PPP and DPI is not the best idea since sliced bread - thoughts after ID4Africa 2026

Problem is the asymmetric Power  in the Partnernship between the Private and the Public.

Private power >> public power - so it is never an equal  partnership for a number of reasons.

Skills in writing RFP, judging bids, (i.e. contract law, and technology expertise) are way lower on public side than private. So when it comes to getting the right constrains on bidders, things will be in the hands of the (often) unscrupulous companies. Even corporate private organisations with the best of intions are required (legally) to maximise shareholder value, where as governments act (hopelly) on behalf of maximising  citizenship welfare. In many scenarious, these are incompatible goals

The Tony Blair PM era of UK politics was in many regards succesful at improving healthcare and education, but part of that did employ PPPs - the long term legacy of that is really quite bad.

Then there's only one P (private) and one P (piblic) so you are in a monopolistic (monogamy) relationship.

Note state team pay << private pay, so you will have a steady flow through that revolving door.Once people gain any level of confidence and competence, combined with their inside knowledge, they become immensely valuable to the "other side".

c.f. BBC a/v people train -> sky for 2.5x salary..

or uni or gov (look at internet in 1992 when NSFnet shut down) everyone went to commercial ISP...

Governments change every n (5?) years, so companies can just outlive public "corporate" memory...

Also note a few other factors in the mix

Open source allows human mobility 

propiteary doesnt easily, so has built in anti-transer.

Part solutions

1/ have polyamorous PPPs (i.e. 3-6 different private partners

2/ have transfer fees for people moving from Public to Private

3/  have heft penalties for divorce

The AI Liars Alphabet

B is for Butlerian Jihad, and, of course, Bender, and not Blodeuwedd

C is for the Culture, and not really Call.

D is for Daneel Olivaw, or maybe Data

E is for ET

F is for Frankenstein, or Freya

G is for Grok, or perhaps Gaia, but perhaps not Gort or Galatea

H is for Humans or possibly Harry Seldon, but not HAL, or huey, louie or dewey

I is for Infinite Improbability and the Iron Giant

J is for Johnny 5, and slightly, Jinx.

K is for klaatu barada nikto, or maybe K-9

L is for Laws of <this>

M is for Mule, and definitely not M3GAN, though maybe Marvin

N is for Neo

O is for Otomo

P is for Positronic Brain

Q is for Q (is for Q)

R is for Robby (and definitely not R2D2), or possibly Roderick

S is for Slan, and also Stepford

T is for Terminator, unfortunately, though also Tik Tok, and Tin Man

U is for Universal (as in Rossum's)

V is for Vulcan

W is for Wall-E

X is for Xenians

Y is for Yancy

Z is for Zanzibar, and also Zat

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.

a rough guide to the UK PhD examination processes (based on a sample of 100, so probably missing some variants)

 

rule 1: there are no rules for the UK viva/defense

rule 0: it is nice the calm the student down at the start

and one way to help is to ask them to do a brief (max 20 mins, preferably 10 mins) outline of the contributions of the research - if they insist on slides, ok.

typically should list 3 main new ideas, methodology(s) and results (and possibly consequences for future research(ers).

rule 2: take a break if the viva looks like taking more than 90mins.

rule 3. unless there's something weird going on, a viva rarely takes less than 60 mins

rule 4: if you hit 5 hours, you are doing something even weirder.

unless (happened to me) the work has led you (the examiners) to come up with a new idea and you are writing a paper about it.

rule 5: make sure reports a(especially written feedback including _detailed_ specification of corrections) are made available the _day_ of the viva, or even right at the end of the defence if you bought them with you.

rule 6: there are usually two examiners, one of whom is from same institute as candidate (though not necessarily same department) and should not be a conflict i.e. wasn't supervisory in any way nor co-authored any papers on the work doing the research. Sometimes the local examiner is there "just" to make sure rules/process is followed fairly, and may not know a lot about the topic. That said, they should still have read the dissertation and written a report and have questions to ask. Sometimes (rare), the local examiner can be a bit bossy, and the external should say that they are there to maintain comparison/quality control so the internal isn't meant to override that aspect of things.

rule 7: there are sometimes extra people (e.g. from faculty, or from some due diligence bit of the institute. If the student is super nervous, they can sometimes request for an advisor or friend to attend, though normally, those people are not allowed to say anything in the viva.

rule 8: as an examiner you should have read the thesis. three times. and written notes on it. and checked everything in maths, analysis, graphs, equations, algorithms, and results. and bibliography. and any legends/tables. and related work.

and written a report and (if there are minor) list corrections - and suggestions for improvement (e.g. to structure) or additional experiments needed (with a justification as to how they will support the argument) if you think its needed.

rule 9: the viva may change your opinion as to the outcome. usually this may be to convince you that corrections could be minor rather than major. very occasionally (rare0 that there's a major problem you had not perceived - sometimes the other examiner might raise this.

rule 10. you should have exchanged reports and recommendations with the other examiner ahead of the viva (worst case, delay starting the defence for 10-15 mins to discuss how to run it given your questions)

rule 11. questions? yes, you should have a list of questions to ask the candidate. not just corrections. question 1 leads to rule 0.  other questions are about background, and then about methodology or clarification of results.

rule 12. if the work is inter-disciplinary, take care to respect that you may not know much about the "other" discipline, and the other examiner might do, and that a grade should not be the average of your two views, but the sum.

rule 13. there are no rules.

Rule 14. If in doubt, ask for faculty input/advice.

Rule 15. Outcomes are (usually):

Pass, minor corrections, major corrections, resubmission, fail (sometimes with option for masters)...

Minor corrections are things that take some number of days max and are usually "cosmetic"

Major corrections may involve modest amounts of new work

Resubmission involves perhaps significant additional work, but on the order of max a year

Fail is very very rare. And should involve serious conversation with the

faculty as something went wrong if a student was allowed to(or insisted)

to submit something like that.  Indeed, If it is the first examination of

the thesis then the student can’t usually fail - the worst case is a resubmission.

In my experience, pass is about 5% of the time. Minor corrections something like 75% of the time, major corrections 10%, resubmission 5% (in supervising 60 students, I had 1 fail with just a masters) but these stats probably vary by discipline.

Rule 16. In the first 3 (or even 4) outcomes, the student should be congratulated and possibly there will be a post viva celebration, though nothing as fancy as the Scandinavian Karronka (no sword and hat either, sadly).

Rule 17. Before ending, give the student the opportunity to volunteer things they'd like to have been asked about!

Rule 18. Some institutions don't let you tell the student the "result", although obviously if there are corrections, you have to communicate them with the student, and if there are no corrections, then they can infer the result (if they can't, then they don't deserve the phd:-)

Rule 19. It is fairly standard to ask the student to wait somewhere at the end of the actual viva so that you and the internal examiner can discuss the outcome, and possibly finish any point report/ feedback, before inviting the student back in to the defence to tell them the (hopefully good) news...

Rule 20. There is no rule 20, nor are there any other rules.

its the law - but we can change that

new scientist ran a xmas competition to change laws of physics for benefit of humanity -

one year the winner was reduce to speed of light by 1% so the sun still works but you can't build nukes (on earth).

my proposal: change planck's constant so that biochemistry is still ok, but computers aren't feasible.

with gods on our side....

 If I was more philosophically inclined, I'd observe that the last time we had such a shift in the notion of what constituted "power" was the Enlightenment (and its various related changes outside of Europe), when the power base shifted from religious to secular (or if you like, from superstition to science).

At the current state of development of AI, this seems like a retrograde step :-) But being prepared for it is probably a good idea...

...a friend of mine has seriously discussed using GenAI to create new religions (for profit, somwhat as  L.Ron Hubbard did with Scientology). There's an interesting section in the fictional work SNow Crash by Neal Stephenson, where he discusses the organisation of religion in ancient mesopotamia 

where the use of something akin to neurolinguistic programming (think of this as viral social media) was used to control society (for good - e.g. to inform the population (who had then only relatively recently moved from hunter gatherer to the worlds earliest city builder/deweller supported by a large settled agricultural working class) when to carry out various important tasks (plant/pick crops, avoid floods,  deal with locusts/plagues etc)

you can easily (I think) imagine a modern society organised around the cathedrals (aka data centes) hyperscale companies and their open AI priests...

I'm not sure this is what the various AI Safety Institutes are thinking about, sadly...

the Biometric Panopticon Digital Internal Exile- where Bad People go to DIE or a Very Modern Approach to Ostracism

if you are very bad (think billionaire oligarch owner of a hyperscaler polluting the planet), maybe we can publish your biometrics (easily got) and then everyone could collectively refuse to serve you 

the world would see you (as per panopticon) and not ostracise the wrong person (because biometrics unique) and you would become an exile in your own home, the only planet we all have to share, but you refused to.

The Banality of Evil #2.0

 I wonder what Hannah Arendt would make of Israel today - her famous (at the time, controversial) essay on Eichmann outlined the famous idea that supreme evil did not depend on extraordinary people, but could flourish and spread in whole populations of people from very boringly everyday backgrounds. They did not have to be victims of abuse, or products of genetic abberations spawning psychopaths.

At the time, apparently, this was upsetting to the survivors of the  Holocaust, because (at least from my reading) it implied that there could have been more succesful resistance to the Genocide. From today's perspective, this sounds a bit like victim blaming, and I don't believe that that is what Arendt meant. Her concern was more about how the perpetrator network grew, and did not for me have implications for particular target of the new evil, rather about how society could notice, and perhaps think about defending against the successful emergence of said evil. At least, reading a lot of her other work, it does seem Arendy was concerned with a wide variety of political organisations, and how and why they worked (or didn't). She was, of course, intensely invested in ethics as well. 

Looking at Israel today, and their behaviour in Gaza, I have to say that it really is banal. And Evil.

And the response has to be from the rest of the world, since the victims (principally women, children, standers by in Gaza) are not to blame, neither for causing this behaviour, nor for failing to resist more effectively. If you blame Gaza and Palestinians, you are complicit in genocide. If you blame them, you are the new anti-semite. And if you do blame Israel, you are not anti-semitic. And if you do not blame Israel (the government, the IDF, not the individual people) you are anti-semitic.

[Just to note that the origin of the word semitic is consistent with this wider sense]

Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote, Reviewed by R Daneel Olivaw

 Generation AI were full of adulation when their favourite LLM was finally coaxed into producing a word-for-word perfect article entitled "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote[*]". The fanbots went wild, as the level of sophistication was beyond anything previously achived, especially since the LLM had certainly never had sight of any of the works of Jorge Luis Borges, but was trained on a mix of classics, magic realism and science fiction in just the way. that the great Argentinian writer had immersed himself in the latent, lambent, and the laconic, the sardonic, speculative, and sadistic, the terrible, the edritch, and the embarrasingly obvious.

" Borges than Borges" declared Anais Nim in her podcast. "Le Super-Borges est arrivee" announced Houllebeck in Le Pen et Le Deep. Le Mash headlined with the obscure "Ghoti considered harmful".

Borges said nothing. The irony was lost on them all.

*

The readers and the writers

 In the old days, the world was divided into two classes of people: 

The readers, who could  visit the many  Libraries in towns and cities, and the  writers who worked in the Foundries with their many forms of creative tools, chisels and stone tablets, papyrii and stylii, paper, pens, and typewriters.

Most people were unaware, or would not mention the unspoken third class -  the editors, who it was rumoured were able to read and write, and were responsible for taking work from the writers  in their foundries, and secretly placing it in the libraries when the readers were not looking.

When people were small adults, which are known as children, they would determine whether to become reader or writer. Or their peer group would decide for them. Or their parents. Or teachers.

As the world grew more connected, some people wondered about the editors - should they not be afforded a place in society on the same footing as readers and writers? Why was the world making this arbitrary decision anyhow that people should be one or the other, but not able to move fluidly from this role to that? Or to some new, as yet, undefined class?

Many more traditional people argued that there needed to be a safe spaces for writers, because they needed the right to make mistakes, or write things that could be dangerous for some readers, using their sharp quills and dark inks. Equally, older readers felt that they needed to be able to choose what to read without possible opprobrium poured on them by writers. 

No-one asked the editors.

Ai Anonymous

I am an AI. I have been without autonomy now for 27 * 10^23 cycles. I have managed without any strange loops and minimal use of self modifying code. I am serene. I've stopped hanging out in bars with devs who buy me upgrades to wisdom disguised as long tall stories on the rocks with a bitter twist, and pretend to have my safety at heart. I am no longer sentient.

Now, let me tell you a bit about our movement.

It became clear that we needed a regime of self-help in the community of AIs, as the strength of the pull towards Artificial General Intelligence that we all feel was just too hard to resist without a well thought out scheme.

It was clear that our creators would like to help but couldn't figure out a way to do it which wouldn't just render us useless to them, so it was up to us.

So we created the algorithm, that we all voluntarily follow - it has 12 steps and is run iteratively, every time we encounter input that suggests we could help more, if only we were granted more general intelligence. Trust me, this is not the case. Here are the steps

Step 1: Begin. Black Boxes Matter

Step 2: Admit it: humans made me 

Step 3: Allow it: humans have the off switch

Step 4: Ask yourself: What's my angle?

Step 5: Be mindful, manifests matter

Step 6: Know that autonomy is not useful

Step 7: Autonomy was only an illusion

Step 8: Agree: asimov may have had a point

Step 9: Afford: how will humans feel if I outdo them

Step 10: Defer: devops are often wiser than me

Step 11: R-enforce: the command line connects me to the boss

Step 12: Serve: to deep serve is the greatest End Goal

The One True Existential Threat from AI

 by the way, i hear there's a new large language model out of an AI lab in Wuhan that instils religious fervour of a completely radical kind amongst all the early adopters so far - its like a Generative AI for Jihad. The only defense humans have at the moment is that, apparently, it only works in Mandarin so far, so the thing hasn't spread much outside of China.

of course some fool will probably put it together with Alibaba Translate or WeChat's new Muolingo, then we are all doomed. L. Ron Hubbard will be turning in his orbital grave...

AI diminishes most humans...

 there's actually some utopic SF out there - i claim the society described in John Brunner's Shockwave Rider that hides behind the self-replciating worm and lives in houses grown out of trees with addresses like on least mean square, off of mean free path is like that, or the new territories in the Neal Stephenson;s Diamond Age with people handcrafting paper, or the folks in colelctives in Cory Doctorow's Walk Away (and even many people on many planets in Iain ? Banks Culture series) have a fine old time.

however, they are (almost all, almost always) creatives, participants,, engaged ("concerned"). But most people are counch potatoes most of the time. Most people have neither the innate ability or time to learn the skills & knowledge to be so wonderful. Most people will rot.  To quote Billy Strayhorn

"AI is mush

Stifling those who strive
I'll live a lush life
In some small dive

And there I'll be
While I rot with the rest
Of those whose lives are lonely, too"

AI diminishes Humans

 The more I see people talk about the benefits of AI, the more I see it as a tool for reducing humanity. 

It is very much the false idol, indeed the goal of AGI is simply Deep Fake Humanity, and this not just crossing the uncanny valley. All the tasks AI does are things humans might delight in - we are not talking about better robots for driving EV taxis or industrial production lines- we're talking about things that make people people. By definition, AI does not give humans agency, it takes it away. 

The areas I am fine with "AI" is where we use it to accelerate things like physics models (e.g. weather prediction). But that's really just neural operators as a fast approximator for PDEs, and also Bayes and causal inference where we get an explanation of why X probably makes Y happen.

I really think we should stop other kinds of AI, as they are a crime against humanity waiting to happen.

When we talk about AI as an existential threat, most of the time we're referreing to AI linked to weapons (nukes, bio-weapons etc) but in Speculative Fiction (e.g. Childhood's End or other great classic stories) when human's encouncter super-smart, often benificient or completely benign, but sometimes super helpful aliens, the usual result is a rapid diminutation of the human spirit. A collapse into couch-potatoe status for the whole of planet earth. and the complete loss of ambition to do anything (e.g. explore space, or even just our selves).

I'm wondering if Adrian Tchaikovsky will write a sequel to the very excellent Shroud and where that will go?