A Stick a Dog and a Box With Something In It

The recent excitement over agentic swarms and their effectiveness has led to a lot of speculation about the capabilities of these systems, and naturally to a conversation about what they mean in the debate about emergent intelligence and then superintelli…

Today (August 28 2026) marks twenty-five years since the first broadcast of Go Digital, the World Service radio programme that became Digital Planet, then Click, then Digital Planet again until it ended in April 2023.

In January 2013 I posted a note on the BillBlog to say that I had decided that I’d no longer sit on men-only panels at conferences.

The Catholic Church is actively responding to the challenges posed by artificial intelligence through various teachings, but the main event is Pope Leo’s new Encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas.

I gave the opening keynote at a two-day workshop looking at ways to make work that is digital, inclusive and sustainable as part of part of programme to support transformation across the European opera and dance community.

“We must build AI for people; not to be a person,” Mustafa Suleyman’s recent essay on the importance of avoiding what he terms ‘seemingly conscious AI ‘is a welcome intervention, and much better argued than his recent book, The Coming Wave.

At noon today, in half an hour, there will be a two minute silence to mark VJ Day, the eightieth anniversary of the surrender of Japan and the effective end of World War Two It doesn’t get the same attention as the end of the war in Europe but it matters…

I arrived to study at Cambridge University forty-six years ago, in 1979, and moved into a room at St Catharine’s College, or Catz.

“As I write, highly civilized human beings are crafting algorithmic timelines, trying to kill my ability to focus for longer than thirty seconds.

I’m editing a newsletter and I just copied and pasted a photograph I took in Savino’s cafe this week of my coffee in a cup from the 2019 Venice Biennale, which I attended.