For most of human history, people only ever experienced awe commingled with ignorance and fear, from which they distracted themselves by calling it “god” or “gods” or “spirits”. We have the unprecedented privilege of experiencing awe commingled with understanding.

Programming languages are primarily means to articulate precise ideas about data, transformations and processes, and only secondarily tools for producing working software. As the AI coding revolution continues, the need to articulate ideas precisely will not decrease in value.

The earliest author known by name was Enḫéduanna, (possibly first) high priestess of the moon god Nanna in Ur, daughter of king Sargon of Akkad, and prolific poet, who lived circa 2300 BCE.

Is any common experience more intellectually and morally corrosive than prolonged exposure to social media?

Watching “Squeeze” on Christmas Eve and wondering whether Eugene Tooms rather than Santa Claus will come down the chimney.

At last it is time, before I fade into the gentle embrace of dotage, to learn the subtle and forgotten art of Ring-making.

People who believe in objective morality: what is the procedure for determining the truth or falsity of moral assertions?

Life would be better for everyone if we collectively abolished the policing of gender norms.

War is failure. Humanity won’t truly grow up until every person fully internalises this.

The government of the United States of America should not be an apparatus dedicated solely to propping up its President’s fragile self-esteem.

Science is the ongoing discovery of ideas that are false.

Almost the entire discourse about AI risk, AI safety and AI alignment is, for all it might be interesting, utterly irrelevant to systems we can build now or are likely to be able to build over the next many decades.

The main teaching of the Buddha is that numbered lists are really cool.

The path from ignorance to knowledge winds though the endless valley of uncertainty and confusion. Being comfortable with doubt is amongst the greatest of virtues.

I quite want to write a short essay on knowledge, problems, knowledge generation, problem solving, tractability, knowledge models and AI. But would anyone read it?

The rate of improvement in the exploitation of old ideas says nothing about the rate of generation of new ideas.

The Soviet Union provided the vaccine that eliminated smallpox in eastern Europe, India and China. Smallpox killed 300 million people in the 20th century. So the USSR did some good in the world. What has post-Soviet Russia done that isn’t a net negative?

If we make a better world then fewer bad things will happen. It sounds utterly obvious when stated like that but a surprising number of people don’t seem to grasp it. You can’t suppress bad things by making the world worse.

We need a deep and profound secularism, in which governments don’t attempt to impose any ideological commitments on citizens, except for the most minimal commitments to liberalism and pluralism that we need to be able to all live together regardless of our individual values.

There are no utopias, just worlds with an endless series of problems, and dystopias dominated by one big problem.

The only futures that won’t descend into dystopian nightmares are ones built on a solid foundation of liberalism, pluralism and secularism.

The single most important way to inoculate people against outbursts of murderous violence is the cultivation of complex identities, woven from many threads of the tapestry of civilisation. Simple narratives are the enemy.

There were more than sixty murders in America yesterday (based on the average homicide rate). The only acceptable number is zero. All of those people, whether saintly, monstrous or anywhere between had a right to life.

My theory: Weyland-Yutani has an actual science ship out there doing the survey and the Maginot is just a support ship returning samples to Earth. Surely this crew weren’t the people collecting the specimens.

The region now called “Britain” has been colonised by humans at least eight times as the ice advanced and receded over the last 700,000 years. Only the most recent attempt (11,500 years ago) has modern descendants. For long stretches of that time there have been no inhabitants.

We know very well our own virtues and flaws, and have a tendency to judge someone virtuous or flawed based on their accidental resemblances to us in ways that have no moral valence rather than by any more objective standards. We must fight this tendency.

In case there is any doubt, I’m entirely in favour of immigration, and I believe that in a just world everyone should be able to live, learn and work in whatever region of the world they like. The way to tackle “illegal immigration” is to have better, easier legal paths.

If you’re using the symbols of your country to intimidate and exclude rather than to celebrate and include, that’s nationalism not patriotism. In so doing, you often show yourself opposed to your country’s highest ideals.

Civilisation is a conversation, and on the longest timescale the most for which any of us can hope is to have been a participant.

We still call it “social media” but the “social graph” is now totally shredded and atomised. The only reason I’m still posting on social platforms is to clarify my own thinking rather than for any expectation of engagement or discussion.

The important question is often not whether A causes B or is necessary for B, but how much of the variation in B is caused by variation in A.

Being able to read old books is going to become a superpower as the online world and contemporary books become increasingly polluted with the output of large corpus models.

Facts aren’t something that live out there in the world distinct from our theories, but more like an atomic fragment of theory. When we say that some assertion about the world is true, we mean that we expect it to remain a part of all of our future explanatory frameworks.

I can only take topology in very small doses.

Military spending is a tax on humanity’s collective leaders’ inability or unwillingness to grow the hell up.

I expect large corpus models and generative AI to have a smaller effect on everyday life than the iPhone. Probably much smaller.

What are the “second best” alternatives to your most cherished beliefs?

Apple should clearly skip the numbering of iPhones to iPhone 26 this year too.

You don’t have to take strong positions on philosophical issues. For instance, I have no attachment to any interpretation of quantum mechanics, and not because I find the issues uninteresting.

Just as wetness ultimately depends on the electromagnetic properties of nuclei and electrons that lack wetness, so consciousness could depend on additional properties of particles that lack consciousness. There could be a panpsychistic theory that doesn’t entail everything having consciousness.

This morning I seem mostly to be trying to explain group theory to my seven-year-old.

iPadOS 26 window management is a gigantic improvement, but the transparency effects look like a student project rather than the output of what is supposedly the world’s best UI design company.

It’s shocking how quickly generative AI systems have gone from amazing to boring.

I’m wondering how a brain-controlling eyeball jellyfish monster could possibly have evolved in the depths of space.

The concept of “intelligence”, particularly as a one-dimensional scale of cognitive ability, is the greatest impediment to understanding the current state and future prospects of computer technology.

A government spokesman has just said that the Signal chat was an example of deep and thoughtful discussion between senior members of the government. If not for that statement, I would mistakenly have assumed it was an example of bumbling incompetence and gross irresponsibility.

The idea that economic outcomes are moral outcomes, with people getting what they deserve, is fundamentally wrong. Everyone, everywhere deserves everything they want and need to flourish, and the only question is how to most effectively approximate this situation, now and in the future.

Where is our Jacob Bronowski or Kenneth Clark?

What was the point of voting for a Labour government when they’re effectively indistinguishable from the Tories?

I sometimes have to remind myself that 2001 is not just no longer the future but is about a quarter of a century ago. No other year sounds as futuristic.