Whenever futurists sketched daily life after the robots, they drew silver jumpsuits, food pills, and homes that looked like airport lounges. But the more I think about it, the less likely that seems. The real future is not about speeding up everything until it’s frictionless. It’s about slowing down, because suddenly we can afford to. Not financially – temporally.
Continue reading “Forward to the Past”
Author: Tam
I wish I could speak Akkadian
Imagine saying to a machine: I wish I could speak Akkadian. And instead of a blank stare, it nods politely and begins surrounding you with a world in which Akkadian is normal. Cartoons chatter in it, bedtime stories arrive in it, recipes explain themselves in it. Before long, you’re dreaming in the tongue of Babylon.
Soil and Labour
Eight months ago I wrote here about the future of food – from robot foragers bringing wild garlic to your door to decentralised swaps of apples for eggs. That vision was about what ends up on our plates. But behind the cuisine lies the soil, and if the soil fails, so does every other dream.
No More Piles
When I first wrote about domestic robots in Three-Armed Spot, I argued that we didn’t need humanoid butlers, but a practical, Spot-like creature with three arms to do the dirty work. I still believe that. But let’s imagine we’ve already got it. What changes then?
The first thing that disappears is the pile. For centuries, piles have structured our homes: the laundry pile in the basket, the dishes pile in the sink, the stack of papers and unopened letters by the front door. We pile things because we batch work. Continue reading “No More Piles”
The Tragedy of Modern Education
A century ago, schools were brutal, rigid places. Latin declensions were drilled into unwilling heads, children forced to sit still for hours, individuality met with suspicion. The “normal” kids—those brimming with life, energy, and emotional spontaneity—hated school. The system wasn’t designed for them.
It was designed for a very different kind of mind.
The ideal student of that older system was intensely focused, rule-bound, and capable of sustained abstraction. In today’s language, a student who might score moderately high on autism or ADHD scales. The old system rewarded those who could sit alone, concentrate deeply, and endure solitude for the sake of mastering Latin grammar or solving geometric puzzles.
But today, we’ve swung dramatically the other way. Modern schools cater to the masses, emphasising collaboration, emotional intelligence, and social fluency over solitary genius. The “odd” kids—those restless, obsessive, or socially awkward—are seen as problems to be fixed, disorders to medicate.
We risk drugging away the very minds that could have driven tomorrow’s breakthroughs.
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Flothensburgh: Could AI Spark a New Renaissance?
Throughout history, certain places have acted as catalysts for intellectual and cultural explosions. Athens during the time of Socrates, Florence during the Renaissance, and Edinburgh in the 18th and 19th centuries all produced an outsized number of geniuses, reshaping the world in the process.
The question is: Can we recreate those conditions today?
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Demolish, Rebuild, Repeat: The Future of Home Sweet Home
The concept of robots transforming the way we build and live is as exciting as it is transformative. House-building robots, such as the 3D printers already being deployed, show the potential to revolutionise construction. Yet, while these machines are undeniably impressive, they often rely on concrete, a material with a heavy carbon footprint. Concrete production accounts for a significant proportion of global CO₂ emissions, primarily due to the energy-intensive process of producing cement. This reliance poses a challenge: how can we embrace the convenience and efficiency of these technologies while aligning them with a sustainable vision for the future?
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Turning Rubbish into a High-Tech Treasure Hunt
When we think about how artificial intelligence and robotics might change our lives, we often leap to dramatic visions of self-driving cars, robot chefs, or AI assistants managing our every whim. Yet some of the most exciting possibilities might come from areas we rarely consider. Take litter sorting, for instance. At present, people across Europe are tearing their hair out over recycling. Six bins, endless rules, and still, most of us get it wrong. It’s hardly a recipe for success.
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You Cannot Eat Promises of a Brighter Tomorrow
The Industrial Revolution upended traditional ways of working. In its early stages, farmers and weavers who had once sold their goods locally found themselves undercut by machinery that churned out more at lower prices. With fewer customers and dwindling earnings, these people became part of a restless mass whose livelihoods had been overturned in the pursuit of efficiency. It’s crucial to remember that the new factory jobs which eventually replaced older roles did not appear overnight. Rather, they arrived slowly, in dribs and drabs, while the displaced workers struggled to pay rent or even secure a hot meal. That gap – between the promise of future prosperity and the immediate reality of being unable to make ends meet – created a tinderbox of public anger. Coupled with inadequate social support and a rapidly expanding wealth divide, the situation lit the fuse of protest and, in some instances, revolts. The lesson is that disruption on this scale rarely proceeds without resistance from those bearing its harshest consequences.
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How Intelligent Is ChatGPT o3?
On 20 December 2024, OpenAI announced the release of its groundbreaking o3 model, a leap forward in artificial intelligence. The announcement included a slew of benchmark results that highlight its extraordinary capabilities. On ARC-AGI, o3 more than tripled the previous model’s score on low compute tasks and achieved a score of 87%. On EpochAI’s Frontier Math, o3 solved 25.2% of problems, a massive leap where no other model exceeded 2%. In SWE-Bench Verified, it outperformed its predecessor by 22.8 percentage points in software engineering benchmarks. On Codeforces, o3 achieved a rating of 2727, surpassing OpenAI’s Chief Scientist’s score of 2665. It also scored 96.7% on AIME 2024, missing only one question, and achieved 87.7% on GPQA Diamond, far above human expert performance.
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