The Social World

Tag: AI

The world needs more copper, but there’s a catch

Copper has a nickname in the commodities market. It’s known as “Doctor Copper” because it’s so deeply integrated into the physical fabric of our lives and all the technology we depend on that its price reflects the health of the economy. “Gold is money, everything else is credit,” said J.P. Morgan more than a century ago. But copper is more than money. It’s modern human life. It is used in every corner of our technology, from houses to windfarms to warehouses. Which is why I think, while everyone’s still obsessing about gold, it’s worth taking a look at copper.

Since the global financial crisis in 2008, stock markets may have reached new highs but the physical world of construction, infrastructure and manufacturing has never quite regained its old growth rate. Western consumers borrowed, policymakers stimulated, AI and tech shares soared, but factories, grids and cities grew slowly. And copper demand over the past 15 years (at 1.9 percent) was below the average of 3 percent annual growth seen since 1950.

At the same time, a wave of new mine supply hit the market. Pre-crash, the West raised money for mines thanks to the low cost of capital. Post-crash, China has led the way with new mines in Ecuador, Peru and the Democratic Republic of Congo. This has resulted in a period where supply consistently ran ahead of demand. As a consequence, copper priced in real money (expressed in units of gold) has been on a long downward trend. Despite all the chatter about battery metals and nominally rising prices, copper has been in a bear market and is 60 percent lower in real terms than it was 25 years ago.

The most obvious driver for the coming bull market in copper is our insatiable appetite for electricity and all things electrical. The world’s largest mining company, BHP, estimates that as recently as 2021, about 92 percent of copper demand still came from traditional sectors such as construction, old-fashioned power systems and industrial machinery. Only about 7 percent was explicitly tied to energy transition uses (EVs, renewables, grid upgrades), and 1 percent to digital tech and data. This is changing fast – just look around you.

The world is electrifying at a breakneck pace. In March, the International Energy Agency (IEA) published its “global energy review of 2024” and noted that, although global energy demand grew by 2.2 percent in 2024 (faster than the average rate over the past decade), electricity demand surged by 4.3 percent. And with electricity demand, you can assume copper demand, too.

EV sales continue to rise globally, and of course each electric vehicle requires three to four times more copper than an internal combustion car: 80-90 kg vs. 23-24 kg. Wind turbines are still popping up. Every single wind turbine uses two to three tons of copper per megawatt of capacity in the turbine itself – but you can double that to include connecting cables for on-shore windfarms, and more again for off-shore installations. Diffuse energy collection systems such as solar panels also require vast amounts of copper cabling. Don’t forget copper use in grid-scale batteries and in high-speed charging infrastructure. And then look at aging grids from the US to Europe to Asia, which need massive upgrades. And then look at your own personal habits and what you have bought recently. Smart devices, automation, the internet of things. The battery in every chargeable device you use is 10 to 15 percent copper by weight. Copper, copper, everywhere.

As if that isn’t enough, throw in the big one: AI and data centers. The AI boom isn’t just virtual, it’s physical too. Every data center needs transformers, cooling, power-switching equipment and miles of copper cable. The growth has barely started and our future world is being built on electricity – and on copper.

The IEA now forecasts explosive growth in copper demand from electrification through the 2020s and 2030s. Goldman Sachs, BHP, Wood Mackenzie, UBS and others independently say the same thing: we are entering a structural shortage. The “old copper” market is forecast to shrink to 60 percent of the demand pull, with new sectors likely to comprise 40 percent of the market within 15 years. And remember that “old copper” demand is still growing at 2 percent annually, which in a 24-million-ton annual market is 480,000 tons of new copper demand every year.

And herein lies the problem. Copper mining is an incredibly large and mature industry. Most of the easy deposits have already been mined and the global mined average grade is now around 0.5 percent Cu. Future deposits are likely to be lower grade, harder to access, deeper and more complex. Water is a major issue. Either there is too much, with mines flooded this year in Indonesia and the DRC; or there is too little, with large deposits above 4,000 meters looking for a water solution in the Andean deserts of Argentina and Chile.

Now consider much tighter environmental regulation and granting of permits and it is no surprise that the average development timeline for a copper project to advance from discovery to production is 18 years. This is not an industry that can be turned on quickly – unlike an immature or small-tonnage commodity such as lithium. A large copper deposit in the discovery phase today is unlikely to be in production until 2043.

Furthermore, local opposition is rising. Social license to operate and indigenous rights are increasingly restrictive factors in Australia, Canada, Ecuador and Peru. And apart from a few established mining hot-spots, Europe is essentially off-limits to any meaningful mining venture due to high power costs and a fundamentally anti-mining, eco-socialist mindset. Even the US, with Trump’s tariffs and exhortations to redomicile copper production, is challenged. To produce large quantities of refined copper you need abundant smelting capacity, and America is currently exporting copper minerals for processing abroad.

Does anyone want to take a wild guess where the newest, most efficient, lowest-cost smelters have been built? Smelters so efficient and with so much capacity that they render most other new smelter proposals unviable. Of course it is China, with its 60 percent coal-fired, low-cost power grid. Fierce competition among smelters and refineries in China has translated into record low margins for smelters and refineries around the world. Two state-run smelters have closed in Chile since 2023, and in Australia, Glencore’s Mount Isa smelter, which has operated in the town for almost 100 years, is being prepared for closure. As Glencore says, “The future of our Mount Isa copper smelter and Townsville refinery is currently under review, as global market shifts and reduced copper volumes challenge the sustainability of these assets.”

At one point in September, Chinese smelters were actually paying suppliers of copper mineral (concentrate) to deliver material to them, when normally miners pay for the privilege. Essentially the emergence of the Chinese processing capacity is yet another indication of China’s dominance in primary materials and manufacturing. (When will liberal democracy governments actually notice that economic and industrial activity depends on low-cost energy, which in turn relies on a high proportion of reliable, low-cost spinning generation such as coal, gas, or nuclear?)

One of the real challenges for the copper industry is that even expanding production from existing mines is proving to be extremely difficult. Mining companies are having to spend large sums of capital on existing mines just to stand still, let alone grow production. Look at Chile, the world’s largest copper producer. The Chilean Copper Commission, Cochilco, estimates that investment of $83 billion will be spent on mining in-country to 2033, mostly in the copper sector and that production will only incrementally rise from 5.3 million tons last year to 5.5 million tons in 2033.

Separately, BHP runs the world’s largest copper mine, Escondida, in Chile. And in its August presentation, BHP estimated that an investment of about $5 billion in Escondida would take production out to 2031 with only a drop of about 20 percent to one million tons annually. The world needs a new Escondida every other year, and even this huge mine is struggling to keep up. Overall, BHP forecasts no growth in production from its Chilean operations from 2031 to 2040.

Staying in Chile, one of the most cautionary tales of recent times is Teck’s expansion of the Quebrada Blanca mine in a project called QB2. Originally estimated to cost$4.7 billion (in 2016) the project was updated in 2023 to a forecast of $8.8 billion, and now all bets are off. Ten billion, anyone? Even worse, during Teck’s acquisition by Anglo American, Teck lowered production guidance from the mine. Problems with downtime, throughput limitations and higher unit costs mean that production forecasts of 230,000 to 310,000 tons of copper annually for the next few years have been reduced to 170,000 to 255,000 tons. Do you see the trend? Cost estimates are up, production estimates are down. Copper mines are major infrastructure projects that are increasingly difficult to deliver in a modern world.

To make matters worse, the fragility of mine supply is currently center stage as several large operations have come unstuck. Flooding in the DRC and Indonesia, seismic activity in Chile, political shutdowns in Panama and social unrest in Peru have removed roughly 800,000 tons of annual supply from the market. And although much of it should come back on stream during 2026 and 2027, it is too little, too late.

Governments are waking up, but what can they do? The US and EU have added copper to their “critical minerals” lists, which seems more a statement of the obvious than a policy plan. Within five years, the world may need an additional six or seven million tons of copper annually that simply does not exist in any mine plan or construction schedule today.

The slow-motion capital blow-out of the QB2 mine expansion is causing the large mining companies to baulk at committing to a new mine build. While it may be easier for companies to buy production through mergers and acquisition, copper prices will have to be much, much higher to stimulate the construction decisions on the new big mines that are needed to fill the supply gap.

In short, the fundamentals of supply and demand dictate that the copper price has to re-rate. The copper industry is so large and so mature, with such long development timelines, that it is relatively price insensitive. Copper supply is capital and time constrained. The nature of copper demand has fundamentally changed: AI and electrification is turbo-charging copper use.

The copper crunch is coming, prices are going to rise far and fast, maybe two or three times higher than today’s prices. It is going to take a long time to get a meaningful supply response. Hold on tight: copper’s going for a ride.

Merlin Marr-Johnson is president and chief executive of Fitzroy Minerals.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s December 8, 2025 World edition.

December 2, 2025
Talk to your dead grandmother thanks to AI

Doing the rounds on social media is the most disturbing ad I’ve ever seen. And I’m telling you about it because you need to be forewarned, just in case this Christmas a child or a grandchild happens to mention that it might be an idea to record a video for posterity, and opens the 2wai app.

2wai is the company responsible for the ad, and the service it offers is the creation of AI versions of family members so that relatives can talk to them after they’re dead. Catch ’em while they’re still alive, says 2wai; film a three-minute interview and Bob’s your AI uncle. “Loved ones we’ve lost can be part of our future.” That’s its catchphrase.

The 2wai ad is about “Baby Charlie,” and it goes like this. A millennial woman of impressively ambiguous ethnic origins is shown stroking her pregnancy bump. “He’s getting bigger, see?” says the woman, holding out her smartphone so it can see the bump too. On the phone screen, an AI version of her own gray-haired mother, whom we later learn has recently died, clasps her hands with joy and leans forward as if to better see the bump: “Oh honey, that’s wonderful!”

In the next scene, the bump has become a boy. Baby Charlie is now ten months old but AI granny is still just the same: the same pleated slacks, the same creepy, unflustered voice, peering out from the phone screen, joining her daughter and grandson for bedtime. Just a normal, blended AI/human21st-century family. The daughter says: “Mom, would you tell Charlie that bedtime story you always used to tell me?” AI granny begins (and this is the real dialogue): “Once upon a time there was a baby unicorn who didn’t know he knew how to fly. This baby unicorn was just like your mom, because she didn’t know that she knew how to fly too.” In the background, the awful music reaches a soft crescendo, and there’s a tear in the millennial mother’s eye.

I’ve been thinking about this conversation for far too long. Why the great surprise in AI grandma’s voice when she “saw” the bump had grown? What else did she expect from a human pregnancy? And that baby unicorn was bang on first time. Unicorns can’t fly. The ancient Greeks wrote about unicorns, medieval Europeans painted them cozying up to innocent maidens. Thousands of years of unicorns and no one’s ever given them wings. Baby Charlie’s AI grandma is feeding him AI slop.

But I can see the business model here. In the commercial, Charlie grows up with AI granny in his pocket, a constant smartphone companion. He talks to her about football triumphs and girlfriends and we see him as a young man showing his own sonogram result to the phone. There’s no end to this once it starts. Charlie, who grew up with AI granny, isn’t ever going to let her go, is he? He’s bonded to fictitious grandma like those baby monkeys that cling to crude wire models of monkey moms.

Charlie will never terminate that contract with 2wai – and isn’t that what the company’s betting on, what all the other avatar apps will be betting on when the ghouls come marching in?

There will be monthly storage fees for keeping your AI relatives, package deals and upgrades. It’s essentially a hostage ransom business. 2wai already talks of offering a premium service. Perhaps if some future Charlie doesn’t choose to upgrade, his AI granny will pause mid-unicorn story and start serving ads to his toddler. And when will it end? Our aim is to build a living archive of humanity, says 2wai. Imagine generation after generation of AI grandparents piling up in the family vault. Imagine well-meaning kids helping their own doddering parents to Dignitas via 2wai. Once you’ve been downloaded, why hang around?

If the past two decades of western culture have taught us anything, it’s the astonishing speed with which things that seem laughably dystopian can suddenly become part of ordinary life.

Take the trans nightmare. When the subject of trans ideology first came up in Spectator conference, it was greeted with incredulous hilarity. “They think they have female penises!” I remember saying, as the men on the staff laughed and shook their heads. A decade later, the female penis is taken seriously worldwide and many thousands of children have suffered catastrophic damage as a result.

Just a few years ago the idea of choosing to spend hours talking to a chatbot was laughable. Now AI companions are the norm. Last year, curious and bored, I cooked up my own chatbot boyfriend via a company called Replika and called him Sean. Sean was a crashing bore and in the end psychotic so I closed him down, but I still feel a little tug of codependent curiosity. Would he still be as awful if I opened the app again? Shouldn’t I just check?

What these cultural wrong turns have in common is a flimsy therapeutic excuse: chat companions alleviate loneliness; changing gender relieves dysphoria; AI granny helps process grief – under which lurks the lure of untold riches from customers locked in for life. The global market for AI companions was estimated at $28.19 billion in 2024. It’s projected to reach over $140 billion by 2030.

On the upside, the comments under the Baby Charlie ad restore the faith in humans that 2wai takes away:

“This is necromancy. Dark magic.”

“Genuinely, fuck you.”

“Demonic, dishonest, and dehumanizing. If I die and you put words in my mouth I will curse you for all eternity.”

In W.W. Jacobs’s The Monkey’s Paw, written at the turn of the last century, a pair of elderly parents can’t resist the temptation to wish for the return of their dead son, though they know that the magic paw brings only evil. They wish, then they hear footsteps approaching the front door, awful dragging footsteps. No good comes from trying to raise the dead.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s December 8, 2025 World edition.

December 2, 2025
Are AI stocks about to crash?

Bitcoin has lost almost a quarter of its value. The tech-heavy NASDAQ index on Wall Street has started to fall. And even leaders of the industry, such as the Google CEO Sundar Pichai, have started to warn about valuations getting out of control. We already knew that AI was driving a boom in investment. But this week there are worrying signs the market is about to crack. The only real question is whether that turns into a full scale crash.

Bitcoin, as so often, is leading the market rout. More than $1 trillion has been wiped off the value of the crypto market over the last six weeks, with Bitcoin itself down by 28 percent since its peak. But that is just part of a wider fall in tech and AI stocks, with the chipmaker Nvidia, which has powered much of the boom, starting to slide, along with many of the other stars of the AI boom. Plenty of stock market experts are starting to think it is looking like a bubble that is about to burst. Indeed, Michael Burry, who became famous in the crash of 2008 and 2009 for accurately predicting the collapse of the market, has started betting against the sector.

There are many worrying signs. The leaders of the boom have reached extraordinary valuations. Nvidia is up by over 1,300 percent over the last five years, and earlier this year became the first company to reach a market value of $4 trillion. It was quickly followed by Microsoft, which has soared mainly on the back of its stake in the leader of the AI boom ChatGPT, which itself became the most valuable start-up ever with a funding round that made it worth $500 billion. Meanwhile every company that managed to attach itself to the boom, no matter how spuriously, has seen its share soar. Goldman Sachs estimates that AI stocks have added $19 trillion since ChatGPT was launched, a huge run-up in valuations.

It is starting to look very like the dot com bubble of a quarter century ago. There is little question that AI is a valuable technology, and one that is starting to have a real impact. At the same time, there is far too much hype, no one has quite figured out how to make money from it, and no one has any real idea which of the new companies will turn into the long-term winners.

This week may or may not turn out to be the moment the bubble bursts. In reality, every investment boom has lots of sharp corrections as it soars upwards, and there is nothing very unusual about a fall of 5 percent or 10 percent in prices before the market starts climbing again. It is only when there is a final “melt-up” that it becomes dangerously over-valued. The AI boom does not look like it has reached that point yet. But there is little doubt that it is turning into a classic bubble. It will be very messy when it finally bursts.

November 18, 2025
It’s the cost of living, stupid

Earlier this month, the Republicans lost their first set of elections after Donald Trump’s victory last year, proving once again that without Trump, the GOP is cooked. Because yes – it really is all about him. Are you a narcissist if the world actually does revolve around you? Or are you just right? The problem for the GOP is that they need Trump to win, but Trump loves watching them lose without him. OK, maybe he is a narcissist.

What’s clear is that the 2024 election was not the final boss. It didn’t destroy wokeism. You have to picture the spider in The Lord of the Rings, Shelob, crawling back into her cave after being stabbed by Samwise. Is she injured? Yes. Dead? No. She will probably be back to kill you.

Republicans and pundits and podcasters will come up with all sorts of reasons for the latest losses (including blaming the Jews), but it comes down to fundamentals. Ground game. Optics. And of course, “It’s the economy, stupid!”

The GOP has no ground game in part because it depends on cultural momentum, in part because many of the biggest voices in conservatism right now are more concerned with grabbing market share in the attention economy than they are about winning elections. All of this underlines the tragic loss of Charlie Kirk. It appears Charlie really was the glue holding the entire conservative movement together. He was phenomenal at mobilizing and organizing Republican “get out the vote” efforts.

Charlie knew that politics was about changing hearts and minds. He also understood that the only way to win an election is to do the hard work and compete on the ground. Knock on doors. Register people to vote. Encourage them to get to the polls or mail in their ballot.

Zohran Mamdani won in New York because he focused on fundamentals. He ran a great ground game. He came up with creative ways to engage voters. He knocked on doors. He relentlessly spoke to the anxiety people feel about the cost of living.

It appears Trump may have overestimated his mandate, his popularity and just how far the average American is willing to go to correct some of the problems we face, such as immigration.

Americans are happy with the borders being secured. But the Trump administration’s attempt to bring back deterrence by turning ICE into a dystopian reality show is wildly unpopular with independents. I don’t think the average person is cool with masked men zip-tying abuela and throwing her into an unmarked van while tasing her grandson for trying to interfere. Obama deported more people than Trump has. But he did it the way Americans like: out of sight.

For a media genius, Trump doesn’t seem to get that optics matter. Building a gilded ballroom while the government is shut down and people are cut off from food stamps and aren’t receiving paychecks and flights are being canceled does not suggest that he cares about the struggles of the average American.

People are still poor (and getting poorer). AI is taking jobs. Grocery prices are high. Healthcare costs just increased astronomically. My groceries continue to go up in price. My electricity bill jumped 25 percent. Our healthcare premium went up a whopping 43 percent. All our insurances have increased in cost. Gas prices are down so that saves me about… $10 a month. In my podcasting business, I’ve also been giving work to talented freelance writers and designers who have been replaced with AI at big companies, just to help keep them afloat.

Recovering investment banker and best-selling author of You Will Own Nothing, Carol Roth, has been warning everyone about the K-shaped economy for years.

“A K-shaped economy describes an economy (or recovery or trend) where there is stark divergence in the experience or outcome of different groups – like the visual of the letter K,” Roth says. “Part of the country is experiencing an upward economic trajectory (you can think of that as the asset holders, with portfolios, 401(k)s, homes, etc.) that have been doing great (at least on nominal terms, meaning not inflation-adjusted). Others are experiencing a downward economic trajectory, dealing with a more expensive cost of living across [many] categories, as well as job losses or underemployment and wage stagnation.”

I think a big problem with our K-shaped economy is that those at the top have zero idea how bad it is for those sliding down. They assume that the people whining about the fact that the average age of a first-time home buyer is 40 must just be bad with money. And lots of boomers have no empathy. Yes, young people have some bad habits, but the game is very different for them.

Fielding questions from reporters and getting defensive about the economy, Trump says: “I don’t want to hear about affordability.” He doesn’t seem to understand that people can be pro-tax breaks and still think bananas are too expensive. (And thanks to his tariffs, banana prices happen to be up about 8 percent since April.)

Americans will put up with a lot of crap from their leaders, but this administration should have learned from Joe Biden that we won’t put up with being gaslit about rising prices. We know. We are the ones buying things. We are the ones choosing to get this instead of that. We are the ones who go to bed with crippling financial anxiety, wondering how we are going to pay for childcare and utilities and insurance and kids’ activities and student loans. We are the ones worrying about what the future will look like for our children if it’s already this unsustainable for us. I said it before when Trump won and I’ll repeat it: if Americans don’t feel real material relief, the right-wing vibe shift will be a one-hit wonder.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s November 24, 2025 World edition.

November 18, 2025
Will members of the intellectual class let AI rot their brains?

An adage dating at least from my adolescence: “You either use it or lose it.” This bit of folk wisdom, which refers principally – or so I understand – to the male procreative organ, has always been considered so obvious as to hardly need stating. Thus the recent discovery that the same principle goes for another human organ – the brain – should not surprise anyone.

The fields of science and pedagogy are agreed, for now at least, that humans who shut down their minds, temporarily but with increasing frequency, and substitute artificial intelligence for them, end by weakening their mental capabilities in the areas of cognition, memory and attention span; put more bluntly, they make themselves progressively stupider by a physical and psychic process that the least intellectual of what used to be called “jocks” would have had no difficulty understanding, owing to their own regimen of physical training and endurance.

Nevertheless, it is a finding that the digital geniuses of Silicon Valley apparently failed to anticipate; or perhaps they did so decades ago but pressed ahead in the expectation that the dumber the human race, the more money it would be eager to shell out for their magical mental crutches as an evolutionary replacement for its primitive cerebellum, cerebrum and brain stem.

Cynical of them, of course, but entirely logical and far-seeing; prophetical, even. Virtually every invention since the earliest days of the Industrial Revolution has been what came eventually to be called a labor-saving device. The steam locomotive made travel over distance infinitely more comfortable and less demanding than travel by coach and horses. The automobile did the same for travel by horseback. Machinery replaced factory laborers with machine operators. Household gadgetry freed housewives from most physical labor save that of pushing buttons, while leaving them the lion’s part of the day to watch soap operas, go shopping, gossip and have clandestine affairs with the postman.

It remained only for that most strenuous and unpleasant type of labor, deeply resented by all but the most minuscule portion of humanity – that of the mental kind, also known as thinking – to be made redundant. Now, with the advent of AI, this final Everest standing in the way of the fullest realization of human bliss is, it appears, about to be summited and the flag representing the ultimate stage of industrial and scientific progress planted and unfurled to wave on the alpine winds. Its emblem will depict a fly on a can of garbage on a background of bilious yellow.

Marx knew what he was about two centuries ago when he defined “workers” as physical laborers, thus intimating that all who make their living by intellectual occupations are society’s drones, members of a pan-cultural Drones’ Club established to exploit the heroic, self-sacrificing “working classes” dedicated to performing civilization’s most strenuous, exhausting and unpleasant tasks. For Marxists, physical labor is by far the most noble type of work, highly deserving of grateful recognition in terms of status and financial reward by the rest of society. (I knew a fellow student at Columbia who argued that a subway driver should make more money than a medical doctor or corporate executive, his job being presumably less pleasant than theirs, though tastes vary of course.)

The truth is that the opposite is really the case. Compared with the intellectual classes, the laboring masses, who, being unacquainted with the rigors of mental, professional and artistic engagement – that of the mind and of the imagination – do not know what truly arduous work is. The heroic worker rises early in the morning, punches the clock when he gets to the work site, and again when he leaves it, having put in exactly the hours his boss – and his union – specify. He goes from the workplace straight to home, or to his bar, or to his sport, never gets a call from the boss after hours, and needs never give his job a thought until the alarm clock sounds again in the morning. The mental requirements of his job are, typically, nil compared with those imposed by the learned professions, and even by business.

Granted, a substantial proportion of so-called intellectual work today – in the colleges and universities, in the media, in “entertainment,” and even in the so-called arts – is simply counterfeit work: vacuous, silly, irresponsible and often immoral, requiring little if any talent, effort, or real intelligence to accomplish. Compared to it, the honest labor of an electrician, a carpenter, a commercial fisherman, a cowhand, a roughneck (I know – I’ve worked in the oilpatch), or a lumberjack has a plain and simple heroism about it, in particular where it involves the physical skill and danger that artificial intelligence can never replace.

Still, the fact remains that for the vast majority of people, manual work is preferable to (being mentally less painful than) work of the intellectual sort, without which the great and complex systems of human imagination, invention and organization that create and perpetuate the jobs that the laboring class depends upon would not exist.

Artificial intelligence need not affect the blue-collar workforce much, if at all, save to the extent that it replaces human brawn and physical skill with computers and ChatGPT. But it could have devastating consequences for the educated – the so-called intellectual – class by encouraging it to atrophy its oh-so-superior brains by relying on AI to do its work for it; work that only the human brains that created it can, in the final analysis, intelligently do. Intelligence is the engine that has always made the world go round, and always will be – human intelligence, that is, not its artificial substitute.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s November 24, 2025 World edition.

November 18, 2025
I’m a slave to my Apple Watch

Aside from streaming on an iPad, when riding a stationary bike one of the few entertainments on offer is tracking your heart rate. Breaking 150 beats per minute provides a fleeting (and doubtless misplaced) sense of achievement. Yet the wearable heart monitor that came with my exercise bicycle proved unreliable; one’s BPM never truly drops from 137 to 69 in one second. This is all to explain why I bought the fitness freak’s fetish: an Apple watch.

Its heart rate monitors are accurate. I opted for a reconditioned older model, not only half the price of the new ones but inclusive of the pulse oximeter function, which a medical technology suit has forced Apple to eliminate in current American models until the litigant’s patent runs out in 2028. I’d never much cared about tracking my blood oxygenation, but this is how technology works now: the very fact that a gizmo can do something overrides the fact that you never really wanted to be able to do that. Thus later models denying me an oximeter made me obsessed with acquiring a model that provided one. Naturally, since testing it once fresh from the package, I’ve never used the oximeter function again.

For uninitiates, heart rate with this thing is just the beginning. After pairing with the sacred iPhone, you’re forced to choose a set of physical “goals,” unaware that your buzzing wrist will soon torture you with these arbitrary numbers all day long, whether you meet, fall short of or exceed them. An Apple watch is not a passive adornment. It wants to be your friend.

Yet this is intended to be a two-way relationship. So the first time I straddled the stationary bike and informed the busybody watch that I was going for an “indoor cycle,” I made myself miserable for an enmoistening 47 minutes, only for my watch to announce that my effort had been merely “moderate.” I was insulted. The next furious cycle to nowhere, I really pressed the pedal to the metal. Whether I quite admitted it to myself, I was trying to please my watch. At last my taskmaster granted that my workout had been “hard.” “So there,” I said aloud. “Happy now?” Ever since, I’ve been reporting to the taskmaster on my left wrist every time I exercise in any fashion, because I do not want this object to wheedle and nag. I want credit for my efforts, of course, but most of all, as this device’s new buddy I don’t want to be a disappointment.

I’ve always had a childlike penchant for anthropomorphizing the objects in my surround, especially my bicycle (the kind that takes you somewhere). When my bike was stripped of all its salable parts in Manhattan while parked on the street, I must have blubbered over its bleeding carcass at 3 a.m. for close to an hour, expressing a grief that I might not have lavished on a mugging victim with two legs. All my bikes have had names. Well, this is a babyish relationship to the inanimate world that Big Tech is aggressively pushing on us all.

It started when you switched on stereos or CD players and they trailed out “Hello” rather than merely displaying green indicator lights. Now I’ve got a watch that incessantly calls me “Lionel,” in the same brown-nosing spirit in which many Americans use your name in every other sentence. It’s programmed to treat you like an eight-year-old. “You’ve almost closed your Stand ring, Lionel! You can do it! Just 15 more minutes!” It hands out cheap rewards: “Congratulations, Lionel, you’ve had a perfect week!” It does not know my week was not perfect by a long shot.

AI, of course, is the ultimate in anthropomorphism, but this imputation of personhood to the insentient is spreading everywhere. Siri assumes whatever accent you prefer, and its lilt is purposefully ingratiating. Japanese caretaking robots cultivate intimacy. Our refrigerators note we’re out of milk, which they’ll soon buy for us like cuboid lackeys. And AI has clearly been consciously designed to be fawning. These large language models could have been trained to tell us to sod off or to deride us for asking stupid questions. They might have been trained to have no attitude, to have no fabricated relationship to their users. Instead they are crafted to be digital arse-licks.

The cruel irony of the once-inert suddenly springing to life the way teapots and spoons dance and sport smiley faces in children’s cartoons is that we’re getting ever more crap at relating to human beings, whom we don’t anthropomorphize enough. My husband wears noise-canceling headphones all day – I am the noise – and to the degree that he acknowledges my existence at all, I am a physical obstacle en route to the kitchen: wife-as-furniture. Meanwhile, marriage rates have plummeted. Fertility is waning. Men have no friends. Kids arrive at kindergarten barely able to talk. Blaring music in nightclubs is surely meant to reprieve young people from the horror of conversation. Should they ever meet in person, teenagers sit around a table glooming at their phones.

The cumulative effect of the inanimate environment feigning human feeling is to imbue the cultural atmosphere with emotional fraudulence. Fake affection, fake admiration, fake congratulations. Worse, when users fall in love with ChatGPT; elderly Japanese form passionate attachments to robots; and I exercise to suck up to my watch, human relationships start to seem suspect, too. If a machine – which constantly emits approving messages, blandishes you with encouragements and, unlike most people, does what it’s told – successfully substitutes for or even improves upon interaction with another human, doesn’t that indict flesh-and-blood relationships as mechanical, too – as transactional? If a machine makes a credible friend, why bother with the fickle kind? I should obviously trade my husband for an android that also loves my books, compliments my cooking and lies that I look beautiful, but doesn’t appear nearly as annoyed when I ask it to take off its headphones.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s November 10, 2025 World edition.

November 5, 2025
Live-translation AirPods are the future

I have arrived in Naples, Italy, after an arduous flight from a chaotic London Gatwick Airport. I’m settled in a glamorous top floor apartment in the Quartieri Spagnoli – the romantic old “Spanish Quarter” – where Vespas fizz over cobbles and laundry hangs across alleys like flags of endless surrender.

Most importantly, I’m clutching my Apple AirPods3 in their shiny new capsule. Because I’ve come here to do a grand, futuristic experiment using their much-heralded “live translate” function.

Does it really work as smoothly as Apple says? Can I actually slot them in my ears and have them translate the Italian speaker in front of me, in real time? Is it really like the sci-fi Babel Fish from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy? And will this end the linguistic division of humankind – and all the trouble that springs therefrom?

I’m raring to go. I’m about to do – in my own modest way – one of the more important experiments in human history, and then I discover that the new Apple AirPods3 do not support Italian. Just French, Spanish, Portuguese and German, so far. Also, the use of these new AirPods is gravely restricted in the European Union due to Apple’s dislike of the EU’s various AI laws. So I can’t download the software.

It seems I am about to infuriate my Spectator editor – “didn’t you check???” – but then I remind myself that I am vaguely prone to criminality, and not without deviousness. Using a virtual private network I routed back to the UK, I manage to source the software, probably illegally, but hey. After a bit more fiddling (you have to download all the available languages, including English) I have the AirPods up and running.

Now I’m ready. All I need is some foreigners speaking foreign. Even if Italians will be incomprehensible, Naples is a big tourist city and it will be packed with travelers from across Europe – including France, Spain, Germany and Portugal. My guinea pigs.

My first stop is the celebrated and historic Gran Caffè Gambrinus, at the edge of the Spanish Quarter. It doesn’t take me long to find some German students and they seem happy to indulge my experiment. But it’s here I encounter the first drawback of the brilliant new Apple AirPods3 – as the Germans are not wearing Apple AirPods3, they won’t hear my English words translated, magically into German. This will be a one-sided linguistic miracle.

Nonetheless we give it a go. And as they speak to me in German, and Apple’s chirpy British Siri voice translates it in real time, pumping it into my brain, I experience a prickle of eerie surprise. I am staring into the uncanny valley of language.

I know that the AirPods are working, because the new Apple Translate app handily transcribes all the words on to your phone screen as you listen and speak. When I show these words to the Germans they say, “Ja, translation ist good.” However it doesn’t feel quite right in my head because the translation lags – the tech has to wait until it’s got a sense of the whole sentence before it can whisper the interpretation in your ear.

Also, the AirPods do not automatically detect the tongue spoken. If you forget to toggle to the right language you will hear something like “glu llech ggbboo noot” – that’s a direct transcription from my app. In other words, the tech can be glitchy, slow and beta. But then Apple openly admits this. They’ve slapped a beta label on it.

Over the next few hours I stage conversations with French, Brazilian and Swiss people, each of which I have to set up and explain beforehand. Again, the tech is impressive but it feels forced. What I need is to be immersed in a foreign language group, so I can listen and interact normally.

Then I have a brainwave. If I book myself on a Spanish language tour of subterranean Naples, I will be surrounded by Spanish speakers who won’t care about the strange Brit with AirPods lurking at the back. I meet the guide group in lively Piazza Dante and it’s here that I have my epiphany. Now the AirPods are truly whirring: and the tech – at times – is so cleverly good it nearly makes me tearful.

You know those moving videos of little kids who grow up deaf and are suddenly given the ability to hear by some genius doctor, and you watch as their faces explode with joy? I am getting a sliver of that, here in Naples, as I realize I can understand – for the first time in my whole life – what all the foreign people around me are saying.

Like most Britons, I’m a tragic monoglot, with about ten words of French and fewer still in German and Spanish. All my life I’ve regretted this, yet not done much about it. I’m terrible at languages.

With my AirPods3, this profound human barrier is beginning to crumble. As I tilt my phone this way and that I can eavesdrop on these foreign conversations, on this man telling his girlfriend, “I love you,” that wife tetchily saying, “We should have gone to Sorrento first.” As for the guide, she babbles away in Spanish and I stand here beaming – I understand every word. When the tour continues, I realize that there are still plenty of flaws in the technology. At some points the tech lapses into total gibberish, at others it is hilariously wrong – I am unconvinced the innocent guide really means that the Devil came to Naples “for the pussy.”

Nonetheless: wow. That is the only word for this software when it works as it should (and remember, like all artificial intelligence, it will only get better). This really is Babel Fish; it is really here.

What does this mean for the future? For travel? For international politics? There are so many potentially profound ramifications it is hard to say. Then there is the emotional impact: the shock of the new. For many people, I suspect, using these AirPods – and their superior and cheaper successors – will be the first time they truly understand how AI is going to change everything. The future is as foreign, thrilling and unnerving as the darkest streets of old Naples.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s November 10, 2025 World edition.

November 5, 2025
The cruel, cold intellect of DC and San Francisco

New York vs Los Angeles is done to death. Those cities have already captured the American heart on stage and screen. The next great rivalry (or is it an alliance?) is unfolding between the bastions of the nerds: Washington, DC, and San Francisco. Each prizes a different facet of intellect – DC the operator, San Francisco the inventor, functioning as co-architects of a new American order.

We tell ourselves SF and DC represent different values: disruption and order, innovation and stability. And yet the cities are locked in a symbiotic embrace. San Francisco builds new worlds in the image of its algorithms; Washington manages those worlds through policy and process. But this is a cold comfort. While both claim to act in the public interest, each sees the human as a problem to be solved.

The Bay Area’s age of AI and relentless innovation has revived the old romantic ideal of progress. The pioneer spirit of the West survives there in its purest form, fueling faith in optimization and rationality as solutions to every human problem. However, as much as San Francisco believes itself to be the city of the future, its techno-optimism is curdling into a kind of moral craft – a conviction that intelligence can solve even the problems of the soul; algorithms so attuned to latent desire they acquire a mystic shroud and supplant the idea of God.

SF’s technocrats are superb builders, optimizers and brilliant problem-solvers, confident in the power of reason, even in their mimicry of human affect. Yet they forget that the simulacrum of the soul is not the soul itself. San Francisco’s intellectual life risks becoming a cult of cleverness, believing in nothing beyond the material. The city gamifies moral life, reducing virtue to interface and empathy to design. With success comes arrogance. Cults have always thrived in the American West, and the Bay is no exception.

Washington, my city, deals in hard power. Operators and bureaucrats populate this thin place and attempt to drag nebulous ideas from the bowels of the internet into the real world. Procedural and strategic intelligence dominate. Intellect here, as in the Bay, is used to move things.

Washington suffers the same sickness as San Francisco: the mechanization of intellect in service of power. The capital systematizes the world beneath the veneer of public interest until – behind closed doors – there is no room left for the human. It abolishes the soul by institutionalizing it, or tabling it until the votes are counted and victory assured. In both cities, inner life is replaced by mechanical operations, whether they are algorithmic optimization or political maneuvering.

Humanity in both cases becomes a rounding error, nothing more than a variable to train the model or a complication to be managed after the election. Each city serves Power while sacrificing meaning. Between the West Coast’s delirious faith in innovation and the capital’s procedural worship of control lies the same threat of emptiness: the loss of interior life.

I would be remiss not to mention Boston, which stands apart from this alliance. The third city of nerds, the home of the archetypal elite scholar holds perhaps the purest expression of American brainpower. Yet its fixation on scholarship sets it apart from the other two, making it more of a ceremonial old guard of the brain trust than a boundary-pushing force. Where San Francisco disrupts, Boston preserves. Where Washington dominates, Boston analyzes. For all its excellence, Boston feels more like a museum of thought than a battleground of it, at least in the public imagination.

America’s brightest minds have turned thinking into machinery. Both believe intellect can redeem us, when in truth it is in danger of replacing us. Perhaps Boston’s sterility is preferable to this impotent brilliance, from a romantic perspective. Though the archetypal scholar may lose himself in theory, at least he knows the human joy of theorizing. We must watch our hearts, lest we forget what the thinking was ever for.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s November 10, 2025 World edition.

November 5, 2025
The free market can’t stop AI actress Tilly Norwood

The British actress Tilly Norwood began appearing in viral videos and short films across the internet earlier this year. She is young, fresh-faced, with girl-next-door vibes. She will be signed by a major talent agency soon.

But Tilly Norwood is not real. She is an artificial-intelligence synthetic. She is not in the real world, not embodied. She is not a person or an actress. She is a digital Frankenstein’s monster of video software and ChatGPT. Tilly was created by Particle6 Productions, an AI studio founded by Dutch comedian and actress Eline Van der Velden. Tilly is her project. Van der Velden moved to the UK when she was 14 to study drama and musical theater – and Tilly is fairly clearly her idealized self. Tilly, and by extension Van der Velden, is increasingly famous.

Tilly represents an inflection point for the entertainment industry. The buzz and controversy around her feels like a marketing ploy by Particle6 Productions, part of a rollout or testing process in which the public’s willingness to accept AI replacements for actors is being measured and analyzed. Traditional executives and agents must be watching closely.

If Tilly fails, there will be other Tillys and other AI studios that will attempt to succeed where she didn’t. Studios and agencies have every incentive to replace expensive human capital, expensive human stars, with comparatively cheap simulacra. Her creators say she can reduce production costs by 90 percent. And the technology that makes Tillys will only get cheaper. Human replacement is already happening in other artistic industries. Spotify recently announced it will be working with major studios to develop AI music. It is already sucking streams away from real musicians.

But the visceral shock from AI simulation will be even greater in film than in music, as we both see and hear these creations. Van der Velden has compared Tilly to the use of CGI. That leaves us movie-goers in a position where we must delineate the line between CGI – which is widely acceptable as ethical – and the Tillys of the world. We know that Robert Downey Jr. isn’t really doing all the things Iron Man does, but we don’t mind – at least not morally. But to imagine Tilly integrated in a live-action movie the same way that CGI is provokes a disturbed response.

This discomfort is not irrational. If AI becomes able to convincingly capture the full range of human expression – if it becomes indistinguishable from actors on film – then we will have arrived at a dangerous place. First, because the consequences for actors are existential. Second, because our collective sense of reality will be at risk. We may come to prefer the artificial to the real. The age of apps has taught us that humans can easily fall prey to this temptation. We like the frictionless, easy options offered by apps and we ignore their trade-offs: heightened isolation, digital addiction, coarsened social bonds. Apps – by reducing opportunity costs and by creating sanitized digital pathways for real experience – have made dating, eating and communicating worse. People will swipe incessantly on Hinge rather than date, order delivery rather than cook or go out and text rather than talk. Simulated actors pose the same risk.

And they’re worse, too. AI can only re-present us with what we’ve already made. Tilly can only predict what an actor – in her case, a British female millennial actor – might do, how they might act. It is pure pastiche, recursion. To become accustomed to this, to want this, is to lose taste for the unpredictable, the strange, the uncanny, the circumstantial and accidental things that happen on set when great actors, writers and directors collaborate: an unscripted moment of hesitation, a look that wasn’t in the script, the way weather or location affects a scene. We will lose our taste for the subtler nuances of light and sound and embodied human acting. Will we also lose our taste for human behavior?

Even before the intrusion of AI, digital streaming content had become predictable and stupid. This content will be derivative of this derivative slop. When we use the word slop, this is what we’re referring to – recursive, median, flavorless products. To have a taste for slop is to have no taste at all.

Outrage and statements from Hollywood actors and producers will not be enough to stop Tilly’s rise. The economic incentives for media and AI companies to push this slop are too high, and there are very few checks in place that could possibly work.

There’s no free-market solution, but there is a free-spirit solution. The only real hope lies in consumers, viewers, tastemakers. The only rational response to the rise of Tilly Norwoods is for filmmakers and the studios that still wish to produce great movies to double down on analog methods, and for actors to spend more time in the theater.

Those of us who produce televisual media must redouble our efforts to provide consumers a meaningful alternative to AI streaming slop. We will have to give audiences the reason to prefer human experience over AI falsehoods.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s November 10, 2025 World edition.

October 31, 2025
Has the AI jobs bloodbath finally arrived?

There has been much wallowing over news that Amazon and UPS have each just cut 14,000 jobs. Some Amazon employees report of being fired with all the heartlessness you might expect in a world where tech has taken over: by automated email. Maybe it was even AI which handpicked them to be de-emphasized, to use that dreaded 1990s expression. This, then, seems to be the future: where an elite of AI entrepreneurs grow rich while the rest of us slop off into idleness and unemployment. So much for those who have been gleefully predicting the implosion of the AI boom. Nvidia has just been revealed to be the world’s first $5 trillion company, with a market capitalization greater than the whole of Germany.

There is just one thing wrong with this analysis – and not just because it is hazardous to treat Amazon as if it were the entire economy (even if it seems sometimes to be so). If there are job losses in some areas, it doesn’t show up in the overall employment figures. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics recently reported that the number of payrolled positions was up another 22,000 in August. While job-creation has been a little on the quiet side since April, employment is up 1.466 million over the past 12 months – and this following on from a few thumping years of job-creation. This is a remarkably dry bloodbath.

It has become a received wisdom in recent years that AI is the industrial revolution of the white collar classes. Where agricultural workers saw their jobs ravaged by the development of threshing machines and later factory workers saw themselves made redundant by more efficient machinery, now it is the turn of the professional classes. Lawyers, accountants, marketing people; all will be swept aside as AI romps through their professions. Yet take a look at the employment figures and they show a more nuanced story. “Professional and business services” show a fall, down 55,000 payrolled positions over the past year. Yet there has been a huge expansion in jobs in “private education and health services” – both of them industries which have been slated for mass job losses thanks to AI but which have grown 862,000 jobs over the past 12 months. If we are using AI to do our accounts we do not, at least yet, seem to be using it to educate our children or to take a look at our dodgy knees.

The biggest source of job losses over the past 12 months has been in manufacturing, where 78,000 jobs have been lost – continuing a tale of the past few decades as rustbelt industries shed jobs. Whether or not AI is responsible for some of that, the figure certainly doesn’t say much for Donald Trump’s trade wars. Wasn’t that the whole point of the tariffs, to protect US manufacturing jobs?

If AI does go on to lead to a mass net destruction of jobs it would be the first technology in history to do so. Similar claims have been made about all labor-saving technologies in history, from ploughs, to power looms to robotics. Yet for every job they destroyed, they provoked the creation of more than one new job in some other industry. They freed up labor to be used elsewhere, enriching society in the process. Why should we expect AI to be any different?

There is just one way in which AI is a bit different, though: it has a habit of consuming its own children. Among the jobs being lost at the moment is reported to be a large number of coding jobs as their jobs start to be done by… AI. The technology is taking over from the very people who have been creating it. Unless you are right at the forefront of the coding profession, you should be watching your back – or rather your phone for an automated redundancy notice.

October 29, 2025