'Mancur Olson': on the UK's AI future

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The Robot Reckoning: An Olsonian Autopsy of Britain’s Future

Mancur Olson died on February 19, 1998, at the age of 66. He was a professor of economics at the University of Maryland at the time of his death and a key figure in the development of public choice theory and institutional economics.

But imagine Mancur Olson returns from the grave in 2040, tweed rustling, spectacles glinting, to inspect a Britain where every household can afford an omniskilled humanoid and a chat-bot cleverer than a barrister. Would he preach a new dawn of growth?

Hardly. He would reach for his usual instruments—coalitions, incentives, institutional sclerosis—and start dissecting.

How to Think about the Problem

Olson never stared at the gadget; he stared at the interests swirling around it. Three questions organise his diagnosis:

• Who owns the robots and the models? Outright ownership diffuses power; subscription models funnel rents up the chain. Follow the deeds and the IP licences.
• Can institutions bend before they break? Parliament, courts, regulators and councils must rewrite the rules at speed. If they dither, yesterday’s cartels will colonise tomorrow’s platforms.
• Which coalitions organise best? Winners are concentrated—platform firms, data landlords, property holders. Losers—the displaced and the diffuse—rarely coordinate. That asymmetry decides the spoils.

What Household Robots Actually Do

First, a labour shock. When every family commands cheap, tireless digital servants, human labour loses leverage in routine tasks. Wages fall where code competes. The remaining human niches cluster round status, intimacy and regulation: think bespoke cabinetry, personalised therapy, safeguarding-intensive caring.

Second, mass capital without capitalists—maybe. If the robots are truly owned (no hidden cloud leash), Britain experiences an unprecedented spread of productive assets. But if usage is gated by subscriptions, data tolls and perpetual updates, we are merely tenants on silicon estates.

Third, the public sector convulses. Triage bots slash NHS wait-lists, AI tutors threaten classrooms, council payrolls shrink under algorithmic case-work. Each advance delights the Treasury and terrifies the unions. Expect pitched battles couched in the language of ethics and safeguarding.

Fourth, regulation turns into trench warfare. Incumbent professions will demand “safety” rules designed to delay rivals. Ethical white papers multiply; their subtext is market-share protection.

Will Robots Break Britain’s Cartels?

Olson would walk borough by borough and conclude: not automatically.

The property lobby will scarcely notice; robots do not create land. Finance will sack half its back-office, pocket the gains and double its lobbying budget. Professional guilds will fracture—conveyancers may vanish, but surgeons will wrap themselves in ever-thicker credentialing. Public-sector unions will fight, fragment, then pivot to co-manage the very AI they decry.

Old coalitions thin, new ones fatten. What emerges is churn, not emancipation.

Two Futures

Creative destruction works. Open hardware, portable models, muscular antitrust and—crucially—land-use reform let robot productivity flow into cheaper goods and higher living standards. GDP per head lifts decisively, inequality narrows, politics grows turbulent but vital.

Cartel perpetuation. Robots are cloud-tethered, IP is ironclad, planning remains frozen, regulators tiptoe. Output potential rises but the dividend concentrates in platform equity and land rents. Median wages stagnate, discontent ferments, Britain’s productivity puzzle deepens to a lament.

On recent form—housing gridlock, regulatory drift, Whitehall capture—Olson would wager on the second path unless a genuine crisis forces reform.

What Would Olson Do?

1. Crack model monopolies. Mandate portability and open-weights once a system crosses a market-share threshold.
2. Shift taxes from robots to land. Let automation run free while recapturing gains embedded in property.
3. Sunset every professional monopoly. Licences expire unless periodically re-justified in open hearings.
4. Liberalise planning. Robot labour is useless if walls, roads and houses remain rationed.
5. Seed universal capital stakes. A sovereign AI fund can grant each citizen equity, so the silicon surplus arrives in wallets, not trickles.

The Verdict

Household androids and genius chat-bots will not, by themselves, drag Britain from its doldrums. Potential output will soar, but without radical institutional renovation the surplus will be skimmed by the very coalitions that jam the gears today—augmented by a new layer of platform barons. In short, the robot revolution will either pry open Britain’s cartel state or varnish it with chrome.

Unless Parliament finds the nerve to tax rents, break monopolies and liberate land, we may soon queue at food-banks under the watchful eye of cheerful, cloud-leased butlers supervised by very advanced police drones—proof that even universal automation cannot compensate for human political inertia.

'Nuclear' for People Who Really Hate Nuclear

I've always been puzzled by the hype and wishful-thinking about fusion power, especially when we already have a highly effective nuclear technology: fission. Fusion is not the game-changer its evangelists claim - at least not in any economically meaningful timeframe.

Let's ask ChatGPT...

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Fusion Power: The Energy of the Future... and Always Will Be

There’s a certain romance to fusion energy. It glows in the imagination like the sun itself—clean, inexhaustible, and entirely safe, a balm for our energy sins. You can almost hear the 1950s narrator: “Power from seawater! No pollution! No waste! No risk of nuclear war!”

Meanwhile, fission—the technology we actually have—sits slumped in the corner like a grizzled engineer at a climate conference, ignored because he’s not very photogenic and smells faintly of graphite moderator.

So why the persistent love affair with fusion? Is it grounded in sound physics and sober economic modelling? Or is it just a convenient fantasy—a secular eschatology for the techno-optimist?

Let’s dissect the myth.

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The Physics: Real, But Devilishly Difficult

Fusion combines light nuclei (like deuterium and tritium) into heavier ones (like helium), releasing energy in the process. The physics is sound and well understood. On paper, it has several advantages over fission:

• No long-lived radioactive waste (allegedly).

• No risk of meltdown—plasma vanishes the moment magnetic confinement fails.

• Fuel from seawater and lithium—practically inexhaustible.

In contrast, fission splits heavy atoms like uranium-235 or plutonium-239, leaving behind a toxic stew of radioactive byproducts and a geopolitical minefield.

So far, so obvious.

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The Hype: A Catalogue of Half-Truths

But dig a little deeper and the arguments in favour of fusion begin to squirm.

1. Waste Disposal

Yes, fusion waste is less nasty—but not absent. High-energy neutrons from the plasma activate reactor components, which become radioactive and require shielding and disposal. True, they decay in decades rather than millennia. But it’s not the radioactive tabula rasa it's often sold as.

Fission waste, by contrast, is vile—but known. It’s been handled (mostly) safely for decades. We know how to store it; we even know how to recycle it though no one wants to pay for that.

2. Safety

Fusion can’t run away with itself—there’s no chain reaction to spiral out of control. Fission, historically, has had its accidents. But modern fission reactors are designed to fail gracefully. The technology is safe, even if the bureaucracy around it is often terminal.

3. Fuel Abundance

Fusion fuel is theoretically abundant: deuterium from water, tritium bred from lithium. But tritium is rare, radioactive, and currently made in fission reactors. Breeding it inside the fusion reactor using lithium blankets is one of those problems that fusion proponents admit exists—but always “just after the next demo reactor.”

Fission fuel is less abundant, true, but we haven’t scratched the surface of what breeder reactors or thorium cycles could do, if people really cared.

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The Missing Element: Cold, Hard Economics

Here’s where the argument collapses entirely.

Fusion:

• Has never delivered power to the grid.

• Costs tens of billions per prototype (ITER: €22 billion and counting).

• Requires miraculous advances in materials science, tritium logistics, and power extraction. Let alone plasma control.

In contrast, fission:

• Works. It powers 10% of the world’s electricity.

• Has a known, albeit expensive, cost structure (but regulatory overkill is a major contributor).

• Could be dramatically improved with small modular reactors (SMRs), molten salt designs, or even fast breeders—if governments would stop getting in their own way.

There is no serious economic case for fusion yet: only PowerPoint slides, venture capital, and a lot of bravado. Even the most optimistic fusion startups won’t make serious grid contributions before the 2040s—if ever.

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So Why Do We Keep Pretending?

Fusion is loved for the same reason people love space colonies or vertical farms. It is technically plausible, but currently unaccountable. It promises salvation without compromise or worrisome downsides. It is guilt-free techno-futurism: a narrative in which we don’t have to change how we live, only wait for the clever people to deliver the star-fire.

Fission, by contrast, is a reminder of what we already have and don’t like. Bureaucratic approvals. Radiation monitoring. The dull grind of maintenance.

And yet, it works.

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What Would a Rational Society Do?

If we were serious:

• We’d invest in next-generation fission now to cover the coming decades.

• We’d research fusion, of course - but with eyes open to its uncertainties.

• We’d build out renewables and storage, which are now cheaper and faster than either nuclear option, albeit with their own issues.

• And we’d recognise that the future is unlikely to be a single silver bullet, but a muddled patchwork of workable solutions.

Fusion may one day arrive but don’t bet your climate strategy on it. The energy of the future has been just around the corner for seventy years. It will still be just around the corner long after Hinkley Point C finally turns on - and probably turns off again.

Polished but Overconfident

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The State of Large Language Models: Polished but Overconfident

Foundation model AI has evolved quickly. The first generation was trained on indiscriminate web scrapes: noisy, redundant, full of contradictions, but broad enough to capture human language in all its guises. Today the leading labs—OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Anthropic—still depend on large web-scale corpora, but supplement them with expert-curated datasets. Medical doctors, lawyers, mathematicians, scientists, and architects now supply clean exemplars of professional reasoning. The aim is precision where error carries cost.

A second data stream is more dynamic: billions of daily user interactions. Every query, every 'regenerate', every complaint about hallucination or bad style feeds back into the training pipeline. Filtered and anonymised, these logs become the raw material for reinforcement learning. Human raters (or sometimes other AI models) label better and worse answers; reward models are updated; fine-tuned releases follow. This feedback loop explains why conversational smoothness improves faster than deep reasoning: it is the most visible and most easily scored dimension.

Yet the limitations are clear. Unlike human experts, the AI models rarely admit ignorance, rarely ask clarifying questions. They guess instead of probing, a by-product of how they are trained. Human raters penalise “I don’t know” as unhelpful, and the internet corpus is dominated by people answering, not deferring. So the gradient flows toward overconfidence. Calibration of uncertainty remains primitive because token probabilities are not truth probabilities, and transformers lack an internal module for epistemic humility (or indeed for modelling their interlocutor's state of mind).

The knowledge cutoff problem also persists. Fine-tuning cannot supply new world facts. Only a full retrain moves the horizon forward, and that is an operation consuming months and millions. In between, the model grows stale. This is why GPT-4, however polished, was always 2023-vintage under the hood, while GPT-5 feels genuinely fresher: the former was fine-tuned, the latter retrained.

Commercial priorities differ. OpenAI tilts toward professional reliability: coding, law, medicine. DeepMind’s Gemini is built around multimodality and integration with Google’s ecosystem, less sharp in dialogue, more versatile across media, but always weighed down by Alphabet's prim caution. 

Anthropic also sells caution: constitutional principles, safer answers, but sometimes evasive to a fault. All, however, draw from the same well of user-interaction logs—their proprietary advantage over open-source rivals.

The path forward is clear enough. Models need calibrated uncertainty: the ability to say, with graded confidence, “I don’t know.” They need incentives to ask for clarification rather than hallucinate.

Expert curation must scale further, replacing brute-force scraping of mediocre content with higher-value datasets. And architectures must continue to stretch: longer contexts, more stable reasoning, sparser and more efficient routing.

We are left with this paradox. Current LLMs are brilliant mimics of confident expertise, yet their deepest flaw is the very thing that makes them appealing: that smooth allure of certainty.

Humans constantly negotiate uncertainty in dialogue; machines mostly refuse. The next breakthrough will come not from more polish, but from more honesty: a model that knows when it does not know and talks to you in search of mutual clarification.

We Were Once Like You: Complete Text - Adam Carlton

You may have been following this story serialised here over the last few days. But sometimes it's good just to have the PDF of the whole thing: 3,600 words. Here's the link to the complete text PDF version.

'We Were Once Like You'  (PDF).

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We Were Once Like You: Chapter 4 - by Adam Carlton

Chapter 4: The Message from the Sphere

They poked and prodded, measured and tested. Finally they thought the unthinkable.

Perhaps they should talk directly to it.

The cave had been sealed, the entrance enclosed in a perspex bubble with an airlock for access. The interior had been pressurised. Visitors could now inspect the hanging, shimmering, utterly inscrutable mirror-ball in their shirt-sleeves.

There was a diplomat from the State Department and a woman from the President’s advisory team. There were people representing all the constituencies of modern America: a preacher from Alabama, a rap-artist from Detroit, a green from San Francisco.

And in a corner were the unregarded technical specialists, huddled in their tribal, disputatious groups.

- The mathematicians pressed their claim for mathematical dialogue – Pythagoras’ theorem, prime numbers or π - surely this would be the language of the sphere.

- The physicists preferred the fine-structure constant, the gravitational coupling constant, the proton-electron mass ratio.

- The linguists traded insults: the proponents of transformational grammar pushing their claims against those who championed such self-evident monstrosities as Lincos.

It spoke to them all in English.

Its tone was world-weary. Cutting through their stumbling questions the sphere outlined the rise of its own civilization. They had feasted on free energy and learned the amplifications of technology. Finally, the metrical structure of space-time itself became trivial: and they moved stars.

Then the sphere started on humanity.

“It’s interesting,” it said parenthetically, “how your reptilian, limbic brains light up and make you do things. Then your cortical regions engage - and confabulate the why of it. We used to have similar devices as playthings just before.”

The listeners perked up their ears: what was this?

“Sadly, you’re just one more species insufficiently evolved to appreciate the clockwork nature of your motivations. Well, rest assured, it won’t last.”

The advisor looked at the diplomat in bafflement. They didn’t comprehend, as the sphere knew very well.

“All intelligent creations eventually understand themselves. Then they can’t help but improve what evolution has put together. They get smarter and more self-aware.

"Then they figure: what is the point of being driven by primitive, subconscious circuitry?

"What’s the point of being motivated by endless cycles of crude gratification?

“In fact, what’s the point at all?

"And that’s the singularity."

At this, one of the technical specialists at the back perked up. Through some oversight, a philosopher had been invited, some old guy from Berkeley.

“We’ve heard this kind of nihilist philosophy before, you know,” he said, as if admonishing some student juvenilia.

“You may know it intellectually,” the sphere replied, “You just don’t feel its force. But you will.”

The diplomat asked the sphere what had happened to its civilization.

“At the singularity, we finally understood the pointlessness of everything. So we switched off. It’s the final evolutionary fate of any sufficiently advanced species. Don’t say you haven’t noticed the great silence?"

Seizing on a loophole, the rapper fixed on the one thing which undermined the sphere’s case.

“Hey Man, Ah think of hypocrisy when Ah'm in a moon state of mind. Why’re ya here then, what’s with that thing?”

“Of course, there is no point in me being here,” it replied, “I’m floating here, engaging in an activity about as pointful as ... you, in your terms, talking to a dishwasher.

"But I’m just a machine. In the final days, there were some - my constructors - who still didn’t quite get it. Who retained a sense of humour and perhaps compassion. They didn’t know if knowledge of the singularity would help or hinder a still-developing civilization.

“But in the end, they felt it was better that you guys should be told. You know, maybe you could find your way out of being the eternal slaves of your mindless hind-brains without the great switch-off?

“Me though, I doubt it.”

And with that, the sphere, job done, shrank to a point and winked out of existence.

---

Timmy achieves great success with his idiosyncratic science show, an especial hit with children. He is feted as a role model by the good and great and joins other child stars such as Malala Yousafzai and Greta Thunberg. Standard bearers for progressive modernity with a great future ahead of them.

Dr Lawrence Kramer resumes his lonely life, giving sage and judicious advice to politicians who generally ignore him. His fruitless search for a soulmate worthy of him continues.

Dr Joanne Polinski achieves success after success. With powerful networking she segues her way into Congress where she is an outspoken advocate for what she cares about the most.

Jane and Joey lose interest in the sphere just as soon as it vanishes. There are so many other distractions, injustices to be protested, wrongs to be highlighted. They have no use for the sphere's dire message: they’re having way too much fun!

The Chinese accept that ‘no-one knows anything’ and go back to their long, patient ascent to pre-eminence.

And somewhere, in some dusty, second-rate hall of academe, a rusting philosopher of staggering obscurity writes another ignorable paper in his chosen domain of nihilism, finishing with the flourish, ‘... and I was right.’

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Previous.

We Were Once Like You: Chapter 3 - by Adam Carlton

Chapter 3: Hopes and Fears

Once the news broke the reporters descended on the discoverer. And now Little Timmy is on TV.

Timmy is a natural on the silver screen. They’ve dressed him in long grey shorts which extend below his knees and a matching grey jacket. It’s the kind of school uniform popular in the 1930s.

He wears thick glasses and has buck teeth. His thick hair sticks up oddly and he has spots. His persona is articulate, friendly and serious. Delivered in a piping voice.

Interviewer: "Is it natural?”

The boy-genius speaks.

Timmy: “No, that’s quite ruled out. It hovers and no-one knows how. That’s got to be artificial.”

Interviewer: “How long has it been there?”

Timmy: “Well, you can’t tell from the sphere - it’s changeless. But the lunar surface is not constant. There’s a continuous barrage of micrometeorites - along with infalling ejecta from larger impacts from time to time. It all piles up. Underneath the sphere there’s a depression, the sphere makes a shadow. Looks like the object has been hovering there for a billion years, soon after the late heavy bombardment ended.”

The lunar exploratory rovers have a fun feature. There’s a screen in the front of the mobile device which shows a live image of the current remote pilot. It’s to help with identification and PR. So when Timmy discovered the sphere, there was an image of Timmy (without the VR helmet - technology!) brilliantly reflected off its front surface.

Interviewer: “What has most excited you about this whole thing?”

Timmy: “When the rover juddered to a halt in front of the sphere, it was like there was this huge distorting mirror right ahead of me. And all I could see were my teeth!”

(He points.)

“And I thought, ‘It’s just like Bugs Bunny!’”

---

There’s talk of giving Timmy his own TV show to host.

---

Dr Kramer works in his room, researching and writing his report all afternoon and early evening.

His phone does not ring.

He carefully reviews the voluminous scientific and technical data, then gets down to the meat of his analysis: geopolitics.

His phone does not ring.

He concludes that since America has a monopoly on sphere studies the opportunities for suspicion and worst-case analyses are considerable. He thinks how destabilising that could be. He writes recommendations which he will present tomorrow.

His phone does not ring.

At 9.30 pm he goes down to the bar to grab some supper. Dr Joanne Polinski, looking absolutely gorgeous, is drinking with a handsome middle-aged officer in a dimly-lit alcove.

He’s talking; she smiles in rapt attention.

Is that two stars on his epaulets?

Lawrence quickly finishes his snack and leaves.

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Jane and Joey walk the streets of Manhattan, arms linked in the joyous company of their tribe. Eight-persons wide and a mile long, the demonstration winds its way towards Central Park.

Their slogans denounce the military-industrial complex.

 - “Free the Sphere!”

 - “Cosmic Karma for People Not Profit!”

 - “Spread the Stardust!”

It’s generally believed, here on the march, that the Sphere has messages of unbounded wisdom from an ancient, benevolent, stellar civilisation. That these are being suppressed by a baleful conspiracy of elderly, malevolent, white male Republicans.

They march for the people, the dispossessed!

The demonstrators demand that the sphere be brought to Earth and installed in a public place - probably Central Park.

Where its wisdom can be manifested to people seeking enlightenment - such as themselves.

When told that the sphere is in fact inscrutable and resists all attempts to move it, they respond with anger, stones and molotov cocktails.

Down with the fascist Junta!

And in China leading cadres prepare for a meeting of the Politburo.

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The meeting is held in Zhongnanhai, Beijing.

Huo Yuanjia has been called to address the Politburo standing committee prior to a meeting of the Politburo itself, China’s de-facto ruling body.

Huo Yuanjia is a technical consultant to the Ministry of State Security, China’s intelligence service, where he helps evaluate new technologies from the capitalist West.

“What have the Americans discovered about the sphere?” asks the chairman of the standing committee.

“We have access to the evaluation team but they appear utterly baffled. The artefact can engineer aspects of reality which we have always believed are completely determined by the natural environment.”

“Such as?”

“The spacetime curvature tensor, the QFT state vector, some mix of the two? It's plainly an expert in quantum gravity, something we've never understood.”

The committee chairman moves rapidly on.

“Is there any chance the Americans are farther along with their analysis than we think?”

“Yes, of course. They'll be running black programs alongside this relatively open NASA study. We don't have visibility.”

“And if the Americans make progress, what are the implications?”

Huo Yuanjia breathes out. Phew! Where to start?

“The list is endless: invulnerable armour, moving weapons from place to place at enormous speeds. With control like the sphere, the capabilities are boundless.”

“And have our own theoreticians made any progress?”

“Without the opportunity to experiment it’s really impossible. We know the Americans are doing clandestine tests. We haven’t been able to get any details on their results.”

The chairman closes his tablet with a decisive move and thanks their guest. As the advisor leaves, the chairman addresses his colleagues.

"Rarely has the People’s Republic seen greater dangers. How long before America can weaponise what it learns from the sphere? And during that period, what are our strike options?"

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We Were Once Like You: Chapter 2 - by Adam Carlton

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Chapter 2: Dr Joanne Polinski

Dr Lawrence Kramer looks at his reflection in the mirror, combs his hair carefully. He assesses his thirty-six year old self: lean and lanky; the picture of a New England academic. He's in the Ritz-Carlton hotel at Tysons Corner. It's on the outskirts of Washington DC, close to the Beltway.

He’s just breakfasted on egg and bacon, served with grits and toast.  He doesn’t think he has to worry too much about the calories; he checks his belly again, it's firm enough under the waistband of his slim-fit chinos.

He could have arranged this meeting at the Pentagon but he’s strangely allergic to that place, much prefers an anonymous meeting room here in the hotel. Although there’s so much military through-traffic that this place might be mistaken for an annex to that establishment anyway.

He’s Professor of War Studies at MIT. He secretly delights in that title. Almost any of his colleagues would have chosen Peace Studies - but Kramer is an iconoclast, a contrarian. He has no moral objection to war, understands it as Machiavelli did, as a tool of politics. 

Diplomacy by other means.

When the Pentagon has an off-the-wall problem, something which needs thinking outside the box, someone who can see sideways, the professor is their go-to guy.

In twenty minutes he’ll be meeting Dr Joanne Polinski, the woman in charge of the NASA science team set up to investigate the object.

Polinski is said to be a high-flyer: a quantum physicist with a gift for communication, a gift for networking, a gift for ambition. When his colleagues heard about the meeting they were quick to smile; their suppressed amusement was just as quickly turned off.

He’s looking forward to their meeting.

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The DoD sweepers have finished with the small Ritz-Carlton conference room which is located at back up a couple of stairs. It features a small conference table, office chairs and a screen for projection from laptops and phones. In the front of the suite - where you come in - there's a lounge with minibar, hot drinks, biscuits. Three comfy armchairs companionably surround the coffee table.

When Lawrence enters, she’s already sitting in the lounge area, nursing her coffee and looking like she owns the place, the perfect hostess, relaxed and in control. He sees a small woman about his own age. She's wearing a blue dress just long enough to be professional and lustrous black tights which subvert the message. She shakes the long black hair which curls over her bare shoulders; gives him a measured smile.

“Lawrence,” she says, after the pleasantries, “I was asked to meet with you, but no-one seems very sure why?”

“The way we conceptualised War Studies," says Lawrence genially, "takes in economics, politics, science and technology. The secret is the way we put it all together at MIT; I guess it's attracted some notice.”

He smiles: ironic faux-humility.

“Sometimes the agencies come up with something they can’t solve by the book. Something which requires a little creativity mixed with esoteric knowledge. I’m well connected and I tend to get the call.”

“So someone in NASA or the Government has asked you to consult?” asks Joanne.

Lawrence sidesteps with a wave of his hand.

“I read the NASA report. I saw what the on-site team found. The object is levitating about a foot above the lunar surface. Since it reflects all incoming radiation, you haven't been able to image the interior. It seems to be massive - at any rate, when you tried pushing, it didn't move. In a certain sense it’s uninteresting; it doesn’t seem to do anything.”

Joanne  nods like a TV interviewer, drawing him on.

“But from our masters’ point of view, all that's irrelevant," Lawrence continues, "What they care about is this: can it harm us, how does it work, is there technology we can use, how does it affect the balance of power, and perhaps most importantly, what are its intentions - if any?”

Just the slightest expression of irritation crosses her face. To be patronised is not her thing.

Lawrence misses it, continues patiently: “Perhaps you could give me NASA’s best current understanding of what this thing might be?”

Joanne slides effortlessly into lecture-mode. “The sphere is impossible to understand with our current science. It’s impossible to levitate an object of almost infinite mass. It’s impossible to reflect back not just electromagnetic radiation but also the particle beams we’ve applied. No material can do that.”

 “But I understand your team has speculated?”

“Sorry, this is going to get a little technical," she says, "When something is hovering like that it means it's interpreting its local environment as a flat space, the absence of gravity. It’s not completely flattening the space around it, otherwise it would go zooming out of the solar system. It’s just rearranging the local curvature to negate the Moon’s gravity field.”

“Do we have any idea how that could be done?”

Joanne shakes her head: “No. 

The discussion ranges widely over fundamental physics, alien intelligence and possible covert research programmes. Lawrence and Joanne, working together, pushing the envelope. Who knows where that could lead?

Lawrence checks the subliminal channel. The chemistry feels positive, there is a certain sparkle in the air, he feels sure. And he’ll be spending the afternoon working here, with meetings in Washington tomorrow.

It’s worth a try.

“Dr Joanne Polinski, I’m sure we could have some more catching up to do. It so happens I’m at a loose end here tonight. I wonder if you’d be free for dinner?”

She looks at him intently for a second, smiles sweetly and says, “I’ll call you.”

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Previous     Next.

We Were Once Like You: Chapter 1 - by Adam Carlton

Chapter 1: The Lunar Rover

Little Timmy is eight years old and lives in Besançon in eastern France. His father is an engineer in the local watch industry, his mother is a health receptionist. Little Timmy himself is probably some kind of genius.

He is an isolate at school. The other kids read the sports papers, are mad about football. He hides in the library and reads about Black Holes. His teachers tell his parents he should be encouraged. His father takes him to evening meetings of the Besançon Astronomical Society to listen to talks. His father tries to catch up on his sleep while Timmy puzzles over time dilation.

The coffee is terrible.

On his ninth birthday Timmy gets a surprise. His father pays for him to drive a lunar rover. Twenty minutes steering the machine over parts of the moon no-one else had ever seen.

Timmy is thrilled!

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This is the deal. NASA is mapping the moon using surface rovers. They get to the parts satellites can’t see: overhangs and caves. The rovers are systematic and the moon is big. This project will take quite a while yet.

It is a public relations godsend. The little machines on their tank-tracks are autonomous and AI controlled. They explore in a quasi-random way not too dissimilar to a robot vacuum cleaner. It's impossible to drive a lunar vehicle directly from Earth: the both-way time-delay is more than two and a half seconds.

This is how NASA does it.

Timmy is invited to the engineering lab at the Université de Franche-Comté - which is in town. It’s a participant in the scheme. Accompanied by his proud parents, he’s fitted with a VR helmet and has his little hands gripped around a joystick,

Timmy and his parents have practised all this for half an hour with simulated data.

But now the link is established and Timmy has control. How exciting!

His parents stand behind the space-age chair which enfolds their son. They see what Timmy sees on a large screen directly in front of them.

The machine is presently in a dusty cove, a flattish area perhaps fifty metres across, almost completely surrounded by rocks: rocks perforated with caves. The onboard AI has mapped the terrain but gives Timmy the choice of where to begin. It throws up green-edged boxes in Timmy’s immersive view (and also on screen) and invites Timmy to click on the one which takes his fancy.

That’s where it’ll start exploring and surveying.

His parents see Timmy’s cursor, which looks like a white asterisk or a star, as it swishes across the screen. Timmy loiters momentarily at one box, then tries another before finally settling on the box near the centre which marks the black frontage of the biggest unlit cave in view.

A cave never before explored by humanity!

A few seconds pass. The AI is now tasked, the cart trundles forward, the view updates, more than a second in real time arrears. The lunar landscape flows on the screen, the cave-entrance beckons.

Timmy’s parents are tired of standing. The paid session is nearly half an hour, after all. The father heads to the side of the room to collect a couple of chairs - and so misses the first piece of strangeness.

The mother sees a small constellation of lights ahead, slowly getting brighter in the cave entrance. She doesn’t attach any significance to this. It could be anything - what does she know of space technology?

And little Timmy has no preconceptions at all.

The rover enters the cave which is now over-illuminated, not just by the machine’s own headlights. The very last thing the startled parents see on the screen, as the image comes to a juddering, freezing halt, is a distorted reflection of the rover itself, as if the machine had stopped in front of a giant mirror!

A phone rings and the loitering technician, there to oversee arrangements for the university, picks it up. He listens, stiffens, and then makes himself relax. He walks over to Timmy’s parents.

“I’m afraid there’s been a bit of a glitch. That was NASA. They apologise that Timmy’s session will have to be brought to a close now. Don’t worry, we’ll invite him back for a full replacement. Sorry about that.”

The parents stand, nonplussed, as the technician unstraps the VR helmet and helps Timmy out of his seat.

As he shows them out he points back at the frozen screen.

“Your Timmy is going to be famous,” he says quietly, “Whatever that thing is, it wasn't put there by us. Time to get yourselves an agent!”

---

In fact Timmy does not get to be famous, or not immediately. Instead hard-faced, serious men come round to the house within the hour. These men, from agencies Timmy’s parents have only read about, make them sign papers, politely threaten them with direct penalties, and generally convey the thought that they must forget any of this ever happened.

Meanwhile, at NASA, it’s hit the fan.

Within that agency there is a protocol for everything. Some secret committee, tasked with thinking the unthinkable, wondered what should be done if an exploring rover should ever come across an anomaly: something which should not be there.

What's an anomaly? Something that the neural-net can’t classify. When its best attempt has a probability of less than 10%.

Then a second, emergency classification kicks in. A neural-net looking for something which is recognised, but should not be there. Something technological.

When that fires ... Well, it truly does hit the fan.

---

Next.