“We must build AI for people; not to be a person,” Mustafa Suleyman’s recent essay on the importance of avoiding what he terms ‘seemingly conscious AI ‘is a welcome intervention, and much better argued than his recent book, The Coming Wave.

It could be argued that it’s also a good way to put some clear blue water between OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and Meta, all of which are hell-bent on giving us new token-based pals who are fun to be with, and his current employer Microsoft and the trusty but personality-free Copilot sidekick, helpful but in no way a likely boyfriend, but that doesn’t invalidate the argument.

What Suleyman is arguing is that the current design of chatbots is designed to exploit vulnerabilities in human psychology in order to lock themselves into people’s lives, and that doing this is a bad idea and should stop. Because just as certain visual illusions, like those of MC Escher or the Land Effect, are impossible not to see as they are hard-coded into our perceptual apparatus, certain emotional illusions around interactions with non-sentient actors are impossible not to feel.

We failed to address these issues when we allowed social media and social platforms to use the same intermittent reinforcement systems that make gambling so problematic, and Suleyman argues that we have a space within which we could do something about the design of interactive LLM-based services to ensure that they don’t exploit a parallel set of unpatched vulnerabilites.

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I arrived to study at Cambridge University forty-six years ago, in 1979, and moved into a room at St Catharine’s College, or Catz. It was Bull 51, a room at the top of Bull Hostel under a leaded roof, looking out over King’s Parade (the one marked in the photo above).

Three years later I graduated in the Senate House on the other end of King’s Parade and two years later I picked up my Diploma in Computer Science from the same spot. That was forty years ago. Later that year I started work as a programmer at Bensasson & Chalmers in offices above the Lunn Poly travel agency at 6 King’s Parade. about half-way between the two. It was my first job in computing and I learned to code in C on UNIX systems, working with databases.

As I look back, it seems that much of my life has involved moving up and down the same street. When I left B&C after two years I worked for Acorn Computers, in the famous Silver Building on Cherry Hinton Road but I kept the King’s Parade connection, as Acorn’s first office had been the B&C office at 6 King’s Parade, after Sinclair Research moved out.

In my years working for Instruction Set, PIPEX, The Guardian and then freelancing until I joined the BBC in 2009 I spent a lot of time around the centre of Cambridge. There were some great pubs, and twenty years or so ago I started going to a cafe just off King’s Parade, on St Edward’s Passage. Over the years Indigo and its proprietor Claire have been woven into my life, and Claire has done so much for my family, as well as keeping me supplied with excellent coffee. And cake.

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“As I write, highly civilized human beings are crafting algorithmic timelines, trying to kill my ability to focus for longer than thirty seconds.

“They do not feel any enmity against me as an individual, nor I against them. But their stock options and share prices depend on taking the most of my conscious attention as they possibly can.”
After Orwell, The Lion and the Unicorn

I had my first piece of writing for money published in 1979, a short essay in a book called The Condition of English Schooling edited by a friend of my then headmaster. It wasn’t very good, but they sent me a cheque anyway, and it means I’ve been a professional writer for over forty-five years now.

Being paid to think out loud is a privilege, and I’ve made my living doing it for newspapers and magazines and websites as a journalist, as well as writing papers and code and courses during my long career working in the tech industry.

If writing is one strand of my life, the Internet is the other, and they have always been entwined since the first time I encountered the network while doing the Diploma in Computer Science at Cambridge in 1984/5 and later when working for Acorn Computers from 1987. Acorn, as a partner in a university project, had access to the nascent Internet and we used it for email, moving files, and accessing the earliest social network, USENET.

There’s some background here: https://thebillblog.com/about-bill/new-media-dog/

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If you have a Netflix subscription you might have come across Toxic Town, the story of how the contaminated soil from a decommissioned steelworks in the UK led to many cases of developmental abnormalities and the birth of children with affected limbs during the 1990s. The drama focused on the efforts of a dedicated solicitor to expose the lies and deception of those involved, particularly the local council, and told the tale of some of the families most affected. It is not easy to watch, whatever your connection to the story.

For me, it was a story I already knew well, because I grew up in Corby, the town affected, and lived there from 1965 when I was four until I left for university in 1979. While I was at university the steelworks was closed down in the service of a cruel ideology that measured value only in terms of profit, and my mum moved back to the North East, so I never went back to live there after I graduated.

So I wasn’t in Corby when the lorries loaded with toxic topsoil drove through town to the dump, and my children were neither conceived nor born in a house contaminated with heavy metals and the rest of the product of decades of iron and steel production at the works that dominated the town.

But those affected were my contemporaries or near contemporaries, and anyone represented in the programme who spoke with a Glaswegian accent would have grown up in the same streets I did, shopped on Corporation Street and in Queen’s Square, use the swimming pool and boating lake, drunk in the White Hart and the Nag’s Head and (on a bad day) The Corinthian, and taken the bus to Kettering to catch a train to London or Scotland.

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As I see in the new year quietly for once, I’m remembering the turn of the millennium, a mere quarter-century ago, and being on BBC One as the nation’s Millennium Bug correspondent. I spent most of the day in TC1, the main studio at BBC Television Centre in London, while an array of presenters and guests were wheeled on and off, covering the New Year celebrations from around the world.

And once an hour it was my turn to step up next to Peter Snow and talk about what was happening with the millenniun bug, the error that would happen when software that used only two digits to represent the year had to cope with the switch from 99 to 00. Of course, a lot of people had worked very hard to make sure that impact was minimal, so Peter Snow never got his dramatic stories, but I had an excellent time.

I headed back to Cambridge in time for the midnight celebrations, then joined agan via the TV studio in BBC Radio Cambridgeshire as the dawn broke on the new millennium. I wrote about it ten years later in my regular column on the BBC News website:

“I spent the evening of 31 December, 1999 in the company of Rolf Harris, Peter Snow and a large number of other people in a studio at Television Centre in London, seeing in the New Year as the nation’s official Millennium Bug watcher”

And here’s a clip.

Of course, spending the time hanging out with Rolf Harris became slightly tarnished following his conviction for sexual abuse, but that wasn’t known at the time.

My time there was also my only known appearance in fiction, as you’ll see on p141 of Ruth Ozeki’s Tale for the Time Being:

“Their move to the island was a withdrawal. The first New Year’s Eve, they’d spent on the couch, with her mother tucked under a blanket between them, drinking cheap sparkling wine and watching the world turn 2000. The BBC was covering the millennial celebrations, tracking the time zones and slowly working its way westward around the planet.”

That was me they were watching.

I’d like to feel that every reader of this blog gets value for money, so today I’m going to give you a real bonus and hand back the fifteen or so hours it would take to read Nexus, the latest 500 page outpuring from Yuval Noah Harari, author of Sapiens and the sort of person who can describe himself as ‘one of the world’s most influential public intellectuals today’ without blushing.

Nexus is advertised as ‘the story of how information networks have made, and unmade, our world’ but (from the extract breathlessly promoted in the Guardian) is yet more rehashed anecdata linked together by barely-researched references to Phaethon crashing the sun god’s chariot and Goethe’s sorcerer’s apprentice, all based around massively optimistic projections of the capabilities of AI and an underlying belief that it is “an unprecedented threat to humanity because it is the first technology in history that can make decisions and create new ideas by itself”. It’s the sort of book that treats as credible the latest of scaremongering survey of AI researchers in which ‘more than a third gave at least a 10% chance of advanced AI leading to outcomes as bad as human extinction’ as if the assessment can have any useful relevance.

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I went to a conference in Stockholm and wrote about it on LinkedIn.