A month or so out from Christopher Nolan’s much-anticipated biopic Oppenheimer, the Artificial Intelligence (AI) community is having its own Oppenheimer moment. Like the director of the Manhattan Project and Los Alamos Laboratory, who famously came to regret his part in the development of the atomic bomb, the Big Tech Titans are falling over each […]
Society
In Fully Automated Luxury Communism (2018), the British writer Aaron Bastani puts a leftist spin on the Promethean view of technological development. While noting the revolutionary potential of recent genetic innovations, he insists that the latter are no different in kind from the selective breeding practices of the past: they are simply another great leap […]
This review was first published in The Weekend Australian * Running to almost half a thousand pages, prodigiously researched and immaculately written, David Marr’s Killing for Country is surely one of the books of the year. Modestly described as a ‘family story’, it is in fact as solid a work of history as one could […]
EVERY NOW AND then a sort of morphic resonance overtakes the world of literature. For reasons that are far from obvious, a number of books about (or around) the same broad subject will suddenly materialise in a way that itself transforms public interest and even shapes public sentiment. In 2023, for example, the name of […]
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The best scene in Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer comes towards the end of the movie. The titular physicist is talking to Einstein, recalling a previous conversation in which they’d discussed the possibility that an atomic bomb would ignite the Earth’s atmosphere. ‘When I came to you with those calculations’, Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) reflects, ‘we thought we […]
Black and ethnic minority communities are under-represented in dementia debate and action – despite facing multiple inequalities related to the condition
Nick Davies shared a post featuring London Mayor Sadiq Khan and Adolf Hitler
Since Boris Johnson's 2019 pledge, the public has received more of the same – austerity and higher taxes from the Government and, in many cases, cash-strapped local councils