Armageddon

Thursday

Sean Thomas

Where will AI strike first?

Homo sapiens, as a species, is programmed to anticipate death, disaster and apocalypse. The monster in the mere, the ague that comes from the east, the flood that wipes out all living creatures outside the Ark. The reason children – and adults in horror movies – are scared of the dark is because darkness is where predators strike. We have a sensible evolutionary fear of things that go bump in the night. For thousands of years it was possible to argue this primal fear of apocalypse was overwrought. No matter what humans did, or did not do, we were incapable of destroying ourselves and anything that might destroy us in toto – like the comet that erased the dinosaurs – was simultaneously so rare and so beyond our ability to resist that it was pointless worrying.

Friday

Alexander Larman

The bitter irony of Bruce Willis bowing out

The news that Bruce Willis is to “step away” — rather than explicitly retire — from acting following a diagnosis of the brain disorder aphasia, is sad for both personal and artistic reasons. Even as a flood of stories emerge about Willis’s erratic and unpredictable behavior on film sets over the past few years, it is a bitter irony that, after a lengthy career as the tough guy hero — in Armageddon, he defeated no less an antagonist than a planet-threatening asteroid — the actor has finally been undone by his own brain. The news also makes the recent receipt of Willis’s Golden Razzie “award” for his performance in Cosmic Sin particularly cruel, not least because he was “honored” with a special category, “Worst Performance by Bruce Willis in a 2021 Movie.

Wednesday

Will Lloyd

Style on steroids: the power of Jerry Bruckheimer

This article is in The Spectator’s January 2020 US edition. Subscribe here. Jerry Bruckheimer is a quiet man who produces the loudest movies in the world. Early, arty Jerry was the fixer who put together 1980’s slight neo-noir American Gigolo. Thrusting mid-period Jerry, happily partnered with the 1980s zeitgeist and fellow producer Don Simpson, made the classics Flashdance, Top Gun and Beverly Hills Cop. Don died a truly maximal Hollywood death in 1996 — they found 21 different substances inside him — but Jerry, always the sober one, kept going bigger, faster, louder: The Rock, Con Air, Armageddon.

jerry bruckheimer

Friday

Lionel Shriver

Why catastrophising is my idea of a good time

When, on a test of general knowledge, the highly educated score far worse than chimpanzees, university degrees may be overrated (definitely). But something more interesting may also be going on. According to the newly released Factfulness by Hans Rosling, we would-be smart people would improve our results on multiple-choice questions about the current state of the world (16 per cent) if we picked the answers at random (33 per cent). We all seem to think that humanity is in the toilet, and swirling more deeply into the sewer by the day. We’re wilfully blind to social progress. The more cheerful a host of indices look, the more belligerently we cling to the conviction that everything is getting worse.