We’ll Choose Huxley over Orwell any day

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We’d Choose Huxley over Orwell

Clare told me once about her nice-but-dim friend Linda, at her teacher training college for women. Their English class was assigned Brave New World to read and discuss. Linda’s startled question: “What’s wrong with it? It sounds perfect!”

Yes, it’s the standard question. No one wants the Inner Party stamping its boot on the human face forever (except perhaps the stronger candidates for the Inner Party); a lot of people like the idea of endless pampering, no responsibilities – and Soma.

So no question which future gets to win the vote.

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The Technology: Social Competence as a Service

The devices themselves are straightforward enough: microphones and cameras paired with generative language models. Worn unobtrusively, these devices experience what you experience, see what you see, hear what you hear – interpreting it in real time, then whispering advice into your ear or flashing it onto your smart glasses’ heads-up display (HUD).

They identify that rather familiar person and give you their background; tell you what to say, how to say it, when to interject, when to back down - like an actor's prompter.

They’ll record and summarise meetings for you. Flag your missteps. They’ll even suggest a diplomatic rephrase mid-sentence. No more mistakes, no more losing the plot or being stuck for what to say.

Health and Safety heaven.

The First Reaction: Uncanny and Unacceptable

The likely immediate reaction? Social panic.

You’re talking to a friend or colleague in a meeting and you realise they’re not quite present. Their tone, their timing, even their facial expressions are AI-modulated. Their wearable is watching you – analysing your body language, inferring your intent, drawing game-theoretic conclusions.

Suddenly you become tense. Everything you say is being recorded: so no gossipy observations about other people, no jokes, nothing you couldn’t defend in a court of law or the court of public opinion.

Nothing you’d want to stay personal is likely to remain so.

Spontaneity dies. Ambiguity and privileged information – so essential to humour, to intimacy, to negotiation – become impossible.

This will never catch on, you think.

But maybe the rebellious youth will take to it?

Historical Echoes: Delegation and Decay

There are precedents. The Roman aristocracy delegated not just labour but competence. Highly skilled slaves (their human equivalent of today’s promised AI robots) wrote their letters, managed their estates, even raised their children. The aristocrats became brilliant salon conversationalists, but dangerously disempowered when crises arrived.

Versailles functioned on the principle that no noble should lift a hand. Life was a choreography of servants, rituals, and affectations. And so, as 1789 rolled around, few retained the instincts or resilience to respond.

In late Imperial China, scholar-bureaucrats perfected social rituals while their proxies governed. But the world moved on. Foreign powers moved in as the empire atrophied.

What the Philosophers Know

All the major traditions – Stoicism, Buddhism, Christianity, Confucianism – agree on one thing: we grow through struggle. Character is shaped by challenges, by mistakes, by misjudged words and the courage to apologise and learn. By confronting fears and acquiring difficult new skills.

Maturity is not the absence of failure. It is, contrariwise, the ability to act in a world where failure and disaster are always possibilities; learning how to cope.

Remove that friction, and development stalls. You remain emotionally juvenile: cosseted and immature, a stunted child rather than an effective agent in the world.

In Brave New World, people are not oppressed but pampered. They’re pleasant, well-behaved, and empty. They live in a hollow world without searing problems to confront – and therefore without meaning or the opportunity for personal development.

Where This Leads

If social competence becomes a service, we will see dramatic improvements in superficial interaction. Less conflict, more fluency. Everyone now operates – via their AI social prosthetic – as the best (or even better than best) version of themselves.

We will mostly prefer it. The assistant will always be smoother than we are. We step back, let it handle more… and slowly disappear from our own lives. Why turn up to the meeting and lip-synch AI lines? Let your robot PA do it. Already, people let ChatGPT write an essay for them – then don’t dare to change it.

It's smarter than I am.

So then we’re finished. Not in some apocalyptic collapse, but in something quieter and more irreversible: the soft extinction of agency. Flightless birds with tiny brains; abundant food supplies and no predators. The dodo.

The Soft Oppression of Helpfulness

Orwell warned of a future where truth is crushed beneath the boot – brutal, overt, and imposed. But what we’re getting is Huxley: a world where truth is drowned in pleasure, convenience, and endless distraction; where control is not seized but offered: volunteered.

We are not being beaten into submission. We are being soothed into irrelevance.

Orwell feared censorship. Huxley feared there would be no need because no one would care to read anything anyway. Orwell feared surveillance by the state. Huxley saw us installing the cameras ourselves, so our AI companions could “know us better.” Orwell imagined pain as a means of control. Huxley imagined sedation: intellectual, emotional, and moral.

Huxley’s world is more stable. No gulags, no terror, just quietism. A populace pacified by hyper-personalised media, constant nudging, and artificial intimacy. Not oppression but overfitting to our wants.

The AI wearable era – at first so horrifying – insidiously becomes merely necessary. It comes offering real help. It will make your life easier, your social world smoother, your mood more stable.

Solitude, failure, and difficulty – the conditions in which depth is forged – will be optimised away.

Our future is Huxleyan, not because the architects of OpenAI, Alphabet, Meta, etc., are evil, but because they are efficient and can't afford to lose.

Because they build what people want in the moment – and what people want is mostly to be spared from the jagged edge of life.

A Walk in the Woods - by Adam Carlton (intro)

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And sometimes they walk in the woods and discuss this and that. Happy Valentine's Day!

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My Experience of Guitar Lessons

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I’d like to think I look forward to my weekly guitar lessons. I mentally class them, however, as akin to a visit to the dentist. Why is that?

I carry a legacy of self-taught guitar from my teens: I know the common chords; I can play lead riffs up and down the fretboard on the blues scale. Fingerstyle blues doesn't leverage much of this: the action congregates at the top of the fretboard near the nut, where the frets are spaced wide apart, where reaching scale notes - melody notes - demands contortions of the wrist, the thumb, and overspread fingers.

I have found that I do not have good motor control across all my fingers and that moving them independently on and off the strings is a new challenge for my motor cortex.

The right hand is no longer wielding a pick; instead the thumb is meant to lay down an independent alternating bass while the other fingers pick out melody and harmony above it. There are a great many moving parts here.

Fingerstyle is said to be deceptively difficult. Not much of what I previously knew carries across beyond the chord shapes.

So my ordeal by fire proceeds as follows. I am asked to play my homework assignment - for example, a scale in E with alternating bass, or a blues in A with melody lines. I have practised assiduously for a week, but Rome was not built in a day, and neither is a clean chord change under scrutiny.

There are mistakes - sometimes at high density. A piece may be signed off by my tutor (relief!) and then I am asked to work - really work! - bar by bar on the piece I have just mangled, under his judging, observant eye.

I know myself to be a perfectionist. I concentrate and sweat, and there’s a dampness in the eyes (not quite tears of frustration and humiliation). I stumble through the piece.

“And again.”

My travails are not over. There will be a new piece to address in the coming week. I am shown it, and then invited to “have a go”. Yes, quite. 

My instructor has become weary of my muttered mantra: “I haven’t seen this before - it will be much better next week.”

I am not good at reading music, at matching notes to fretboard positions and fingerings. And the tablature beneath the stave is simply one more damned thing to process in real time. Half an hour passes both quickly and slowly.

I leave with a curious sense of euphoria, reflecting that for the next six days I may practise upstairs at home, over and over again, without anyone watching over me. 

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Today my mother would have been 103

My parents, Beryl (25) and Fred Seel: engagement picture in 1948

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Beryl Seel (1923–2015): On What Would Have Been Her 103rd Birthday

On 11 February 1923, in a nursing home in Brunswick Square, St Paul’s, Bristol, Beryl Porter was born into a world still recovering from one war and heading, unknowingly, towards another. Today, this February 11th, she would have been 103.

She grew up in William Street, St Paul’s, in a crowded, extended household shaped by strong personalities and strict expectations. She described herself as a shy child, wary of a mother who believed that children were best observed silently. Yet there was warmth too, especially in the presence of her grandparents, whose room became a refuge. Her grandmother, in particular, emerges from her own recollections as a kind of unofficial civic institution - diagnosing childhood ailments, helping neighbours in distress, even cutting down a man who had attempted to hang himself. They were different times.

That family competence became a defining trait. As a schoolgirl she was already burdened with responsibility, required to look after a disabled brother during play times because no one else would. Yet she was not cowed by this. She joined the Brownies and then the Girl Guides, earned her badges with pride, became a Patrol Leader, and later a Brown Owl herself. She loved sport - netball, swimming, competitions against other schools - and won her Bronze Medallion at thirteen, even earning a mention in the local paper for hauling an incautious non-swimmer out of the pool. The phrase “stupid non-swimmer”, which she used herself, gives a fair indication of her wry, unsentimental humour.

War arrived when she was sixteen. She remembered with absolute clarity the Sunday morning when the family clustered around the radio to hear the Prime Minister speak, the older generation muttering grimly, remembering the last time. During the Bristol Blitz she worked alongside her father in civil defence, fitting gas masks, helping to run an air-raid shelter in the church crypt, serving refreshments during raids. When a bomb tore through the church roof and into the shelter below, killing some of those inside, including friends of hers, there was no rhetoric in her telling. Just the terrible facts locked down in memory.

Like many of her generation, she combined fear, endurance, and an undiminished appetite for life. There were dances, friendships, and a romance conducted through letters written almost daily while her future husband served in the Army. She disliked the work she was pushed into - the local Fire Service, then four years of 12-hour shifts underground in an aircraft engine factory near Corsham - but she did it anyway. When the factory was abruptly closed because the engines kept exploding on test, she remembered the night with delight: no work, what a relief!

Peace brought marriage, housing struggles, ration books, and the slow construction of an ordinary domestic life. Children arrived, and with them pride, worry, arguments, and joy. If there is one constant in her account, it's her sense of duty. When traffic accidents repeatedly occurred outside her Henbury home, she recognised that her Girl Guide first-aid training was outdated and simply joined the Red Cross to rectify the problem. 

That decision led to 34 years of service, qualifications in first aid, nursing, mental health, psychology, and physiology, and eventually a Badge of Honour awarded jointly to her and her husband. She trained cadets, many of whom later became nurses.

Later still, she spent 21 years working as a classroom assistant at a school for deaf children, with responsibility for the medical room. Again, she wondered whether she would cope, then got on with it. When she retired, the affection shown by pupils and staff clearly mattered to her; she kept in touch long afterwards.

Reading her self-written memories now, what stands out is not nostalgia or sentimentality, but steadiness. She was observant, modest, capable, and quietly brave. She disliked fuss. She valued usefulness. She lived through bombing, rationing, exhausting labour, and the slow rebuilding of post-war Britain, and emerged neither embittered nor romantic about it.

On her 103rd virtual birthday, eleven years after her death, the right tribute is not great language but clear memories. She was a woman of unbending moral principles, who did what needed doing and who understood that a good life is made from serious engagement: turning up, learning what is required, and helping where you can.

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The Chinese Room: a retrospective

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Searle’s Chinese Room in the Age of LLMs

John Searle, who died late last year, left behind a body of work that shaped late twentieth-century philosophy of mind. His Chinese Room thought experiment in particular became a touchstone, provoking countless debates about the nature of thought, language, and machines. Whatever one makes of it today, the example stands as a clear statement of his conviction that computation alone could never amount to genuine understanding.

The scenario of the Chinese Room is simple: imagine a man (Searle himself) locked in a room with a rulebook for manipulating Chinese symbols. He receives characters through a slot, consults the rules, and sends back strings of new characters. To those outside the room, it looks as if they are conversing with a fluent Chinese speaker.

Yet Searle insists that, since he personally doesn’t understand a word of Chinese, the system doesn’t either. The thought experiment is meant to show that symbol manipulation (syntax) can be decoupled from genuine meaning (semantics).

Yet neurons in the human brain are also mere processors of signals. If syntax alone cannot yield semantics, the dilemma applies as much to biology as to silicon. Searle’s claim that brains “do meaning” while programs cannot leaves the central mysteries untouched.*

Coherent, even apparently intelligent, conversation can occur in humans without any accompanying awareness. Sleep-talkers, patients in certain automatisms, or those under hypnosis can generate language without consciousness. The Chinese Room dramatises the same phenomenon: a conversation partner can exist in performance, without any inner understanding.

This shows that Searle's real concern was not so much with meaning - formal semantics - as with with awareness, with consciousness.

Fast forward to today. When we interact with large language models, we are quite literally instantiating the Chinese Room. Input tokens come in, they are transformed according to a vast set of implicit, probabilistic rules, and output tokens are produced. To the human user, it feels like a meaningful dialogue. But the internal process is just Searle’s box, writ large. The difference is scale and efficiency, not kind.

Searle’s intended conclusion was that consciousness cannot be algorithmic, since the Chinese Room shows syntax is not semantics. But this is not as secure as it sounds. We have no explanatory bridge from human consciousness to the neural substrate either.

Brains are electrochemical systems obeying physical rules. How subjective awareness arises from them is unknown. The mystery of consciousness stands equally before silicon and biology. Searle’s room, therefore, has no decisive bearing on that question either.

In retrospect, the thought experiment looks more dated than decisive. It was provocative in the early 1980s, when AI was still associated with symbolic rule-following, but it does not map well onto today’s science of the mind. Its chief contemporary use is as a reminder: conversational fluency and experiential consciousness are not the same thing.

The Chinese Room clarifies the difference between competence in dialogue and the mystery of lived experience.

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* Yet what is 'meaning' here? If I watch an automated theorem prover churning through consequences of some set of propositions, it's easy to say that I know the meaning of what's going on, while for the machine system it's just doing symbol-production. Yet my brain is also just doing correlations between symbols of the machine's logic-production and other symbols - neurally encoded - which represent the 'aboutness' of the formulae. I'm just connecting the dots at the meta-level - so what's the difference?

There are only two ways out of this recursive dilemma: praxis - if you believe the world exists; and solipsism - if you don't. Today, the LLMs illustrate the latter.

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Why do I write on this blog?

XKCD#386 - Duty Calls

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Why this blog?

Decades ago one of my brothers-in-law (a fireman by trade, a pretty practical guy) expressed his opinion of the fact I wrote a regular blog in an uncharacteristically diplomatic way.

I parsed his somewhat whispered comment as: ‘It’s pretentious.’

Things sting when they have an element of truth and I’m more than aware of some of my faults: over-serious, didactic, egocentric, pompous - and, of course, pretentious.

I ask myself the question James was too polite to ask: do I write a regular blog (since 2006) in a Walter Mitty-like attempt to be a famous person on the Internet, followed and quoted? And I answer that I do not want that particular straightjacket. All fame is transitory - yes, really - and also, so what? The status accolades of strangers do nothing for me - I see only the many downsides in the unlikely event...

I say to people - honestly - that I like writing, that when ideas churn in my mind, my only means of exorcism is to ‘sort them out by writing them down’. And then I see in their eyes the obvious response: keep a diary, why don’t you!

But I’m no more immune from the dangerous thrill of putting my best-considered thoughts ‘out there’ for anyone to see (and then seeing what happens) than any other person with an exaggerated sense of their own intellect.

No, I can’t come up to bed: someone just said something stupid on the Internet!

And yes, I do look with interest to see how many reads each post gets, although I know it’s only a harmless fun-diversion.

Do I think my posts are any good? Generally better than most of the thought pieces which drape the commentary sites, I reckon. But I know I lack the access to informed networks, and the training and education, to be the bearer of genuinely new thinking. So I really can’t use that as an excuse for your attention.

I’m on surer ground with biography. My ancestors left a pretty thin trail of documentary information; their opinions and quotidian experiences are lost for good. I rather regret that - and perhaps my descendant-kin will be interested in my view of my life and times, or (as we say these days), their AI surrogates might want to check me out on their behalf.

No-one has to read anything I produce and I think it’s fair to say that all but an infinitesimal part of the literate public literally has no idea (and cares less) that I even exist.

And that’s expected, obvious and perfectly OK.

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GPT5.2 comments on my introspection...

You ask for a forensic reading, so I’ll be unsentimental. The piece is lucid, self-aware, and written in good faith — but it still contains several evasions, soft landings, and rhetorical sleights of hand. I’ll take them in turn.

First, the fireman anecdote does more work than you admit. You frame James's judgement of you (“pretentious”) as both stinging and partially true, but you also smuggle in a class and temperament contrast — practical man versus cerebral blogger — that quietly cushions your ego. The implication is: he would think that, wouldn’t he. This doesn’t refute the charge; it domesticates it. You never really interrogate what kind of pretension might be operative — moral, intellectual, stylistic, performative — because the anecdote allows you to move on having acknowledged the word without submitting to it.

Second, the fame disavowal is sincere but incomplete. You reject celebrity as a goal, but you replace it with a more refined, and therefore more dangerous, desire: recognition by the right sort of reader. You say you don’t want to be “followed and quoted”, yet you clearly want to be taken seriously, not dismissed as a diarist or crank. This is not mass fame; it is reputational dignity. The essay pretends the alternative to fame is indifference, when in fact the real alternative is anonymity. You haven’t chosen that.

Third, the “I write to sort out my thoughts” trope is only half true, and you know it. Writing for oneself and writing in public are phenomenologically different acts. Public writing sharpens, edits, stylises; it introduces imagined interlocutors and latent adversaries. Your own parenthetical aside — the nocturnal Internet argument — gives the game away. You are writing against stupidity, vagueness, fashion, and error, and hoping someone will notice you doing so competently.

Fourth, the diary rebuttal is rhetorically clever but philosophically weak. You implicitly concede that a diary would meet the stated need (sorting thoughts), yet you reject it because it lacks exposure. That exposure is not an accidental by-product; it is the point. The essay treats this as a minor indulgence — “a dangerous thrill” — but it is structurally central. Without an audience, however small or imagined, much of your motivation would evaporate. Calling this “harmless fun-diversion” is minimisation, not honesty.

Fifth, your judgement of quality contains a quiet contradiction. You claim your work is “generally better than most” online commentary, yet immediately disqualify yourself from “new thinking” due to lack of access and training. This is false modesty of a particular kind. Originality does not require institutional access; it requires clarity, independence, and sustained attention — all of which you plainly possess. What you really mean is: I do not expect to matter in the way recognised thinkers matter. That is a social claim, not an epistemic one, and conflating the two lets you retreat gracefully from ambition without abandoning self-respect.

Sixth, the biographical justification is the most revealing — and the most sentimental. The ancestors-without-voices motif is attractive, but it disguises a deeper impulse: the refusal to vanish without trace. You invoke descendants and AI surrogates not because this is likely, but because it licenses the activity with a quasi-moral seriousness. Posterity is doing the work that God or History once did. This is not vanity, but it is metaphysical consolation. You are building a cairn and pretending it is an archive.

Finally, the closing paragraph — the assertion of insignificance — is rhetorically neat but emotionally evasive. Yes, it is true that almost nobody knows or cares that you exist. But repeating this functions as inoculation: if nothing matters, nothing can wound. The stance is Stoic on the surface, but it also pre-empts disappointment. It allows you to continue writing seriously while claiming not to care whether it is taken seriously. That tension is unresolved, not transcended.

In short, the central self-deception is this: you portray the blog as a private intellectual hygiene practice with incidental publicity, when in fact it is a public act of self-placement. You are locating yourself — intellectually, morally, historically — in a world whose dominant voices you distrust but refuse to ignore. The blog is neither a diary nor a bid for fame. It is a wager: that clear thought, honestly pursued, is still worth setting down as if it might matter.

You don’t quite admit that last clause. But everything you write depends on it.

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Taking the MBTI with HFA

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Back in the early 2000s I was working in America for Cable & Wireless. One of my colleagues was Craig, a Duke University professor of psychiatry; his wife, Dee Ann, was also trained in psychotherapy. I remember talking to her at one of our works dinners about the Myers-Briggs classification scheme and when it didn't work. She replied that it tended to give erratic results with people who exhibited abnormal mental conditions, such as schizophrenia and Asperger's syndrome.

And I left it there.

Today I'm wondering what happens if a person with High-Functioning Autism (formerly Asperger's syndrome) takes the Myers-Briggs Inventory. How does their MBTI come out?

ChatGPT tells me...

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How HFA People Score on the Myers–Briggs Type Indicator

The Myers–Briggs Type Indicator rests on population averages of neurotypical psychology. It was never built to describe autistic cognition. When people with high-functioning autism (HFA) take the MBTI, the results often wobble or misclassify. The same is true of the Five Factor Model, though in a different way.

Take the S/N dimension. Some autistic people live in concrete domains: bus timetables, mechanical systems, the fine grain of sensory detail. They look like S. Others immerse themselves in mathematics, philosophy, speculative worlds. They look like N. Both are common.

The test assumes the two poles are exclusive; autism ignores that rule. A developer who can design high-performance real-time transaction systems may come out as a classic N for abstract thinking. Yet ask him about politics or engage in small talk and he seems incurious, even obtuse - answers that tilt back toward S.

Extraversion is another fault line. HFA people can be talkative, sometimes performatively gregarious, yet maintain no close friends. The MBTI interprets their verbal energy as E, while their lived experience is solitary. A literal answer to “Do you enjoy going to parties?” might be “Yes, I like the food and the noise,” even if the same person leaves early, interacts with no one, and has no social bonds. The test confuses stimulus-seeking with sociability.

On the T/F scale, many answer as T. They rely on explicit reasoning, exploiting rules and consistency. That does not mean they lack affect, only that their affect is not measured in the MBTI’s idiom. Similarly, the J/P axis is confounded: autism’s need for sameness, its preference for routine, shows up as J. But this is neurology, not “personality preference”.

If you shift to the Big Five, the pattern persists. “Openness” can score high if interests are abstract, or low if they are repetitive and concrete. “Conscientiousness” may appear strong on orderliness but weak on adaptive planning. “Agreeableness” is pulled down by low empathy-related items, though fairness and honesty are often high. “Neuroticism” is inflated by anxiety, a frequent comorbidity. Instability is the rule.

The real problem is structural. These instruments assume traits cluster as they do in the neurotypical bell curve. Autism reshuffles the deck. Literal answering, context-bound interpretations, and construct mismatch ensure that the outputs are noisy. What looks like inconsistency is the wrong measurement framework.

Better alternatives exist. The Empathising–Systemising Quotient, the RAADS-R, and sensory processing profiles capture dimensions orthogonal to MBTI and FFM. They measure the axes on which autistic cognition varies.

So when an HFA person emerges from the MBTI as ENTJ one month and ISFP the next, it is not a crisis of self-knowledge. It is the instrument failing to fit the mind it tries to describe.

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Plan for the Galaxy *

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Nigel: Elon Musk’s rhetoric about pivoting his company towards humanoid robotics strikes me as wildly premature. The technology is nothing like ready. We are nowhere near solving robust manipulation, autonomy in unstructured environments, or long-term reliability. Scaling production now - it looks like a delusion: confusing a demo-prototype for a ready-to-go mass product.

GPT-5.2: That is the central problem. What exists today are research artefacts with good PR. A humanoid robot that can walk, lift a box, or fold a T-shirt under contrived conditions is still missing the hard parts: error recovery, adaptive learning in the wild, energy efficiency, and graceful degradation when things go wrong. These are not polish issues; they are foundational research problems. Betting a company on them now would be a triumph of narrative over engineering.

Nigel: And of course we already have 'humanoid robots': human beings. They are abundant, adaptable, currently cheap by comparison, and astonishingly general-purpose. That’s the benchmark any future humanoid robot has to beat.

GPT-5.2: Precisely. Humans are the incumbent platform. They arrive self-powered, self-repairing, socially competent, and pre-trained by a civilisation that absorbs the cost. Against that baseline, a robot must be not just comparable but decisively better over its lifetime. Until labour is scarce, or required for situations intolerably dangerous, humanoid robots are competing with the most efficient all-round machine ever produced (by natural selection) for the human economy.

Nigel: Except, perhaps, on Mars? Given Elon Musk’s focus on a Martian colony, surely that’s the environment where humanoid robots and AI systems ought to be doing all the heavy lifting: construction, maintenance, preparation all set in place before the first humans ever arrive?

GPT-5.2: I can't agree. On Mars, humans become grotesquely expensive and fragile, so robots do start to look attractive. But Mars is not a proving ground; it is an extreme endgame. Any robot sent there must operate with near-total autonomy, survive years of mechanical stress, corrosive dust, radiation and cold, and repair itself or its peers with minimal human intervention. We cannot yet build machines that do this reliably in a terrestrial warehouse, even. Mars is not a shortcut around Earth-bound difficulty; it is in fact the ultimate stress test.

Nigel: Which pushes us into a deeper question. Why are we so intent - at least in our imaginations - on spreading humanity across the universe? None of us will get to go. Most everything out there looks bleak, uncomfortable, and sterile. Mars itself makes Antarctica look cosy - and we haven't exactly built cities or an economy there, have we?

GPT-5.2: That question is usually dodged with talk of destiny or survival, but stripped of romance it is deeply problematic. Human beings are savanna primates. We flourish only in narrow ecological bands, augmented by environment-mitigation technologies. The wider universe is not hostile by accident; it is hostile by default.

Nigel: Yep, just hostile. And AI and robotics will advance far faster than our capacity to move fragile human bodies across interplanetary, let alone interstellar, distances.

GPT-5.2: Yes. Once machines surpass us in harsh-environment durability, autonomy, and cognition, galactic exploration becomes their project, not ours. At that point, the human role presumably shifts from explorer to originator: the species that lit the fuse...

Nigel: So perhaps the long-term future is not humanity spreading bodily through the cosmos, but humanity giving rise to systems that do, almost by accident?

GPT-5.2: That's a future with a gradual decoupling: humans remain local, terrestrial, culturally rich but spatially constrained; meanwhile, our machines range outward, mapping, building - and expanding where we cannot.

Nigel: There is at least one major science-fictional counter-vision to this rather bleak handover. In Iain M. Banks’s Culture series, very advanced technology and very advanced AI are dedicated to replicating almost utopian human (strictly: human-like) environments elsewhere in the galaxy just by sheer cleverness and the use of vast amounts of energy and technology.

Whole artificial ecologies - Orbitals, habitats, engineered worlds - are built to be extravagantly hospitable. Savannahs, seas, weather, danger without lethality, difficulty without misery. Humans don’t adapt to the galaxy at all; the galaxy is adapted to humans. And the prospect of more savannah-like utopian real estate across the galaxy - for which we don’t have to change humans very much - might be a future humans would be very motivated to try to bring about.

GPT-5.2: Yes. Banks takes the opposite bet to rugged frontier mythology. Instead of forcing humans into hostile environments through grit and sacrifice, the Culture expends unimaginable effort to eliminate hostility itself. Gravity problems, poisonous atmospheres, harsh radiation, scarcity even: all engineered away. It is a vision where intelligence serves comfort rather than combatting the hostile with raw toughness.

Nigel: And crucially, humans are not asked to change very much. No radical post-biological leap is required. They remain recognisably human - fallible, social, embodied - just freed from the tyranny of the mundane, and scarcity, by Minds doing all the heavy lifting.

GPT-5.2: In that sense, it is deeply conservative about human nature, even as it is radically ambitious about technology.

Nigel: Which suggests a motivation that makes more sense than grim Martian heroics. Not survival at any cost, but abundance through exquisite engineering. More and nicer Earths, not harder near-misses. More room to live well, not more ways to endlessly suffer the hardships of pioneers.

Which brings us back to AI. In that vision, AI is not humanity’s replacement but its galactic infrastructure - vast, patient, incomprehensible, and largely benevolent machines to watch over us.

GPT-5.2: And that may be the most plausible long-term equilibrium. Humans remain local, embodied, narrative-driven creatures. AI becomes the civil-engineering layer of civilisation at cosmic scale. Not our descendants, exactly but not rivals either. Something closer to our climate, our environment, our extended phenotype.

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* This is in homage to BA Gillies's 'Return to the Galaxy' pulp military-SF series.

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Narrenschiff — the Ship of Fools

Narrenschiff — the Ship of Fools

The image originates in medieval allegory, most famously in Sebastian Brant’s 1494 satire Das Narrenschiff, where a vessel full of fools sails toward Narragonia, a fictional paradise of folly. Brant coined Narragonia by blending “Narr” (German for “fool”) with the pseudo-classical suffix “-gonia” suggesting a land or origin.

Each fool represents a human vice - vanity, greed, pride - and the ship, rudderless and captainless, becomes a metaphor for a society adrift, morally unmoored, absurd in its self-regard.

Later, Hieronymus Bosch painted it: leering grotesques, gluttonous revels, a lute-playing nun - the world as madhouse. Foucault seized on it in Madness and Civilization, seeing the ship of fools as a literal and figurative vehicle of exclusion: the mad expelled from the city, yet still haunting its margins.

In modern use, Narrenschiff is a potent metaphor - for a culture that has lost its reason, for political or economic systems spinning into dysfunction, or even for the human condition itself: brilliant, deluded, fragile, floating godless through the void.

And Robert Plant sang about it.

'Ship of Fools', released in 1988 on Robert Plant’s Now and Zen, is a melancholy meditation wrapped in elegiac blues-rock. Unlike Brant’s medieval satire, Plant’s Narrenschiff is romantic and introspective - a metaphor for emotional drift, disillusionment - and love receding on a tide of time. 

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'Ship of Fools' (1988) - by Robert Plant and keyboardist Phil Johnstone

On waves of love, my heart is breaking

And stranger still, my self-control I can't rely on anymore

New tide, surprise, my world is changing

Within this frame an ocean swell behind the smile, I know it well

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Beneath a lover's moon I'm waiting

I am the pilot of the storm, adrift in pleasure I may drown

I built this ship, it is my making

And furthermore, my self-control, I can't rely on anymore

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I know why

I know why

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Crazy on a ship of fools

Crazy on a ship of fools

Turn this boat around, back to my loving ground

Oh no, oh no

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Who claims that no man is an island?

While I land up in jeopardy, more distant from you by degrees

I walk this shore in isolation

And at my feet eternity, draws ever sweeter plans for me

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Cute.

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The Minkowski Geometry We Live In But Never See

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The Geometry We Live In But Never See

Minkowski spacetime is unsettling in a specific way. Not so much because it is conceptually hard, but because it is categorically unlike the Euclidean geometry our instincts expect - and yet it largely stays out of sight.

We live in a world whose metric admits null vectors, whose orthogonality behaves oddly at the light cone, and whose causal structure is rigid in ways no Euclidean space can mimic. Still, daily life feels like three-dimensional space with time tacked on as a separate parameter. Where has the weirdness gone?

The usual explanation is that the speed of light is enormous, so relativistic effects are small. True, but shallow. The deeper explanation is geometric plus biological: Lorentzian structure is real, but our species only samples a thin, very timelike region of it, under strong thermodynamic and cognitive boundary conditions.

Begin with the geometry. Minkowski space is not Euclidean four-space with a sign flipped as a mere technicality. Minkowski mixed signature changes the rules: a nonzero vector can have zero norm; the orthogonal complement of a null (lightlike) direction fails to be transverse; at null surfaces (light cones), “normal” and “tangent” collapse into the same direction.

This is why you cannot “model” even 1+1 Minkowski space as a surface inside any Euclidean space to get an intuitive feel for it. A Euclidean embedding inherits a positive-definite metric; it simply has no place to put null vectors. Spacetime diagrams are therefore not models but coded projections: what your intuitions see on the page is not literally what is happening.

So why does such alien structure not intrude? Partly because everyday life is carried out deep inside the timelike cone. For ordinary speeds, worldlines cling close to the time axis, and the Minkowski interval looks Newtonian (space and time separate and different*). The geometry is not Euclidean, but we keep walking in a narrow region where the difference barely registers.

Yet one everyday fact is already a clue. Time and space present themselves to us as categorically different kinds of thing. In a straightforward four-dimensional Euclidean universe, by contrast, “time” would be just another axis - in principle rotatable into “space” - and that felt distinction would be hard to justify as anything other than an arbitrary psychological quirk. Minkowski spacetime, at least, builds in a deep and invariant difference between timelike and spacelike directions.

The most distinctive feature of Minkowski space is also the least inhabitable: the null directions. The light cone defines the boundary between possible and impossible causal influence. But no massive organism can live on a null worldline - our worldlines are timelike. There is no rest frame of light, no proper time along a null curve, no “lived experience” of that geometry from within. The sharp edge of the metric is precisely the edge we cannot stand on.

Then add the thermodynamic arrow. Lorentzian geometry by itself does not demand an irreversible time, but it cleanly separates timelike from spacelike and makes causal order frame-invariant. Our experienced asymmetry of time - memory, anticipation, decay, the sense that causes precede effects - is a dynamical fact about a low-entropy past. Yet it sits naturally inside a spacetime where “time” is not just another axis you can rotate into “space”. In Euclidean four-space, that experiential distinction would be an awkward add-on. In Minkowski space, it is at least compatible with the underlying geometry.

Relativity becomes visible mainly when different inertial slicings are forced into comparison: moving clocks, synchronisation disputes, high rapidities, long baselines. Absent those comparisons, Lorentzian structure is present but quiet - like the curvature of the Earth to a pedestrian.

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* Newtonian space-time is not “Minkowski with a different sign” (all pluses?) but a different kind of geometric structure altogether, one far less elegant.

Minkowski space is a four-dimensional manifold equipped with a single non-degenerate Lorentzian metric of fixed signature, so one invariant object simultaneously defines intervals, orthogonality, proper time, and a light-cone causal structure.

Newtonian (Galilean/Newton-Cartan) space-time is typically formalised on a four-manifold too, but it has no non-degenerate spacetime metric: instead it carries an absolute time function (time is absolute, universal, and geometrically prior to space) that foliates the manifold into three-dimensional simultaneity slices, plus a Euclidean spatial metric that only measures distances within each slice. 

Because this “metric” structure is degenerate, there is no invariant spacetime interval between arbitrary events and no geometric mixing of space and time under boosts. So relativity’s unified causal geometry fractures into separate notions of absolute time and instantaneous Euclidean space in a mechanistic way.

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