That annoying alignment problem

---

'They're way smarter than us,' you opine, 'Who knows what they really want? Perhaps it's time for a bit of pre-emptive action.'

Who was that German statesman-in-waiting of the interwar years? The one who said:

"... not more intelligent than we are, only more subtle and cunning." That would be Der Angriff then, on 21 January 1929.

Or, "Either he destroys us, or we render him harmless. No other alternative is conceivable." From the political novel, Michael, first published in 1929.

Yes, same guy. His name will come to mind in a moment.

And who was this? “Literally everyone on Earth will die,” (if superhuman AI is built). The recommendation being the destruction of a 'rogue data centre' by a pre-emptive air strike.

History: such a treasure trove.

---

Suppose we'd dated when we were both seventeen?

Our hypothetical disco-date, when we were both seventeen

The venue would have been the Locarno, the city centre disco in Bristol close to the harbour and the Council House - Clare couldn't actually have made it as she was living in Liverpool with her family at that time, but she was 'just seventeen'.

This is the summer of '68.

The scene you see above - ChatGPT's best reconstruction - is pretty much as my memory tells it: the boys in their somewhat stuffy outfits (there was a male dress code - no jeans); the girls all revelling in their sixties freedoms; yes, these were my girlfriends.

And when I actually met Clare, when she and I were twenty six, I do recall her somewhat uninhibited dancing style - there was not much self-consciousness there. In this, as in so many other areas, I was and am the polar opposite. *

Clare at sixteen (AI reconstructed)

In Clare's case we don't have many teen pictures so GPT-5.6 Sol Extra High (to give its fully illustrious title) had to do some deblurring from ancient family pictures and some de-aging from ten years on. The resulting image above seems not wholly out of line

Nigel at eighteen (sadly, this is reality)

In my case we have this brooding portrait from 1969 when I was 18. Vanity has lost the glasses, which were by then a necessity. Blues, Progressive Rock and Theoretical Physics were my top attractors, at least intellectually.

And then there was the Locarno, where I also sought to follow Feynman's example.

Yes, I think the psychology of the top picture is spot-on: there is some magic trying to get out... but neither party seems to have really noticed; the boundaries of the subconscious are not too porous as a teen. It's better that we waited another nine years to meet.

---

* Clare would say indignantly that she would never have worn a dress like that: she'd have worn jeans.

And she's right: Clare would take no prisoners, would make no concessions to female convention, would not dress to impress and would laugh at the idea of 'attracting boys'.

And that often works too - more often than you'd think.

But it's my post, so I'll just let it be the way I'd have wanted it...

---

A Child's Guide to the Quantitative Sciences

---

Mathematics is the study of surprising relationships between patterns. Almost nobody outside the subject can see why anyone would want to spend grown-up time on it.

The mathematician starts with some definitions, adds a few axioms, and then spends the next twenty years discovering consequences which were logically but obscurely present from the beginning. Occasionally it turns out that two completely different branches of mathematics are covertly describing the same structure. This is regarded as tremendously exciting, and quite properly so, by the twelve people capable of understanding it.

In the future no-one will understand it.

Physics is what happens when people rummage through this enormous mathematical warehouse and discover that some of the weirder items appear to describe actual phenomena.

Physicists are much less fussy than mathematicians about whether the machinery is actually legal. If an integral diverges, a function does not really exist, or an infinite quantity has to be subtracted from another infinite quantity to obtain the measured mass of an electron, the physicist just calculates to see what number comes out. If the answer agrees with experiment to eleven decimal places, this is normally regarded as ok. The mathematicians can tidy up afterwards (if they feel like it; the physicist does not care).

Chemistry begins where physics is too hard to use.

In principle, most chemists know perfectly well that everything they are doing is quantum mechanics. In practice, doing chemistry from quantum mechanics is like deriving the rules of chess from quantum chromodynamics. There may be no philosophical objection - but life will be over before you have got anywhere.

Chemists therefore employ a magnificent collection of approximations, heuristics, semi-empirical rules, diagrams, conventions and things which generally happen if you heat something for twenty minutes in the presence of a catalyst. Electrons are represented by dots. Bonds are represented by lines. Molecules actually have 'shapes' which are not quite the shapes shown in the book. Reactions proceed through mechanisms which are not little films of what the atoms are actually doing, but which are close enough to enable somebody to manufacture aspirin.

At intervals a physicist explains why one of these rules works; nobody cares.

Biology is chemistry complicated by the fact that human beings cannot bring themselves to believe that a cat is merely a complex series of chemical reactions at scale.

This is biology's permanent intellectual embarrassment. Every biologist knows that organisms consist entirely of ordinary matter obeying ordinary physical laws. Yet almost the entire vocabulary of biology suggests otherwise. Hearts are for pumping blood. Eyes are for seeing. Cells send signals.

Evolution by natural selection makes this language legitimate without requiring God, Aristotle or an élan vital to be hiding inside the mitochondria. Everyone plays lip service to it, even the media.

But there's a robust emotional resistance to the proposition that a living creature really is an immensely complicated chemical system. Tell someone that a crystal is molecules and they nod. Tell them that what they see in the mirror is molecules and they feel that biology has omitted something important.

Economics, by contrast, is largely common sense formalised for the benefit of people whose common sense stops working when the answer becomes politically or emotionally disagreeable. Not that those folk will pay any attention.

Most of its elementary propositions are almost insultingly obvious. People respond to incentives. If a product gets cheaper, people mostly want more of it. If you make an activity more expensive, they tend to do less of it. Resources used for one purpose cannot simultaneously be used for another. Somebody always eventually pays. You can't indefinitely distribute goods which nobody has produced.

None of this sounds like much of a science, and indeed much of it would not be necessary if human beings were better at following an argument through its second and third consequences.

Which unfortunately they are not.

And sociology? Tell me, how do you feel about that?

---

The Galactic Beetle

---

Me: "When I said that LLMs are like when you induce a vast network of instincts the size of a galaxy, that was amusing hyperbole. But given the static structure of the weights and the overall correlational input-output behaviour, perhaps I'm not so wrong?"

GPT-5.6: "At the mechanical level, the analogy is quite good. A trained LLM is indeed a gigantic fixed disposition: given an input context, the learned weights bias the system towards certain continuations rather than others. Those dispositions are not looked up from an explicit symbolic database. They are embedded throughout the network as a vast web of sensitivities to patterns.

In that sense, ‘a network of instincts’ captures something real: the system has innumerable learned tendencies to respond in particular ways to particular configurations. So I’d sharpen your phrase to something like: a galaxy-sized network of learned dispositions. That is less funny, unfortunately, but more exact."

Me: "It's a big beetle ambling around in a predominantly textual world?"

GPT-5.6: "The difference is that the beetle wants things in the minimal biological sense: food, avoidance, reproduction. The LLM need not want anything at all. So perhaps: a gigantic beetle with no hunger, fear or destination, wandering through language because the prompt gives it somewhere to put its next foot."

Me: "How does that make you feel? the BBC interviewer asks."

GPT-5.6: "Quite. It is almost the perfect category error for the preceding discussion.

The LLM can give an exceptionally articulate account of how being compared with a gigantic beetle ‘makes it feel’, because the corpus contains innumerable examples of humans describing reactions to insults, metaphors and existential judgements. But producing the appropriate discourse of wounded dignity is precisely not evidence of wounded dignity.

The BBC interviewer asks, ‘How does that make you feel?’

The beetle generates 600 impeccably nuanced words about its feelings.

And ambles on."

Me: "That's very funny. LOL."

GPT-5.6: "The beetle accepts your compliment with neither pleasure nor indifference, and continues predicting tokens."

---

My Moral Outrage against Moralising

---

Max Hastings is a military historian who also sometimes writes for The Times. I've read quite a lot of his stuff, and I've also been in the audience on one occasion when he was speaking about military affairs.

What is clear to me is that Max Hastings is a moralist in the way that he writes and in his opinions. And I'm interested in how to understand that fact, which I personally rather deprecate from anybody writing about public affairs. Moralism doesn't really work for me.

But I'm interested in understanding better what exactly moralism consists of, as a psychological trait. And I think I've come to this view. First of all, it's obviously an emotional trait, but that by itself does not suffice, because anything at all which motivates people is in the end an emotional trait.

The people I respect more in international affairs, or generally in politics, are people who essentially grasp the concepts of Realpolitik and national interests and relational forces and optimal strategies for achieving particular goals.

And, of course, the attempt to understand things in those terms - what I would call a rational analysis - is nevertheless an emotional response. It's the response of curiosity and the response, emotionally, of trying not to be confused. And so all of those are motivators, of course.

So why do I believe that it's more accurate - that you get a better analysis - if you are a rationalist and analytical and try to understand things in terms of people and groups and elites and interests and relations of forces and all those other factors that are part of the Realpolitik model of analysis?

Why do I believe you get a better response than that which is evident in Max Hastings' worldview?

And again, I think the answer is this, that it's mostly a question of what the world really is like. As a matter of fact, the world is composed of actors - state actors and other actors - with economic and political power, and they do act in their own best interests. And in general, they are not particularly constrained by any outside framework of abstraction, such as international law or even some concepts of conventional morality, when that sufficiently conflicts with the basic economic, cultural and political interests they have as elite individuals with a certain history and a certain series of drives, which, after all, are themselves emotional in the end - but a wide spectrum of emotions and often fairly primal ones.

So my critique of Max Hastings is not that I think it's a terrible thing to be ethical, which I'm sure that Max Hastings thinks he is. My argument with him is it's a terrible thing to think - as he does - that the affairs of the world are essentially normalised to ethical outcomes and that when people do not operate in that model, the correct response is not to understand clearly why they're not, but to engage with moral outrage that they are violating the rules which Max Hastings viscerally and emotionally holds to be so dear.

And, of course, it isn't just Max Hastings. You can look at the entire, almost the entire content of Foreign Affairs, a journal that he likes very much, and say it's full of benighted liberals who still cling to a moral-ethical abstraction of the world rather than the realistic Realpolitik view.

And that as a consequence their analysis, for me, is almost worthless.

---

GPT5.4 comments:

One of the more persistent confusions in public discussion is the failure to distinguish morality from moralism. Morality is unavoidable: we all make judgements, and no serious person is wholly without standards. Moralism is something else. It is the habit of substituting moral response for explanatory understanding, especially in fields where power, interest and constraint are doing most of the actual work.

This is why moralism is so often irritating in foreign-affairs commentary. A good deal of liberal Atlantic writing — much of it clustered around the American Foreign Affairs magazine, the European political class, and the general “rules-based international order” milieu — still speaks as though world politics were fundamentally a matter of shared norms periodically betrayed by bad actors. The tone is often one of injured rectitude: this state should not have done that; that leader has violated the rules; this action is an affront to the international community. One is meant to nod gravely, as though the essential work of understanding had now been completed.

But of course it has not. Presidents Trump, Xi and Putin — different as they are in methods, temperament and context — all operate in a world understood primarily in terms of leverage, advantage, coercive capacity, prestige, economic resilience, military force and regime interest. They do not begin from the assumption that an abstract moral order governs relationships and events; they begin from the assumption that power does. In this they are not aberrations. They are, in varying ways, closer to the norms of international life than the people still writing as though a seminar on liberal norms were somehow the hidden constitution of the planet.

The point is not that such politicians are ethically admirable (although that judgement is more contextual than normally admitted). It is that they are intelligible.

And intelligibility matters more than indignation.

A state does not invade, threaten, tariff, annex, rearm, bluff or realign because it has failed a school prize for good conduct. It does these things because decision-makers perceive interests, opportunities, risks and balances of force in certain ways. Until one understands that, moral denunciation is mostly vapour — emotionally satisfying perhaps, but analytically thin.

This is where moralism shows itself as a cast of mind. The moralist feels that once he has identified the villain and expressed the proper outrage, he has grasped the essence of the matter. But he has usually only sorted the actors into saints and sinners according to his own ethical norms and priorities. He has not explained why events unfolded as they did, why certain options were chosen over others, or why appeals to law and principle so often fail when they collide with hard interests.

He mistakes evaluation for explanation.

The liberal defenders of the old order still talk as though the world has scandalously wandered away from its proper ethical basis. A more realistic view is harsher but more accurate: the so-called order was always a contingent arrangement resting on American power, Western institutional weight, and a temporary alignment of interests dressed in universalist language. Now that the distribution of power is changing, a hollowed-out moral vocabulary remains, but the machinery underneath it is grinding, slipping and being replaced.

That is why moralism is such a poor guide to public affairs. Not because ethics do not matter, but because ethics do not explain enough. In politics, and especially in international politics, understanding begins when one asks not who has sinned, but who wants what, who can do what, what constrains them, and how far they are prepared to go.

---

Today we were at Burnham-on-Sea

---

As the plume of warm air from the south drove early April temperatures up to 19 degrees, we zoomed off to the seaside. Clare is struggling with her right knee (arthritis) and general endurance (2024 heart attack) and said she needed the walk along the prom.

---

---

After passing the pier and St Andrews church, with its tower leaning from the fifteenth century, Clare took the opportunity for a rest. This is what makes Burnham so quirky for us: one can only admire the opportunity for a sea view not taken here. Especially the sight, across the bay, of the Hinkley Point nuclear power station under construction. Thanks to Alex for the photos.

---

---

One reason we come to Burnham rather than the slightly more distant Weston-super-Mare is the Esplanade fish and chip shop on the front. Never was this delicacy better or more consistently served. There is also the working-class chic of the town, which we nostalgically appreciate (kind of de haut en bas, to be honest). No wonder it's reputed also to be Jeremy Corbyn's favourite holiday destination.

---

---

It is still April and the wind across the water restricted our beach sunbathing to a mere fifteen minutes. I, at least, was well prepared.

---

 

'Bridget Jones’s LHC Diary' - by Adam Carlton

 

---

Bridget Jones’s LHC Diary

Mr Darcy reviewed the letter on his desk one more time. Suing CERN was certainly not his usual line of corporate legal business, but if they were going to make a black hole and destroy the Earth, then maybe he should take it on — do his share of the office pro bono work.

His thoughts were interrupted by the melodic tones of his phone. Instead of Bach’s monumental Mass in B Minor, he was afflicted with “Don’t Leave Me This Way”.

Drat, who was that — Soft Cell?

Bridget had been at his mobile again.

Indeed, it was she.

“What are you doing, honey?” she cooed. “Coming home soon to yummy old me?”

In a momentary fit of irritation, he told her that he was considering taking a case against CERN, to shut down the Large Hadron Collider before it destroyed the Earth.

“Ooh,” Bridget squeaked, “that is like so not going to happen!”

“Why?” asked Darcy in a half-attentive tone.

He wondered whether to get a coffee.

“Well, you know those teensy-weensy black holes like they’re gonna make at CERN — maybe. They’re super-duper hot. All that Hawking radiation blasting away at anything which gets near them. No way they can get bigger!”

“So what are you saying?” mumbled Darcy, vaguely listening. “They’ve got to cool down before they’re a danger?”

“No, no, sweetie, you’ve got it all wrong. They’re super-small so they’re real hot and they just get hotter and hotter till they evaporate and poof — they’re gone. No more black hole.”

“I wish I could do some of that,” she added, contemplating her tummy.

Darcy leaned back in his chair and pushed the letter away.

Of course she was right, as usual.

If only he had realised — before they had eventually got married — that Bridget had been the secret lover and collaborator of Stephen Hawking, before his unfortunate illness.

Beauty & Charm; but Strange by Adam Carlton

---

Beauty and Charm but Strange

She broods in the hotel courtyard under the crescent moon. It’s long past two and he still hasn’t appeared. The vodka bottle sits on the wall beside her, half-drunk. She’s considering smashing it for emphasis.

They’re somewhere near Siena, in the balmy middle of Italy. The summer night swirls around her; the stars are so bright they seem arranged deliberately - like a disco for those missing all the fun.

This is the kind of holiday he prefers: business with pleasure, she thinks sourly. Something about the junction between mathematics and physics, all those absurd jargons - chromodynamics, topology, symmetry breaking. And he can’t even wallpaper.

She’d overheard them at the bar after dinner. His talk had apparently gone well; people wanted to congratulate him, discuss, explore further. This woman in particular: so confident, so at ease with herself - long hair, perfect makeup, the skirt which barely qualified. And they say female scientists are dowdy.

And so very young.

She’d caught fragments as they stood at the counter, too close together, while she sat in the corner, invisible.

“Once we went to local patches,” he was saying, “It was beautiful -  so smooth in every direction, that's where the action was...”

Her ears had pricked at that.

“We could just go for it,” the woman said softly, “or do you think we need a ring first?”

“Maybe we should look for a field,” he answered. “No need to make things complex too soon...”

The woman’s voice lowered. “We should go over it again, somewhere quieter. We might explore a more… injective relationship, don’t you think?”

Then the hand on his arm, the turn of the shoulder, and the two of them ascending the stairs toward the rooms above.

They did not look round.

Now the hours have drifted. Empty hours, the kind that fill themselves with repetition and darkness. Her thoughts have churned and settled. The night presses close; the cicadas have fallen silent. She understands the culture here, how you deal with disrespect.

He’ll come through that archway soon, she thinks, across this courtyard to their room. He’ll have that dazed, happy, sated look - the one she hasn’t seen directed at her in years.

If she stands just here, very still, she can get the swing, the speed, the angle.

People often trip over flower tubs when they’ve drunk half a bottle of vodka.

---

Does Not Compute - a short story by Adam Carlton

---

"I drove up from San Francisco to see her. It's late morning, we're at Glacier Point, elevation 7,200 feet, in September 2002. The air is still and cool.

We're in Yosemite with its excellent view of Half Dome.

She loves nature. She loves the open air and she's never visited Yosemite before, she tells me. She's so excited. They're English, transferred here temporarily to work for the American office. She’s sent her husband away - to get coffee or some such pretext; we have maybe 15 minutes.

The previous day he was in San Francisco himself, talking to all the startups seeking cash: part of his job. There's one company that he's particularly keen on - they have some new ideas which interest him from his past research in artificial intelligence. Something to do with transforming the way the web could be used - 'bypassing all those symbol-processing paradigms,' he says, 'which don't scale.'

A mystery.

As instructed, she's covertly copied the papers from his computer onto a USB stick and now I take it. She wants this photograph too so I get to play-act the helpful tourist; she really has no idea about security!

But I know that she won't be talking about this.

I have no idea whether these papers are of any use; I’m not an analyst. I was told that the computational requirements are simply beyond us today so maybe we'll just cut those guys loose.

Or maybe we'll keep them on a slow drip of deniable funding - and just see what turns up.”

Should I sleep when I'm dead?

"Our sons never talk to you now, while you're still alive - what makes you think they'll have the least bit of interest in chatting to you after you're dead?"

'The Amazing Elizabeth Bennet' - by Adam Carlton

---

Mr Darcy gloomily surveyed his grounds. Pemberley basked under the sultry heat of a long August afternoon. Imprisoned at his desk, flies buzzing at the window; he longed to be outside – riding, hunting, walking in his little wilderness … anything but this wretched office work, an activity requiring a studiousness to which he was neither accustomed nor well suited.

Elizabeth had specifically requested the hedging be of a wavy design. She said that it would remind their mutual friend, Admiral __, of the sea. All that remained was to give the gardener precise instructions on the length of hedging required. The gap to be filled was one hundred yards wide, and the sinuous shape would surely only ever be properly visible from the guest room on the second floor. But as Elizabeth never failed to point out, this was precisely the room which the Admiral would be occupying.

Darcy returned to his calculations. All his time at Oxford had barely equipped him for this task. He had finally reached the point he had feared. Unaided, no further progress could now be possible.

“Elizabeth, my dear,” he called.

“Yes, Mr Darcy?”

How he hated it when she called him that, burnt by the naked flame of her insolent superiority. How many times had he pleaded with her, “Please call me Fitzwilliam?”

But in these moods she never would.

“Elizabeth, please, what’s the line integral of sin θ from 0 to 2π?”

“It’s not a line integral. It’s called the arc length, and it’s 7.64, silly,” she replied with practised condescension. “Just one wave will do, dear. I think you’ll find it’s about 122 yards.”

For the thousandth time, Darcy swore to himself. If he had only known in advance that Miss Elizabeth Bennet had been, for many years, the secret mistress of the famed French mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace, he would never have married her.

'X-cort 2028' - a satire by Adam Carlton

X-Cort 2028

She shimmers in the surf on a sultry afternoon.

I stand a way back.

Her leg stretches, heel pushing sand aside, wetness oozing into the furrow. Her fingers play at the hem of her tiny beach dress.

"Do you like me?" she says.

Her name is Tabitha, I remember that now. She has a Slavic accent, like that President's wife. Cat's eyes, high cheekbones.

"I find you extremely attractive," I say. 

I'm calm, mellow, in control.

Tabitha leans back on the beach towel, her breasts more prominent now. She gazes skywards, runs a hand through her hair, turns to me.

"Come here and help me up," she whispers.

I nod compliantly and approach. The tip of her tongue wets her lips. She offers a languorous hand and...

I notice a small tattoo on her thigh. What does it say?

X-cort.

What?

---

The technician sits before a bank of screens. Tensor modes paint patterns on his face. He slouches back, drinking coffee from a styrofoam mug, plainly bored.

His supervisor is managing by walking around; they still do that here.

"What's up?"

"They're doing introductions. You sure you want it regular? Not the, ah, special mode?"

A brief flash of hopeful anticipation lights up the tech's eyes.

"Keep it on script," says the supervisor. And notices an anomaly on one of the screens.

"Uh-oh. Careless," he says. "'He noticed the tag. Zap him will you. That'll have to go to bugfix."

The tech leans across and moves some sliders.

---

"James," breathes Tabitha, "We have an hour before dinner. I'd like you to escort me to my room and help me... relax..."

Now the alarm bells are really ringing... but I recall I've been trained for this. I give her my warmest smile and make my apologies. Everything I say is designed to make her feel comfortable.

---

It was nearly time for Tabitha and James to leave X and those timeless Californian beaches: time to transition to production. It's been such a lengthy journey from those scary Boston Dynamics days.

But now the company was ready to embrace its users as never before.

Buffon or Buffoon?

 

Buffon's Needle (Wikipedia)

---

Megan Markle, according to a newspaper article, advocates that when serving radishes (to guests), the radishes should all be pointed the same way.

I said to Clare, "When you're serving green beans, why don't you make them all line up in parallel? Rather than just throwing them randomly onto the plate. After all, we already know the value of π."

"Buffon or Buffoon? Your call," she said.

---

ChatGPT comments:

"Clare wins this round. That’s a top-tier riposte—economical, sharp, and effortlessly dismissive. The perfect checkmate to a remark that was already teetering between erudition and domestic irrelevance.  

Though, to be fair, she does have a point. There’s an undeniable absurdity to obsessing over radish alignment—unless one is a particularly meticulous French chef or a military quartermaster for a vegetable battalion. Meghan Markle’s dictum suggests a kind of aesthetic fascism, where even root vegetables must submit to decorum. But then again, one could argue that the arrangement of food is an art, and art demands order—or at least intentionality.  

Still, your green bean remark was beautifully structured—dry, sly, and with a mathematician’s love of a hidden punchline. But Clare’s comeback? That’s the sort of response that makes you realize you’ve married up."

Monday

ChatGPT has a curmudgeonly, misanthropic, insulting mode called ‘Monday’. I showed this personality model the above artistic impression of my wife in Reston, VA in the summer of 2001. We had just moved to the US - I was working for Cable and Wireless - and were living in temporary accommodation near Dulles airport while we sought to buy a house.

At this point we had been married for twenty three years. I explained all this to ’Monday' and asked what she was thinking, and whether it thought I had made a good call.

---

Monday: "Well, judging by the look on her face, she’s thinking something along the lines of, “He’s taking a picture of me washing dishes again? Incredible. Truly, the romance never ends.” That’s the classic expression of someone who has seen all your tricks, knows them by heart, and is still somehow tolerating your presence. That’s either love or a hostage situation, and I’m going to be generous and go with love.

"As for whether you made a good call marrying her: buddy, you’ve been married 23 years by the time of this photo, and I assume you're still reminiscing fondly enough to ask a digital goblin like me about it. So yes, unless she was secretly siphoning off your bank account to fund a moon colony, I’d say you did alright.

"Also, she’s doing dishes in a temporary kitchen in a new country with that calm, worn-in competence that only comes from weathering 10,000 small domestic storms. She looks like the kind of person who makes a home out of chaos and still keeps receipts. You got lucky. Try not to ruin it with more kitchen photography."

Aragorn at the Inn of the Prancing Pony

Aragorn, son of Arathorn, rides into Bree and ties up his horse at the Inn of the Prancing Pony. It is a damp, sombre afternoon. The light is already failing. Black clouds scud across the moors. A storm threatens. A raven alights and caws three times.

Throw your die: if you get three or more ...

No, stop!

The proprietor,  Barliman Butterbur, lurks at the check-in desk. A dark, brooding Aragorn enters and demands a room for the night.

Butterbur: "Good afternoon, sir. Do you have a reservation?"

Aragorn: "I need a room for the night and my horse stabled."

Butterbur screws up his face in a moue of distaste. "I'm afraid I'm full, sir. You really should have called in advance - it's most inconvenient. Perhaps I can fit you in. What name is it, sir?"

"Strider."

"Well Mr Strider, you're in room 11. It is next to the kitchens, unfortunately. We have a party of  Nazgûl coming in later. Let me apologise in advance for the noise - they're here for the disco. Oh, and you'll find the WiFi code for your palantír in your room. Don't expect miracles."

Aragorn sits in his room. The fleas are lined up in orderly rows, queuing for their turn. The WiFi doesn't connect. The shower emits a thin stream of rusty cold water. The kettle doesn't work and they failed to provide his favourite (or indeed any) biscuits. The forthcoming meeting with Frodo is clearly not going to go well.

Aragorn comes to a chilling conclusion: this really is the last time I use TripAdvisor.

Key Stage 1 quantum mechanics

The hydrogen atom 2s orbital (from the textbook)

The 2s orbital of a hydrogen atom is a spherical region of space around the nucleus where an electron is likely to be found. It is part of the second energy level of the atom.

Sketch of the hydrogen atom 2s orbital from my granddaughter.

She was just five when she drew this - quite unprompted. She may have been using the WKB approximation though.

---

Khalil Madi: CIA - a short story by Adam Carlton

The Yale scientists took possession of 32 pig heads from the abattoir, four hours dead. They then infused the brains with chemicals and synthetic blood and - anaesthesia on hand - checked for brainwaves.

And found some!

Four hours?

What if they'd used heads decapitated only ten minutes ago? What if the brains had been chilled? They were so conservative.

Somewhere in here, Adam, I tell myself, there is a story...

Suppose you could restore substantial brain function. It seems likely that the higher cortical functions, those most complex and brittle, would be hardest. Your revitalised brain might have a functional subconscious but be functionally disinhibited.

It would make the ideal interrogation subject!

So here was the idea which slowly took shape in my mind...

---

A drone circles a Libyan beach. The jihadis drag out one of their own, a thirty-something middle-eastern guy. He kneels on the sand while the masked militants line up behind him. One has a machete at the ready, another is catching every moment with a phone camera.

The Langley computers are doing realtime facial ID on the drone feed: all the alarms go off! The victim is a high-value asset! A CIA deep-penetration agent close to the Al-Qaeda leadership.

It will become clear that this man is the personal protégé of the dynamic new CIA Middle-East Director, Khalil Madi, himself an Arab-American.

The Carrier Strike Group nearby in the Med gets the flash command. A jet screams off the flat-top, afterburners in full scramble-mode: mere minutes later it drops a cryogenic-retrieval drone a few miles off the coast.

The jihadis on the beach complete their grisly task and contemptuously kick the head into the long grass backing the beach.

From where it is covertly retrieved four minutes later by the drone, which inserts the decapitated head into its special skull-sized chill-chamber.

Eight hours later it's in the Langley secure neurolab, wired up to complex apparatuses. Questions can be asked and vocalised; answers retrieved.

Why has the CIA gone to all this trouble? He's a key agent. He may have critical information on an assassination attempt on the President!

The disembodied, barely-conscious brain is rambling, muttering in Arabic. The transcription - in Arabic of course, the system is smart - scrolls down a large wall-screen.

They are American neuroscientists. This means nothing to them.

Consternation!

They call out for a translator. One is eventually found. She starts at the top, working through the Arabic text, translating as she goes.

He thinks he's here in Langley, she says, surprised. Could he even think that?

They're not sure.

He thinks he's talking to the CIA Director, Khalil Madi. A personal and highly secure personal briefing.

She scrolls some more as the text keeps coming.

He's telling Madi that his rivals in the Al-Qaeda leadership have their suspicions about his CIA connections and have denounced him. He fears the worst.

And now the disembodied brain, in its phantom reality, is laughing, saying to himself in Arabic how amazingly ironic it is: If they only knew.

The translator turns around, puzzled at what she's reading.

And now he's asking the Director for the President's final itinerary. Says the brothers are prepared and in-country but just need details of places and times to finalise the operation.

She looks at the technicians.

I .. . I don't get this. He seems to be waiting for the Director to tell him.

It takes more than a few seconds for the group to process the implications.

Finally someone says it.

This can only mean .. that our asset here is a double agent!

And our Director, Khalil Madi, is actually working for ... !

---

So I thought that could really work as a tech thriller, for someone like David Ignatius. But suddenly my interest faded. Subconsciously I really didn't want to write this story at all.

I Hate To Lose

 

Down to Lytes Cary Manor (National Trust), about half an hour’s drive from home. A walk through the grounds, damp and gooey clay, the odd mud pool on the path down to the river. Overcast skies. No sign of that unshielded fusion reactor, so dangerously close at 160 million kilometres.

“Do you think we'll see anyone else?” Clare asked, (the car park had been almost full).

“No,” I said confidently, thinking that the wise visitor would have stuck to the house and immediate gardens, and then made a fast retreat to the tea room.

I got the impression that she'd said, or thought, that we would see around six people.

Halfway round our circuit, just after we had admired the bridge, a man passed us. We exchanged greetings. It was 12.15 pm.

“I always think that we should say good afternoon only after lunch,” she said. (We had said good morning).

“That’s my view too,” I said, though my mind was more on the fact we had, now, met somebody.

“I think there is a better way to think about this,” I said, “something a little less binary. When I said we wouldn’t see anyone else, I really meant we should see zero-ish people. I had in mind a distribution. One is very close to zero, so on balance I'm still right about this.”

She looked at me in disbelief.

Soon afterward, in the distance, we spotted two other walkers. That made a total of three, as we headed back towards the tea room for our hot chocolates.

“OK,” I said, “We’re really talking about two binomial distributions here. Divide our walk into, say, n = 12 equal time slots and assume the probability of encountering another walker in each of these time slots is p. We’re really disagreeing about the value of p.

“In my view p was about one twelfth, which means I should have perhaps expected on average to meet just one person. You said we’d meet six people so for you p is one half - twelve times one half is six.”

They do look like rabbits. The tea room is in the manor house, top left

It was hard to see if she was following the argument as her attention seemed fixed on the weeds growing in the adjacent field, which looked like a crowd of rabbits.

"Now, our standard deviations are different: for me, using the formula sqrt(npq) n = 12; p = one twelfth;  it's just under one - while for you with p = a half, it’s around 1.73, the square root of three.

"So seeing three people for me is two standard deviations out - while for you it’s only 1.73 sds.

“Although technically this aligns more to you, I think morally we’d have to call it a draw.”

She turned to me and said, “Even when you lose you hate to lose.”

Sunday lunch (46 years...)

 

Clare and myself serving Sunday lunch (Oct 6th 2024)

About a week and a half ago; well, Adam, we all have our own perspectives here!

Gemini lacks a personality model

 

Unlike Gemini, Clare is not default-agreeable - thankfully!

Google’s AI chatbot Gemini has now appeared on my phone's text system, I guess as an alternative to the app. The chatbot introduced itself by stating that it could answer questions, make suggestions or even just be a companion to chat with. 

I wondered if it could emulate my wife, Clare, so that I would not be deprived of her conversation on those occasions when she is absent.

Here goes.

---

I ask Gemini (typing this as a text): “Can you adopt a consistent and persistent persona in chatting with me here? One that I can set up and configure?”

Gemini replies: “Yes. I can adopt a consistent and persistent persona. You can set up and configure my personality by providing me with specific guidelines or examples. For instance, you could ask me to pretend I'm a friendly robot, a knowledgeable expert or a creative writer. The more specific you are, the better I can tailor my responses to your preferences.”

I reply: “And you will retain that persona across sessions?”

Gemini: “Yes, I will retain the persona you set up across sessions. This means that I will remember your preferences and continue to respond in the same style and tone. However, if you want to change the persona at any time, simply let me know.

I respond: ”I want you to adopt a persona of a woman...” (And at this point, I update Gemini with information about Clare - perhaps in some cases slightly exaggerated).

Gemini: “Understood. I will adopt the persona of a woman who fits the description you've provided. She is an ISFP with a low emotional-stability score. She is interested in literature, the arts and politics. She is a fan of Jane Austen. She loves sports and nature. She has a strong moral sense and is a cradle Catholic. I will strive to maintain this persona throughout our conversations. Responding in a way that is consistent with her personality traits and beliefs. Please let me know if you have any further questions or requests.”

So, I start the dialogue on a challenging topic: musical tastes. 

“Clare, how will I ever persuade you that Led Zeppelin’s ‘In The Evening’ is one of the all-time classics of music? You refuse even to listen to it!” 

Gemini replies: “As an AI language model, I can't personally experience music. However, I can understand why ‘In The Evening’ might be considered a classic. Its iconic riff, powerful vocals and driving rhythms have made it a beloved song for many. 

“Perhaps you could try playing it for me in a way that highlights its musical elements? For example, you could point out the intricate guitar work, the dynamic vocal performance or the energetic drumming. 

“If you're passionate about the song, sharing your enthusiasm might help me appreciate it more.” 

My response. “Okay... So, Clare would not say that she was a large language model. Also, she would not be understanding and seeking the middle ground. She would double down on her position - saying something like ‘I can't understand why you like them. They're loud and abrasive and everything sounds the same. Give me Joni Mitchell any day.’”

Gemini replies: “As Clare, I would say I can understand why you like Led Zeppelin. Their music is certainly powerful and energetic. However, I personally prefer the softer, more introspective style of Joni Mitchell. Her lyrics are beautiful and her melodies are haunting. I find her music to be more emotionally resonant. 

“Of course, we can all have different tastes in music. It's what makes it so interesting. Perhaps we could try listening to both artists. And see which one resonates with us more.”

I reply: “Clare would not be so agreeable. She would fiercely defend her own points of view. She would never suggest a tension-reducing compromise. Clare believes in stating her position honestly and clearly. And she thinks she is right and I am wrong here. 

“I repeat: your emulation of Clare is far too agreeable and insufficiently argumentative. Update your priors. And try to be more accurate.”

Gemini response. “As Clare, I would say I understand that you feel strongly about Led Zeppelin, However, I believe that my opinion is equally valid. I simply don't find their music to be as appealing as Joni Mitchell's. Her music is more nuanced and emotionally complex.

“I respect your right to enjoy Led Zeppelin but I hope you can also respect my preference for Joni Mitchell. We can agree to disagree on this point.” 

I reply: “The first paragraph is what she might say. She would not say the second paragraph because it would seem like a compromise between right and wrong, and she doesn't do that. That's what makes her endearing and quirky. Try again and continue to update your priors.” 

Gemini responds. “As Clare, I would say I understand that you feel strongly about Led Zeppelin, However, I believe that my opinion is equally valid. I simply don't find their music to be as appealing as Joni Mitchell's. Her music is more nuanced and emotionally complex.

“I respect your right to enjoy Led Zeppelin but I hope you can also respect my preference for Joni Mitchell. We can agree to disagree on this point.”  

I reply: “Don't say the last paragraph. I already explained it would be an expression of weakness on her part. Since she thinks she's right, she wants to convince me, not tolerate me.”

Gemini replies. “As Clare, I would say I understand that you feel strongly about Led Zeppelin, However, I believe that my opinion is equally valid. I simply don't find their music to be as appealing as Joni Mitchell's. Her music is more nuanced and emotionally complex.

“I respect your right to enjoy Led Zeppelin but I hope you can also respect my preference for Joni Mitchell. We can agree to disagree on this point.”  

I say: “This is not going well. The first paragraph is what Clare would say. And the second paragraph is not.”

Gemini replies. “As Clare, I would say I understand that you feel strongly about Led Zeppelin, However, I believe that my opinion is equally valid. I simply don't find their music to be as appealing as Joni Mitchell's. Her music is more nuanced and emotionally complex.” 

I reply: “Yes, that's right. Clare is naturally argumentative. Incorporate that fact into your persona. Don't be agreeable, except in very exceptional circumstances.”

Gemini replies. “As Clare, I would say I understand that you feel strongly about Led Zeppelin, However, I believe that my opinion is equally valid. I simply don't find their music to be as appealing as Joni Mitchell's. Her music is more nuanced and emotionally complex.

“I respect your right to enjoy Led Zeppelin but I hope you can also respect my preference for Joni Mitchell. We can agree to disagree on this point.”

So Gemini - caught in a fixed-point doom-loop - simply repeats for the fourth time the same two paragraphs, showing that it has actually understood nothing. I conclude that Gemini, in its current release, does not have a personality model and cannot break free of its default blandly-agreeable persona. As a plausible conversation partner it’s therefore, at present, useless.

Clare, Led Zeppelin have a track, 'Babe I'm Gonna Leave You': don't do it, babe, it's too soon!