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  • Tracey Jones: Mind Management Mentorship for our Next Generation

    Tracey Jones

    Why is ‘introspective reflection’ critical for our society? And more importantly, our education system.

    As we are aware the mental health crisis among younger generations, including children, teenagers, and young adults, is a serious and growing concern in many parts of the world, supporting our younger adults and our society as a whole is becoming even more prevalent.

    We seem to have lost the ability to use our critical thinking skills and creativity especially when it comes to the emotional problem solving which enables us to deal with setbacks.

    I believe it involves addressing the challenges posed by traditional systems and embracing innovative approaches to learning.  Encouraging students and adults to think independently and analytically preparing them to tackle real-world challenges and adapt to a rapidly changing global landscape.

    A study in ‘active people HR’ stated that almost half (45%) of businesses offering tech roles claim that candidates applying for entry-level positions lack core technical skills, despite holding a relevant degree, and more than a quarter (26%) think they lack soft skills, according to new data.

    By embracing these strategies such as introspective reflection, educational systems can evolve to better support the next generation, equipping students with the skills, knowledge, and mindset needed to thrive in the 21st century. Building the capacity to learn these skills will inevitably have a knock-on effect to our economy.

    What do I mean by introspective reflection? It refers to the process of looking inward, examining one’s own thoughts, feelings, and experiences in a deep, contemplative, non-judgmental manner. It involves self-examination and self-awareness, where individuals reflect on their values, beliefs, goals, and actions to gain insight into themselves and their lives.

    Navigating complexities of introspective reflection is the main part of my work, where individuals can often reach a tipping point of burnout and struggle with diverse life transitions. Whether stemming from work-related challenges, media exposure, financial changes, selling a business, or transitioning from a specific career. Providing support during these critical moments brings me a profound sense of harmony as I impart knowledge and wisdom, empowering individuals to introspect, realign, reassess, and ultimately progress equipped with a stronger toolkit.

    Through creating an awareness and teaching people the ‘how’, individuals can better understand their emotions, motivations, and behaviours, leading to increased self-awareness and personal growth. Enabling people to elevate emotional literacy which in turn lowers stress and anxiety. Learning key pieces of information about themselves enables individuals to make greater informed decisions.

    Understanding the mind in this way can indeed contribute to creating a stronger and more cohesive society and it can help individuals navigate conflicts more effectively. By understanding cognitive biases, emotional triggers, and communication patterns, people can approach disagreements with greater understanding and seek constructive solutions.

    On a visit to Nepal last summer, I was grateful to have spent 9 days within the Kopan Monastery where I often watched Buddhist monks engage in a unique form of debate known as  “Monastic Debate”. This practice involves rigorous intellectual exchanges where monks engage in respectful argumentation to explore and deepen their understanding of Buddhist teachings and philosophy.

    Monks present and defend their viewpoints, challenge each other’s assertions, ask probing questions, and engage in critical analysis. The atmosphere is one of mutual respect, seeking truth, clarifying concepts, and sharpen one’s own understanding.

    The practice of debate also encourages active listening, empathy, and understanding of differing viewpoints. By engaging in respectful dialogue and considering diverse perspectives, monks cultivate compassion, tolerance, and open-mindedness, which are essential qualities for building strong relationships. Whilst I would watch these debates, it made me highly aware that we could learn so much from these ancient traditions.

    By exploring the depths of our minds and mastering techniques to strengthen our resilience and maintain equilibrium in times of hardship, we set out on a quest to comprehend a new language – the intricate dialect of our individual minds. Consider the transformation that could unfold if we were to systematically enhance social and emotional learning from early childhood to university, nurturing deeper understanding and wisdom each passing year within the educational framework. In the span of two decades, such dedication would undoubtedly shape a profoundly altered society.

    This form of understanding does require, patience and discipline. I feel that too often in today’s fast-paced society, where 10-second social media reels dominate our screens and attention spans, the virtues of tolerance and patience are facing unprecedented challenges. The constant barrage of quick, flashy content has created a culture of instant gratification and impatience, making it increasingly difficult for individuals to practice empathy, understanding, and restraint in their interactions with others.

    As we scroll through an endless stream of bite-sized information and entertainment, our ability to engage in deep reflection and thoughtful dialogue is eroded. The pressure to keep up with the rapid pace of online discourse can lead to snap judgments, and a lack of willingness to listen and consider differing viewpoints.

    By consciously choosing to disconnect from the relentless buzz of 10-second reels and instead engage in meaningful, face-to-face interactions, we can begin to rebuild our capacity for empathy, tolerance, and patience. It is through these deliberate acts of introspection and self-awareness that we can reclaim our ability to navigate the complexities of modern life with grace and understanding.

    As we worked through a pilot last year within schools for our Personal Growth Programme for 16–24-year-olds, we came across resistance from some of our teachers. The resistance being, “we don’t have time to work through the programme, we have so much to do”.  They understood the need for such a programme, however, teachers found themselves ensnared by the pressures of preparing students for statutory exams.

    The relentless focus on academic achievement leaves little room for nurturing essential soft skills and well-being techniques in the classroom. As teachers strive to meet rigorous curriculum requirements and ensure that students excel in standardised tests, the vital aspects of emotional intelligence, resilience, and mental well-being often take a back seat.

    The limited time and resources available are stretched thin, leaving educators grappling with the challenge of balancing academic rigor with the holistic development of their students. In this environment, the crucial task of equipping young minds with the tools to navigate life’s challenges and thrive beyond exam halls becomes a daunting and overlooked endeavour.  Whilst working through the pilot this was evident to us within the schools that we worked in. We were also made aware by one teacher that our platform needed to be more TikTok style to engage the young students. However, we decided not to go down this path as our programme is an in-depth transformational programme.

    We believe that wisdom and knowledge cannot be taught in 10 second bite size reels. It can create an awareness of a subject matter; however, the PAL programme is called ‘Preparation for Adult Life’. It does what is says on the tin. To work through the programme takes patience, time and reflection utilising our very own ‘introspection reflection education model’.

    The platform has over 400 minutes of content combining a whole host of methodologies that will support young adult in preparation for the workplace. Enabling them to build empathy, resilience, communication skills. We delve into their values and beliefs enabling them to understand themselves on a much deeper level. We were also proud to have worked alongside the ILM (Institute of Leadership and Management) bringing the age level of certification down from 18 to 16 years old.

    What surprised us whilst working through this pilot was that many of the educators wanted to personally work through the programme themselves and as a result we rewrote parts of it, created a new platform and made it more adult centric. This programme is called ‘Preparing to Lead Oneself’ (PGP Personal Growth Programme) we are currently piloting this version with over 100 educators. The feedback after 8 weeks within one establishment is “ I’m already seeing a shift with the mindset and language with our staff’.

    As we reflect on the impact of these pressures within our young adults and educators, it becomes evident that a shift in educational priorities is imperative to foster a generation equipped not only with academic prowess but also with the essential life skills needed to flourish in an ever-changing world. This is why collaboration among communities, schools, families, and policymakers is crucial in tackling the mental health crisis impacting today’s society.

     

    For more information go to: https://tjlife.net/

     

  • News: Barristers and judges have the largest gender pay gap, new study says

    Finito World

     

    A new study has named the occupations with the largest gender pay gaps in the UK. Barristers and judges have the largest gender pay gap, according to a new study. Financial managers and directors have the second largest gender pay gap.

    Personal injury experts at Claims.co.uk examined data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) to discover which occupations have the largest gender pay gaps. They collected the male and female median hourly earnings and calculated the differences in pay for each occupation, thus determining which ones have the largest gender pay gap percentage.

    Barristers and judges are at the top of the ranking, with the largest gap between male and female hourly earnings. Female barristers and judges earn an astonishing £8.31 less an hour than their male counterparts, meaning they are paid 29.1% less than men in this occupation.

    Financial managers and directors are close behind in second place, with women being paid approximately £11.56 less an hour than men in the same occupation. This leaves female workers in this occupation being paid a staggering 28.8% less than their male equals.

    The occupation with the third largest gender pay gap is web design professionals, where women are paid £6.32 less an hour than men, or 27.7% less than their male counterparts.

    Production, factory and assembly supervisors take fourth place, where female workers earn 26% less than male workers, or £4.46 less an hour. Assemblers of vehicles and metal goods are in sixth place. Female assemblers earn £3.74 less an hour, equating to 23.5% less than male assemblers.

    Meanwhile, Vehicle technicians, mechanics, and electricians have the sixth largest gender pay gap, with women being paid £3.28 less an hour, or 22.4% less than men. In seventh place is education managers, where women earn 22% less than men, which is equal to £6.03 less an hour.

    Similarly, female nursery education teaching professionals also earn less than their male counterparts – 21.2% less to be exact – placing them eighth. That is equal to women earning £5.10 less an hour than men in this occupation.

    Production managers and directors in construction are in ninth place, with female workers earning £5.03 less an hour than men – this equates to women being paid 21% less than men in the same occupation.

    Tenth place goes to newspaper and periodical journalists and reporters. Female journalists and reporters earn 20.6% less, or £4.32 less an hour than males.

  • As the House of St Barnabas closes we look at the future of Private Members’ Clubs

    Costeau reports on how the cost of living is affecting one of Mayfair’s oldest institutions: the Private Members’ Club

    As Costeau walks into 5 Hertford Street, he receives that jolt of self-importance which he has learned to distrust: there is a sense, which surely must be foolish, that one has somehow arrived. Isn’t that Robin Birley sitting over there? Didn’t that tall chap used to chair the Conservative Party? And I seem to remember that woman has a title which she only uses when she comes in here.

    Of course, 5 Hertford Street has an immaculate aesthetic, the bloodline of which one might trace back past Robin Birley, through his father Mark Birley – also the founder of Annabel’s and a myriad others – back to his father Sir Oswald Birley, the middling portrait-painter. Part of its pleasure is the sense of a very plush warren, where some of the most important meetings are taking place in some attic or anteroom whose existence you certainly wouldn’t intuit in the foyer.

    Oswald Birley, Self-Portrait

     

    Even so, as nice as it all is, the suspicion remains that people join Private Members’ Clubs not just because they’re convenient, but also to say they’ve joined them. There is perhaps a certain commercial power to saying to a prospective client: “Let’s meet at my club.” This sentence alone suggests the existence of disposable income, and therefore success.

    When I speak to an ultra-high-net-worth individual who seems to be a member of almost all the clubs of London, including Alfred’s where the Dover sole is especially to be recommended. “This is my kitchen,” he says, with a gesture at the whole of Mayfair, not referring to one of these clubs, but to all of them.

    The job opportunities in these places mirror those in the broader hospitality industry, marrying up the possibilities of working in a Michelin Star dining setting with working in a luxury hotel. One manager tells me candidates wouldn’t stand a chance of success without “discretion, presentability and perhaps a quiet enjoyment of the finer things in life” – even if you are serving people who are experiencing those finer things and not experiencing them yourself.

    The expansion in these clubs these past years has meant that it is possible, if you have the income, to be never far from a possible exclusive spot. If you’re somewhat exhausted after a meeting with your banker in the City, then for five years or so it’s been possible to swing by Ten Trinity Square. Here you enter a world of wood-panelled comfort: an experience which ought to rub away at the fact of having spent the morning in a financial institution discussing the interest rate.

    While Ten Trinity Square is still relatively new, one of the features of the world of private members’ clubs is to feel a connection with the city’s past – and especially with its aristocratic past. In Home House, there is the magnificent staircase by Robert Adam, spiralling up towards a skylight. The dining room offers expansive views of Portman Square as you eat what may be the best cuisine in the city.

    Ten Trinity Square, the go to club for the City

     

    But perhaps there is an increasing sense of disconnect in today’s cost of living crisis. Pampered luxury isn’t always the best look when, a few streets away, others are struggling to make ends meet. If joining one of these clubs is tantamount to admitting to a spare £5,000 a year, one may sometimes wonder if that money might not have been better spent. Many of the members of these clubs publicly remind the outside world that they’re engaged on extensive charitable works after all.

    Perhaps this is why I was rather fond of the House of St Barnabas just off Soho Square where the food was so reliably bad as to salve one’s conscience. I say was because news has now reached me that the club has sadly closed, but I think there is much other clubs can learn from the attempt. In the House, the coffee possessed the unmistakeable tang of Nescafé Instant, the pizza – one of the few things on the menu – tended to almost laughably inedible, and even the nibbles could reliably bring on any number of gastric illnesses.

    But there was method in this madness, since the place doubled up as a homeless charity. The club’s website tells visitors that the House is on a mission to change the conversation around homelessness, broadening the definition away from rough sleeping to encompass the 104,510 households currently in unsuitable accommodation.

    The House of St Barnabas sadly announced its closure in January 2024

     

    Chief Executive Rosie Ferguson explained in the club’s 2023 Impact Report: “Private member’s clubs have existed for centuries. They have often acted as exclusive spaces for the elite, an environment created in order to give wealthy people their own networks and careers, and their exclusivity has been at odds with diversity, inclusion and social progress.” This is an important document – one searches in vain for evidence of 5 Hertford Street’s social impact report. That’s not to say Robin Birley doesn’t do any good – most people do – but The Guardian has reported that staff were lobbying in 2019 for a living wage, with porters paid £8.50 an hour. This report may need to be taken with a pinch of salt, since it was written by that scourge of the right, the left-wing commentator Owen Jones who might be said to have a certain predisposition to paint Birley et al. in a negative light.

    But it does make one wonder a bit about the ultimate purpose of these places, even as one always enjoys dining at them. One also can’t help but feel that their original historical intention has been slowly mutated by a failing politics.

    These clubs originally emanated out of the coffee shops, and were places of political debate: one has an image of William Pitt the Younger holding court at White’s or Charles James Fox issuing his latest opinions at Brooks’s just down the road. This was not an undebauched time, especially not for Fox who, being the Boris Johnson of his day, was as dedicated a philanderer as he was an orator. But nobody doubts they had concrete matters to discuss.

    William Wilberforce, who was in the Pitt set, extricated himself from the club scene after his conversion and the result, after a long period of attrition in Parliament, was the expedition of the abolition of the slave trade. One wonders whether the House of St Barnabas, with its impressive Employment Participation Programme, where 95 per cent of participants have completed the course, might have marked a new seriousness of purpose more suitable for these times. The club had worked with 42 employers, partnering with Bafta 195 and Nimax Theatres. Let’s hope that despite its failure it has some sort of legacy.

    Similarly, there has been a marked rise in the women’s only private members’ club, with the Allbright leading the way. This is named after the first female US Secretary of State Madeleine Allbright who once remarked: “There’s a special place in Hell for women who don’t help each other.” Notable members include actress Olivia Wilde, filmmaker Gurinder Chadha, and the business woman Martha Lane-Fox.

    All of this shows that the sector is shifting, and that the opportunities for a meaningful career are broadening. This is now an area where you can work in a thoughtful environment as much in the service to ideals, as in the service to ultra-high-net-worth individuals whose opinions you might not agree with. Obviously, if the coffee had been better at the House of St Barnabas that might have helped with the membership numbers; but equally, it might not be an idea for 5 Hertford Street to do a bit of visible giving back to the community.

  • Peter Jackson’s Beatles film Get Back as a study in workplace toxicity

    Christopher Jackson

     

    The data is mixed as to whether The Beatles have broken through to the younger generation. The band which used to make a habit of being number 1, is currently listed as the 93rd most streamed artist on Spotify, with 20 million followers. This pales somewhat predictably when set against the sort of numbers totted up by Taylor Swift (83.23 million), and who recently made headlines by greedily having the whole of the top 10 to herself; The Weeknd (79.04 million) and Ed Sheeran (76.60 million).

    Of bands people over the age of 35 will likely remember from their youth, the best performing are Coldplay, who are 12th on the list with 58.54 million, and Elton John who is 21st with just over 50 million listeners.

    However the available statistics on the Beatles, while they testify to the fact that Beatlemania itself happened over half a century ago, do show that the band’s popularity endures among the young, with over 30 per cent of downloads coming from 18-24 year olds.

    These statistics seem to assure the Beatles continuation in the culture well into the 21st century. This will include not just the music but movies, and therefore Peter Jackson’s epic three-part series Get Back.

    The film follows the Fab Four as they record an album which would become Let It Be , the last album the band would release, and  a few songs from Abbey Road, which was the last album the group recorded. As the pair meet in Twickenham it seems possible that they will shoot a new film of some kind, but as the hours go by, it becomes clear that nobody has a clear idea of what the film might entail and so it is abandoned in favour of the famous concert on the roof at 3 Savile Row. This would turn out to be the band’s last live performance.

    That’s because in this film, all isn’t quite well with the Beatles. We, the viewers, know that the band is in fact close to its terminus: the break-up which coincided with the end of the 1960s and brought that colourful epoch to its conclusion.

    In fact, in places the film turns out to be a study in workplace toxicity. Though there are passages where the magic of music-making makes you feel, though you know differently, that the band could continue, the air of tension is at other times unmistakeable.

    The dynamic of the four feels dictated throughout by Paul McCartney, sometimes to a surprising extent. We often think of John Lennon as the leader of The Beatles but there appear to have been a few factors which worked against Lennon being in charge by this point in their careers.

    The first is that Lennon at times seems disengaged. Whereas Linda McCartney accompanies Paul to the studio only occasionally, and always seems a straightforward and optimistic presence when she does, Yoko Ono accompanies John throughout, sometimes maintaining what must have been an unnerving silence and at others screaming into a microphone in an alarming way.

    One might add that it might have been especially alarming on the ears of the man who wrote ‘Yesterday.’ Even so, despite the difficulty, one notes throughout a certain tenderness, which feels heartbreakingly residual, about the way in which Lennon and McCartney look at each other, and converse. It suggests, even as that friendship is unravelling, a profound connection based on having journeyed through strange seas of song together for so long.

    But something else is clear. McCartney, certainly at this stage, and perhaps throughout, is in a leadership position because his talent feels of another kind. Lennon’s was always the stronger personality, but McCartney is the one with the preternatural gift, the writer of the melodies which we still sing around the piano today. It is notable that McCartney wrote without much input from Lennon: Hey Jude, Yesterday, Yellow Submarine, When I’m Sixty Four, and in this film he is seen writing Let it Be. These songs are standards in a way which Lennon’s songs aren’t: they have their origins sometimes in music hall or in jazz. They have a capacity to endure in any setting which you cannot say songs like ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ or ‘I am the Walrus’, so tethered to the unusualness of Lennon’s personality, really have.

    Genius of McCartney’s kind creates imbalance. In this film it is shown in the way in which McCartney seems to be working on a huge number of songs. By my count he is writing more or less simultaneously: Let it Be, I’ve Got a Feelin’, Oh Darling, Let it Be, Maxwell’s Silver Hammer, Her Majesty, The Long and Winding Road, Get Back, She Came in Through the Bathroom Window, Carry That Weight, around half of which are songs now of lasting fame, and the other half of which are musically interesting. Lennon, by contrast, is working on Across the Universe, Don’t Let me Down, Dig a Pony, Polythene Pam, an early version of what would become Jealous Guy, and has the riff for what would become I Want You (She’s So Heavy). These songs are slight by comparison with what McCartney is working on, as well as fewer in number.

    Meanwhile, George Harrison is working on I Me Mine and Old Brown Shoe and has the bones of a song which would in time become a standard, Something. One sees here the ludicrousness of Harrison’s position: Harrison is writing a song which will reverberate forever yet there is a clear assumption that his songs are unlikely to be included in any significant number.

    McCartney is not only ahead as a composer but as a player of instruments. It was Lennon who was once asked if Ringo Starr was the best drummer. When he replied, “He’s not even the best drummer in the Beatles” he was referencing McCartney. Likewise you sense that McCartney can also play guitar better than Harrison. This knowledge leads him to micromanage and makes you realise that the band can’t function really as a team anymore.

    But there’s a paradox here because McCartney’s talent, as we know from the comparative decline of the post-Beatles years, also feels oddly dependent on the Beatles, and so you feel there is more at stake for him in wanting the band to remain together. At one point he plaintively tells everyone: “We can sing together when we’re older.”

    Ringo Starr meanwhile is worth watching closely throughout the film as he remains unobtrusive and popular. He is in fact an exemplary study in how to handle workplace toxicity.

    At times the juxtaposition between McCartney’s gifts and the others can be almost ludicrous. While the others are talking at one point, we see McCartney in the background writing Let It Be. Nobody looks up to tell him how good it is. Either they are inoculated to his genius by long exposure to it, or they do notice and suppress some feeling of envy.

    Sometimes, you feel that the horsing around is irksome to McCartney as it takes him away from the heavier workload caused by his own prolific nature. Yet he takes part anyway, as he senses that whatever else he will go on to do with his abilities, The Beatles will be the end of something important: you can taste his fear throughout.

    Then beautifully all this disappears in the final episode which deals with the rooftop concert. Here we see the Beatles perform Get Back, Don’t Let Me Down, I’ve Got a Feeling, One After 909 and Dig A Pony. We get a glimpse of the typical pedestrians on the streets of Mayfair towards the end of the 1960s: most are positive about the concert but enough people in the area have issued complaints to mean that a pair of bobbies, who seem young enough to be alive today, are sent over to ask them to turn the sound down. At one point he mutters: ‘They’re disrupting all the local business.”

    The scene is a fascinating snapshot of the police in the 1960s. On the one hand one can see the powerlessness of law enforcement in the face of global celebrity; it is all told beautifully in the delighted smile McCartney gives at the beginning of Don’t Let Me Down when he turns around to see the police have joined him on the roof: this is what he wanted.

    During the concert one feels drawn particularly to Lennon; in fact, power somehow seems to devolve to him during the live performance. Public charisma and private force of character seem to be very different things.

    What is it that enables someone to have sufficient confidence to insist on their idea of music before allcomers? As we watch Lennon, we see two things. First he is proclaiming the idiocy of the homogeneity of anything establishment. Much of the film shows us how absolutely victorious he had been in pushing back against the dullness of the post -War settlement. Many of the pedestrians are dressed in styles which emanated out of the Swinging Sixties which they themselves had to a large extent brought about. Meanwhile, everybody else has to accept their presence.

    But I don’t think Lennon would have got so far with all this if he hadn’t also had positives to offer. Throughout the songbook, love is always being proclaimed. It is the sadness of this film that that ideal couldn’t prevent the break up of a band whose music still matters today.

     

  • Sir Terry Waite: Maths is important – but we can’t afford to forget the lessons of history

    Sir Terry Waite

    I have been observing the government’s education priorities, which currently place particular importance on maths. It is important that we focus on this subject, of course, but we shouldn’t do so at the expense of others: most importantly we are almost at the point where we begin to find that history doesn’t matter – and yet, of course, it matters very much.

    That’s because you have to know where you have come from, and what has happened in the past. For instance, I have just been reading about and understanding the Churchill family. If you do that you discover that John Churchill, the first Duke of Marlborough, was an extraordinary general – perhaps the most famous in Europe, in the pre-Napoleon era. He was instrumental in winning the Nine Years’ War against King Louis XIV. If you read about Marlborough’s command of his troops, you see an almost exact parallel with his ancestor Sir Winston Churchill who would play such a prominent role as Prime Minister during the Second World War. History is full of such lessons, and we can learn from these links and correspondences.

    Our problem appears to be that we don’t take the trouble to learn from history – and especially the past mistakes that have been made. In a society which seems not to place sufficient value on history, we tend to carry on regardless, creating havoc, misery and mayhem in so many parts of the world. Unfortunately, we have arrived at this rather stupid idea that aggression and warfare is going to resolve our problems. It doesn’t resolve our problems; it increases them. When you consider the suffering and disaster that is continually being meted out to millions of people, you realise we need more politicians and people in positions of leadership who have this understanding.

    This is not to say that this kind of historical awareness alone will solve matters. It is extremely complicated to know how to deal with international conflict and to know what structures both domestically and internationally might be required. It goes without saying that if we don’t give some thought to that, then we are heading straight into the abyss. By that light, history isn’t just a mere curiosity – it calls to us with urgent importance.

    Russia-Ukraine remains a very difficult situation. I think we should be making active attempts to seek a negotiated agreement but it is extremely difficult when you have a person such as Vladimir Putin in charge. The fact is, he has committed himself and if he fails, he may well recognise that he will follow the destiny of previous leaders who overreached. Russia has a history of getting rid of its leaders: if you are a leader in Russia it’s unwise for you to go to the top floor of any apartment and keep well away from the windows.

    In a sense it’s not only that Putin is fighting this war, he is also fighting for his life. When someone fights for their life they become desperate and this fact alone will make a negotiated settlement extremely difficult. But this doesn’t mean this goal should not be worked towards. We need the best brains to help resolve this particular issue – not just for humanitarian reasons, but also because of the scale of what might go wrong if we don’t. Of course, for a long time now, there has been the threat of nuclear warfare over our heads and though it would be extremely stupid for that to happen, if we have to admit the possibility then that increases the urgency of the need to find a resolution.

    We have a lot facing us in the future. If I might conduct some basic mathematics, since I’m 84, I am old enough now to say I’ve only got a few years left. Much of this will be for future generations to know – and I hope that they will have both maths and history at their disposal in order to meet these many challenges.

  • Long Read: Me, Myself and AI

    Christopher Jackson

     

    When I consider the question of AI as it relates to the matter of myself, I find I have to begin with a board game. After playing chess occasionally in childhood, by 2021 I began playing with bots. My return to low level chess formed a crucial plank in my plan to give up Wordle – that very 2022 fad to which I became pointlessly addicted for a month or so. I decided to swap one addiction for a slightly more meaningful one and became a regular visitor to chess.com.

    I play chess to a level which may almost be deemed infantile, full of incomprehensible failures and idiotic myopia (“Oh, I didn’t realise my Queen was there”) where humiliation constantly vies with a curious sense of pleasure. One feels faintly intellectual just by trying to play chess at all: there is a sense of a brain muscle which needs attention getting a minor massage.

    As many will know, on chess.com, if you want to play humans, you can set yourself up with an ID and then play against another flesh-and-blood person roughly of your level. Interestingly, when you play a fellow human, you can sense their humanity even when there is a computer screen intervening. It was John Arlott who said in relation to the cricketer Jack Hobbs that what made him great was his ‘infallible sympathy for the bowled ball’. In chess.com something similar seems to happen: when you play a human being, each move feels personal in some way – and may even have something to do with a shared humanity. Sometimes a pause will occur and you’ll think: “They’re probably making a cup of tea.” Or when the moves come rapidly, you might think: “I see you’re going out for the night and you need this game finished in the next five minutes.”

    But the problem with playing people is that they’re unreliable: either they’re busy, or else they can be petulant losers. Quite often, you’ll begin a game on chess.com with another human and find that the time between moves can be inexplicably long, and you’re not sure if they’ve left the game and not bothered to resign. Sometimes, you begin to win and your opponent capitulates depriving you of the real pleasure of chess: the unfolding of the logic of victory. In a just chess world, you begin to sense victory long before check mate is confirmed, but it’s part of the sportsmanship of it all to let the drama unfold: the defeated are meant to fight, to let their opponent pin them to the wall. All this means that playing humans on chess.com is something of a lottery. It can be anything from fun to a mild disappointment to a notable waste of time.

    Which is why, one evening, I thought I’d bypass all that nuisance by playing a bot, starting with Coach Danny – named after Danny Rensch, the chief chess officer of chess.com, who has a score of 400, which is to say he’s programmed to be a rank beginner. Victory against this bot comes relatively easily, and as I have gone on I’ve eventually been able to compete with intermediate players.

    But it feels different. There is never a thought-delay between moves, and never any sense of anything shared: there is a gulf between you and your opponent, the gap between robot and human – between AI and me. One feels infinitely separate from one’s AI opponents: they never make a cup of tea while they consider the way in which you cunningly developed your rook. They never expose their queen accidentally because they’re rushing not to be late for the cinema.

    The more I played bots on chess.com the more I came to feel my humanity. I felt how separate the bot was, isolated in its bottishness: a different kind of thing altogether. The division is this: I possess a self – or to use a now antiquated term, a soul – and the bots don’t.

    By 2024, I now know that those matches of chess, pitted against a computer, were harbingers. Now it’s not just my chess ability which is to be matched against AI – but my whole self, my soul: me.

     

    The Looming Revolution

     

    I have been reading William Hague’s excellent biography of the great campaigner and statesman William Wilberforce. Since it is a faithful reflection of the great man’s life, the book largely concerns Wilberforce’s extraordinary contribution to the abolition of the slave trade. Wilberforce’s campaigning gathered pace through the 1780s – and Hague brilliantly depicts the way in which momentum was building in 1788. In fact, the reader is left with the distinct impression that in any normal year, the slave trade would have been abolished in 1789. But of course 1789 was by no measure destined to be normal: it was to be the year of the French Revolution. War would have to be prioritised. The abolition of the slave trade would be delayed until 1807.

    In early 2024, we are talking about any number of things: the return of Trump, the the interest rate, migration. But are we doing so in ludicrous ignorance that we are on the cusp of a similarly sweeping force?

    When I meet the Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities Michael Gove, I mention the French Revolution analogy to him in relation to AI. Gove agrees, and explains the enormity of the situation to me: “We’ve had two Cabinet sessions about AI and the point was made at one of them that this was perhaps the most consequential issue with which we have to wrestle. AI has the potential to transform our world to an even greater extent than nuclear power and the hydrogen bomb.”

    So what kind of transformation will this be? Gove isn’t sure. “It is difficult for us to envisage quite the scale of transformation that AI will generate in our societies. At different times, people predict the impact of technology – wiser minds than me will know you overestimate then underestimate what the impact will be. But AI will undoubtedly be impactful. It may further entrench and indeed exaggerate inequalities and of course it has the potential – unless you have proper alignment for catastrophic outcomes.”

    This echoes what we sometimes find in the discourse. All anyone can agree on is the enormity of the oncoming shift. There is a terrible sense of unpreparedness in all of us – because how do you prepare for something when you don’t know what it will be?

    Some of this is to do with the structure of our economy and the question of where wealth, and therefore knowledge, happens to reside. It’s possible to intuit that AI’s true nature is hidden behind the veil of the gigantic and essentially impregnable tech companies where all this will unfold – and to a certain extent has already unfolded.

    Unless you happen to have a management role at Google or Tesla, you are given scraps. In Walter Isaacson’s superb biography Elon Musk there is an astonishing moment when Musk is sensibly arguing with Google co-founder Larry Page that safeguards need to be built into AI. Page accuses Musk of being a ‘specist’ – someone in favour of his own species and goes onto argue that humanity needs to be replaced and ought to accept its own demise. “I fucking like humanity, dude,” comes Musk’s reply. When Page seeks to buy DeepMind, Musk tries to put together financing to block the deal. “The future of AI should not be controlled by Larry,” Musk says, putting it rather mildly, and echoing my own thoughts.

    What Musk ends up touting towards the end of Isaacson’s book is “maximum truth-seeking AI. It would care about understanding the universe, and that would probably lead it to want to preserve humanity, because we are an interesting part of the universe.”

    This is already heady stuff and many people will wonder how, by dint of not being tech billionaires, they have accidentally outsourced their entire future to the likes of Page and Musk.

    Whatever one thinks of the tech barons – and some of them are more likeable than others – it probably is the case that a grounding in history, philosophy and theology isn’t their strong suit. They also, I have decided, don’t particularly mind about the economic future of journalists.

     

    Journalism v the bots

     

    Chess turned out to be merely the opening salvo in my experiences with AI. By 2023, with the release of Chat GPT, AI seemed to want to do my job for me – or to help me do my job, depending on which way you looked at it. Writing being so much more central to my life than chess, this in turn seemed to up the stakes between me and AI. It went much nearer the heart of me.

    The self and the soul. These are not necessarily wheelhouse topics for an employability magazine, but since the meaning of this turns out to be decisive for the future of work and therefore of humanity, its discussion can hardly be avoided.

    The argument may be lost on Larry Page – and to a certain extent on Musk – but it runs like this. Human beings have always had something rather unique and mysterious about them. There is a certain bestowed strangeness attached to us, on which basis we’re constructed. This is valuable – even infinitely so. We don’t know where we come from, or where we’re going, but we’re can’t quite escape the nagging suspicion that we matter. This could be called ‘specist’. But it is quite likely to answer to reality too – it is certainly a more respectable opinion than Page realises. I don’t think, for instance, that there is a major figure in history from Shakespeare to Bach and Michelangelo who would seriously dispute it. When one hears Page take the opposite view, one wonders if he seriously thinks the creation of Google entitles him to override the creator of Hamlet.

    This in turn opens up onto the notion of sanctity. To put it mildly, our sense of ourselves has never been as straightforward as we would like. One trouble with human beings is that we tend to note our value when it’s absent – for instance, when there is some terrible atrocity in the context of war. When that happens we think: “Hang on, aren’t we meant to be more than that?” By expressing our dismay at negative development, we are indicating the value we ought to be ascribing to one another. This sense of ourselves is more likely, paradoxically, to be present at the aftermath of a shooting than it is in an AI lab at Google.

    In the ordinary scheme of life, it resides in us quietly. Most of us, when we seek an ideal career, are also seeking to give expression to some sense of destiny burning within us, which we might think of as being an aspect of our self, or soul. We act as though we matter. Page would say we are delusional in this; I would say we are acting on a valid but admittedly mysterious logic which flows out of our existing at all in the first place. Sometimes, in workaholics, it might be that a large part of the self or soul manifests itself through work.

    I’m sure a chess grandmaster feels that way about chess – and perhaps the chess world therefore knew early on – when the first computer beat Kasparov – what I have begun to see in 2023: namely the possibility that a computer can usurp you. Over the past twelve months, AI has begun to sneak nearer to my career – by turns like a sun about to rise, or a storm about to come.

    Writing for writers usually does form a large part of the soul. It tends to manifest as an obsessive condition, and the stories are legion of writers failing to separate out work from their personal lives to the detriment of family.

    The increasing popularity of ChatGPT – the acronym at the end stands with an almost laughable ugliness for Generative Pre-Trained Transformer. Its mounting popularity caused me to wonder how skilled the bot would be at writing a Finito World leader.

    To that end, I issued the command: write me a leader for an employability magazine about the importance of skills in education. It replied:

     

    Welcome to this edition of our Employability Magazine, where we explore the dynamic intersection of education and skills that propels individuals toward success in the ever-evolving landscape of the professional world. In an era marked by rapid technological advancements and global connectivity, the traditional paradigm of education is undergoing a profound transformation.

     

    Faced by the ludicrous dullness of this, I experience a rise in self-confidence that the plight of the journalist may not necessarily be an entirely hopeless one at least for the next few years. I might, however, feel differently if I were a copyrighter.

    The situation is the same, if not increased, for songwriting, painting or poetry where the link to the self is greater than in journalism which is in some way to do with the conveying of factual information, and its organisation.

    To take poetry as an example: its creation is much more mysterious than the creation of journalism – it comes from, to use Martin Amis’ notion, the back of the brain. Writing poetry can actually feel like a complete possession of body and soul in a way in which writing journalism does not.

    It is not surprising therefore that AI and the arts have already clashed, most notably in the 2023 Writers Guild of America strike. The moment which most caught my eye occurred in Nick Cave’s indispensable Red Hand Files, in August 2023. As readers may know the singer-songwriter famously takes questions from his fans on any range of matters. ChatGPT has come up a few times.

    Cave takes a very anti-AI view. He views true creativity as being fraught with self-murder and challenge – its difficulty is, according to him, what renders it worthwhile. Art is hard work and meant to be so – it is a sort of voyage along suffering. Cave writes: “ChatGPT rejects any notions of creative struggle, that our endeavours animate and nurture our lives giving them depth and meaning. It rejects that there is a collective, essential and unconscious human spirit underpinning our existence, connecting us all through our mutual striving.” So what, for Cave, does Chat GPT ultimately amount to? “ChatGPT’s intent is to eliminate the process of creation and its attendant challenges, viewing it as nothing more than a time-wasting inconvenience that stands in the way of the commodity itself. Why strive?, it contends. Why bother with the artistic process and its accompanying trials? Why shouldn’t we make it faster and easier?”

    And so what should we do about it? Cave’s response strikes me as very beautiful. “As humans, we so often feel helpless in our own smallness, yet still we find the resilience to do and make beautiful things, and this is where the meaning of life resides. Nature reminds us of this constantly. The world is often cast as a purely malignant place, but still the joy of creation exerts itself, and as the sun rises upon the struggle of the day, the Great Crested Grebe dances upon the water. It is our striving that becomes the very essence of meaning. This impulse – the creative dance – that is now being so cynically undermined, must be defended at all costs, and just as we would fight any existential evil, we should fight it tooth and nail, for we are fighting for the very soul of the world.”

    Therefore, we’re in a mortal fight brought about primarily by economic circumstances. Technological advance throws to the top of the pile people like Page who can precipitate astonishing developments while knowing very little about the broader context of what they’re doing. They are immune to knock-on effects, because they are financially unassailable, and blissfully ignorant of what they’re doing, knowing no history or literature. It’s sometimes the case that to understand the world you have to go to the artists and the philosophers as well as the scientists and the tech entrepreneurs. The worrying thing is that the tech entrepreneurs don’t need to do that. They either want to plough on because they believe in progress for its own sake, or because they want to see the money rolling in – or usually both.

    There are minor silver linings. It seems likely that Musk, the most safety-conscious of the AI moguls – will succeed by dint of owning Twitter with its vast linguistic datasets and Tesla with its visual dataset of driver behaviour in competing with ChatGPT and DeepMind. More experienced with his success at SpaceX and Neuralink at rapidly building competitive engineering companies, there seems a good chance that he will define the AI future to some extent. It may therefore be very fortunate that the most gifted entrepreneur-engineer of our time at least doesn’t take the Larry Page view of life. But it might not be a bad thing too, if he were to listen to Nick Cave.

     

    The Cry of the Theologians

     

    He could also do a lot worse than listen to the great humanitarian and religious thinker Sir Terry Waite. Waite begins by explaining to me the irreversible nature of the progress the big tech companies have made. “I don’t think you can ever reverse these trends,” he tells me. “I think there is a trend towards artificial intelligence and that is now moving and it will not be stopped. What can be done is somehow to control it. It has very real dangers, of course, and I don’t fully understand the full implications of what AI is going to be.”

    Waite tells me of a minor AI scrape he’s recently been in. “I have been suffering this morning from the effects of a very minor form of AI – namely, a parcel should have been delivered, it was delivered to the wrong address and every time I get close to speaking to any human being about that I get some automated response which gives me a series of answers to questions I pose which bear no relation to my problem. I need to know where it is and where it’s gone. They tell me it’s been delivered but it hasn’t been delivered here; it’s been delivered somewhere. That’s very minor and it’s not the full use of AI but it’s an indication of what is coming where we do not speak to another human being.”

    In a sense Waite’s worries are rather similar to Cave’s – a world where human closeness, and even meaningful interaction, is radically curtailed. “Maybe this will be different in the future but a machine does not have the human qualities of compassion and love which is central to human existence and central to the teaching of Christ who constantly emphasised the values of compassion and love,” Waite continues.

    Waite also explains how we have tended to express these values throughout history. “You can express compassion in a number of ways but in general it’s expressed with face-to-face meeting. There is a very good book recently written called The Matter of Things by a neuroscientist and writer called Iain McGilchrist. He speaks about the two sides of the brain: the left hemisphere and the right. The left hemisphere is the area of calculation and decision-making.  The right area is the area of imagination and spirituality and all that goes with that. He points out that much of modern society is now concentrated on the left hemisphere, especially in the teaching of mathematics and the teaching of science. These things are important – I don’t deny that – but they’re now being pursued to the detriment of history and the arts. We are being put out of balance.”

    And what are the dangers of that? Waite is unequivocal. “Lack of holistic understanding does not make for rounded human beings.”

    The way society appears to have gone is that left hemisphere-dominant people have created things which the right-hemisphere dominant would never have dreamed of, and monetised these creations aggressively, essentially marooning the right-hemisphere dominant – among which I count myself – in a world they didn’t particularly want or need. Left-hemisphere people tend to make a big impact on reality, and their version of society has a momentum which can’t be realistically reversed. But they are not dreamers – and dreaming is important too.

    The predicament may be more serious still. The right-hemisphere seems to me to link far more reliably to human meaning, and human meaning is probably more important than analysis and measurement (left-hemisphere thinking). It could therefore be that we have created the entire future out of the wrong side of our brain. But a decision-maker like Larry Page, full of self-importance and unlimited money, would likely give short shrift to the notion that their worldview is false: they will not feel it to be so in their gilded boardrooms and, again, have no particular reason to listen to you.

    We therefore face a precarious situation where Waite and Cave are right but that nobody in positions of decision-making power will listen to them. It is this which has led many to argue for government intervention.

    So will AI affect everyone in the world similarly or will there be different outcomes on a country-by-country basis? The answer to that is that while individual governments will harness potential in different ways, the overall impact is likely to be pretty broad. And how is the UK placed? Michael Gove, as might be expected, is optimistic: “As nations go, we’re in a better position than most. But we may well find ourselves in less than a year’s time reframing many of the questions we’re discussing now.” Then he pauses and says, almost defiantly: “But human nature itself won’t change.”

    Yes, but will it be eradicated? Here, the international landscape becomes important and cannot be realistically divorced from geopolitics. And geopolitics, if we’re honest, isn’t in a great place either.

     

    Cleverly does it

     

    When one reads the coverage, it can seem as though America is way ahead and without any serious competitors. That’s partly because we’re discussing the brands we all know and bankroll: Amazon, Facebook, Google, Tesla, Twitter, Microsoft.

    But worryingly it has been said sometimes that China is ahead – that’s the view of the philanthropist Mohamed Amersi whose brilliant autobiography Why? has just been published. He tells me that China is in a far more advantageous place in terms of AI technology than many realise. “China is way ahead,” he tells me. “One indication of this is the number of patents filed – if you google patent filing you’ll see that China is way ahead of the US, and perhaps ahead of all other countries combined. It’s worth noting also that China has put together a code for regulating AI. This law which came into force in August 2023 and was internationally ground-breaking. When you put those two things together the consensus is that China is in out in front and by a long way.”

    This seems sufficiently serious to be worth communicating to the then Foreign Secretary James Cleverly. When I ask Cleverly about China’s progress he puts his finger immediately on the key issue. “This is one of these classic foreign affairs quandaries,” he tells me. “China in so many areas is on a completely different page to the UK. This is partly to do with history and culture, but their attitude when it comes to the relationship between the state and the individual is completely different to the UK’s.” For Cleverly, this has clear ramifications: “Therefore, their use of AI, what they might utilise AI for, and what they are fearful about in terms of AI – all these things are likely to be different.”

    But does he know how far advanced China is on its AI development compared to the West? “The truth is, in direct answer to your question, I don’t know whether they are ahead of the UK or ahead of the US or behind us, or both. They are a very closed society but the fact is they’re on the podium. They are one of the top AI countries in the world. They are a Top 10 country and therefore they are inevitably developing AI technology. It almost doesn’t matter exactly what the ordering is, they are – and will continue to be – a very serious global player with a fundamentally different set of values.”

    For Cleverly this opens up onto the question of how global safety agreements should be structured going forwards. “If we try to build some kind of framework for safety and rules-for-the-road limitations, as we do for example with nuclear weapons technology and chemical weapons technology – as we are now beginning to do with the use of space hardware cyber rules – countries are less likely to break the rules if you include them.” Cleverly therefore reasons that China ought to be included in negotiations. “If we don’t include China at all – if we create a western framework and consciously exclude them right at the start of the process – I believe they will feel liberated to do what they want to do and that may well not be in our best interests. We need to at least try to persuade them to sign up to some reasonable pragmatic behaviour around AI safety. There is no guarantee that they will play by the rules, but it gives us a better fighting chance.”

     

    Seldon Says

     

    As the AI debate continues, I realise that the effects for me are of less significance than the effects on the lives of my two young children, who are aged seven and three. It was Christopher Hitchens who said that once you have children your heart lies outside you – the self, the soul, appear to extent outwards in time and space beyond one’s own predicament into theirs. In my own case, the older already displays a passion for architecture which strikes his teachers as being outside the norm; he has already been given a prize in respect of this. But when he says: “I’m going to be an architect, Daddy,” I find myself quietly wondering to myself what being an architect will mean, if it means anything, when he’s old enough to make a living doing it.

    For thousands of years, being a father has meant handing on the world reasonably unspoiled to your children. We might try to improve it if we’re lucky, but we have tended to assume that it will have been broadly preserved. My father expected the world to be intact for me – and it was, at least until now. The fact that I am unsure of my ability to replicate what had seemed a fairly basic feat can sometimes cause me disquiet.

    It is therefore probably true to say that I am invested in the idea that AI will actually not be the doom-laden scenario which many predict for it, but instead an unlooked-for boon, where Musk’s vision of human beings existing happily alongside robots is fulfilled – and my son gets to be an architect if he wants to be.

    If I look for these apostles of positivity I find one in Sir Anthony Seldon, who has written a book called The Fourth Education Revolution which paints a rosier picture around AI’s impact on education.

    Seldon was in this conversation pretty early. He tells me: “I started writing that book in 2017, seven years or so before AI was as much talked about as it is now. One of the governors at Wellington College Tim Bunting put me onto it. We talked about how it would change everything about education.”

    So how does Seldon view AI in the education space? “It is the understanding that AI would come along at a time when we still have a fundamentally 19th century model of schools – and to some extent universities – where the lecturer and the teacher’s at the front, students sit passively, and everyone moves at the same speed. That whole image of white boards and so on is hardly different from the whole model which was absurdly redundant by the late 20th century. I felt that AI would be the dynamite that will finally blow it apart.”

    And why is that? “That’s because it compensates for the deficiencies and endemic failures of the third revolution, which is that everyone has to move at the same pace, in every subject, regardless. Everyone has to work at the same time of day in the same fundamental way.”

    For Seldon this flat-footedness has severe ramifications. “It makes social mobility static or declining,” he tells me. “Teacher workload gets worse. But above all the model assumes that the student should produce the right answer at the right time in the right way, and isn’t interested in what the student thinks.” Having two very individual children who don’t fit easily into boxes as I do, this is cheering to hear. The quality I have always most valued is curiosity and if AI can accelerate that, while having built-in safeguards, then I can imagine a very bright future indeed.

    Furthermore, the pre-AI education system has been bad, Seldon says, for our well-being. “Homogenisation is a key contributor of mental unwellness and devotes itself to a very narrow range of human intelligence. As a system, it is very good at helping people pass exams but not at helping them learn how to live, how to lead meaningful lives, be good physicists and good historians, or how to be good MPs, or even good parents.”

    So AI could help with that? Seldon replies: “If it’s harnessed early enough, it can overcome all those things.”

    That sounds promising although there remains the suspicion that Larry Page, in addition to not being a historian, artist or theologian, is also not an educationalist. Again the sense is of unchecked and rampant momentum, and worse, a momentum primarily driven by financial gain. Even so, I am also prepared to admit that Larry Page isn’t all powerful and that there is clear evidence here that good can come of AI too.

     

    Message in a Bootle

     

    Seldon’s arguments, if taken to their conclusion in other areas of life, could form the basis of an even sunnier set of predictions. If you want this full-scale optimism then you need to go to Roger Bootle, the economist and chair of Capital Economics, who has authored the excellent study The AI Economy: Work, Wealth and Welfare in the Robot Age (2019).

    I ask him how he came to write the book. “There has been this massive obsession in the media and elsewhere about AI and robots and the conclusion was fundamentally negative,” he tells me. “Most people argued that this great technological advance was going to bring some form of impoverishment because we were all going to lose our jobs. Robots and AI were going to take over and I thought this was a pretty important subject so I got stuck into reading about it. Most of it turns out to have been written by non-economists claiming to be technical experts. I discovered that they’d got their economics upside down and I thought it was time an economist got to grips with the subject, which I did, and my take on it all was fundamentally optimistic – so my book really does stand out from most on the subject.”

    So what are Bootle’s reasons for optimism about AI? “The first thing to appreciate is you have got to start with the history. Technological improvements have been going on for ages. Since the late 18th and mid-19th century, we have had a wave of technological developments and improvements which have knocked out various job skills – and in some cases industries – and others have sprung up to take their place and for me the question was always: ‘Why should this be any different from that?’”

    And what did Bootle discover? “When you got down to the specifics, what the pessimists focused on was the idea that essentially there were going to be no areas where human beings could compete with AI and robots. Therefore, they leapt to the conclusion that this is different. I looked at that and I thought it was bunkum. For a start, the capability of AI and robots is massively exaggerated in the literature put out by the enthusiasts.”

    I ask Bootle for examples. “Every time I go through an airport I am amused by the AI-enabled automatic passport machines which are fine when they work, but beyond them there are rows and rows of border force officials guiding you.  Robots have been working in industry for 40-50 years but the idea of an omni-capable robot is a long way off because they don’t have sufficient manual dexterity. If you have a robot maid, for instance, to your house, they can’t plump the cushions, or tie shoelaces: there are umpteen things they just can’t do.”

    But mightn’t that technology improve? “It might, but I think the most important thing is to realise what human beings are. I quote someone in the book who says that the human brain is a computer that happens to be made of meat. I think it’s fundamentally wrong. There is something about how the human mind works which is very different from the way that a computer works – especially the capability of making jumps which a computer can’t make. But on from that comes the most central thing: human beings are social creatures. They like to relate to other human beings; they are naturally suspicious of machines and sympathetic to humans.”

    In this Bootle echoes Sir Terry Waite and Nick Cave – but his observation is a cause for hope not despair. According to Bootle, there are therefore a whole range of areas where humans, contrary to the horrific predictions, are in fact indispensable. When I ask him to name one, he is swift. “Let’s take medicine, for instance, where not only is there room for greater advances and record-keeping and so on but also diagnosis. But some people have suggested this is going to lead to the redundancy of medical professionals, with surgeons doing robotic surgery. This is complete and utter nonsense. Apart from anything else, human beings need to interact with and trust other human beings and so you are not going to go along with some sort of AI-disembodied voice telling you you’ve got to have your right leg chopped off and say: ‘Okay, fine, I’ll go ahead and do it’. We will need to have human beings intermediating between us and AI. Of course, at the moment, robotic surgery has brought some terrific advances but what it hasn’t done is make surgeons redundant. Instead it has made surgery much more accurate, reliable, quicker and potentially having it done at remote distances.”

    This seems to hold out some hope for me to continue working as a journalist – and more importantly, for my son to one day practice as an architect. It also means that both my children are much less likely to do dull jobs. After naming checkout tills and passport control as jobs we need to get rid of, Bootle lands on translation services as a good example of the rate of progress. “When they first started they were completely useless. They are now not bad. It is still the case it seems to me in the future that there will be professional linguists who are ultra-skilled in the language with its literary flushes and its ambiguities and so on – you will want to employ those for specialist cases but if you just ordinarily want to translate a letter that’s written to you in a foreign language you just plug in translate and most of the time it does a pretty reasonable job and it will be getting better.”

    So it’s those middle jobs which will be under threat? Bootle agrees. “Basic accounting, basic legal services. It is suggested that the development of AI and robots is going to substantially undermine the demand for labour from people at the bottom of the heap. I don’t think that’s right. I think it will undermine the demand for labour of people a bit above the bottom of the heap. A lot of manual tasks I don’t think will be replaced at all. It’s the clerical positions or the lower reaches of the semi-educated middle classes – people doing admin, clerical type jobs. I suspect a lot of those are going to be replaced.”

    So overall, this will be good for productivity? “I see it as fundamentally something that is going to massively increase our productivity over time. Just like all the other things that have occurred since the industrial revolution some people will lose their jobs,” Bootle explains.

     

    The Great Reskilling

     

    So what does this mean for people who are now in jobs which are potentially for the scrapheap. Will they need to reskill? “I think that’s right,” Bootle continues. “To some extent it has already been happening. There used to be banks of typists in most firms, but all that’s gone. Your personal assistant or secretary now does other sorts of jobs to what they used to do. They use the technology but they have to develop other skills.”

    So what will the impact be on the working week? Bootle explains: “Well if it is the case – as I argue it is – that this is going to make us a lot more productive then I think this is going to be one of the forces pushing for a shorter working week. In other words, if we are going to become a lot more productive, we can consume and produce a lot more based on an increase in productivity.”

    So what does Bootle think will happen? “I think in general there will be a society wide move towards shorter working hours particularly I suspect a four day week and some individuals may do this more than others but the average will be shorter working hours. If you look at the historical evidence, working hours have fallen dramatically since the industrial revolution but also of course we have become an awful lot better off. We have trod that middle way already.”

    Bootle is also a fan, perhaps not surprisingly, of Seldon. “I think there is scope to use AI a lot in the education process and I personally think the old system of a lecturer standing up in front of a class of 30 or 40 or in some cases hundreds of people and he brings out his notes and they then write them down – that’s absurd.”

    So how does Bootle see the education future? “The way I see education going is essentially along the lines of the tutorial system. You have more one-on-one sessions which are about discussion and interaction and seminars where you have got a small number of students discussing and interacting so that the ratio of teachers to pupils or students may not change that much – but the ratio in individual teaching sessions will change dramatically. There will be a big increase in the ratio of teachers to students but there will be fewer hours doing in-person teaching because the students will be doing their other stuff remotely.”

    This all sounds broadly positive, assuming those people in vulnerable jobs can be effectively reskilled, which arguably suggests a programme of a far greater reach and imagination than what governments tend to be capable of nowadays.

    One can imagine that the modern day equivalent of Roosevelt’s New Deal would need to restructure the economy around the soon-to-be-unemployed clerical classes, and redirect them toward more fulfilling work.

     

    That Uncertain Feeling

     

    I am emotionally invested in the idea of AI as a positive – the life we are about to enter would be so much better if that were so. But I find that while I can accept much of what Bootle and Seldon say, I find that I don’t trust the big tech companies, nor do I particularly trust government to regulate AI effectively. Furthermore, I have read compelling evidence that suggests that Bootle may be underestimating the way in which AI technology works: it isn’t something which is programmed, it is something which grows. And if it grows, then we have no more control over how it develops than we do over the direction of the branches of a tree.

    In short, there is something spooky about the technology. I cannot escape the notion that AI will be both good and bad – as the Internet has been. This sentiment is echoed by the great filmmaker Guy Ritchie who tells me: “I think I’ve got a handle on it. It’s going to be brilliant – and in equal measure it’s going to be awful. I don’t think it’s any more complicated than that. In proportion to how brilliant it’s going to be, it’s going to be awful too. There seems to be a consistency to anything that’s great – it’s awful. I can’t see how the equation isn’t going to work like that because all those things do. With communication came great benefits and at the same time great deficits.”

    This feels just, and Ritchie explains how that viewpoint can help anchor us when it comes to the advances coming down the track. ‘Everything is subject to these laws – I’m yet to see anything that isn’t. It’s the only way I can reconcile it. Otherwise it’s just a wild dog and that wild dog will end up consuming you.”

    What Ritchie is saying is that AI, however major its advances, will ultimately have to conform to something like the pattern of good and evil which has been one way or another the basis of all major religions, and many philosophical systems as far back as we trace humanity. This is comforting – and it may well be true. If the universe is in fact forged somehow according to good and evil, then AI, also an aspect of the universe may very likely be subservient to these things. That would mean that our struggle will go on. It is a titanic one, but it at least has the virtue of being somewhat familiar.

    When all anyone can agree on is the enormity of it all, I find myself continually coming back to the question of what life really is. It seems to me pretty certain that it is in some sense sacred, as Cave and Waite say. The cultural conservative in me, who likes old things like cathedrals and poems written hundreds of years, wants to put the brakes on. But what Waite, Ritchie, Seldon and Bootle seem to agree on is this overarching need of the human. This is a good aspect of this debate: it keeps bringing me round to the fragility and generosity of the human experience.

    As I have researched this article, I have been going back and forth to school to drop off and pick up the children. Each day at 9am and 3.30pm I am presented with a sea of humanity: children in their innate optimism; parents looking harassed by the pressure of the work-kids juggle; teachers most of whom emanate a bright sense of vocation. When your daily life entails writing about robots, you see more sharply than before the beauty and the kindness in your fellow people. It might be that we’re on the cusp of some tidal wave, but I have sometimes had the image that we need hold the line, here together, on the shore.

     

  • Electrifying Europe from the Black Sea to Brussels

    Dinesh Dhamija

     

    Plans are afoot to connect Western and Eastern European with the Black and Caspian Seas via a 1200km-long cable, exporting renewable energy from Azerbaijan, Georgia and Romania.

     

    The ‘Highway of Green Energy’, as Romanian energy boss George Niculescu called it, will cost around €4 billion and deliver 1.3GW of electricity once it launches in the early 2030s. The engineering challenges of the project are daunting: it will be the world’s longest cable of its type, with 700km of the length installed under the seabed. It also depends upon Georgia and Azerbaijan both turbocharging their renewable energy generation and export capacity. There are security challenges, not least from the Russian navy, which could try to sabotage the undersea section. Even finding such a huge amount of High Voltage Direct Current (HVDC) cable is a major undertaking.

     

    On the plus side, the project promises to increase energy security for the whole of Europe at a time of anxiety over Russian energy exports. It adds to the momentum to develop renewable energy resources and to foster cooperation between nations in the region. Azerbaijan sees a huge renewable energy future for itself. President Ilham Aliyev talks of a potential 27GW of onshore wind and solar power and 157GW of offshore wind power in the Caspian Sea. In 2023 Azerbaijan, Georgia, Romania and Hungary signed an agreement to develop the project, with Armenia and Bulgaria later expressing their interest in collaborating. This was a diplomatic breakthrough, since Armenia and Azerbaijan spent 35 years locked in a territorial conflict, which was only resolved in 2023.

     

    The idea of Hungary helping to cut Russia out of European energy markets, given Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s support for Vladimir Putin, is surprising. Turkey could also have a role to play, both as a transit nation for the cable and as an energy market. As so often, the success of such projects is as much to do with politics as economics or energy. The 2023 agreement included a signing ceremony at which European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and Romanian President Klaus Iohannis stood next to the Azerbaijan President Ilham Aliyev, together with the Georgian, Hungarian and Romanian Prime Ministers.

     

    There were no firm commitments, no fixed budgets or timescales, just a vague plan to explore an idea. But it was a hell of a photo opportunity. What the plan underscores is a determination at the highest level of each country to pursue energy independence from Russia, while building an interconnected regional network and to invest in renewable resources.

     

    These are all laudable aims. Bring on the mega-cable!

     

    Dinesh Dhamija founded, built and sold online travel agency ebookers.com, before serving as a Member of the European Parliament. Since then, he has created the largest solar PV and hydrogen businesses in Romania. Dinesh’s latest book is The Indian Century – buy it from Amazon at https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1738441407/

     

  • Henry Boston Crayfourd on his remarkable journey in film: “I always knew it was what I wanted to do”

    Henry Boston Crayfourd

    I think it was probably the fun of bursting a balloon full of water over my Dad’s head and filming it in slow motion on my 9th birthday that really got me hooked on film. Or possibly that my Mum let me use my underwater camera to swim after, and film, reef sharks aged 10.

    Whatever it was, I have had an obsession with film direction and production for as long as I can remember. I used to spend weekends making films with my friends (hilarious to watch now as the acting skills left a lot to be desired). There was no doubt though that I always knew it was what I wanted to do.

    Travel grew my love as I had such wonderful things to record on video. My parents invested heavily in taking me on far-flung trips to remote places like Papua New Guinea, Sulawesi and Ecuador. Places well off the beaten track, full of incredible wildlife, giant clams, pistol shrimps and marine iguanas. It was amazing. By the age of 15, I was heavily into freediving and have since been able to hold my breath underwater for 6 minutes.

    This underwater odyssey led to a second hobby of marine fish and coral keeping and it was the reason I started a marine biology degree. There just wasn’t enough camera work in it for me though… so after a year, I switched to film production and the rest is history as they say.

    Now I channel my love of film into Boss Content: a content creation company that specialises in brand aware advertising. I love what I do and I love it when I meet like-minded, passionate people who understand the power of video.

    As blogger Seth Godin says, “Marketing is no longer about the stuff that you make, but the stories you tell.”

    I am a storyteller but I tell stories in short bite-sized clips because that is how the world is today. It’s the new advertising. However, just like the old advertising, it is originality and relevance that count. That is how you differentiate yourself and how people differentiate you.

    I go to extremes to get the right shots when I am shooting live. I recently spent about two hours lying on the floor to film an advertisement for Paw Patrol. We had the dogs running round the corner time and time again. It turned out brilliantly though. We even managed to get the main pooch to put his paw on the card swipe machine.

    This year I also went to Spain to film a 1000 year old kiln. It was incredible and took 36 hours to fire up. It did mean staying up for 36 hours though but I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.

    Most jobs are far more straightforward. I produce content for top restaurants, banks, retail clients and more specialist people such as fine art lighting companies and sculptors. I’ve also been lucky enough to film some interviews with people like Dame Judi Dench and Jeremy Irons and I feel fortunate to have heard some great stories first hand.

    Of course, I have to mention the new big word, AI. People keep asking me if AI is going to do me out of job? Honestly, I don’t think we need to fear it. AI doesn’t think like advertising creatives do. It doesn’t dig to find the emotion of what makes consumers’ hearts beat … and then turn it into a campaign or story that connects. It’s not as human. Not yet anyway.  AI is amazing though and I use it to enhance production values. Give me your product and I can transport it to sunnier climates or frozen landscapes without ever leaving my office. What AI does do is bring down the cost of business, meaning that medium-sized companies can afford campaigns as good as the corporates. In that way, it’s a game-changer.

    How important is video? It’s critical. Done right, as Forbes says, “marketers who use video grow their revenue 49 per cent faster than non-video users”.

    Video is memorable and it’s vital for business growth and customer loyalty. How else today do people discover your brand, services and products? It’s the new norm. “86 per cent of businesses use video as a marketing tool.” Whether you are a one-person band, a hairdresser, engineering company or are promoting your personal brand, make sure you are one of them.

    A successful content campaign is the result of many inputs, but it is the relationship between client and videographer that can really make the results zing! When I met Ronel, the Chief Executive of Finito Education, it was a meeting of minds.

    I love it when I meet like-minded, passionate people who understand the power of video. And how original thinking and creativity combined with quality production can really excite your audience. Originality and relevance is how you differentiate yourself and how people differentiate you.

    Finito was fast on the uptake with this, and they are bold with their creative approach, believing fortune favours the brave. And it does.

    At Boss Content, we produce short advertising videos that provoke an emotional response because that is what leads to rationale action. We work with both direct clients and agencies – in other words we can create or execute.

    We are also always happy to help clients plan. After all social media and content are just buzzwords unless you have a plan of how to use them. We have a deep understanding of social and how to use it. Undoubtedly the more you plan, the more success you will achieve.

     

    For more information go to http://www.bosscontent.co.uk

  • Ronel Lehmann reviews Jeremy King’s new restaurant Arlington: “an inspirational overcoming of adversity.”

    Arlington Restaurant Review: A Delightful Dining Experience with Jeremy King, by Ronel Lehmann

     

    When Karin Stark, wife of the late Dave Allen, described how life was without her comedian husband, she movingly said: “It’s like being a very long way from home.” Those words always struck a chord with me. To an avid restaurant goer, it felt the same, only this time on a happier occasion to be greeted by Jeremy King in his new abode, Arlington in St James’s.

    I had to research whether there had ever been a battle of Arlington. Indeed, there had, at the time of the American Civil War. The Arlington National Cemetery is also the final resting place for many of the United States’ greatest heroes, including more than 300,000 veterans of every American conflict, from the Revolutionary War to Iraq and Afghanistan.

     

    The reason for my own sudden conflict was learning that my own Editor had wanted to visit Arlington and write a review, and I had unintentionally usurped him.

    My marketing director guest had arrived just before me, although I wasn’t late, and she was by then well tucked into a small table facing other diners. I had the window outside view, although I was totally focussed on the dazzling finish of the interior, with its new tablecloths, black furniture, polished steel, mirrors, lighting and framed prints.

    The menus arrived and felt immediately comforting. It was a Monday lunch, the start of a new week and we both decided to decline wine. For our starters, we ordered Plum Tomato and Basil Galette and the Spinach and Ricotta Tortelloni. I felt the infusion of wild garlic in the tortelloni which was served warm.

    The main courses of Risotto Nero and Chicken Milanese, Rocket, Parmesan followed suit. My own chicken was beautifully flavoursome. If I am honest, I struggled to finish the huge portion. It was at that moment that I noticed the teeth of my guest opposite. Her mouth had turned completely black. I felt that I needed to do the honourable thing and gently alert her. She was shocked and her white serviette also began to turn black as she delicately wiped her mouth to try and remove traces of the squid ink. At moments like these, we could only laugh together, as I thought that Dracula had arrived.

     

    After the drama of the risotto, we decided to pass on the puddings but enjoy an expresso coffee with some chocolate truffles. Readers will know that I have a sweet tooth and my big eyes noted the temptations of Cappuccino Crème Brûlée, Mousse aux Deux Chocolats, Hokey Pokey Coupe, Treacle Tart with Cornish Clotted Cream, Scandinavian Iced Berries with White Chocolate Sauce, Tarte Tatin with Cinnamon Ice Cream and Rhubarb Crumble with Custard.

    Leaving the restaurant was a bit like old times. You feel valued and don’t receive such a personal and caring gratitude expressed like it anywhere else. Jeremy and I reminisced about what happened to him before. I told him that he was inspirational overcoming adversity and making such a grand return. His long-standing commitment and service to his diners is legendary.

    As I walked away, I remembered Dave Allen again. He once said “You wake to the clock, you go to work to the clock, you clock-in to the clock, you clock out to the clock, you come home to the clock, you eat to the clock, you drink to the clock, you go to bed to the clock, you get up to the clock, you go back to work to the clock… You do that for forty years of your life and you retire — what do they fucking give you? A clock!”

     

    I hope the King of Arlington continues to reign over us and never retires.

  • Opinion: Rob Halfon MP is one of the great parliamentarians of our time

    Christopher Jackson

    The departure of Rob Halfon MP from Parliament at the next election, which was announced yesterday, will leave a huge gap: by turns charismatic and passionate, Halfon has for over a decade been one of the most likeable figures on the political scene.

    It has been an extremely impressive career. The outgoing Minister for Skills, Apprenticeships and Higher Education, has served as the MP for Harlow since 2010. But this was the sequel to over a decade on the front lines of the constituency which he has devoted so much of his life to: he was selected as the Conservative Parliamentary Candidate for Harlow in 1999 and subsequently fought two elections, reducing Labour’s majority on both occasions.

    Announcing his departure yesterday, Halfon said: “It was a childhood dream to be an MP. It has been the honour of my life to be the longest-serving MP for Harlow – being part of the Harlow Conservatives is like being part of a family. However, after almost three decades as the Parliamentary Candidate and as MP, I feel that it is time for me to step down.”

    Halfon will be remembered also for his brilliant chairmanship of the Education Select Committee, a role which he fulfilled with great gusto, always championing the vulnerable.

    What Halfon brought to Parliament was, quite simply, a belief that things could be changed. His campaigns as a backbencher included the Petrol Promise and his campaign to scrap hospital car parking charges. His passion for apprenticeships was another thread in his career: he was the first MP to employ an apprentice in his office. There was perhaps an air of throwback about Halfon: during his great tenure of the chairmanship of the Education Select Committee, Halfon proved himself to be in that line of other great parliamentarians which goes all the way back to Joseph Chamberlain and Edmund Burke: those who speak from the back benches with that air of authority which means ministers have to listen.

    This is not the place to consider his many achievements – but it is a moment to pause and thank a politician who has vividly fought for many important causes. Above all, what sets Halfon apart is his personal and approachable manner: ever kindly – and from the journalistic perspective, delightfully quotable – Halfon never approached the media with fear but with trust, and so always found a way to get his message out. He also has a passion for literature and journalism, and perhaps he shall have more time for reading now.

    As to the future, Halfon has reassured his friends: “Please be assured that I will continue to work hard and do all I can for Harlow until the election, and will continue to champion education, skills and apprenticeships in and out of Parliament.” All this remains to be seen, but there seems little doubt that he will go on to greater and greater things. For now, it feels as though the House of Commons will be an empty place after the next election.