I Thought Prompt Injection Was A Vaccine Thing Until I Discovered AI

Information Week

The generative AI hype bubble definitely deflated significantly during the summer. Gartner calls it the "trough of disillusionment" in the "AI hype-cycle" and points to 'agentic AI' and 'AI-native software engineering' (aka 'vibe coding') as (somewhat) distinct new entrants. Why the disillusionment? Well, on top of earlier risk management warnings, we've heard lots about the fact that inaccuracy, bias and hallucination are features of generative AI, rather than bugs, as explained very well in the 'myth busting' post by The Guardian. But what we're really hearing about now are the security vulnerabilities, which seem even more problematic for agentic AI and vibe coding. In fact, the more applications that sit on top the worse the problem gets.

AI CEOs Get Cold Feet

Having greedily rushed to get their open generative AI services to market as 'minimum viable products' leaving all the shortcomings as 'externalities', the AI bosses spent this summer pretending to care as a way of demonstrating the 'true power' of what they'd foolishly unleashed. 

Altman signposted the fraudster's charter, and later found himself on the receiving end of a tragic wrongful death suit in connection with the death of a teenage user of Chat GPT between September 2024 and January 2025. This appears to have led the CEO of Microsoft AI to begin his own hand-wringing over the illusion that you seem to be having a 'conversation' with an AI, which he couldn't resist 'branding' as 'Seemingly Conscious AI'.

Humans replaced... then rehired

Meanwhile, overly enthusiastic adopters of chatbot functionality found themselves rowing back on their plans to nuke their customer service teams. Klarna performed such a volte 'farce', as did Australia's Commonwealth Bank, making it all the more bizarre that Microsoft should publish some, er, artificial research claiming to be able to 'predict' which jobs will be replaced.

Even if it were possible to run 'agentic AI' processes that do a lot of the mundane work "...before escalating..." more complex issues, to whom would they escalate those issues? Experienced senior managers? When they retire, who will have gained the experience to replace them? 

Advisory AI?

While the state of Illinois became the first to ban the use of AI to provide therapy, the UK government remain undeterred, announcing its decision to enable the unwitting British 'populace' to use agentic AI for everything from employment advice to obtaining driving licences...

Meanwhile, lawyers have had to be warned again about the fact that open generative AI tools produce fake law.

And before you start thinking of simple processes that AIs could fulfill, it's worth pointing out that ChatGPT-5 still fails at such seemingly straightforward tasks as creating an alphabet chart with each letter represented by an animal whose name starts with that letter; maps and decision trees, among other things. But a generative AI will still boast that it - or others - can do such things. For instance, when searching for an example of poor map making, Google 'AI Overview' produced the following slop (my emphasis):

The assertion that "AI can't do a map of Europe" is false, but it highlights the limitations of generative AI in producing accurate, detailed maps, which often contain errors like misplaced cities, incorrect country borders, and inaccurate iconography. While AI has access to a vast amount of data and can create maps that look plausible, it struggles with the precision and reliability required for a complex geographical representation.

AI Insecurity

But by far the worst issues are to do with security, including 'poisoned calendar invites' containing malicious prompt injections. This is a grave issue that 'better prompting' cannot fix, and the open architecture of open generative AI militates against a 'zero trust' approach which is unlikely to be commercially viable in any event. 

Rogue AIs can only be shut down

An 'agentic AI world' would be wide open to malicious prompt injections, hallucination, bias and error. So what, you might say. We could just shut it down. Yet researchers have found that some AIs can resist shutdown and find ways to keep working on their latest tasks. 

And if you've replaced your 'traditional' staff, systems and business processes with an AI, what then? 

Further reading:

For the AI sceptic's view, I follow Professor Barry O'Sullivan, Denis O., Axel C., Simon Au-Young and Georg Zoeller. Your mileage may differ ;-)

Koup Aid: Trump's Lethal Brand Of Soft Drink Has Killed Populism

The murder-suicide of Jim Jones' 900 cult followers in 1978 was "the largest single incident of intentional civilian death in American history" - until Donald J Trump began wreaking havoc on society with his own lethal brand of soft drink: 'Koup Aid'. Those of his MAGA cult followers who managed to avoid injecting themselves with bleach now face unemployment, wealth & pension evaporation, incarceration, deportation, bankruptcy and/or starvation, thanks to his mindless, lawless public cost-cutting and destructive tariffs. And you can add to that list the many politicians around the globe who'd pinned their electoral hopes on populism as a route to power. That's over now. A new political strategy is required. 

Trump's global distribution of Koup Aid has been undermining populist regimes the world over since Brazil's Bolsonaro lost in 2018. Argentina's very own chainsaw-wielding maniac faces his own net disapproval ratings. And right 'whinge' leadership hopefuls have just lost their national elections - and their own seats - in Canada and Australia.

While Britain's own Brexidiot populist provocateur, Nigel Farage, continues to enjoy modest electoral success, that's only in a few of his country's predominantly white constituencies who actually suffer little from the 'channel crossings in dinghies' that he ironically clings to for his own political survival (we fear the unknown, after all). Last year's Labour landslide shows that the rest of the country isn't fooled on that front. And the Australian populist parties' own doomed electioneering demonstrates that directly copying Trump's DOGE approach to government efficiency, the "Make [your country's name here] Great Again" slogan and the promise of 'border control' do not carry you into the nation's top political job.

Nope, the populists must find a new route to political power. Gone are the days when the blithering idiots in the Conservative Party, for example, could try to 'out-Nigel' Nigel. And they can only go so far right, anyway, before they meet the blithering idiots on the far left, as Corbynites revealed. 

Such is the nature of what I like to call the Political Opportunity Donut. The Trump experiment in America - and recent electoral victories everywhere else - highlight the political vacuum that has emerged in the 'centre' of western democracies. And 'nature abhors a vacuum', as Aristotle observed, so every aspiring political leader worth their salt is now rushing to fill it.

Of course, the political Centre is also a tough place to be, as Tony 'Bliar', 'Wavy' Dave Cameron and Nick 'Tuition Fee' Clegg all found to their eventual cost in the UK. It's only so long before populists with their phoney issues and respective lethal cocktails emerge on the left and right to try to reclaim the ensuing vacuums elsewhere on the Donut. 

So it always goes. We are where we are.

I must say that I enjoy this Centrist phase. It's when genuine problems get identified and solved. The decent political leader need only focus on that process and demonstrate progress, because it's hard to argue with actual solutions. People even generally enjoy helping. Morale is boosted, which brings its own tailwind.

Of course, there are inevitably heated arguments about which socio-economic problems to solve first, their root causes and potential solutions; and which get more resources than others. But those are political arguments worth having, instead of washing down meaningless slogans with Koup Aid.

Our mistake is to allow politicians to distract us from the problems that remain.

What To Do About The Coup

It's clear that Trump 2.0 is a coup: an illegal and overt attempt to seize control of the United States government. Rather than operating as President (other than in name), Trump's plans involve him running the US government like a private corporation, with himself as chairman and Musk as CEO. Yet while we are in this 'move fast and break things' phase of American politics, Trump and his co-conspirators have opened the way for Congress to turn the tables on them in relation to each of their three key tactics, and it must do so swiftly. 

First, as Vance himself recommended, Congress, the courts and all 'paper protections' are being ignored. This means that Congress should be free to act against Trump, Vance, Musk and the other co-conspirators as it sees fit. Trump (then Vance) could be impeached under the 25th Amendment. Solitary confinement in Guantanamo Bay awaits, pending their trial under Chapter 115 of the US Code.

Second, in their efforts to purge the democracy and dismantle institutions every civil servant in the administrative state is either being fired or replaced by Trump's people. Congress can therefore treat every person who agrees to replace a civil servant as a conspirator in the coup.

Third, in the course of seizing control of government media and information to maintain power, all Government IT and payment systems are being expropriated and modified or replaced using private software and systems without recompense. This may be very difficult to undo, so Congress could simply nationalise all the replacement software and systems and service providers, also without recompense.

The consequences for a coup must be swift and severe. These people knew the risks...

Hey, WTF's Going On?

Well may you ask! I'm assuming you're referring to Trump 2.0: Revenge of the Musk? 

Well I've learned that this is a coup planned among Musk, Thiel and Sacks (Trump's new "Crypto Czar"), the South African members of  the PayPal mafia, with input from Thiel lieutenant, Vice President J.D. Vance. You can read a summary of The Plan by Gil Duran of the Nerd Reich, who has understandably experienced a surge in subscribers since January 20.

“Trump himself will not be the brain …He will not be the CEO. He will be the chairman of the board—he will select the CEO (an experienced executive). This process, which obviously has to be televised, will be complete by his inauguration—at which the transition to the next regime will start immediately.”

With Musk as the “CEO”, they are systematically rebuilding the US government as if it were post-war Japan. They are replacing federal employees with their own “ninjas” - and extending this to academia and the media. They’re ignoring the courts and “paper protections”, as Vance told them to: 

I think that what Trump should do, if I was giving him one piece of advice: Fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people. 

This is an illegal and overt attempt to seize control of the US government. A coup.

You can spot the growth of the techno aspect of their "New Reality" in Google's 2014 declaration of war on the human race and the creed of the techno-optimists. And much I've observed on these pages in between.

Much was made of their $1m 'donation' to attend the Orange Leader's inauguration, but you have to wonder whether Zuckerberg and the other tech oligarchs who were then featured in the front row were also in on the plan - or just presented as if they were.

Can America's institutions hold out? Or will the Republican Party remain complicit in the plan - wittingly or unwittingly?

Or is it too late?

Also bear in mind the leaders of this coup also have the world in their sights, riding the rails of their own borderless technology - AI, crypto meme coins and bubbling bitcoin and the social media - and they're attacking copyright and AI regulation worldwide in an attempt to free-ride on our privacy and creative content and make it their own. 

Now that Musk and the nerds from DOGE control the federal government IT and payment systems, you could replace Mad Marjorie Taylor Greene's "jewish space laser" geoengineering conspiracy theory with a Tesla-Starlink cyborg network fueled by $TRUMP meme coins bought with US government money.  

It's in our power to simply stop using their tech, and there are plenty of independent providers of social media, search, email and so on. 

Or is it too late?

Open Agentic AI And True Personalisation

Sixteen years on from my own initial posts on the subject of a personal assistant that can privately find and buy stuff for you on the web, and we have 'open agentic AI'. But are you really any closer to the automated selection and purchase of your own personalised products without needlessly surrendering your privacy or otherwise becoming the victim? Should this latest iteration of open generative AI be autonomously making and executing decisions on your behalf? 

What is Agentic AI?

An 'agentic' AI is an evolution of generative AI beyond a chatbot. It receives your data and relies on pattern matching to generate, select and execute one of a number of potential pre-programmed actions without human guidance, then 'learns' from the result (as NVIDIA, the leading AI chip maker, explains). 

A 'virtual assistant' that can find, buy and play music, for example, is a form of agentic AI (since it uses AI in its processes), but the ambition involves a wider range of tasks and more process automation and autonomy (if not end-to-end). 

You'll see a sleight-of-hand in the marketing language (like NVIDA's) as developers start projecting 'perception', 'understanding' and 'reasoning' on their agentic AIs, but computers don't actually do any of those human things. 

It's certainly a compelling idea to apply this to automating various highly complex, tedious consumer 'workflows' that have lots of different parameters - like buying a car, perhaps (or booking a bloody rail ticket in the UK!). 

Wearing my legal hat, I also see myriad interesting challenges (which I'd be delighted to discuss, of course!), some of which are mentioned here, but not all...

Some challenges

The main problem with using an 'agentic AI' in a consumer context is the involvement of a large language model and generative AI where there is a significant (e.g. economic, medical and/or legal) consequence for the user (as opposed to a chatbot or information-only scenario (though that can also be problematic). Currently, the household or device based virtual assistants are carrying out fairly mundane tasks, and you could probably get a refund if it bought you the wrong song, for example, if that really bothered you. Buying the wrong car would likely be a different matter.

There may also be confusion about the concept of 'agency' here. The word 'agentic' is used to mean that the AI has 'agency' in the sense it can operate without human guidance. That AI is not necessarily anyone's legal 'agent' (more below) and is trained on generic training data (subject to privacy, copyright consents/licensing), which these days is itself synthetic - generated by an AI. So, agentic AIs are not hosted exclusively by or on behalf of the specific consumer and do not specifically cater to a single end-customer's personalised needs in terms of the data it holds/processes and how it deals with suppliers. It does not 'know' you or 'understand' anyone, let alone you.  

Of course, that is consistent with how consumer markets work: products have generally been developed to suit the supplier's requirements in terms of profitability and so on, rather than any individual customer's needs. Having assembled what the supplier believes to be a profitable product by reference to an ideal customer profile in a given context, the supplier's systems and marketing/advertising arrangements seek out customers for the product who are 'scored' on the extent to which they fit that 'profile' and context. This also preserves 'information asymmetry' in favour of the supplier, who knows far more about its product and customers than you know about the supplier or the product. In an insurance context, for example, that will mean an ideal customer will pay a high premium but find it unnecessary, too hard or impossible to make a claim on the policy. For a loan, the lender will be looking for a higher risk customer who will end up paying more in additional interest and default fees than lower risk customers. But all this is only probabilistic, since human physiology may be 'normally distributed' but human behaviour is not.

So using an agentic AI in this context would not improve your position or relationship with your suppliers, particularly if the supplier is the owner/operator of the agentic AI. The fact that Open AI has offered its 'Operator' agentic AI to its pro-customers (who already pay a subscription of $200 a month!) begs the question whether Open AI really intends rocking this boat, or whether it's really a platform for suppliers like Facebook or Google search in the online advertising world. 

It's also an open question - and a matter for contract or regulation - as to whether the AI is anyone's legal 'agent' (which it could be if the AI were deployed by an actual agent or fiduciary of the customer, such as a consumer credit broker). 

Generative AI also has a set of inherent risks. Not only do they fail to 'understand' data, but to a greater or lesser degree they are also inaccurate, biased and randomly hallucinate rubbish (not to mention the enormous costs in energy/water, capital and computing; the opportunity cost of diverting such resources from other service/infrastructure requirements; and other the 'externalities' or socioeconomic consequences that are being ignored and not factored into soaring Big Tech stock prices - a bubble likely to burst soon). It may also not be possible to explain how the AI arrives at its conclusions (or, in the case of an agentic AI, why it selected a particular product, or executed a specific task, rather than another). Simply overlaying a right to human intervention by either customer or supplier would not guarantee a better outcome on theses issues (due to lack of explainability, in particular). A human should be able to explain why and how the AI's decision was reached and be able to re-take the decision. And, unfortunately, we are seeing less and less improvement in each of these inherent risk areas with each version of generative AIs.

All this means that agentic AI should not be used to fully automate decisions or choices that have any significant impact on an individual consumer (such as buying a car or obtaining a loan or a pension product).  

An Alternative... Your Own Personal Agent

What feels like a century ago, in 2009, I wondered whether the 'semantic web' would spell the end of price comparison websites. I was tired of seeing their expensive TV ads - paid for out of the intermediary's huge share of the gross price of the product. I thought: "If suppliers would only publish their product data in semantic format, a 'widget' on my own computer could scan their datafeeds and identify the product that's right for me, based on my personal profile and other parameters I specify". 

By 2013, I was calling that 'widget' an Open Data Spider and attempted to explain it further in an article for SCL on the wider tech themes of Midata, Open Data and Big Data tools (and elsewhere with the concept of 'monetising you'). I thought then - and still think now - that: 

"a combination of Midata, Open Data and Big Data tools seems likely to liberate us from the tyranny of the 'customer profile' and reputational 'scores', and allow us instead to establish direct connections with trusted products and suppliers based on much deeper knowledge of our own circumstances."

Personalised assistants are evolving to some degree, in the form of 'personal [online] data stores' (like MyDex or Solid); as well as 'digital wallets' or payment apps that sit on smartphones and other digital devices and can be used to store transaction data, tickets, boarding passes and other evidence of actual purchases. The former are being integrated in specific scenarios like recruitment and healthcare; while the latter tend to be usable only within checkout processes. None seems to be playing a more extensive role in pre-evaluating your personal requirements, then seeking, selecting and purchasing a suitable product for you from a range of potential suppliers (as opposed to a product that a supplier has created for its version of an 'ideal' customer that you seem to fit to some degree). 

Whether the providers of existing personal data stores and digital wallets will be prepared to extend their functionality to include more process automation for consumers may also depend on the willingness of suppliers to surrender some of their information advantage and adapt their systems (or AIs) to respond to and adapt products according to actual consumer requests/demand.

Equally, the digital 'gatekeepers' such as search providers and social media platforms will want to protect their own advertising revenue and other fees currently paid by suppliers who rely on them for targeting 'ideal' customers. Whether they can 'switch sides' to act for consumers and preserve/grow this revenue flow remains to be seen.

Overall, if I were a betting man, I'd wager that open agentic AI won't really change the fundamental relationship between suppliers, intermediaries and consumers, and that consumers will remain the targets (victims) for whatever suppliers and intermediaries dream up for them next...

I'd love to be corrected!

$TRUMP: A ShiteCoin Fit For Dangerously Weird Times... "Doom Is The Operative Ethic"

Source

Just when you thought the world couldn't get any weirder, the "anti-woke" US President-elect decided to celebrate "Winning!" the leadership of the Free World by dancing at his own personal rally to the tune of a gay anthem and bleeding his fans of their cash with the launch of a dodgy cryptocurrency (slamming the campaign cryptocurrency they'd already bought). 

But, hey, this is just the start. Wait til you see how it ends...

While teams of lawyers pore over Trump's latest droppings like big game hunters tracking their prey on safari, most pundits will probably consider these brazen acts as simply 'Trump being Trump'. 

But Machiavelli will be pounding at the lid of his coffin. He advised that a good ruler should strive to appear wholly compassionate, loyal, humane, honest and religious, yet know how to occasionally act otherwise when required. A good ruler must not seize or steal their subjects' property or be seen as "changeable, superficial...." A good ruler's choice of ministers will immediately demonstrate to the country either "good sense or lack of it" - they must be intelligent people with permission to tell the ruler the truth, rather than flatterers. Above all, he wrote:

"...a ruler must avoid any behaviour that will lead to being hated or held in contempt."

...because Machiavelli had witnessed firsthand not even an army or castle can save a ruler who becomes generally loathed by the people (as the intervening centuries have demonstrated time and again).

Trump will not buck this trend. It's one thing to flip two fingers at prosecutors and blather about the 'swamp' and the 'deep state'. But it's quite another to flip from anti-crypto in 2021 to rabidly pro-crypto, hire a bunch of flatterers to your cabinet and then openly grab money from the people who voted you into office.

The Orange One's legion of followers are what Hunter S. Thompson christened 'the New Dumb'. Aside from the 'marks' or unwitting victims who actually believe all the nonsense, Trump's fans are drawn from among fauxpro-wrestling fans, conspiracy theorists and other keepers of the Trump's special brand of Covfefe 'kayfabe'. Moths to a populist flame fanned by fake news, behavioural targeting, bizarre fundraising schemes, meme coins and tacky souvenirs, televised rallies, criminal trials, and fat donations from self-interested vulture capitalists. These people are not "dumb" in the sense of being necessarily stupid or lacking in intelligence, but in the sense that they believe themselves to lack a voice in a complex world they see as run by, and for, a mysterious group of 'others' who are known only by epithets like the "deep state", the "new world order", "liberals", "libtards"...

But now these people can see that their Dear Leader is simply mistaking them for idiots and lining his pockets at their expense [update via CoinDesk here].

Writing in 2000 after years of successfully deriding Richard Nixon, Hunter S. Thompson never bothered to comment directly on Trump, presumably because he viewed Trump as just a symptom, if not a portent, of doom. Remember that Trump first openly talked of running for President in 1988 and actually tried in 2000. Thompson would merely have seen it as another confirmation of his thesis if he'd stuck around to see Trump eventually conspire his way into office twice - to Make America Groan Again - rising to power like a slow-festering boil during what Hunter Thompson described in his article on The New Dumb as "dangerously weird times". For that reason it's best to simply leave you with his words:

"We have seen Weird Times in this country before, but the year 2000 is beginning to look super weird. This time, there really is nobody flying the plane. ... We are living in dangerously weird times now. Smart people just shrug and admit they're dazed and confused.

The only ones left with any confidence at all are the New Dumb. It is the beginning of the end of our world as we knew it. Doom is the operative ethic...

Look around you. There is an eerie sense of Panic in the air, a silent Fear and Uncertainty that comes with once-reliable faiths and truths and solid Institutions that are no longer safe to believe in. ... There is a Presidential Election, right on schedule, but somehow there is no President. A new Congress is elected, like always, but somehow there is no real Congress at all -- not as we knew it, anyway, and whatever passes for Congress will be as helpless and weak as Whoever has to pass for the "New President."

If this were the world of sports, it would be like playing a Super Bowl that goes into 19 scoreless Overtimes and never actually Ends..."

The Bubble With Bitcoin

Followers via LinkedIn will have seen a string of my recent posts focused on the fact that bitcoin miners are borrowing to buy bitcoin, aping the "very novel strategy" of MicroStrategy, the loss-making former software company whose boss, Michael Saylor, continuously hypes the cryptocurrency. We've been here before, in 2022 when several miners collapsed, ruining many amateur investors, but the stakes are gradually rising each time...

In November '24, Allianz, the German insurer, bought 24% of MicroStrategy's $2.6bn convertible bond issue that was used to purchase bitcoin (raising the price by 4.3% to $98k). It seems that Allianz wants to gain exposure to bitcoin without actually going to the trouble of buying and holding it, even though it could have got that exposure more cheaply through ETFs. After all, the convertible feature of the bond only gets Allianz shares in a company that consistently loses money and whose share price is tied to bitcoin volatility and price: 

On November 21, 2024, MicroStrategy issued $3 billion of 0% convertible notes maturing on December 1, 2029... Its stock was trading at $430 at issuance, and the conversion price was $672. Investors were willing to accept call options instead of interest payments. The equity options have value if MicroStrategy shares rise by more than 50% over the next five years. If the stock does not get above $672, investors will earn a 0% return on their investment. MicroStrategy And Its Convertible Debt Scheme

By purchasing the bonds with cash that it knows will be used to buy bitcoin, an investor like Allianz is effectively boosting the price of bitcoin - and by direct correlation MicroStrategy's share price - to the conversion price. As Michael Lebowitz explains, MicroStrategy's share price began correlating with the price of bitcoin the more the company borrowed to buy the cryptocurrency - a total of $7.27bn since 2020.

So it was interesting to see the USD price of bitcoin subsequently hit $106k for two days in December (for which Donald Trump weirdly congratulated everyone, so presumably he's in on the trade).

But why did the price stick so firmly at $106k (before sliding ominously below $100k)? 

Well, on 7 Jan 2025, the FT reported the estimate by CoinShares, the investment group, that:

“Including depreciation and stock-based compensation charges, the average cost to produce a bitcoin was $106,000.”

This is somewhat new, as previous cost estimates at the time of the bitcoin mining bankruptcies in 2022 only seemed to factor in the (very significant) energy/computing costs, not those wider costs.

Meanwhile, the FT reports, not satisfied with mining rewards that halved in April, miners are continuing to borrow more and more to buy and hold bitcoin in a bid to support the price (and eventually ‘profit’ from sales to ‘greater fools’). For instance, at the latest peakRiot Platforms borrowed $595m, maturing in 2030, using it mainly to buy bitcoin. Others have also concluded that bitcoin miners aremimicking MicroStrategy by borrowing to buy bitcoin.

But all this capital is clearly failing to support the price of bitcoin at the cost price, as the slide below $100k from the recent peak has demonstrated. This suggests that the miners (and MicroStrategy) will need to borrow again and buy more bitcoin as the overall mining costs rise, hoping that the price of bitcoin at the time of bond maturity is enough to repay the principal owed.

Some miners are looking to diversify into supporting AI and to cut mining costs by producing their own electricity from smaller, remote landfill sites (though surely the power generated should still be accounted for as a cost at market value?). But both of these moves highlight miners' - and bitcoin's - vulnerability to competition for resources from businesses pursuing more profitable ventures, or actual energy producers. Note that crypto mining is responsible for up to 2.3% of US annual electricity consumption. 

All of which suggests that it is not sustainable to endlessly borrow to buy your own product without being able to sell it.

Defying Idiocracy: Connecting The Fediverse: Open Social Media

If you've followed my musings on Idiocracy (the inevitable 'dumbing down' of content quality when any media platform reaches a certain scale), then you too may be worrying about how to defy it. 

I joined the Fediverse (via Mastodon) two years ago. From the beginning I noticed the tendency among users on my 'mastodon.world' instance to worry about the rate of adoption versus other Mastodon instances, like 'mastodon.social', or instances running other fediverse protocols, like BlueSky. These were then contrasted with the early adoption of, say, X/Twitter or Threads, as if a failure to mimic the growth rates of proprietary platforms was somehow a shortcoming, rather than a strength. 

In other words, even as all these X/Twitter refugees emigrated to the brave new world of decentralised open platforms, their instinctive FOMO was driving them to hope they'd landed on the 'best one' which, rationally, they should have therefore concluded was actually the worst in terms of its likelihood to end up exactly like X/Twitter...

So, how do we protect ourselves from human nature? How can we ensure that humans communicate about their 'wildly different refined, aesthetic and noble interests' and avoid voting for an even worse version of Donald Trump? 

The answer may lie in being able to interact with many small scale networks without exclusively joining them or their communities. As with tools, like TweetDeck, which enabled you to communicate across multiple X/Twitter accounts on one interface, there are new federated tools, like OpenVibe that enable you to communicate with users across the Fediverse of decentralised platforms. 

Of course, I hear you wonder whether this will still deliver Idiocracy, once the aggregation platform itself reaches the critical mass of X/Twitter. But my sense is that there should always be new decentralised platforms joining the Fediverse, enriching the content.  

Hell, it's worth a shot, right? 

Starmer Has Nobody Left To Appease

It's fitting that Starmer had his Chamberlain moment on his way to appease the oil & gas lobby at the deeply flawed COP summit in Azerbaijan (of all places). Asked to choose between Trump and the EU in the imminent trade war, he preferred not to upset the vengeful, malignant narcissist who's sparked it, by waving the flimsy, blank sheet of paper that every British PM claims to contain the text describing 'the special relationship'.

It would be kinda sweet if Starmer were to genuinely think that Trump will be looking after Brexit Britain while allowing Putin to expand Russian territory, arch conspiracy theorist RFK Jr to cancel the US vaccine program and demanding that Elon 'Space Cadet' Musk pull a $2 trillion rug from under a population that relies on the world's largest outright public spending program, including government-funded free school meals, subsidised mortgages and business loans and much, much more. 

But I suspect Starmer is simply pretending to be that dumb, because that's what most people seem to want these days.

Meanwhile, yet another governor of the Bank of England has urged Britain's politicians to unite with its biggest market, when there's no sign of any political courage to do so in the face of our own local Trumpian mob.

How many more Prime Ministers the UK economy must burn through before Reality creates an opportunity for one of them to claim hero status by leading what's left of the country back into the Single Market and Customs Union remains to be seen, but... 

Next!

  

Will We Ever Tire Of The Vulgar, Prurient and Dumb?

The US Presidential election results have confirmed a trend that first surfaced in television and has spread into the social media and politics.

“Television is the way it is simply because people tend to be extremely similar in their vulgar and prurient and dumb interests and wildly different in their refined and aesthetic and noble interests.” David Foster Wallace, 1993

At scale, we humans unite at 'base' level, the lowest common denominator. 

Nearly 40 seasons of The Simpsons can't be wrong.

Donald Trump has run for President numerous times, but it was only via The Apprentice TV show that his schtick truly resonated with the nation, infecting tens of millions of people with his special brand of the 'vulgar, prurient and dumb'. 

His weird press conferences, shameless lies and hypocrisy, junk food obsession, narcissistic posts, bizarre rally rants, tawdry courtroom dramas and near assassinations all fed the ravenous hordes.

Losing to Biden merely proved grist for the media mill.

Regardless of whether US voters self-identified as Democrats, Republicans, multi-billionaires, teachers, SillyCon techno-optimists, professors, college kids, middle class professionals or illiterate fools - everyone was transfixed - whether in horror or ecstasy - by the Homer Simpson of politics. 

And that effect meant that he resonated with enough people to secure Homer's a Trump victory over a candidate who offered nothing vulgar, nothing prurient and nothing dumb. 

Where will it end? Or will it end at all?

The question is whether this trend has peaked, like television viewing figures did in 2010, and whether social media and streaming platforms will be disrupted the same way that their early versions disrupted TV with something that seemed more refined, aesthetic or noble - and maybe even was, until it gained critical mass. Or whether society will continue to be 'dumbed down' and end up as portrayed in the film Idiocracy.

Well, TV viewing figures may have peaked, but they haven't dropped far, despite the surge in eyeballs aimed at social media and streaming platforms.

If anything, the two types of media are working in concert, or echoing each other.

In my early posts on this site, as exemplified in Lipstick On a Pig, I used to think that Greed and Stupidity were winning, but only through our institutions - top down - while 'people power' was a force for something better. 

How wrong I was!

While it was true in 2011 - and true now - that 'Bailouts Fail and People Power Will Succeed' the problem was that 'success' meant uniting around the vulgar, prurient and dumb.

Welcome to Idiocracy.

Starmer Makes A Spectacle Of Himself

No sooner did we rid ourselves of the crony Conservatives than it turns out the Labour PM, his wife and senior ministers accepted clothing and spectacles from donors. Not to mention all the football tickets and so on.

Never mind that they declared the gifts. The point is that they thought it okay to seek or accept them in the first place - at a time when others can't afford new clothing of their own - from political donors. 

Never mind that BoJo and his cronies did far worse and without declaring it. Starmer and Reeves promised an end to all that.

And it's all so petty! 

I mean, if Britain's Prime Minister can't buy his own specs and a half decent suit, how easily could he be bought by really big donors...? 

Look for Tory rorts that never get scrapped, like freeports...

Never mind that they've ended the free-clothing practice - that merely demonstrates the greed and stupidity of doing it in the first place.

British Infrastructure Bonds and the Office of Public Infrastructure

Now that Labour has nailed its colours to the mast of that sinking ship, HMS Austerity, it's time to consider alternative ways to publicly fund the renewal and maintenance of Britain's sagging public buildings, bridges, sewerage systems and other infrastructure. A 'British Infrastructure Bond' programme, administered by a new public body, could focus on ensuring the long term availability and stability of Britain's infrastructure according to the national interest, without being distracted by the short term political issues of the day.  

As the UK government won't spend the revenue it raises through taxes and general borrowing on such things, and has privatised the operation of utilities etc in ways that did not oblige the private operators to invest for the longer term  - and probably shouldn't be trusted with the money anyway - it seems we need a dedicated 'infrastructure bond' programme to ensure that adequate funding is raised and spent where it should be. 

A 'British Infrastructure Bond' programme could be administered by the Office of Public Infrastructure, a non-departmental public body (like the Office of Budget Responsibility) with discretion in the performance of its duties, as long as those duties are performed objectively, transparently and independently and takes into account the sitting government’s policies (specifically, what public infrastructure needs and responsibilities those policies are creating, as well as failing to support). 

The OPI could also prevent a government of the day getting its filthy hands on the loot, or granting contracts to donors and cronies.

While the international money markets rightly rejected the Truss/Kwarteng 'mini-budget' to fund tax cuts, there is no reason to suggest that they would frown on a dedicated public borrowing programme to support the countries' genuine long term infrastructure needs that clearly are not being met under current tax and borrowing progammes. 

Such 'infrastructure bond' programmes are not new. Even Scotland announced it's intention to issue a dedicated infrastructure bond in October, though that seems to be very much in the early planning phase and, ironically, may have been derailed by interim political events - surely another demonstration of the yawning gap such a programme should fill.

You Pay For Social Media, AI and Crypto Via Your Utility Bills

Households consume the most electricity in the UK. That's why the huge surge in global energy prices following the expansion of Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 prompted the government to invoke price caps and handouts to protect consumers (and businesses) from bankruptcy, along with private energy providers who failed to manage their market exposures. Yet few have noticed that the world's computing data centres, including those hosting artificial intelligence platforms, already consume enough energy to power entire countries and compete with humans for vast amounts of fresh water. Crypto-currencies also require huge amounts of energy to 'mine'. So, not only are you paying for many 'free' online services with your personal data, you're also paying through your energy and water bills. And based on the advertising and other revenues from your participation, Big Tech can afford to outspend you. To illustrate the challenge, the UK government just announced a massive new Microsoft AI facility in London, even as Thames Water circles the drain and lack of capacity in the UK's national grid is delaying the construction of new homes, renewable energy projects and electric vehicle charging points. Given these costs and shortages, should we be speculating in bitcoin and using generative AI (either for fun or to do things we could do for ourselves)?

How much power does the latest consumer technology use?

While consumer electronics only account for 6% of household usage, that doesn't account for the centralised data processing among digital media and gaming platforms, for example, when you participate online. As a result, households are responsible for 35% of electricity usage, services 29% and industry 30%. You might argue that much of this data centre capacity is used by businesses, but many of them do so ultimately to serve consumers - from online search, shopping and social media services to powering giant credit card networks. 

Artificial intelligence, however, operates at a whole new level above the more traditional digital media. A Netflix fan would have to have watched 1,625,000 hours of content to use the same amount of power it took to train OpenAI's ChatGPT 3.0 during 2022, according to a Dutch researcher. Generating a single image from text on other AI platforms costs the same amount in energy as charging your smartphone.

The same Dutch researcher has estimated that the AI sector alone will use as much power as the Netherlands by 2027, while the International Energy Agency predicts that the world's data centres (including AI and other digital media) will consume the double the amount of electricity in 2026 that they consumed in 2022 - about as much as Japan (the 5th largest electricity consumer in the world, behind China, the US, India and Russia).  

Bitcoin mining - an activity whose sole purpose is to feed the world's first and largest distributed Ponzi scheme - absorbed nearly 1% of the world's electricity in 2023 - enough to power Greece or Australia. That's up to 5 times the cost of legacy payment systems that process vastly more transactions (though they also use enough to electricity to power Portugal or Bangladesh).

How much water does the latest consumer technology use?

Data centres also consume vast amounts of water (not counting what they recycle) to cool the computers and humidify the internal air. But even the process of generating the electricity they use also consumes water. 

In 2021, for example, Google's data centers consumed approximately 4.3 billion gallons of water (16.3 billion litres), an average of 450,000 gallons (1.7m litres) of water per data centre each day. Microsoft reckoned that it consumed 1.7 billion gallons (nearly 6.5 billion litres) in 2022.

Gridlock

The surge in energy and water usage by future-gazing tech providers comes at a time when Britain's infrastructure is already failing to support the construction of new and more energy efficient homes, renewable energy sources and the switch away from diesel and petrol vehicles.

“Nationally, we’ve got an absolute ­crisis in all infrastructure.” Plans by Michael Gove, the housing secretary, to build 150,000 homes in Cambridge to create a British Silicon Valley were already being hampered by lack of water... “And where’s the power coming from? Something fundamental has to change...”

"...90 new homes in the Littlemore district had been meant to have heat pumps. “The National Grid basically said ‘we won’t have enough power to connect them’ so half the houses are going to have to have gas boilers instead – it’s so frustrating. 

Great Britain’s power stations together generate 75 gigawatts of electricity, and the mainland is expected to need about twice as much by 2050 as people switch to ­electric vehicles and heat pumps.” The Guardian

Dissatisfaction with Britain's electric vehicle charging network is running at about 70% of EV drivers, citing a lack of public charging stations and unreliability. The government is targeting 300,000 charging stations by 2030, with only 53,677 available at the start of 2024 (an increase of 45% in 12 months) and the majority to be provided by private investors.

Meanwhile, Britain's water problems flow partly from the risk of drought and party from its combined sewage system which takes rainwater through the same pipes as the grey water from sinks and baths, as well as the raw sewage from toilets. Any excess of rainwater simply overloads the sewerage system of pipes that normally takes sewage to local treatment works, and the overflow goes directly into the waterways... 

Crisis? What Crisis?

Who's to blame for Britain's sagging infrastructure involves lots of finger-pointing and misinformation. 

When challenged over delays to connect new systems to the electricity grid, the National Grid's system operator complains that the queue of projects waiting to connect would add 800 gigawatts of electricity - "more than more than four times as much as the country would ever need." There are even delays in the time it takes to get an estimate of when a project will be connected, as well as 'zombie projects' that were approved but have been abandoned due to connection waiting times of 5 to 15 years.

Yet this hides the fact that more renewable projects/systems will be necessary to reduce Britain's reliance on fossil fuels, since energy systems that generate electricity from solar and wind don't all contribute to the grid at the same time, unlike a gas-fired or coal-fired power station where the energy source to create the electricity is under human control. 

As for water - well, none of England’s rivers is classified as being in good ecological health and Britain is already failing to produce enough fresh water to meet its needs year round. The country's 'combined sewage system' should be replaced by separate systems for rainwater and sewage, yet modernisation efforts have merely doubled-down on the combined system.

UK Government Distracted by Culture Wars

Britain's energy sector is self-evidently poorly prepared for the future. Here is a good description of the alphabet soup of bodies involved and the problem of every additional significant energy system creating the need for some change in part of the network. Here's a good overview of the challenges facing sewerage reform and here is a discussion of drought risk.

There is undoubtedly a need for reforms and there are plenty that have been announced with targets of, say, 2035 and 2050, but where are the plans that had a target of, say, 2023? And if we had them, why weren't they being updated?

It's hardly surprising that a country with 5 prime ministers in 8 years and as many Cabinet reshuffles has failed to find the time or dedication required to overhaul the energy sector and water industry. Too much control over the maintenance and renewal of Britain's creaking infrastructure has been left to private interests. Had the income from customer bills gone into public coffers instead of draining into investors' pockets, it might have been a different story - or at least the money might have been used to bolster the many other public services that are in such a dire state. 

Choices, Choices

All this brings us back to scarcity and the need to make careful choices over how we develop, protect and deploy our energy and water resources. This is largely a question of politics and intervention by a responsible government to balance out the many competing interests. Areas in which Brexit Britain has been - and continues to be - very poorly served. 

It must be doubted that a new government will be able to make much progress after 15 years of under-investment and poor decision-making by its predecessors.

In these circumstances, it seems unwise to devote enormous amounts of power and water to mine bitcoin for speculative purposes or to support generative AI systems that are either used merely for entertainment or to render people jobless (if the hype is to be believed). 

Certainly cash-strapped consumers should think about their utility bills and water shortages before speculating in bitcoin, playing online games or using open AI systems for entertainment or to do things that they could do for themselves. 

 

How Britain's Economic Future Still Depends On Brussels

Britain has a services-based economy: 80% of our output and employment is in services. Professional services, finance, travel, telecoms/computing are all key areas, as is degree to which retail sales are online. This is clearly an advantage for a set of islands when it comes to exports, because services don't need to be shipped. But services may be subject to other trade barriers, such as licensing requirements when offered in other countries, as well as unfair trade practices by local competitors and suppliers. Rules and how well they're enforced are important issues. About half our trade is with the EU, because it's closer than the rest of the world. The EU is also a market of 448m people, 412m of whom are internet users, with 288m online shoppers. That makes enforcement of the EU's new Digital Markets and Digital Services Acts all the more critical, regardless of the fact that the UK no longer sits at the regulatory table.

Scale of UK services exports to the EU

While we generally import more than we export, that overall trade deficit being £33bn in 2023. That's the result of a deficit of £187bn in goods imported over exports, offset by a surplus of £153bn in exported services (including services that overseas customers bought here in the UK, as well as services performed by UK firms working abroad). 

Brexit has obviously made the EU market less accessible for UK firms, so the loss of the free movement in goods, services, people and capital makes earlier comparisons unreliable. But based on trade data for 2022: 

• the EU accounts for 36% of Britain's total services exports;
• we have a trade surplus in services with 14 EU countries and a deficit of trade in services with 13 countries, our closest neighbour being the largest surplus (Ireland at £14 billion) and Spain the largest services deficit (£11 billion); 
• our single largest type of exported service was £55bn worth of “other business services”, being legal, accounting, advertising, research and development, architectural, engineering and other professional and technical services, representing 38% of all UK service exports to the EU. 
• exports of financial, travel and telecoms/computing/data services are also very significant.  

The Importance of Digital Platforms

You can see from the nature of our most successful services exports that their marketing and supply depends on digital platforms and related services, including search engines, cloud/hosting, app stores, browsers, e-commerce marketplaces and messaging services. 

While most of the services exported by British businesses will be supplied electronically to EU businesses of varying sizes, the online consumer markets are obviously also very important. In the retail sector, over a third of British business is now online, making the UK the third largest country in terms of the share of retail that is e-commerce, after the US and China. By contrast, about 15.4% of retail sales across all EU countries occur online. In absolute terms, however, the UK only has a domestic market of 66m internet users, while the EU has 412m (92%) of its population using the internet, 70% of whom (288m) buy stuff online. 

At that scale it becomes very important that the EU's digital markets are well regulated, and that businesses and their customers are shielded from unfair competition and trade practices.

How Does the EU Ensure Fair Digital Markets?

The Digital Markets Act (DMA) builds on existing competition law by rooting out unfair practices of very large digital platform operators (“gatekeepers”) when providing services that other businesses use to reach their own customers online. Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, ByteDance, Meta and Microsoft have all been designated as gatekeepers, since they effectively act as private rule-makers who could potentially create ‘bottlenecks’ and ‘choke points’ that limit access, unfairly exploit personal and business data for their own purposes and/or impose unfair conditions on market participants. All face exploratory investigations under the DMA by the European Commission in connection with search services, app stores, browsers and messaging services, to see if they might be luring away customers from other businesses who use those platform services. 

The EU's Digital Services Act (DSA), on the other hand, protects EU-based users of online communication, e-commerce, hosting and search services, by exempting intermediary service providers (“ISPs”) from certain liability for performing certain duties. There are extra requirements for ISPs with at least 45m average monthly active EU users (known as ‘very large online’ (or 'VLO') platforms and search engines). Even UK providers may be caught, where it has an entity based in the EU or has a 'substantial connection' with the EU (i.e. a significant number of users as a proportion of the EU population or by targeting its activities at one or more EU countries). Services such as Bing, Google Search, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, X/Twitter, AliExpress and LinkedIn already face exploratory investigations under the DSA. Basically, the European Commission wants to know how these businesses: 

• mitigate the risks of creating and spreading information using generative AI and risks to electoral processes; 
• block illegal content; 
• protect users' fundamental rights; 
• avoid promoting gender-based violence; 
• protect children; 
• protect users' mental well-being; 
• protect users' personal data; 
• protect consumers; and 
• avoid the infringement of copyright and other intellectual property rights.

How Do British Businesses Benefit From the DMA and DSA?

British businesses will not want to spend heavily to acquire and deal with customers via gatekeepers' services, only to see the gatekeepers take those customers on directly. That's where the DMA comes in. It should not matter that a foreign business is among those who suffer any violation, since that will also affect EU businesses and customers that the DMA is primarily designed to benefit. 

More widely, British businesses trading online the EU customers should also be reassured that the DSA regime is designed to ensure those customers are treated well and fairly in the intermediary environments. Otherwise, they risk losing both the channels through which they attract and deal with EU customers and/or the EU customers who are unwilling to engage with those channels. Equally, businesses will want to know that they are taking on genuine customers and dealing with reputable service providers online, rather than risking exposure to fraud and intellectual property rights infringement via their EU sales and marketing channels.

Either way, it's clear that Britain's service exporters are highly dependent on the EU trade bloc and its regulatory regime, regardless of Brexit.

Whether they can expect the same protection at home is another matter...

EU Countries To Offer Their Citizens Digital Identity Wallets From 2026

The EU is finally pushing forward with aRegulation that requires member state governments to offer their citizens a voluntary European digital identity wallet from 2026.

Under the new law, member states will offer citizens and businesses digital wallets that will be able to link their national digital identities with proof of other personal attributes (e.g., driving licence, qualifications, bank account). Citizens will be able to prove their identity and share electronic documents from their digital wallets simply, using their mobile phones. 

 The new European digital identity wallets (EDIWs) will enable all citizens to access online services with their national digital identification, which will be recognised throughout the EU, without having to use private identification methods or unnecessarily share personal data. User control ensures that only information that needs to be shared will be shared.

For the past 20 years, various players have pushed the idea that you could have a digital identity issued by any number of certified 'trust providers' based on certain agreed standards. This would go hand-in-hand with concepts of 'personal data stores' and access to your transaction data in machine-readable form ('midata')that would allow you to control how your data is monetized. There was speculation that the trust providers would likely be banks and telecoms companies, or perhaps dedicated new entities; but there were always concerns about whether they really had the core competencies required - or the risk/liability appetite - as well as issues relating to security and privacy.

The European Commission explains that:

• by 2026, each member state must make a digital identity wallet available to its citizens and accept EDIWs from other member states according to the revised regulation 
• sufficient safeguards have been included to avoid discrimination against anyone choosing not to use the wallet, which will always remain voluntary 
• the wallet’s business model: issuance, use and revocation will be free of charge for all natural persons 
• the validation of electronic attestation of attributes: member states are required to provide free-of-charge validation mechanisms only to verify the authenticity and validity of the wallet and of the relying parties’ identity 
• the code for the wallets: the application software components will be open source, but member states are granted leeway so that, for justified reasons, specific components other than those installed on user devices need not be disclosed 
• consistency has been ensured between the wallet as a form of eID and the scheme under which it is issued...

Qualified website authentication certificates (QWACs) will ensure that users can verify who is behind a website under well-established eID security rules and standards (which enable open banking service providers to authenticate each other's systems, for example).