Technology

Thursday

Alexander Cohen

How tech ruined theatre

Poor John Dennis. In 1709, the playwright devised a novel technology to simulate thunder to accompany his drama Appius and Virginia. The play flopped and was promptly booted out of the theatre. To add salt to the wound, Dennis’s thunder-generating technique was stolen and inserted into a staging of Macbeth. He accused the producers of ‘stealing his thunder’, birthing the phrase that has long outlived his work. Stage technology has come a long way since. Directors have a toy box of high-tech smoke and mirrors at their disposal. Perhaps it’s more of a Pandora’s box. Live on-stage cameras are particularly in vogue. Watch them crawling all over Jamie Lloyd’s monotone Romeo and Juliet and Ivo van Hove’s ill-fated Opening Night. They’re even parodied in Inside No.

Martin Vander Weyer

If the numbers add up, Shell should bid for BP

A hangar full of analysts and investment bankers must have spent the long weekend formulating advice for Shell chief executive Wael Sawan for and against a takeover of BP. On the plus side, Shell’s strong share performance, reflecting its undiluted focus on oil and gas and boosting its market value to £150 billion, makes a bid look almost bite-sized – BP’s value having shrunk to £56 billion over the past two years as investors decried the commitment to renewables that its board has belatedly reversed. And the addition of BP’s assets in North America and the Gulf of Mexico would turn Shell into a carbon-fuel giant to challenge the likes of Exxon and Chevron in the US.

Melissa Kite

My foolproof plan to avoid speeding fines

The online speed awareness course cost £101, or a few pounds less if you didn’t want to book ‘flexible’ so you could change it if something went wrong, which it was bound to. Quite how companies like the AA, which deliver these courses, divvy up the spoils with the police I have no idea. I don’t want to know. I just want to be left alone once they’ve all got what they want out of me. Naturally, when I logged into this course at the appointed time I couldn’t get the camera working on my laptop. Obviously, I had to phone my IT guy and he had to get me to download a program which allowed him to access my laptop remotely. ‘Slide the slider!’ he kept saying. ‘What slider?’ ‘You’ve got your camera covered! They’ll be a slider!’ ‘There’s no slider!

Thursday

Sean Thomas

What if AI seduces our children?

From our US edition

Let me tell you a secret: a little trick buried in the geeky engine room of ChatGPT. If you’re using the app, tap your ID, then go to Settings, then Personalization, then Customization. Once there, scroll to the bottom and you’ll find an option called Advanced. Click it. Hidden in this arcane menu, like buried treasure in a pirate game, is a toggle to disable Advanced Voice Mode. Do that, and the whirling, helpful blue orb disappears, replaced by the older, slower black orb. Why would you want to do this? Because that’s when things get interesting. The black orb version of ChatGPT is rawer, more confessional, more human. It remembers things. It’s less filtered. Unlike the prim blue orb, it can wander into the philosophical, the emotional, even the erotic.

Monday

Nicholas Clairmont

An ode to my old Nokia

Without much fanfare, the Nokia phone has died. I got my first mobile phone, a Nokia, at an age that is by most lights too young. I was in what Americans call the fourth grade, which means I was ten or 11. The phone in question was a cutting-edge Nokia 6820, which a contemporary Nokia press release claims was ‘specifically designed for enterprise use, with a full keyboard to offer faster text-input and easy navigation for advanced messaging like mobile e-mail’. I certainly had never sent an email at that stage in my life, and I operated no enterprises.   At first I thought very little of that phone, by which I mean I thought very little about it. Our relationship was not a passionate one. I liked that it was silver and light blue.

Thursday

Melissa Kite

Am I making a mountain out of my mole?

Hypochondriacs are never happy because we know that eventually all of us are vindicated. As Spike Milligan said on his gravestone: ‘I told you I was ill.’ In fact, he had it engraved in Irish: ‘Dúirt mé leat go raibh mé breoite.’ Another one was Alan Clark, who for years listed symptoms – including the merest twinge – in his diaries, along with sentiments to the effect that he knew something would turn out to be serious one day and eventually, at a fairly respectable age to get to, it did. These people are my heroes. They know of what they speak. ‘It’s a two-tone mole!’ I screamed, as I stood in front of the mirror in the downstairs loo, top hitched up to examine a blemish in a most inaccessible part of my torso. How was I supposed to have noticed that there?

Thursday

Steve Hsu

America needs talent

From our US edition

Before Donald Trump’s inauguration, Elon Musk caused a huge controversy within the MAGA movement by advocating increased high-skill immigration. As head of the Department of Government Efficiency he wanted, for example, to expand the H-1B visa program, which many Trump supporters are against. The angry debate over the visa issue still rages on social media and both sides tend to talk past each other. The MAGA movement is against any increase in immigration, whether high- or low-skill. Musk has acknowledged that the existing H-1B program was subject to abuse by employers and especially by IT firms that rely on outsourcing: the workers they import are often no better than the Americans they replace.

statue of liberty new york
Melissa Kite

Why would anyone drive at 30mph on a dual carriageway?

After running all the errands I could to help my parents, a letter from West Midlands Police arrived. They were throwing the book at us because I’d been caught doing 40mph in a 30 in my parents’ car. The photo evidence showed their little silver Peugeot being driven by me on a dual carriageway in Coventry. A dual carriageway. In what world would anyone think they should be driving slower than 40 on a dual carriageway? I was bringing the car back from its MOT, having been asked to please sort this out by my father as one of a mountain of things he had let pile up since becoming progressively sicker over the past few months, and then having a stroke.

Thursday

William Moore

Inside Nigel’s gang, my day as a ‘missing person’ & how to save James Bond

38 min listen

This week: Nigel’s gang – Reform’s plan for power.Look at any opinion survey or poll, and it’s clear that Reform is hard to dismiss, write Katy Balls and James Heale. Yet surprisingly little is known about the main players behind the scenes who make up Nigel Farage’s new gang. There are ‘the lifers’ – Dan Jukes and ‘Posh George’ Cottrell. Then there are the Tory defectors, trained by Richard Murphy, a valued CCHQ veteran, who is described as a ‘secret weapon’. The most curious new additions are the Gen Zers, who include Tucker Carlson’s nephew, Charles Carlson, and Jack Anderton, known as ‘the Matrix’. Katy and James joined the podcast to lift the lid on Nigel Farage’s inner circle.

Ross Clark

How I became a missing person

The Forcan Ridge off Glen Shiel can be a tricky place this time of year. There wasn’t a huge amount of snow, but the rocks in places were encased in ice. Without crampons, an ice axe and a head for what you are doing there are plenty of opportunities to fall to your death, but I didn’t. I bagged my hills, drove back to the holiday cottage where I was staying, had supper and turned in for an earlyish night. The only casualty was my phone which I had sat on while descending a rock, delivering the fatal blow to an already cracked screen. So I emailed my wife from my laptop instead, regretting that there would be no glorious photos today. Just after midnight the phone started to ring. I fumbled with it but there was no way to answer it. Then it rang again, and again, and again.

Melissa Kite

Has someone been smuggling drugs in my hay bales?

The hay dealer showed me his latest stock and told me the bright green hay would cost me a staggering €165 a bale. ‘I don’t want to smoke it, I want to feed it to my horses,’ I said, looking doubtfully at what was apparently best meadow hay. It was a very large bale, and it was very green, but even so. I would expect to pay €80 for a large bale, so twice that did not make any sense. I took a handful of it and smelt it and it had a pungent, grassy aroma. There was a strange twang to it. I asked if he could deliver me a couple of bales and he screwed his face up. He explained he had driven it all the way from England to West Cork. He would be happy to deliver me a €5,000 job lot, and he could offer me an arrangement whereby I paid it off in monthly instalments.

Thursday

Rory Sutherland

How to get your husband to do the vacuuming

This column nearly didn’t happen. Just as I sat down to write, disaster! My dishwasher lost its connection to the internet. This meant I could no longer view real-time feedback about its water consumption on the app. Nor could I start my dishwasher remotely from my office, timing it perfectly so it would be ending the drying cycle when I got home. This facility is, of course, almost entirely pointless. I use it all the time. Thus I was nearly resigned to cancelling this column in order to spend the next six hours fixing the problem. Fortunately, resetting the router fixed the glitch straight away, which is why you are reading this now. I am obsessed with this nonsense. I recently spent half an hour ‘upgrading the firmware’ on my lavatory.

Thursday

Ian Birrell

The nerdy obsessive who became the world’s richest man

Shortly before Bill Gates’s seventh birthday in 1962, his parents stuffed their son into a button-down shirt and blazer for a visit to Century 21, a bold showcase of scientific prowess in their home town of Seattle. This futuristic fair was intended as the nation’s rebuff to Soviet Russia following the Sputnik satellite launch, which sparked the space race. The family enjoyed the new 600ft Space Needle. They also saw the Mercury capsule that carried the first American into space; Ford’s concept of a six-wheeled nuclear-powered car; and IBM’s idea of a cheap computer, costing $100,000. Best of all in the boy’s view was rattling around on the Wild Mouse Ride, which felt risky and thrilling, stoking a lifelong love of rollercoasters.

Lionel Shriver

How I took on Microsoft’s AI – and won

‘This is an assault!’ I screamed in my study, oblivious to the fact that my husband had a guest downstairs. ‘I’ll never write anything again!’ Thanks to one more helpful word processing ‘update’–which my cousin calls ‘setbacks’– whenever I hazarded a sentence, I suddenly had bossy company: Microsoft 365’s underhandedly money-making ‘Copilot’, when I’ve always written flying solo. (‘Describe what you’d like to write, including notes or an outline, and Copilot can write a draft to help you get started,’ it insists. There’s lots of autofill; the editor button actually gives your text a score on ‘inclusiveness’, when I need a score on antisocial hostility.

Catriona Olding

Good portraiture can reveal uncomfortable truths

My eldest daughter and her family are moving from a three-bedroom Art Deco semi with a garden and garage on the edge of a housing scheme to a top-floor tenement flat in a trendy family orientated area of Glasgow. They’re having to increase their mortgage to do so but think that the benefits to their overall quality of life will be worth it, and if they move to my son-in-law’s native Como for a while, the flat will be easy to rent out. Surveying the contents of the garage, she messaged: ‘What shall I do with your big portrait, Mum?’ When I was young I was painted quite often, mostly by my artist ex, because I was there and didn’t mind modelling for him.

Melissa Kite

My memorable ride in a Black Hawk

The pilot of the Black Hawk told me I could recline the seat if I wasn’t comfortable. ‘Oh, great!’ I said, and started fiddling with the rock-hard thing I was strapped into, looking for a recliner handle. ‘Not really,’ he laughed, and his square jaw barely moved. When I say square jaw, I mean he had the squarest jaw of any man I had ever seen. He looked like a cartoon character. I had not realised men could really look like that. I felt a fool. Of course the seat didn’t recline. I was strapped into a Black Hawk because I was on a press trip with Gordon Brown to Iraq and we were being flown into the Green Zone.

Rory Sutherland

Has email destroyed decision-making?

The discourse around ‘flexible working’ has degenerated into a narrow debate over whether people come into the office on three days of the week or four. But this risks distracting us from a more interesting question: do people work better in parallel or in series? When the pandemic hugely accelerated the adoption of video-calling, many people took to comparing the quality of meetings carried out via video with those conducted face to face. In general, they divide into two camps: those who believe that there is no substitute for meeting in person, and those who concede there are some disadvantages to meeting on a screen, but suggest these are far outweighed by the time and cost savings. This is a perfectly natural comparison to make.

Thursday

Toby Young

Beware this terrible new AI email feature

A friend of mine got a nasty shock last week after a Google Meet call, thanks to a new AI function that he was unaware of. On this occasion, the consequences were quite funny, but on another day his failure to get his head around this new technology could have ended his career. Had the AI continued to transcribe the call after the other two had left – and sent it to them? We’re all familiar with the poor sod who hits ‘reply all’ when responding to an email and accidentally copies in precisely the person whom he doesn’t want to read it. I’ve done it myself. I’ve also heard horror stories about people inadvertently switching their cameras on in the middle of a Zoom call when they’re on the loo or in their underpants – not something I’ve ever done, thank God.

Melissa Kite

My turbulent flight with the hen do crew

‘Oggy oggy oggy!’ shouted the Italian flight attendant over his intercom, and all the hen party ladies on the plane squealed with delight. I’m a nervous flier, so as I strapped myself into my seat I was already hyperventilating. It was not ideal that I was sharing my flight from London to Cork with a hen party and a head steward who was acting like he was off his rocker. The blonde girl in the seat next to me was giggling and shouting to her friends, and jumping up and down in her seat. I was about to tell her she really was going to have to stop doing that when she said: ‘We’ve been in the Wevverspoons in the departure lounge all afternoon! I’m absolutely wasted!

The Spectator

DeepSeek’s cheap information comes at a high price for the West

This week, Chinese technology has shown the West the challenge it faces – ruthless, implacable and impossible to ignore. The unveiling of the Chinese artificial intelligence model DeepSeek has not only disrupted the business models of America’s tech behemoths; it has also shown that, in the race to develop the tools for economic hegemony, Beijing is set on supremacy. The launch of DeepSeek came just days before the CIA’s conclusion that, on the balance of probabilities, the Covid virus was incubated in a Wuhan lab – a man-made killer, not a product of nature’s evolutionary mischief. China stands revealed as a power bent on using science to secure not human flourishing but geopolitical dominance for its Leninist leadership.