The Transport Committee of the London Assembly doesn’t think that driverless vehicles are safe for London’s streets. But the actual evidence of driverless cars being deployed in the US is that they are significantly safer?

This matches my observations in other domains as well (sorry, Bluesky).

It will never stop amazing me that people who consider themselves pro refugee, pro immigrant and general Pro Good Guys Of the Left sneeringly describe the half-dead Holocaust survivors who went to Israel after having been so failed by Europe as “settler colonialists”

Americans discover “tell us once”. (Given how DOGE went, not holding my breath for it to work). (Britain still doesn’t have anything like this).

In lights of recents news, last 6 months of multi-agents research is interesting. Where model optimization looked like *chemistry* (optimizing for a recipe between craftmanship and science), multiagent-systems look like sociology (observing emerging behaviours, without real power over them) anthropic.com/research/multi…

This is also true for AI in government and public services – we’ll need evals for everything, all the time – and is made harder by the present dysfunction in data sharing practices. Solving this is an underrated win.

Short Notes On: General Political Rhetoric on AI 1. As I predicted the other day, Labour MP Darren Jones (former chief sec to PM Starmer) has decided now is a good time to speak more publicly about his views on AI. 2. I’ll unpack those in a second, but first let’s pre-empt some of the criticism that will emerge. First, Jones has been talking about this for some time. His work as Chair of the Business and Trade Committee (prev BEIS Cttee, RIP) saw him examine many businesses and their AI workings. Second, he has also been calling for Labour to make AI a central part of their offering to the British people for a few years (Guardian screenshot below), which is more than most of the chump takes that have emerged on here from his fellow Parliamentarians in the last month. I don’t agree with everything he says, but at least he has spent time thinking about articulating his ideas before writing/tweeting them. 3. So what is he pushing for? TL;DR, Jones is concerned about labour market impacts from AI. He talks of loss of jobs, loss of tax, welfare and so on. He notes the companies themselves are talking about this, but UK Govt isn’t/doesn’t look likely to at level necessary. This piece arrives as Labour Conference gets moving, and so is meant to ‘focus the mind’ in No10/11 on this. It is also a thinly veiled dig on PM Andy Burnham’s overall ‘Mr Nice Guy’ approach because Jones is implying (correctly) that not doing anything, trying to please everyone, will have immense costs, and that Burnham will need to make some trade off. 4. Overall, I think the piece’s central argument (not the Burnham slight) is actually a slightly dated and confused view, and I’m again concerned by the delta between takes that are discussed at length on here by actual experts (economists in and outside of frontier companies are often tweeting about this stuff for free! - and what’s ending up in British papers/political chat.) 5. Just in terms of actual concrete things, the UK Government has set up an AI Economics Institute (first Govt in the world to do this) modelled off our booming AISI. I expect to see some stuff coming out of it soon, and hopefully this lights a fire under some SW1 bums. 6. I agree, and have written about, the vacuum created for populist takes if you don’t have an assertive government actioning and communicating actual positive AI achievements. “We are using AI to reduce paperwork” no one cares! Means nothing. 7. The Government - and other leaders too - need to understand that this technology is being pitched on a level of almost going to the moon in terms of what it can achieve and do - “it’s going to cure all disease/transform our society!”- and THAT is what justifies some of the perceived risks. However, too often Western policymakers lack logos and critically thymos in their strategies around this. So we get bad press releases and poorly articulated concrete examples of how this technology is working/why it hasn’t quite worked yet (Apollo programme took a decade!) 8. Overall, Jones doesn’t quite articulate this correctly, but what he and other Westminster folk are struggling to say is that no Prime Minister has yet stated, in clear but comprehensive terms, what exact vision of Britain they have where AI helps it be achieved. If the whole pitch is just stuff like “AI helps us make the shit parts of Britain - long NHS queues, office admin, planning etc - marginally less shit, but by the way it also involves trade offs such as personal data being sold/huge amounts of money flowing around/potential risks to achieve this marginal gain”, that’s not really v inspiring. You are teeing yourself up for valid criticism AND invalid demagoguery.

Further evidence that LinkedIn is currently the best social media platform around (yes, really).

Something very significant here - the government has permitted itself to very quickly publish a 7 page unformatted pdf that sets out its views, gets straight to the point and doesn't waste months of civil service time. You can just do things.

Tom as always is talking a lot of sense, but the point about people is spot on and risks getting lost in the (re)shuffle: it was hard yards, but DSIT always impressed me by how much attention they paid to recruitment – both who to hire and how. Any startup founder/VC will tell you people are the biggest multiplier, and DSIT came closest to replicating this mindset in Whitehall. If its demise leads to similar practices being adopted in the rest of the civil service, it would be an incredible win for state capacity.

A depressing day for UK’s state capacity prospects.

Still lots of room to disagree, but I think people would do better to actually look at the whole reply Andy Burnham gave on HS2.

“Once you do all of the under the hood engineering work to make this ‘just work’ (e.g. across tools, integrations, compute environments, memory, security, etc.)” is the core organisational challenge for any company or institution going forward. Making institutional context legible is the holy grail of agentic, high-agency orgs. Note also @karpathy’s remark in a later reply that “everyone becomes a manager” – that, too, is a paradigm shift that calls for a radically different default skill set in any workplace. When cognitive labour is on tap, how do you tap into it?

we're rebuilding the state from the inside and need a brilliant platform engineer to do it with us. up to £200k. the most impactful work of your life. if that's you - or you know them - dm me. fellows.ai.gov.uk