Ben

Farting around

2026-06-12T00:00:00+01:00

I saw this quote from Kurt Vonnegut recently and I just had to share it, if no other reason than to know where it is so I can look at it whenever I like. He tells his wife that he’s going out to buy an envelope:

Oh, she says, well, you’re not a poor man. You know, why don’t you go online and buy a hundred envelopes and put them in the closet? And so I pretend not to hear her. And go out to get an envelope because I’m going to have a hell of a good time in the process of buying one envelope. I meet a lot of people. And, see some great-looking babies. And a fire engine goes by. And I give them the thumbs up. And, and ask a woman what kind of dog that is. And, and I don’t know. The moral of the story is, is we’re here on Earth to fart around. And, of course, the computers will do us out of that. And, what the computer people don’t realize, or they don’t care, is we’re dancing animals. You know, we love to move around. And, we’re not supposed to dance at all anymore.

I love to tinker with computers, and when I was younger and more naive (and Big Tech was less big) I saw all forms of tech and ditigal advancement as being positive. Obviously, the world has changed, and it’s changed me with it. I still like to tinker with tech, and lots of fun things have happened in the digital realm, but only in the interest of play, and making the lives of my friends and family better.

It is likely that I am writing this post the same year that the AI bubble collapses and, hopefully, takes a huge chunk of the hyperscale tech industry with it.¹. If Big Tech takes its foot off the accelerator, I would love to see more of us taking every opportunity to dance and fart around.

I really, deeply, hope that the human toll, including on the employees of those companies, is negligible. My ire is exclusively for the owners and executives of these reckless companies. ↩︎

Just finished All These Worlds

2026-06-10T11:58:46+01:00

Finished this one today.

All These Worlds

Dennis E. Taylor

Read in 9 days

Ted Chiang on Artificial Intelligence

2026-06-03T00:00:00+01:00

I read a typically excellent take on AI today from Ted Chiang today and it left me sitting with his wisdom, as his writing so often does.

If you don’t know Ted’s name, you probably know his work – he wrote the short story Story of Your Life that the beautiful sci-fi film Arrival is based on. Kudos to Nathalie for introducing me to his writing; she read his book of short stories Exhalation (“Story of your life” is not in that collection, btw).

One of my favourite stories in that collection is the novella-length The Lifecycle of Software Objects, written in 2010, which rigorously, through fiction, tries to ask what digitial consciousness looks like. The theses are nuanced, but the main idea I took away from it was that if digital consciousness were possible, then it would need to be not just created, but parented.

No, Artificial Intelligence Is Not Conscious

Ted has written barn-burning iron-clad plain-spoken articles in the last couple of years unpacking the ethical question of using AI for creative work and the polluting effect inherent in AI, but this piece in The Atlantic is about whether LLMs are conscious, and he’s pretty unequivocal.

Should we seriously consider the possibility that Claude, or any large language model, might be conscious? And if it has feelings, is it capable of receiving moral instruction?

No. Absolutely not. Generative AI is harmful enough when we understand it as a conventional technology, but if we confuse fluency at generating text with consciousness or moral agency, we’re at risk of assigning responsibility to entirely the wrong parties whenever anyone uses a chatbot.

Just, no, basically. But he does of course go further.

I must say that I have never considered the possibility that an LLM is conscious, or that it could become conscious, with any seriousness…but if faced with a True Believer, I don’t know that I would have had the ontological tools to articulate why it didn’t just feel like a fallacy, but was impossible.

Now I do!

Starting with the fact that it’s pretty inconceivable that we would just stumble on something like consciousness. To say that we have achieved something so monumental as a society without any of the steps to get there, is immediately suspect.

Faking the moon landing is a good step toward faking a Mars colony, but it’s not a good step toward actually putting astronauts on Mars.

And while I knew the underlying process or loop of running an LLM is iterative (they don’t plan ahead, they just generate the next most likely word), seeing chatbot interactions characterised, accurately, as just interactive co-authoring of a document with a statistical word generator, made the scenario even more ridiculous.

Being open to the possibility that LLMs are conscious is the same as being open to the possibility that Microsoft Word is conscious, or, more precisely, that multiple distinct consciousnesses are dormant in every Word document containing a conversational transcript, and that they are awakened every time the document is loaded. Should you consider the possibility that every time you open a Word document, you are bringing multiple conscious interlocutors into existence, and every time you close one, you snuff their existence out? No. Contemplating that scenario is not a good use of your time. Even if the Microsoft Office team employed a philosopher who said you shouldn’t be so certain, because consciousness is not well understood, that would not be sufficient reason for you to take this idea seriously. We don’t need to fully understand the nature of consciousness to definitively say that certain things are not conscious, and conversational transcripts fall in that category.

I’m not going to just quote the whole article here, it’s well worth a read.

Choosing his audience

I will also note that Ted writes beautifully, he has an amazing command of the English language. I think it is very interesting how flat and unaffected his writing is in these articles, most of all in his New Yorker piece explaining why AI can’t make art. I was nodding furiously throughout, but I also felt that I wasn’t really the target market for his arguments.

I absolutely agree with all of Ted’s points, he is speaking about ethics, morality, personhood, justice, creativity, expression and art. Importantly, he is not talking about how these technologies can be used for other applications. That’s a much less interesting set of questions, both philosophically and in piercing the sheen of marketing that encases these deeply troubling companies.

I’ve been using them at work and even personally, for wrangling information and automating some of the drudgery of professional software development. The efficacy of LLMs in these scenarios is frequently wildly overstated, but it’s also not nothing. Things like publicly musing their text-prediction engine may be conscious, and waving next to the Pope, allow Anthropic to build hype for their pension-fund-obliterating IPO.

Just finished For We Are Many

2026-06-02T00:00:00+01:00

Finished this one today.

For We Are Many

Dennis E. Taylor

Read in 25 days

I’m actually super loving these weird little sci-fi books. He is not the most expressive writer, but the story is novel, and our protagonist is amiable.

He also does the work to plumb the depths of this high concept, pulling up genuinely surprising ideas and developments, often in the tiniest ways. For example, a Bob decides to clone himself to go on a suicide mission. Then the next chapter is the point of view of the clone, who because he’s just a pure digital copy of his progenitor from a few moments ago, can remember the decision to send himself on a suicide mission, and all of the rationale that led to it. So the Bobs just shrug at one another and get on with it.

Working out

2026-06-01T00:00:00+01:00

This is the view from the treadmill I warm up and cool down on at my local gym. I’ve gone twice a week for nearly two months, I’m lifting more each week than the week before and I am rediscovering myself as a strong, flexible person. I haven’t lost a ton of weight, I’m not swole, stacked or jacked, but I haven’t felt this good in a long time.

I have two people to credit for this.

The first is my mate Paul, who suggested it in the first place. After a much-delayed pint together, he said that he was considering joining the gym, and asked if I’d be up for buddying up. It’s been great having someone to be accountable to in the mornings when I’m dragging myself out of bed, and it’s also just lovely to do something like this socially. The time passes easier, and it’s nice to chat about family, games, movies and the news with a mate when resting between sets.

The other person is my mate Richard, who when I told him and asked his advice on where to start immediately designed a workout plan for me to follow. Having that direction from the jump has made this so much easier, and I suspect is also a big part of why I feel this is going well.

Nerd alert!

But of course, I couldn’t indulge in a new hobby without it intersecting with others. Namely, my interest in self-hosting. I’ve been hosting an app called Wger, an open-source workout-tracking app.

It’s been super fun tracking my progress, while also knowing that all of my data is fully private and not being used to train some ghoulish AI model another business is going to profit from (after presumably charging me for the privelege of feeding it my data).