Ai

Yesterday

Ross Clark

AI isn’t making us more productive

At some point there has to be an “emperor has no clothes” moment. Why, when we are in the middle of a boom in Artificial Intelligence, which is supposed to transform the way we do nearly everything, is there no tangible increase in productivity across the economy? Surely, if the claims for AI were even nearly true it would by now be showing up in the statistics for Total Factor Productivity (TFP) published by the San Francisco Fed. TPF is a measure of output relative to input from labour and capital; a measure, in other words, of how efficiently workers are using the tools available to them. In theory, it should be increasing dramatically with AI as workers use it to speed up tasks and get more out of their day. Trouble is, that does not appear to be happening.

Rupert Christiansen

The genius of Pam Tanowitz 

From our UK edition

Too much ballet these days is top-heavy with narrative that would be better served by the spoken word than it is by body language. And too few choreographers know how to engage with music, rather than using it as a mere sonic backdrop. So what a blessed relief it was to encounter Pam Tanowitz’s utterly delightful Pastoral, which is guilty of neither of these failings. I enjoyed it so much that I was compelled to go back and see it again, at my own considerable expense, two days later. Pastoral lasts for an hour or so, but seems to ignore tick-tock time: it is both simple and complex, naive and sophisticated.

Tuesday

Jenny Colgan

Adventures of the Time Traveler’s daughter: Life Out of Order, by Audrey Niffenegger, reviewed

From our UK edition

There is only one problem with this beautiful, elegiac novel, a glorious hodgepodge mash-up of time travelling and apocalyptic eco-fiction: it is out of order. It would be very hard to follow such a beloved monster as The Time Traveler’s Wife (2003),which has been turned into a film, a TV show, a musical and a play and has influenced Doctor Who and Richard Curtis as well as numerous inferior copycats. The novel is near perfect, heart-tugging, totally original but still fundamentally a simple love story of Clare and Henry, with its own superb internal logic. After all, other people’s marriages are innately mysterious, so someone occasionally disappearing into a time loop is as good an explanation as any.

Wednesday

James Heale

Harold Wilson is the new Labour lodestar

After Andy Burnham’s speech at the Labour party conference on Tuesday, one veteran factionalist declared: ‘We are all Burnhamites now.’ Romantics love the rhetoric; cynics respect the ruthlessness. ‘Game recognises game,’ says one Labour figure. The Prime Minister’s address was pitched at a wounded party seeking support. Emotive and personal, yet also intensely political, it showed a keen awareness not just of Labour’s values, but of its interests too. Right to Buy, which attracted legions to the Tory ranks, will be halted for new homes; a new National Care Service will bring thousands more members into the unions’ fold.

Wednesday

James Heale

Can Andy Burnham resist the techlash?

From our UK edition

If Andy Burnham wants a reminder of the case for artificial intelligence (AI), he need only walk down the streets of his Makerfield constituency. Drives are dominated by Ford Transits and VW Transporters, the favoured vans of the self-employed. Blue-collar, hard-working, manual labourers: these will be the people most secure in the coming jobs revolution. Their accounting is made easier via new online systems; their public services smoothed by better programmes. Wigan council is using AI to cut costs in the care system; the nearby Heinz factory deploys it in its production line. Burnham wants a ‘Makerfield test’ for all aspects of policy. Yet what does that really mean when AI is so fast-changing? https://www.youtube.com/watch?

Sean Thomas

Did AI write the French book of the year?

Many decades ago (or so it seems, it was actually January 2023, but things move fast in AI-world) I wrote a Spectator piece claiming that The End of Writing was coming, thanks to AI. In return for this favor, I got large amounts of angry and derisory scorn, mainly from writerly types, who banged on about the uniqueness of human creation, but also from techy people, who pointed out that as a mere hack I could not possibly know anything about AI, and anyway AI was just a glorified next-word-predictor. The French, being French, have responded with wise philosophy, or cowardly evasion, depending on your taste Now, I'm not the sort of cheap, mean-minded person who says “I told you so,” so I'll just say “I told you so.

Tuesday

Kristina Murkett

AI is turning the world into slop

It seems AI is not just making everyone sound the same, but now everything must look the same too. I haven’t been able to walk into a pub, cafe or shop this summer without noticing the uncanny, slightly unreal sheen of an AI-generated poster. From caricatured cartoon children on a nursery advertisement to an abnormally glistening burger on a food menu, every billboard, flyer and sign now seems to have been regurgitated from the same ChatGPT printing press. We are hurtling ever closer to a flattened future in which everything converges towards the average, the mediocre, the visual mean There are many telltale signs that a sign is generic AI-slop.

Friday

Maximillian Garely

AI is cosmic justice for the professional classes

For decades the road to success in the developed world has been straightforward. A university education, increasingly treated as a sort of white-collar trade school, offered people the chance to acquire specialist knowledge which could be used to secure a position lingering at a desk for 40 years. For those of us who grew up watching machines replace men on the assembly line, acquiring a degree was the way to escape this fate. In the digital age, however, the automation of cognitive labor has forced many professionals to confront a threat that once seemed confined to workers on the factory floor.

AI robots

Wednesday

The Spectator

Britain needs to get a grip on AI

From our UK edition

We remember the empty hysteria induced by warnings over the millennium bug. We have borne the burden of exaggerated predictions of climate apocalypse from scientists in the grip of confirmation bias. All too recently we endured lurid over-estimations from academics of what the final Covid variants might bring. So it is tempting to dismiss all future warnings of technological Götterdämmerung as the overwrought fever dreams of nerds who have read too much Isaac Asimov. Is artificial intelligence really going to take over the world and kill us all? Are we going to be frozen to death by our smart meters and then incinerated by our microwaves?

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: The assisted dying bill falls, the Sussexes switch schools and Trump praises a united Ireland

From our UK edition

Home MPs voted against the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill that offered assisted suicide, by 286 to 270; in June 2025, an identical Bill was given a Third Reading by 314 to 291. Ben Delo, a British cryptocurrency billionaire, donated £36 million to Reform. The next day, the cryptocurrency investor Christopher Harborne (who had given Nigel Farage £5 million in 2024) gave Reform another £36 million. The government plotted retrospective legislation to stop such donations. Dan Thomas resigned as Reform’s Welsh leader, after his arrest on suspicion of assault. Piddington, an Oxfordshire village of 350, voted in a referendum by 285 to 26 to cede from the UK in protest at an asylum camp for 1,250 men coming there.

Helen D’Vorcee

Girls, let’s not leave AI to the men

From our UK edition

As seen in the Times ‘Sodding sods!’ I exclaim, as I discover that I’m £16,000 overdrawn. Between the tweakments, the Berry Bros deliveries and the maintenance of a feckless toyboy in rented digs in Hove, I’m deep in the red and digging deeper. I shoot Emilia Cash-Barings a WhatsApp. ‘Babe, have you got any comish for me? Something on the new scourge of Athleisure or a righteous skewering of Soho Farmhouse?’ ‘Look, Helen,’ she replies. ‘All I’ve got is something on this “AI” stuff. £2,000? What do you reckon?’ That’s the problem with tech journalism. It’s all done by dorky pale men who want to hide from women AI? Moi? I’m no incel.

Rupert Christiansen

The fearlessness of Steven McRae

From our UK edition

Steven McRae ranked for a decade as the Royal Ballet’s star virtuoso – a fearless technician of dazzling precision, speed, stamina and verve. Serious injury, including a torn Achilles tendon, has recently dogged him to the point that anyone sane would have thrown in the towel, but with a sheer bloody-minded resilience and ego to match his phenomenal talent, he has fought his way to recovery through a fearsome regime of therapy that would make any Wimbledon champion or Olympic gold medallist blanch. McRae tap dances as if possessed by the daemon associated with the composer After another long period off stage, McRae returns to performance in a cabaret-style show in the friendly intimacy of the Linbury Theatre.

Thursday

John Power

Don’t believe everything that AI companies say

Two big stories are driving interest in artificial intelligence this week. The first is the resignation of Jacob Coxon, a researcher at Anthropic (maker of Claude) who used to work for OpenAI. He said in a statement on X: https://twitter.com/hilbertspaess/status/2097476196791709843?s=20 Coxon went on to say that “the people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade”, and that employees at Anthropic are aggressively driving forward because they believe they are in the only company capable of managing the technology safely and ethically. At OpenAI, “many have not deeply internalized the civilizational stakes.”  Scary stuff.

AI

Thursday

James Gray

Don’t fall for the latest scam targeting authors — I nearly did

“Hello, James Gray. I am [ABC, a well-known executive editor at Macmillan, New York]. I recently came across your work and was genuinely captivated by it… I’d love to learn more about any projects you may be developing... I’m also curious whether you are represented by a literary agent. If you are, I would be happy to continue the conversation via them.” This was a shot straight to the pumped-up ego. I’ve been slaving away more or less unnoticed for many years and published a few books, all pretty modest. Small things but mine own. At last, I’ve been spotted by a major publishing house. My name in lights. Here comes the big time. So I shot off some manuscripts, a résumé, a blurb.

Jamie Metzl

Smarter machines are going to need wiser humans

Everywhere we go these days, we hear people talking about the inevitable arrival of artificial general intelligence (AGI), usually understood as the moment when machines can perform every cognitive task as well as or better than humans. Some people await this moment with excitement, others with dread. Either way, the assumption is that sooner or later machines will cross some threshold and surpass us across the board. I have come to summarize my response to this perception in seven letters: AGI is BS. Part of the problem is that AGI has no agreed scientific definition. The term has increasingly become shorthand for the idea that intelligence exists on a single ladder, with today’s machines somewhere below us and tomorrow’s destined to climb past us.

Wednesday

Rory Sutherland

Throw away your keyboard

The older and more plutocratic among you may remember the unlamented business-class airline seat of the 1980s and 1990s. Every few years, major airlines would proudly announce the wondrous extra legroom available in their long-haul business class and the increase in the recline angle of the seat. And each time the experience got worse. You see, the person sitting in front of you now invaded ever more of your airspace when they reclined their own seat. You then had no choice but to follow suit to regain the lost territory. The resulting Nash equilibrium meant everyone on board was forced to spend the entire journey leaning backwards at 45°. Getting to the lavatory required playing an involuntary game of Twister with the person sitting by the aisle.

Tuesday

Richard Walker

Do we really want to live in a world where we’re perpetually spied on?

From our UK edition

Some people think that the United Kingdom ranks as an unusually surveillance-heavy society, what with all the CCTV installations, doorbell cameras and automatic number plate recognition systems that have proliferated in the public sphere – but they would be wrong. In fact, according to Ruben Andersson’s Age of Security, the whole world is sliding towards a state of perpetual surveillance, where everybody is spied on all the time, by cameras and communications interceptions and data capture, without debate or accountability or even much public reflection on what is happening. Do we actually want to live in this state of heightened supervision, looked over by what we are told are ‘machines of loving grace’ (as the novelist Richard Brautigan once wrote)? Does it matter?

Wednesday

Mary Wakefield

Bots for tots: welcome to the terrifying era of AI toys

In the centre of Durham last week, at the far end of the old indoor market, my son and I hit pay dirt. Down past the fishmonger and the cleaning supplies, past the dead-eyed teens suffering through their summer jobs, right against the market’s back wall: Jim’s Vintage Toys. Die-cast Dinkys, Napoleonic soldiers with tufted hats, stormtroopers, old-school Ferraris. Within 20 seconds my ten-year-old had a car in each sticky hand and had dropped, sniper-style to the floor into that universal boy play-position almost never seen in girls: bum up, shoulders twisted, cheek flat to the floor. Another few seconds and he was unreachable, sunk deep into an imaginary race.

Martin Vander Weyer

The fall of AI’s shooting star

From our UK edition

Situational Awareness is a hedge fund that has just taken a spectacular dive. Its name was adopted from the title of an essay by the fund’s 24-year-old German founder, Leopold Aschenbrenner, exploring the promises and perils of AI ‘superintelligence’. Many people who thought Aschenbrenner himself was super-intelligent gave him money to invest and, for a brief while, he outperformed their wildest expectations, his novice fund clocking up a 439 per cent return in the first half of this year. But in July it plunged from $45 billion to $10 billion as AI-related stocks tumbled and its entire holding of listed shares had to be sold to raise liquid funds. Now market-watchers are asking whether he’s the harbinger of a wider crash or just an overhyped shooting star.

Tuesday

Guy Stagg

Looking for Katrin: Rory MacLean goes in search of his dead wife

From our UK edition

One September, Rory MacLean’s wife, Katrin, was diagnosed with terminal cancer. Seven months later she was dead. The couple had been married for 32 years. In the wake of his wife’s death, MacLean decided to write a book about the afterlife. He had already written books about Russia and Myanmar, Berlin and Crete, but it was not clear where this journey should begin. ‘Unfortunately, few who entered heaven alive returned with a guidebook.’ Over the next five years, he travelled the globe, learning how different faiths understood the afterlife and exploring various sacred sites and religious rites. At the same time he read a wide range of mystical writers and collected insights into death from science, philosophy and the history of religion.