Category: Ethics — 33 posts
Democracy, Backsliding and the Need for a Weekly Radar
In March 2026, the V‑Dem Institute published its tenth global Democracy Report: Unraveling the Democratic Era?
For the “ average global citizen ”, they conclude, the level of democracy is now back to where it stood in 1978. The gains of the so‑called “ third wave of democratisation ”, which began with Portugal’s Carnation Revolution in 1974, have been “ almost entirely eradicated ”.
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Engineering Escape Velocity - A 5 year Plan for Europe
This three-part Reckoning series began with a question about what China’s history, including its 19th-century failures and its 20th century successes, can teach Europe about its 21st-century moment of crisis. China failed to adapt to geopolitical changes in the 19th century and that mistake gave rise to a century of humiliation. China learned from that failure and is now a superpower.
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The Stackelberg Trap and how Europe must deal with the American criminal enterprise, China & Russia
Continuing the series:
" It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change."
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Part 1: The Search for a Stable Orbit and the Mathematics of Human Survival
The fourth article in the European Reckoning series. Following on from:
The Rape of Europa: Sovereignty, Security & The Ethical Tech Opportunity
The era of American security guarantees, which formed the bedrock of European stability since WW2, has transitioned into a “three-body problem” of unstable unpredictable gravitational interactions between Washington, Beijing, and Brussels. The war in Ukraine has accelerated Russian decline and it has been drawn closer to the Chinese geopolitical mass.
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There’s a point where impunity is not a failure of the system, it is the purpose of the system. Some things shake our belief in justice and government to the core, anyone who has spent anytime with the Epstein case will feel the same. Justice is too often institutional force applied to the weak and vulnerable by the strong: ‘the strong do what they will and the weak suffer what they must ‘.
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[code] Are Large Language Models anti-poets? [/code]
If great craft in poetry was predicated on plausibility, LLMs would outshine most humans. However, to be better at poetry, LLMs would need to be programmed with rewards for useful unusualness - for finding unlikely pathways across the linguistic landscape. They would need to understand the value of friction, the feeling a poet gets when something unresolved works its way through and out of the subconscious demanding attention and exploration.
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Really Useful Engines
Continued from Part 1:
“**But entropy, heat, past and future are qualities that belong not to the fundamental grammar of the world but to our superficial observation of it. ‘If I observe the microscopic state of things,’ writes Rovelli, ‘then the difference between past and future vanishes … in the elementary grammar of things, there is no distinction between “cause” and “effect””**1
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In this article I want to break down some key concepts about wealth and income distribution utilising concepts from thermodynamics and entropy to show how gamed current economies and societies are and, more importantly, how we can undertake long term policy changes to fix it.
The G20 recently released the Global Inequality Report,1commissioned by the G20 South Africa Presidency in November 2025 and led by Joseph E. Stiglitz. It characterises global inequality as an “emergency” and a “policy choice,” asserting that the negative trends can be reversed. The report finds that 83% of countries globally exhibit high income inequality encompassing 90% of the world’s population. This crisis is primarily driven by wealth concentration, which is far higher than income inequality.
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Book 1: A Tortured Rebel
draft of a new sci-fi series
They redoubled their
Promethean labours
Crafting Robota
To build machines
…that built machines
……that built machines
And so on ad infinitum
Some said a diabolical Matryoshka
In our own day…The war is waged by each ruling group against its own subjects, and the object of the war is not to make or prevent conquests of territory, but to keep the structure of society intact.
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In Part 1 we looked at how Musk takes all of the wrong lessons from the literary greats he apparently admires:
In this Part 2, we will examine the integrity of Musk’s views on free speech, and the engines of hate speech and disinformation he is developing.
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Elon Reeve Musk was born on June 28, 1971, in Pretoria, South Africa. He has become one of the most controversial and confusing figures of the 21st century. He is possibly the richest man in the world (with an estimated wealth of around $400-500bn) and also one of the most fascinating – but not because of his wealth.
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This article has been created using a new public AI Notebook:
Climate Change, Ecological Disaster and Civilisational Risks
The Notebook features a range of key scientific and cultural sources. The complexity of these issues and depth of the data lends itself to a publicly available database for people to conduct their own queries. I hope it is useful, particularly for a new generation more interested in solving the problems we face than getting rich whilst watching the world burn.
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This AI assisted blog synthesises some of the information contained within a public Google Notebook I created to triage submissions made to the Australian Select Committee on Information Integrity on Climate Change and Energy.
I was inspired by a comment of Dr Julia Steinberger (though she did not suggest using AI). I created the AI Notebook to help people (including students, journalists, scientists, policymakers) easily access and query the 227 submissions made to the Select Committee to help review how industry bodies and experts respond to the climate crisis and energy debate.
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Progress Update
I have created an AI notebook with many sources of information on Project 2025 and tracking how it is being implemented (which you can use to query aspects of the Trump & MAGA regime change). This overview of where we are has also been created using it (with minor tweaks).
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I have created a public notebooklm as a resource to provide people with an accessible way to learn about AI as a technology and its ethical implications for humans. It includes most of the existing International AI laws, guidance and standards.
Aim: I hope it is a useful tool for analysts, technologists, AI developers, journalists, students, policymakers and anyone with a general interest in AI Law & Ethics.
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“I feel that the four big AI CEOs in the U.S. are modern-day prophets with four different versions of the Gospel ..telling the same basic story that this is so dangerous and so scary that I have to do it and nobody else.”1
(Max Tegmark)
We enter a new age of AI , with some American snake-oil salesmen promising AI (and themselves) as a saviour to solve all of our ills (a new era of ‘psychohistory’ - but more Wizard of Oz style). Thank goodness for Demis Hassabis.
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This collection of thematic AI news sources is provided in the hope that people will better understand the plight of Palestinians and the ethical degradation of Israel and its Western allies. There must be a better vision for the future of Israelis and Palestinians.
It might be hard for readers to believe, based on the below, but I actually consider myself pro-Israel (in the Gideon Levy vein) and pro-Palestinian (and one day a free Palestine) - but not the terrorists leaders of Israel or in Gaza. If you read my ‘Canto for David’, you can see my attempt to wrestle with god, godlessness and the recycling of suffering in the Israel-Palestine story and history.
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10 poems about Israel and Palestine1
AI ‘art’ – The desert night is full of longing
“Whatever is hateful and distasteful to you, do not do to your fellow man. This is the entire Torah, the rest is commentary. Go learn. "
― Hillel the Elder, Talmud, Shabbath 31a (Judaism’s Golden Rule)
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Table of contents
AI generated image
How to use AI positively (and carefully)
AI art
If you are a creative, don’t run away just yet!
Actual real art is being made using AI by people like Refik Anadol:
Table of contents
Other than this introduction and the section below on the coming US Brain Drain, this article was prepared entirely by AI (Gemini Deep Research) without any edits by me. For an example of how these Reports look when they are created and their depth of research see:
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The Blueprint for an Authoritarian Regime
“a systemic, ruthless plan to undermine the quality of life of millions of Americans, remove critical protections and dismantle programs for communities across the nation, and prioritize special interests and ideological extremism over people.“1
(Democracy Forward)
The following article has been researched manually largely based on sources you can find and review here:
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Russia, Israel, the USA and the far-right in Europe
This is an unofficial companion article to the recent European EEAS Report on Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference Threats.1
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A fearful people
Can do such terrible things
They are so easily tempted
Frightened into
Wagering with Satan
And guaranteed
Damnation
The people of Canaan
(To appease
Great powers
Or avoid defeat)
Sacrificed
Their most innocent
Some say to Yahweh
A dreadful gift
No din of drums
Could ever drown
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The second article in the European Reckoning series. Following on from:
Do you remember where you were when the union of Europe finally began?
It wasn’t in 1957 or even 1993.
It was the 27th of February 2025: the day that President Zelenskyy of Ukraine went to the White House and was ambushed live on TV1 by some mafia thugs. Terrorists in suits.
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The first article in the European Reckoning series.
“**I’m here today to directly and unambiguously express that stark strategic realities prevent the United States from being the primary guarantor of security in Europe. ”**1
US Secretary of Defence, February 12, 2025.
I have also created an AI podcast version (if you are interested in trying it out):
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Read by the author
They’ll try
To cut
The threads
That bind us
To freeze
The love that flows
Between us
So they can
Segregate or
Imprison us
They’ll try
To quell
Our ‘slave’ rebellion
They aim
To kill
Simple compassion
To make
Each heart
Cold tomb
And catacomb
Made ready
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“As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy. Whatever differs from this..is no democracy.”
(Abraham Lincoln) August 1, 1858
Table of contents
AI generated podcast version:
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Table of contents
I have created an AI podcast version with additional information from my article ‘Direct Decentralised Democracy’:
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Continuing the previous article:
Hui Yang, “Nursery of New Stars”, University of Illinois, Wikipedia, NASA, 1995.
A Fragile Living Skin
Continued from:
The distribution of steam molecules in a room, how the molecules will change location and how long it will take for them to become water again are all potentially determinable. However, at the most fundamental scale of where each molecule is exactly and where it is moving from and to, it becomes increasingly difficult and fuzzy – in fact, at the sub-atomic level, certainty becomes impossible. [1] Certainty (determinism) at any scale is only approximate – the smaller the scale or the larger the field (including space-time) in question, the more difficult it becomes to measure and to calculate all the variables. [2] Entropy is the universe’s way of ensuring we are all honest players when it comes to knowing the future, though some may know more than others.
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Vincent van Gogh, “Landscape with Snow”, 1888, Wikipedia, public domain.
“Be melting snow, Wash yourself of yourself”
(Rumi)[1]
The laws of physics are wonderful, not least because they show us some of the magic formulas behind the seeming mystery of life and the universe. They are also good and proper ‘laws’ – that is, they are intended to be equivalent across space and time.
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Little escaped their minute attentions and predations:
The Soul, an early casualty
Of more precise instrumentation
Senescence, just another
Dragon to be slayed
The mysteries gave way
To complex refutation
AI generated image
Too few paused
To wonder whether
Ever quicker
Computation
Would unleash the
Ancient iron law
Of more is less
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