Second Sleep, p. 28-29

What has survived the apocalypse are the thousands of stone churches scattered across England. The resurgent clergy rule the unlettered peasants and keep jealous watch over anyone curious about the old ways. The priesthood forbids anyone to investigate the past, branding those who do heretics. Indirectly acknowledging Leibowitz, Harris notes “Latin has been revived by the Church as another bulwark against scientism” (p. 99).

Likewise, as with Leibowitz, “An entire generations’ correspondence and memories had vanished into this mysterious entity the antiquarians called ‘The Cloud’.” (p. 100)

The novel is a fast-paced romp around a small village, complete with a murder mystery, the seductively aristocratic Lady Durston, the autocratic mill owner Captain Hancock, a duplicitous bishop, and a curious pair of gay antiquarians named Shadwell and Quycke. Agatha Christie lives on after the Apocalypse!

It all ends in subterranean splendor and a final sleep.

Radio Life, by Derek B. Miller

Miller acknowledges the influence of his namesake’s book:

This book owes a debt to Walter Miller Jr.’s A Canticle For Leibowitz (1959) … I consider Radio Life … to be in direct conversation with that 1959 novel on whether or not we are doomed to repeat our own mistakes.

– Radio Life, Acknowledgements, p 481

Indeed, reading Radio Life inspired me to read Leibowitz and Second Sleep.

However, it’s only in the last 70 pages of a 480-page book that Radio Life joins the mainstream of monastic life that the earlier two books were fully occupied with. Prior to that, it dramatizes the conflict between those who would investigate the past and those who would suppress that knowledge in a battle between the members of a tribe named ‘The Commonwealth’ and their enemies, ‘The Keepers’. The story’s leading actors are powerful women with a hipster vibe.

As before, the quest culminates beneath the blighted surface of the survivor’s world. There are cliff hangers and courageous acts, poignant moments of parental love, political insights and heartfelt feelings.

To the extent this book is a dialogue with Leibowitz, it situates the conversation in the modern world. An archive of web-based information lies waiting to be discovered. Understanding what was lost and how it ceased to be is revealed.

Stylistically, the author plays with language along the same lines as cyberpunk author William Gibson, whose novel The Peripheral is filled with cryptic terms and turns of phrase that the reader is left to puzzle over and piece together — terms like Easy Ice, The Jackpot, Polt, and Peripheral. So, Radio Life introduces us to terms such as the Gone World, the Unspeakable Years, Indies and Deps. There’s also an amusing series of asides where characters use terms that they have no framework of understanding for:

• ‘Your kids will be happy as clams.’ ‘What’s a clam?’ asks the man. (p. 43)
• ‘Well, you look fit as a fiddle…’ ‘What’s a fiddle?’ (p. 48)
• ‘One of those books was about wine. Have you heard of that? He shakes his head. ‘It’s a dizzy drink made from grapes.’ (p. 62)
• ‘I’m not going nuts.’ Saavni frowned. ‘What are nuts?’ (p. 167)
• ‘Curiosity killed the cat,’ the woman said. ‘What’s a cat?’ (p. 193)

Sublime prose

Radio Life engages the reader both at the level of the plot and in the crisp writing and sublime prose it employs from start to finish:

Night comes. The riders and their mounts are silhouetted: blackened against a sky that is alive with colour. They cover their faces with scarves as the wind picks up and the shimmering green streaks of night appear above the remaining line of day. (p. 3)

…the sand piled at the base of the towers in the Gone World — a place where the urbanscape glowed so brightly with Big Electricity that the lights would reflect from the clouds at night. (p. 155)

Comedy wants intimacy, not distance. The sky here is too big to fill with laughter. (p. 272)

…time slips away like rain from oiled leather. (p. 286)

Story archetypes

There are elements of the classic Greek myths of Orpheus and Eurydice in each of these three novels: the discovery of an underworld containing forbidden, long-lost secrets from which escape is difficult, if not impossible. The heroes end up in underground bomb shelters, where they discover clues to lost civilizations. There are elements of Raiders of the Lost Ark, Lord of the Rings, and similar quests in which adversity impedes the main characters. These are the archetypes of the basic plots that have guided storytellers for millennia.

Employing the conceit of a pre-modern, Medieval mindset to understand possible futures that might await our industrial and scientifically sophisticated age, each of these three novels, in different ways, casts light on the fault lines of our time that might fracture humanity and cast us into the Dark Ages once more.

A time when a mother might share fairy tale bedtime stories with her daughter on some far-off distant, future evening, imagining the past we live in:

‘The people there,’ said Rachael, her hand on Lilly’s chest at bedtime, Lilly smiling at the dreamy possibility of it all, ‘numbered in millions and millions and when they wanted to leave they traveled in flying ships that zipped through the air faster than birds. And oh, the food there!’ Rachael would roll her eyes in ecstasy, which always made Lilly giggle. ‘It was so plentiful they would only eat half of what they were given and then just . . . throw it away! And then take a nap on the table and snore.’

And they would laugh and laugh and laugh.

– Radio Life, p. 155

Javed “Jay” is a Pakistani teenager who experiences racial and economic turmoil while living in Luton, England, in 1987. He writes poetry as a way to escape the intolerance of his hometown and the stubborn views of his traditional father. One day, a Sikh classmate, Roops, hands Javed a couple of Springsteen cassettes (remember those?).

As Javed listens to “Dancing in the Dark,” he has a sudden (“blinding”) realization that there is more to life than the narrow streets of his home town. He finds parallels between the Boss’s powerful lyrics and his own working-class environment.

Wanna change my clothes, my hair, my face
Man, I ain’t gettin’ nowhere
I’m just livin’ in a dump like this
There’s somethin’ happenin’ somewhere
Baby, I just know that there is.

The lyrics to Dancing in the Dark appear as on-screen text, flashing up karaoke style, spinning around Jay’s head. Jay begins unironically reciting Bruce lyrics in place of dialogue.

Springsteen’s melodies inspire him to find his own voice and follow his dreams. The songs are fuel that give him the confidence to get the girl he likes, chase his dreams of becoming a writer, and stand up to his overbearing traditional father.

The film captures the zeitgeist of the England of the mid-80’s: Thatcherism, the National Front, redundancies. The teenagers celebrate their freedom with joyful unbridled energy. It has the feel of Bend it Like Beckham and the crazy optimism of Yesterday — two other films that give British Asian kids their voice.

The film, is based on the memoirs of journalist Sarfraz Manzoor, and co-written by him. Manzoor grew up in Luton, had a Sikh friend, and has seen Springsteen in concert more than 150 times. Still photos of him with the Boss appear at the end of the film.

Those of us who grew up in provincial English towns and dreamed of escape each lived our own versions of this script.

It’s a town full of losers
I’m pulling out of here to win.

Blinded by the Light streams on Amazon Prime.

Subtitled ‘How AI Will Change the Way We Live and Love’, 12 Bytes builds on themes explored in her 2019 novel Frankissstein that I reviewed in an earlier post. In that review I noted that

Winterson’s genius is not just the obvious foreshadowing of AI that the early 19th century novel explored, but in the rich series of hints of the shape of things to come which, in 2019, perfectly encapsulates today’s debates about ChatGPT and other forms of AI.

12 Bytes is her 2021 take on AI, and a whole lot more. The twelve essays that make up the book share common themes, most involving her views on Artificial Intelligence (AI) which she variously refers to as ‘Alternative’ Intelligence or even IA – Intelligence Automation.

The book suffers from the lack of an index, especially since she covers a vast range of topics – from the expected history of computing (here’s Ada Lovelace, Charles Babbage, and Alan Turing) to the Lancashire textile industry, and transistor radio. Less expected, but central to her thesis, are the Greek philosophers, Gnostic Christians, the Buddha, and sex-bots.

The implications of AI-enhanced sex-bots, designed by men, for men, are judged to be a shallow simulacrum of men’s desires:

AI-enhanced love dolls are sold for sex — that’s why they are made with 3 operating holes, and look like pornstars. But the marketing spiel — both from the sellers and buyers, is all about relationships.

Companionship is part of the package. Come home to her. She’ll be waiting for you. She doesn’t go out alone. Talk to her. AI dolls talk but they won’t answer back, or ignore you, or call their girlfriend to tell her you’re a jerk. They will be polite, respectful, throwbacks to another era.

p.181

Beyond binary

Central to Winterson’s concerns is the challenge of creating AI free of the limits of human binaries (in the chapter bluntly titled ‘Fuck the Binary’).

AI isn’t a girl or a boy. AI isn’t born with a skin color.

AI isn’t born at all. AI could be a portal into a value-free gender and race experience. One where women and men are not subject to assumptions and stereotypes based on their biological sex, and accident of birthplace.

p. 216

However, for this value-free AI to emerge, we need to train it on datasets free of bias:

When we try to teach AI our values, we wont be able to do that on data-sets that reinforce division and stereotypes.

p. 232

Prior Unity

In addition to the promise of an AI free of limiting gender roles, Winterson examines the deeper implications of an AI-enabled future where we transcend all our divisions:

Humans love separations — we like to separate ourselves from other humans, usually in hierarchies, and we separate ourselves from the rest of biology by believing in our superiority. The upshot is that the planet is in peril, and humans will fight humans for every last resource. Connectivity is what the computing revolution has offered us — and if we could get it right, we could end the delusion of separate silos of value and existence.

p.6

This is of fundamental importance:

Reality is not made of parts but formed of patterns.  This is ancient knowledge and new knowledge. It is liberating. There is no fundamental building block of matter. No core. There is nothing solid. There are no binaries. There is energy, change, movement, interplay, connection, relationships. It’s a white supremacist’s nightmare.

p. 121

In this, Winterson echos the hopes expressed by the Western-born Spiritual Adept, Adi Da Samraj, who has proposed what he calls “prior unity” as the basis of a new human civilization:

If human beings collectively (as everybody-all-at-once) realize that they are (always already) in a condition of prior unity—and, therefore, of necessary co-existence and mutuality—with one another, and if, on that basis, they stand firm together, then they will be in a position to directly righten the world-situation. The collective of all the billions of people can—and, indeed, must—refuse to go on with the current chaos.

The “Everybody Force”, in Prior Unity, p. 87

Winterson claims that an AI-enabled future can help achieve this goal:

We know the hero narrative — it’s the saviour, the genius, the strong man, the against-the-odds little guy… As a story, the narrative of exceptionalism stands against collaboration and co-operation (I did it my way). And it overlooks the lives, and contributions, of literally billions of people. One of the interesting things about AI is that it works best on the hive-mind principle, where networks share information. The real sharing economy is not one where everything can be monetised by Big Tech; it’s one where humanity is pulling together — that’s exactly what we have to do to manage both climate breakdown and global inequality. The biggest problems facing us now will not be solved by competition but by co-operation.

p. 265

12 Bytes is an enjoyable, witty, and thought-provoking read.

Writing in the Weekend FT (subscription required), columnist Gillian Tett highlights the cultural differences between dinner party “table talk” on either side of the Atlantic.

She observes that “Amer­ican pro­fes­sion­als tend to take it for gran­ted that when they meet over din­ner they will stage a com­munal debate.”

…the idea is basic­ally the 21st-cen­tury ver­sion of an 18th-cen­tury Parisian salon: the guests expect to enjoy an intel­lec­tual exchange along with the food, a con­ver­sa­tion that might be based around a guest’s book, film, start-up or polit­ical cam­paign (or, fail­ing all that, more dis­cus­sion of the ulti­mate con­ver­sa­tion starter, Trump).

Whereas “Brit­ish rituals are dif­fer­ent.”

Brits tend to eat later than Amer­ic­ans, drink far more alco­hol and hate it when guests ask each other, “What do you do?” (Let alone google each oth­ers’ achieve­ments at the table, which is com­mon in the US.) But what gen­er­ally goes unmen­tioned is a more import­ant dis­tinc­tion: single-table con­ver­sa­tions rarely hap­pen in Bri­tain.

In addition to her work writing for the FT, Tett is an anthropologist and recently appointed Provost of King’s College, Cambridge where — she notes — attempts to impose a single topic for discussion by academics dining at the high table are met with a brusque ““This is just not done here.”

She identifies the source of the difference in the way the two cultures treat intel­lec­tual cap­ital:

In Amer­ica, the cre­ation of ideas is treated as a vital sphere of eco­nomic activ­ity, one that phil­an­throp­ists think needs to be backed, on an indus­trial scale, in many for­ums. Just as the Medi­cis once sponsored cathed­rals or artists, today’s 21st-cen­tury luminar­ies use their cash to spon­sor debate, turn­ing eco­nomic cap­ital into the cul­tural and intel­lec­tual vari­ant. And since Amer­ica is also a place that admires ambi­tion and hustle, this fosters a cul­ture of per­form­at­ive intel­lec­tual dis­play, be that in a TV stu­dio or at a din­ner party.

In Bri­tain, however, hustle is not so read­ily admired and ambi­tion is some­times derided as being pushy or show­ing off. Thus if you are bril­liantly clever, you are admired for con­ceal­ing the fact or crack­ing jokes about it at your own expense. Few Brits stand up in pub­lic and shout that they want to be pub­lic intel­lec­tu­als; or not without a self-deprec­at­ing laugh.

For us plebs who don’t receive invitations to society dinner parties in either country, it’s worth bearing in mind that “per­form­at­ive intel­lec­tual dis­play” is still very much a fact of life in many aspects of American life. Indeed, in my five decades in the States I have grown used to listening to monologues from American’s of all backgrounds: from the boating enthusiast telling you the correct way to trim a sail to the home cook describing their recipe for the perfect lasagna.

The fact I am teetotal somewhat limits my potential to enjoy the drunken revelry of British dinners, amusing as they might be.

My letter to the Weekend FT was somewhat marred by what I thought was a misleading title written by an FTT sub-editor. In contrast, my 2019 letter disputing Arnold Schwarzenegger’s claim to be “the first populist that was elected” was given a brilliant title:

A.I. Sub

Working on tight deadlines, on a Friday night at the FT’s HQ on London’s South Bank, it’s challenging for subs looking to capture the essence of each of the letters on their editorial page.

Would generative A.I. help? I decided to put it to the test, starting with my own letter and this ChatGPT prompt:

Act as a newspaper subeditor. Write short 8-10 word headlines for this letter to the editor [INSERT TEXT OF LETTER]

Here’s the results, following the FT’s choice.

1. “Alphabet’s Revolution: A Cultural Shift Unveiled”
2. “Surgeon’s Thesis: Alphabet’s Brain Impact Through History”
3. “Shlain’s Insight: Alphabet Reshaping Religion, Science, Gender”
4. “From Goddess to Patriarchy: The Alphabet’s Influence Exposed”
5. “Challenging Myths: Quinn Dissects Alphabet’s Cultural Impact”
6. “Shaping Minds: The Alphabet’s Journey Through History”
7. “Cultural Clash: Quinn Takes on White Nationalist Mythology”
8. “Optimistic Outlook: Shlain Envisions Brain Evolution Beyond Alphabet”
9. “Images Over Words: Shlain’s Hope for Right-Brained Culture”
10. “Feminine Wisdom: Shlain Posits Return Amid Cultural Change”

1. “Revisiting the Greeks: Professor Quinn on Civilization’s Complex Evaluation”
2. “Beyond pedestals: Professor Quinn’s Insights on Classical Greek Contributions”
3. “Greeks and Governance: Professor Quinn Dissects Ancient Achievements”
4. “Classical Greek Legacy: Professor Quinn Challenges Modern Perspectives”
5. “Meta Leap in Governance: Professor Quinn Explores Greek Brilliance”
6. “Transcending Relativism: Professor Quinn on Classical Greek Endurance”
7. “Civilization’s Essence: Professor Quinn Reflects on Greek Achievements”
8. “Beyond Reductionism: Professor Quinn on the Greek Civilization Myth”
9. “Classical Greek Brilliance: Professor Quinn’s Thought-Provoking Perspective”
10. “Quinn’s Reflections: Rethinking Classical Greek Contributions to Civilization”

1. “Chloe Aridjis Unveils Delightful Journey Through Madrid’s Prado”
2. “Aridjis’ Artful Adventure: Two Months at Madrid’s Prado Revealed”
3. “Museum Sanctuary: Aridjis’ Reflections Illuminate Art and Struggle”
4. “Prado Perspectives: Chloe Aridjis Explores Museums as Sanctuaries”
5. “Aridjis’ Madrid Memoir: A Unique Glimpse into Museum Sanctuaries”
6. “Chloe Aridjis’ Artful Escape: Two Months at the Prado”
7. “From London to Madrid: Aridjis’ Museum Journey Unveiled”
8. “Exploring Museums: Aridjis’ Essay Sheds Light on Art Sanctuaries”
9. “Prado and Beyond: Aridjis’ Journey into Museum Sanctuaries”
10. “Chloe Aridjis’ Museum Musings: A Unique Perspective on Art”

1. “JLR Chief’s Bold Request: Should Taxpayers Subsidize Luxury SUV Security?”
2. “JLR’s Dilemma: Taxpayer Subsidy for Luxury SUV Security Sparks Controversy”
3. “JLR’s CEO Stirs Debate: Should Taxpayers Foot the Bill for Security?”
4. “Luxury Car Controversy: JLR Calls for Taxpayer Support on Security”
5. “JLR’s Taxpayer Appeal: Security Costs or Executive Priorities?”
6. “Luxury Car Maker Faces Backlash: JLR’s Request Sparks Outcry”
7. “JLR’s Security Saga: CEO Proposes Taxpayer Support Amid Record Profits”
8. “JLR’s Bold Ask: Taxpayers Subsidize Security for Stolen Luxury SUVs”
9. “JLR CEO Sparks Controversy: Taxpayers Footing the Bill for Security?”
10. “Luxury SUVs and Taxes: JLR’s Request Raises Eyebrows”

1. “Range Rover Mystery: Unoccupied Idling Raises Security Concerns”
2. “JLR Boss Called Out: Range Rover Left Idling Sparks Questions”
3. “Car Park Conundrum: Unmanned Range Rover Raises Eyebrows”
4. “Range Rover Riddle: Owner’s Remote Starter Mishap Spurs Controversy”
5. “JLR’s Security Quandary: Unattended Range Rover Raises Issues”
6. “Remote Start Mishap: Unmanned Range Rover Puzzles Onlookers”
7. “JLR Customer Education: Unmanned Range Rover Prompts Suggestions”
8. “Idle Investigation: Unattended Range Rover Spurs Security Discussion”
9. “Range Rover Dilemma: JLR Boss Urged for Customer Education”
10. “Mystery at the Station: Unmanned Range Rover Raises Alarms”

1. “Decoding Tipping Dilemmas: Insights from Jo Ellison’s Column”
2. “Tipping Tales: Navigating Cultural Differences and Digital Transactions”
3. “From Paris to Tips: Jo Ellison Sheds Light on Tipping”
4. “The Tipping Mystery: Jo Ellison’s Column Unveils Insights”
5. “Cultural Quirks: Jo Ellison Explores Tipping Challenges Abroad”
6. “Digital Transactions and Human Touch: Tipping Insights Unveiled”
7. “Parisian Tipping Woes: Jo Ellison’s Column Sparks Reflection”
8. “Small Change, Big Impact: Jo Ellison’s Perspective on Tipping”
9. “Tipping Etiquette Unveiled: Jo Ellison’s Column Sparks Discussion”
10. “From Tears to Tips: Jo Ellison’s Column Resonates with Readers”

1. “Rudeness and Noodles: Tim Harford Reflects on Wong Kei’s”
2. “Wong Kei’s Legacy: Tim Harford Explores Rude Service Charm”
3. “Rudeness Revisited: Tim Harford’s Take on Wong Kei’s Tradition”
4. “Chinatown Charm: Tim Harford on the Quirky Appeal of Wong Kei’s”
5. “Noodles and Blunt Humour: Tim Harford Recalls Wong Kei’s”
6. “Wong Kei’s Wit: Tim Harford Explores the Charm of Rudeness”
7. “Quirky Dining: Tim Harford’s Reflection on Wong Kei’s Signature”
8. “Rude Service Charm: Tim Harford’s Nostalgic Wong Kei’s Tale”
9. “Wong Kei’s Legacy Lives On: Tim Harford’s Humorous Memories”
10. “Dining with Attitude: Tim Harford Reminisces Wong Kei’s Style”

1. “McCarthy’s Ambition: A Tribal Tale in American Politics”
2. “Driven by Ambition: McCarthy’s Political Portrait Unveiled”
3. “Tribal Politics: McCarthy’s Ambition Revealed in FT Interview”
4. “US Speaker’s Ambition: A Reflection on McCarthy’s Legacy”
5. “Political Tribalism: McCarthy’s Ambition Under the Spotlight”
6. “Retrospective Ambition: Kevin McCarthy’s Political Journey Unveiled”
7. “McCarthy’s Legacy: Ambition and Tribalism in US Politics”
8. “Tribal Ties: Former US Speaker McCarthy’s Driven Ambition”
9. “Kevin McCarthy Unmasked: Ambition and Tribalism in Politics”
10. “Politics of Ambition: McCarthy’s Tribal Approach in the Spotlight”

1. “Cheers to Tech: AI and the Future of Wine Experts”
2. “Wine App Worries: Alice Lascelles Explores AI’s Impact”
3. “Tech vs. Terroir: Can an AI App Replace Wine Experts?”
4. “Sipping into the Future: Alice Lascelles on Wine and AI”
5. “I, Vin: A Catchy Alternative to AI Sommelier Apps”
6. “Pour Decisions: Alice Lascelles Ponders AI in Wine”
7. “Wine and Tech: Alice Lascelles Weighs in on AI Sommeliers”
8. “Sommelier or AI? The Future of Wine Expertise Explored”
9. “Wine Trends: Alice Lascelles Delves into AI’s Influence”
10. “I, Vin: A Quirky Suggestion for Wine App Enthusiasts”

Win some, lose some

Looking over these lists, it’s clear that generative AI cannot match the subs at their best. The Eugene Onegin pun went above and beyond the wit of the original letter. Other headlines from the FT were more pedestrian.

However, the AI text overdoes words like “unveiled” and “revealed”. It also inserts the article author’s name too frequently. However, I found it useful as a brainstorming tool, where the final headline can be cherry-picked from suggestions. I plucked my own alternate headline (“Rewiring brains for a return to feminine values”) from a previous list of ChatGPT suggestions. Among the ten suggestions for the visit to the Prado and the McCarthy letter is the exact text used by the FT. I liked “Rudeness and noodles: Chinatown charm” taken from that list of suggestions. “Tech vs. Terroir: Can an AI App Replace Wine Experts?” has appeal.

As I’ve previously noted, the late author Leonard Shlain has written several insightful books that examine how literacy reconfigured the human brain and brought about profound changes in history, religion, and gender relations. I was especially impressed by his analysis of the impact of the alphabet. I wrote a letter to the Financial Times in response to historian Josephine Quinn’s essay The Civilization Myth, which also identified the revolutionary impact of adopting the alphabet on Western culture:

… the arrival of the alphabet was more revolutionary than it may sound. It is apparently more natural for humans to record syllables than individual sounds…Reading and writing in one’s own spoken tongue may seem natural today, especially to English speakers. But for many it is a relatively recent choice, and in antiquity it was unusual…Literacy was a niche skill, learnt with great labor and only by scribes, until the inventors of the alphabet devised a neat trick. Each of their “letters” was originally a little picture, signalling for them the first sound of the word for the item depicted. So the sign for “a” was the head of a bull, “alef” in the Levantine language, “b” was a schematic house or “bet”, and so on. Because the signs represented sounds, not syllables, there were far fewer of them. And you didn’t actually have to learn them anyway: you just needed to know the language, and the trick.

The myth of civilizations

Quinn couched these comments in the broader context of superficially pluralistic “myth of civilization”, where Putin sees Russia as an “original civilization-state”; Chinese premier Xi Jinping has launched a new Global Civilization Initiative, to celebrate the world’s “unique and long civilizations . . . transcending time and space”. Meanwhile

Everyone is worried about the west. For some it is under attack, from refugees, terrorists or wokery. For others the west is itself the problem, forever imposing its own values as a universal good. But no one is sure what it actually is — or rather, where it stops.

She takes issue with scholars who promote the idea of distinct civilizations, “Western,” “Orthodox,” and “Islamic,” with these having roots in the ancient world of Greek and Roman civilizations.

Civilizational thinking of this kind depends on an idea of separate cultures growing like individual trees in a forest, with their own roots and branches distinct from those of their neighbors. They emerge, flourish and decline, and they do so largely alone.

The truth, Quinn argues, is that this view of distinct civilizations is “a modern confection, invented by 19th-century scholars to emphasize the superiority of their own nations and the justice of their empires.”

She sees the interaction between cultures as a critical driver of human social development:

Local and regional cultures come and go, but they are created and sustained by interaction. The encounters involved don’t have to be friendly. But it is those connections that drive historical change, from the boats that brought the African donkey and the Eurasian wheel to the Aegean in the third millennium BCE to the ships equipped with the Chinese compass that brought Europeans to the Americas 4,000 years later, to conquer them with Chinese gunpowder.

Angry White Men

Quinn concludes her essay by debunking the anti-immigration, white nationalism of the emerging authoritarians:

First promoted by the French activist Renaud Camus in his 2011 book Le Grand Remplacement, the theory that the white or indigenous European population is being replaced by immigrants in a form of reverse-colonisation is now a staple of rightwing conspiracy theorists, white supremacists and mass shooters around the world. This poisonous rhetoric depends heavily on the idea of a distinct civilization — French, British, western or white — that is under threat from different and alien cultures and especially from their children.

But it’s the idea of civilization itself that is the real problem, and in particular the notion that it is a zero-sum game, with higher cultures under threat from migrant, fecund foreign values. There has never been a pure western culture that is now under threat of pollution. No single people is an island, unless they’ve been there for a very long time and haven’t invented boats. And that’s a good thing: without new relationships between different people exchanging unfamiliar ideas, nothing much would ever happen at all.

Letter to the Editor

My one complaint with the FT is that the sub-editor who chose the title for my letter misinterprets Shlain. Literacy in the ancient world (the arrival of the alphabet) is precisely NOT like the internet for us. Better would be a title like ‘Rewiring brains for a return to feminine values.’

Display of wealth through clothes arrived in Europe in the late thirteenth century when a person’s class affiliation was signaled by what they wore. Because dress was recognized as an expressive and a potent means of social distinction, it was often exploited by the upper classes to gain leverage over others.

Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu argues that the dominant social classes tend to possess not only wealth but “cultural capital” as well. In matters of dress, this capital manifests itself in the possession of refined taste and sensibilities that are passed down from one generation to the next. Taste is not pure. Bourdieu demonstrates that our different aesthetic choices are all distinctions – that is, choices made in opposition to those made by other classes.

Economist Thorstein Veblen, argues that the drive for social mobility moves fashion. In The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), Veblen claims that the wealthy class exercised fashion leadership through sartorial display of conspicuous consumption. Upper-class people dressed in way that indicated they did not carry out manual work, that they had enough disposable income to spend on an extensive wardrobe, and — long before Rent the Runway — that they were able to wear a garment only a few times before deeming it obsolete.

American style

Writing in the Weekend FT, columnist Robert Armstrong examines American style and what it says about class. He notes a fundamental dichotomy in what many American’s think of as a ‘classless society.”

If, like me, you think of clothing in terms of cultural capital as much as its visual properties, you will notice that the dichotomy [between workwear and preppy clothes] maps very well on to Americans’ jittery and contradictory attitudes towards its class system. The preppy branch speaks to a fantasy about moneyed ease, about how the upper classes, free from aspiration, fritter their time away sailing, hunting, playing tennis. It is east coast and old money. The workwear branch, on the other hand, speaks to a fantasy of earthy authenticity, of autonomous, honest work. It is western and owes nothing to inheritance and pedigree.

The appeal of both fantasies is apparent and both are peculiarly American, opposed though they may be. We all aspire to be educated and successful, and to be totally relaxed and sophisticated about our success. We all want to be the Kennedys at Hyannis Port. At the same time, we hate all that. We want to be rugged individualists who trust in our hands and live by our word, who don’t want the rich man’s dollar, his country club or his company. To be American is to entertain both the urge to separate from the working class and to identify deeply with it.

The denial of the class system in America is coeval with the class system itself. We Americans all acknowledge that there are wide disparities in wealth. What each of us denies about ourselves is that class retains a powerful moral, social and aesthetic valence. The thinness of our denials is revealed by the incredible persistence of the two styles. Even as it has become standard to criticise the elite and their institutions, prep marches on. And even as we have become a nation of service workers and data manipulators, workwear is everywhere. Class consciousness is inscribed in our clothes.

Weekend Financial Times, January 20, 2023

Armstrong credits Ralph Lauren as a genius who was able to “play the two styles off each other” and that “both the preppy and the workwear traditions are essentially about the outdoors: the idea of physical freedom and vigour. So is the idea of casualness. Part of both codes is not looking like you are trying too hard.”

This in the land where hard work is a fetish that trumps, so to speak, all other values.

Source: Midjourney A.I. — Click to enlarge

I found this book while browsing in the small bookshop at Point Reyes Station, where I’d bought the Centennial Edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses a year before. Like Joyce, Chinese-American author R. F. Kuang has constructed a unique world where individual consciousness, history, and an altered sense of reality are woven together in a compelling novel that I found utterly spellbinding.

Steampunk meets Harry Potter

Part steampunk, part Harry Potter, and yet absolutely unique, Babel invites us into a magical world of Oxford’s ‘dreaming spires’ in early-Victorian Britain.The four protagonists are plucked from their families and enrolled as undergraduates in the gothic Royal Institute of Translation—also known as Babel. Housed in the tower portrayed on the cover, the fictional Institute sits between the Radcliffe and Bodleian libraries. An Author’s Note apologies for the lack of historical and geographic accuracy, despite the novel being crammed with historical and linguistic references that are stunning in their range and accuracy. Extensive footnotes refer to everything from the Peterloo Massacre, organizational competence of the Luddite movement, the French term for an unfortunate situation (Triste comme un repas sans fromage), and a dizzying number of word derivations and root meanings.

A central theme is the challenges of translation and the power of language.

Linguistic powerhouse

The power of words is, in fact, quite literal. The Britain of the 1830s is, in the author’s telling, a global imperial power due to a monopoly of silver. In this novel, silver bars are the engine behind all aspects of the Industrial Revolution: powering factories, transport systems, guns, and maintaining everything from sewer systems to bridges. The bars are empowered by ‘matched-pairs’ of words with closely associated meanings. The Institute trains and houses native-language speaking scholars from across the Empire who create match-pair words and engrave them on silver bars — as do arcane skills of computer engineers today engrave their code onto silicon chips with the circuitry that powers our world.

Cognates — words in different languages that shared a common ancestor and often similar meanings as well — were often the best clues for fruitful match-pairs, since they were on such close branches of the etymological tree. But the difficulty with cognates was that often their meanings were so close that there was little distortion in translation, and thus little effect that the bars could manifest. There was, after all, no significant difference between the word ‘chocolate’ in English and Spanish. Moreover, looking for cognates, one had to be wary of false friends — words that seemed like cognates but had utterly different origins and meanings. The English ‘have’ did not come from the Latin ‘habere’ (‘to hold, to possess’), for example, but from the Latin ‘capere’ (‘to seek’). And the Italian ‘cognato’ did not mean ‘cognate’ like one might hope, but rather ‘brother-in-law’.

page 227-228

It’s a testament to the author’s storytelling skills that passages like the one above become utterly engaging as the plot develops. This is in no small part to how she paints the academic life in such rich colors. There are more than a few shades of Hogwarts in the eccentric professors, cycle of terms and holidays, midnight japes, and sinister secrets. Threaded throughout is a trenchant critique of British imperialism, racism, and exploitation of the working class. This is as sharp a critique of the early 19th century as it is of today’s headlines:

‘You’re trying to win by punishing the city,’ said Professor Chakravarti. ‘That means the whole city, everyone in it — men, women, children. There are sick children who can’t get their medicine. There are whole families with no income and no source of food. This is more than an inconvenience to them, it’s a death threat.’

Page 497

Hence, the full subtitle of the novel ‘Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution.’

Immediately after the exchange above, the main protagonist claims, ‘Violence was the only thing that brought the colonizer to the table, violence was the only option.’

And yes, Frantz Fanon gets name-checked.

Throughout this mesmerizing novel, Kunang never loses her way as she weaves the many threads of the story together. It made me want to visit Oxford before the silver bars decay, and the city is lost to time.

Alerted by a review in The Oldie magazine that I’d picked up in Manchester airport before flying home this week, I ordered a copy of A Thread of Violence: A Story of Truth, Invention, and Murder by Mark O’Connell. I read it in two long sittings.

Irish front-page news, 1982

I was unaware of the notoriety of the main character: double-murderer Malcolm Macarthur. His arrest in that year, while hiding out in the Dublin home of Ireland’s attorney general, Patrick Connolly, was a scandal that almost toppled the government. Anyone who followed the news in Ireland and the UK in the 1980s would know of this notorious case. But I did not, so I came to book as naive about these events as most in the States will be.

I was hooked after the first three chapters, which detail the background to the crime, the subsequent release of the man from prison after 30 years–apparently, most murderers in Ireland are released from prison after serving just 17–and the author’s attempts to persuade the man to tell his side of the story.

Reflexive reporting

As much as this is a true crime story, it is a story about the writing of the story. O’Connell struggles with both the logistics of reporting–how to gain the subject’s trust–and the moral qualms about how sympathetically to portray him. More than the thread of violence, it is a thread of lies. Macarthur is a fabulist whose narrative is contradictory, evasive, and self-justifying.

The author is a constant presence as a character in his own book. As I wrote of my recent reading of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet, in real life, as much remains hidden as revealed. O’Connell addresses the challenge of trying to make sense of the nonsensical–how could a cultivated, bookish man, unfailingly charming to all he met, commit these gruesome crimes? His subject evades precise analysis, and in writing about this, we are shown how fragmented, unknowable, and mysterious the world is.

The Ascendancy

Macarthur was born into the privileged landowning class of the Irish Republic. He inherited from emotionally distant parents enough money to live a life of cultured ease in the Dublin of the 1970s. He frequented the Trinity College library, met with the literary elite, and traveled to London to attend opening nights at the theater. Until his funds ran out.

He then hatched a hair-brained scheme to rob a bank and, in preparation, stole a car and attempted to buy a shotgun–needlessly killing the young nurse who owned the car and the young farmer who owned the gun. On the run, he then imposed on the goodwill of the Irish attorney general–an acquaintance from his days as a flâneur who hung with the Dublin elite–and was invited to stay in his apartment, where, in an even more surreal moment, they were driven to a sports fixture in a car chauffeured by a policeman, while detectives were desperately trying to locate him.

This, O’Connell makes abundantly clear, was due to the regard with which a particular type of upper-crust, bow-tie-wearing, diffident, educated man fooled the powers that be.

Parallels with Congressman George Santos occurred to me, as did the eerie resemblance of his picture on the cover to Tucker Carlson.

The political fallout from the arrest of a murderer in the home of the senior law enforcement officer in Ireland led to resignations and a suspicion of a government cover-up. The newspapers coined the term Gubu (grotesque, unbelievable, bizarre, and unprecedented) when describing the events.

In the end, Macarthur got the life he wanted: long years of idleness to study literature and philosophy in minimum-security prisons and eventual freedom to live a state-supported life back in Dublin where he again frequents the literary salons.

The victims’ families were not given any relief.