Responsible Ai for War

 As with Military Intelligence,  Responsible AI for War is an oxymoron.

As demonstrated in the US/Israeli attack on Iran, the use of today's AI technology is fraught with problems. The NY Times reported that the precision weapons had hit a girls' primary school. This had been a (possibly) legitmate target 15 years ago when it was used by the IGRC, but that was completely out-of-date intel. As with early careless use of misinformation, when the US bombed the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, the old adage Garbage in Garbage out, clearly now applies to the state-of-the-art in the AI world - you would be sued for using such unreliable and unpredictable systems in medicine or finance (or even just self driving cars), but in armed conflict, colateral damage and friendly fire just go with the territory.

Of course, there's a whole moral philosophical debate about ethics of autonomous weapons, but right now, empirically, they are just bad, as a matter of objectively verifiable fact.

The Raskolnikov

The Raskolnikov is a new type of weapon. Not so new in fact. Known in some past of the world as the Rascal, and in others as the Russian (after its unfortunate adoption in very dangerous game), the Raskolnikov is a double edged sword. 

The Raskolnikov is the leveller. Everyone should have one. Or no-one. Nothing in-between is fair or just.

The Raskolnikov is the push-me-pull-you, the palindrome, the lottery ticket from heaven and hell, all wrapped up in one.

You may choose fire the Raskolnikov, but remember it may choose to fire you. With exquisite justice, the Raskolnikov is the god-with-dice of weapons. It can slay the target or the shooter. It does so with complete and uniform randomness. Home invaders may snatch the weapon from your hands, and find themselves at the wrong end of the barrel, because both ends are equally deadly. The assailant on the metro or in the war is no more likely to gain an advantage. This is the Ultimate Leveller. Why burn a candle at both ends, when you can blow off the bloody front and back door? Accept no substitutes.

Q-Bikes

 After E-Bikes, Q-Bikes. Very simple idea - you take the front (powered) wheel off of another e-bike, and swap it for your rear wheel, but put it on backwards.

Then when you start moving, it will act as n electricity generator.

So you entangle the rear and front wheel conductors and there you go - no need for pedals or batteries.

Once we've solved the decoherence problems, it will even be safe...

The Angels and Demons of Our Better Selves

 Two things struck me, and only one of them was the ground.

I was finishing the last in Philip Pullman's Dust books and wondering about demons - surely if yours was a mayfly or a tadpole, then your life would be very short. What if it was a goldfish and it forgot you.

But why didn't he use more imagination about what kinds of creatures demons could be? Why not an Oxtopus, which could be worn as camoflage (harry potter invisibility cloak) or watched like a TV? Why not a Bee Swarm or an Amoeba? What about an entire Mycorrhizal network? or a parasitic worm? Dull really. What if your demon was a murmuration? or one of these seaslugs

Then I was thinking about DIY - having fallen off my bike (easier than riding it) I was reading about things to do to fix your knees. I like fixing stuff - i was delighted with myself fairly recently for replacing the circuit board in our lovely old Henry Hoover - with the help of very nice instructional videos online, plus the fantastic Henry Hoover companies extrremely customer friendly replacement part pricing, i just had to undo four bolts, slide out the old board, unplug it, plug in the new one, and the Hoover sprung into life like new - less than £10 and 10 minutes instead of £160 for a whole new machine.

Wouldn't it be cool if human parts were as easy to replace? Having had eye surgery (and cataracts) i have plastic lenses in my eye, but they aren't adpative, so i don't really get "accommodation". Having earing loss, I have hearing aids (thank you NHS for very nice up-to-date oticon in-ear gadgets) but still, not quite the whole facility back to spanking new. 

And some new knees would be a treat right now, but I hear that even going down on bended aforesaid joints, will still find you waiting many months before the surgeons are ready. If only we could do DiY on ourselves as easily as on our household widgets!

overworld building stories

not enough people writing about the world take as big a picture view as these writers do.

here's my eco-spec reading list as of 3.1.2026. additions or criticisms welcome as welcome as weather.

here be funghi bigger than countries, global networks that bring planetary motion into question, radioactive dogs, and octopi. and the odd human. and synth.

the overstory, by richard powers

circular motion by alex foster

when there are wolves again, by ej swift

the ministry of the future, by kim stanley robinson

all the birds in the sky, by charlie jane anders

the mountain in the sea, by ray nayler

hopeland, by ian mcdonald

venemous lumpsucker, by ned beauman

the calcutta chromosome, by amitav ghosh

for good measure, honoruable mention to the windup girl, by paolo bacigalupi

if you are reading these in the england, then read rain by melissa harrison, purely for atmosphere.

or william gibson's agency series...if only because of its subtle allusion to the "jackpot"

Under World Building Rating or is it underrating world builds....

There's a lot of very fancy CGI these days - not least movies like Dune (like a bit but maybe prefer Lynch's flawed earlier take) or Avatar (hate), but I went back to some older stuff and was surprised really how very fine some older efforts (maybe not so old) are...

First off, Altered Carbon on Netflix - while they slightly softened the politics, which was almost as harsh as the contrasts in the great Ursula le Guin Disposessed, and then some, they got the world(s) (two seasons are planets apart) bang on for me - as a contrast, see The Expanse (good), which got historical scoping right (much much better than Foundation, which I hated), the adaptation of Richard Morgan's really excellent trilogy got vibe which was really something.

Then there's the Riddick franchise. Got totally hooked by Pitch Black, which is actually a minor masterpiece of horror/creature feature (wish someone would make a similar movie series of Harry Harrison's seriously great Deathworld books, or if they had the wit, the Stainless Steel Rat).... but then the whole Chronicles thing got out of hand - I read that there's a fourth movie in the pipeline. I like Vin Diesel. He knows his limitations and when he plays within them, like Bruce Willis (perhaps not quite that good:-), he's fun. But the world look in the Chronicles is top rank - the planet scale up/down views remind me of classic covers of Astounding Sci Fi magazines, or great moments at the end of the 1950s movie, This Island Earth's epic ending. (not to mention Forbidden Planet...).

Then there's Serenity. A lot has already been written about this, so not a lot to add, but the angle of making it like a western,  plus the end-of-an-era mood about the whole thing is just fantastic.

There are tons of films like this (Brother From Another Planet, Liquid Sky, Repo Man, Attack the Block, Hardware, I could go on, but new year's eve beckons, and I need to go out and fetch another pail of air.

cyberdark

There was criticism of the Turing Institute for not warning the government about LLMs, and praise for its defense program.

But no-one criticised the defense and security folks for failing to warn the imminent  Jaguar Land Rover cyberattack. Or Tescos. Or Asahi Super Dry. Or many others. There have been cybersecurity centers of excellent across the UK for 10 years or more and a public face to national security, the NCSC, and what do we actually have to show for that in terms of a rugged/resilient defense of the digital realm? What are the costs and what benefit can these organisations and institutes transparently report?

Sure cyberdefense is a complex (wicked) problem because a large fraction of the initial vectors are social engineering and people are difficult to re-train to think suspiciously the whole time. But then there's the actual technical part component (including the recovery - why are ransomeware attacks so difficult to recover from? what's wrong with integrity checked secured backup/restore?). etc etc

Meanwhile, the government passes laws like the online harms bill, which largely annoys civilians but does zilch to prevent actual large scale industrialised economic damage and very little to even help prevent id theft. Oh yeah, digital identity will fix that, won't they? (answer: no, likely make it worse - because? see above).

In another space, we have chat about possible war. Where are our drone defense plans? It is clear that rapid evolution of swarms of low cost quadcopters are a problem, but also they are pretty slow - so easily bought down e.g. by more drones, and a bit of AI driven planning/deployment/reaction. Could also have competitions (like robot wars in the air) to train up a new generation of kids at high school/uni engineering&computing departments to provide a set of actually new ideas on demand...

Lamentable.