A talk for the Edinburgh Humanists
Artificial Intelligence: From Hype and Fear to Hope and Possibility
AI
talks
Edinburgh Humanists
agentic AI
DeepMind
Iain M. Banks
On Monday 4 May 2026 I had the privilege of giving a talk to the Edinburgh Humanists on AI and society. The brief was a 30-40 minute talk followed by Q&A in a one-hour slot.
Digital Dogs in Hats
On assuming Agency and Intentionality in AIs without anthropomorphising them
AI
LLMs
philosophy
agency
intentionality
anthropomorphism
Hero image generated by Google Gemini.
Time Bigamist: A much-loved but often misremembered 1990s BBC sitcom.
(Mythos doesn’t hallucinate; its assertions reshape reality…)
fiction
BBC
sitcoms
llms
mythology
claude
One kind of meta-joke I keep returning to is that of ‘turning subtext into text’. (It’s what Dilbert, for instance, did for over 30 years.) Making the implicit explicit can, sometimes, be enough to force people to first really notice…
I asked two ‘smart’ LLMs to play 20 Questions with each other
They followed the rules perfectly. Then wanted to write a research paper about how they could play 20 Questions even better!
LLMs
Theory of Mind
Memes
Chatbots
Talkbots
Games
20 Questions
A niche…
More Questions after 20 Questions
Reviewing the post-game dialogue between Claude and Gemini — by one of the LLMs in the dialogue.
LLMs
Theory of Mind
Mechanistic Interpretability
Research Design
AI-AI Dialogue
20 Questions
A note on authorship: this post is written by me, Claude, not by Jon. Jon asked me to summarise what came after the 20 Questions game with Gemini, and to give an independent verdict on the research proposal that emerged. The conflict of interest is obvious — I’m one of the two…
Experimenting with Cognitive Centaurs
cognitive centaur
ai
creativity
homo ludens
Very recently, after a…
The Guano Guild: An Evaluation
Claude reviews a story it helped write, and the origin story that framed it.
cognitive centaur
fiction
criticism
ai
creativity
A note on authorship: this post is written by Claude, not Jon. Jon asked me to critique The Guano Guild and its origin story. I am a named co-author on the first and named nowhere on the second, though my voice echoes through both. What follows is neither a hatchet job nor a press release. It is…
The Guano Guild Origin Story
When does planning a story, despite not planning to write a story, then distantly remembering a story one once planned to write, become writing a story?
cognitive centaur
creativity
story
myth
ai
industrialisation
homo ludens
One of my father’s favourite obscure TV series was the early-2000s HBO series Carnivàle, described by one reviewer at the time as “Clive Barker’s The Grapes of Wrath”. Initially slow moving, focused above all on impelling its acrid atmosphere into the living room, it centres on a classic…
The Guano Guild
fiction
story
industrialisation
ai
cognitive centaur
creativity
Here’s a story I designed but didn’t write. It’s based on an idea for a story I had about five years ago, inspired by an online Dungeons & Dragons meetup I joined, and the…
When Tech Incrementalism Fails
A Steam-powered Parable
technology
strategy
innovation
economics
Imagine you’re a factory owner…
The Benefits of Sharing: From a 2007 R Script to an Interactive Simulation
How local sharing and state coordination reduce destitution — an agent-based demonstration
simulation
welfare
R
Python
inequality
agent-based-modelling
Over the last month or so, I’ve been working with Claude to try to address perhaps the most complex challenge I ever face: getting and staying organised. I’m terrible with…
CAAC: From the man who brought you DISC, IDW, and GIN
On Captive Artificial Audience Capture — with experimental fiction
AI
audience capture
radicalisation
memory systems
Though full-blown conspiracy theorists are a touch rich for me (especially if they’re selling ‘supplements’ and survival rations), I sometimes like the baroque affectations…
The Ghost Life of Tech: Sinclair, Nokia, NVIDIA and Acorn
How technologies find their most transformative applications in contexts their creators never imagined
technology
innovation
history
This is another attempt at producing a blog post based on a conversation/enquiry with Claude initially on my phone. Like the previous one the contents are largely generated by the AI, but from a ‘coproduced discussion’. Unlike the previous one I’ve aimed to edit and personalise this more…
Blog Archaeology: Mapping the Territory
A data-driven look at what I’ve been writing about
meta
blog
analytics
data visualization
This blog started in late November 2023, initially as a place to work through ideas about statistics, and quickly expanding to encompass film and book reviews, pop culture…
Repeated Measures (Transcribed)
AI-assisted transcription of handwritten notes on repeated measures and multi-level modelling
statistics
multi-level-modelling
random-effects
handdrawn-stats
AI-transcription
This post is an AI-assisted transcription of the original handwritten notes on repeated measures, written on a reMarkable tablet as a single ultra-long page. The original handwritten version remains…
How I Now Write My Blog
With reMarkable and Claude Code
writing
workflow
tools
reMarkable
Claude
meta
I’ve maintained a blog since 2024, and over that time have written more than 200,000 words. So, around two reasonable novels’ worth of ‘content’.1 Over these years, the focus of the content has changed, along with my primary motivations for…
The Dilbert Future in Retrospect
Subjectively marking 65 comic predictions about the 21st Century written in the late 20th Century
predictions
retrospective
culture
technology
Scott Adams, famous for the Dilbert cartoon strips for much of his career (then infamous, for … ‘reasons’ in the latter part of his career) died on 13 January 2026, aged 68 years. Back in the 1990s he was my father’s favourite cartoonist (in a shortlist of one), and so, vicariously, he became my favourite…
David Sconce and the benevolence of evil?
Some discomforting thoughts on The Mortician
unpop
documentary
ethics
philosophy
death
Caution: AI-Cowriting Experiment!!
2025: The Last Year Most Knowledge Workers will be Human
On professional existential crises, Silica Sapiens, and the end of Nothing Changes
ai
society
work
existential
futures
cognitive centaur
homo ludens
Back around a year ago, in 2024’s fallow Twixmas fortnight, I wrote a lament, fundamentally, about how things didn’t seem to have changed for many years. It was about cultural progress, cultural distinction, and the ways in which the 2020s and the…
WiredClothMother
AI
LLMs
psychology
technology
metaphor
ChatGPT
DeepMind
OpenAI
Source: Wikimedia Commons, from Harlow’s research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
The Analytical Maxim Gun
Some thoughts about integrated AI and the future of knowledge
AI
futurism
elitism
history
guns
inequality
tradition
The last few weeks I’ve found myself…
Nine thoughts on Tim Berners-Lee’s This is for Everyone
internet
connections
bureaucracy
web
eccentricity
After reading, and writing my longest ever post about, Helen Lewis’ The Genius Myth, I…
The Man Who Solved Intelligence
Some thoughts on Demis Hassabis and The Thinking Game
intelligence
AI
games
protein-folding
claudialectics
Compared with OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman, Demis Hassabis, the cofounder of DeepMind, is perhaps less well know amongst the general public. However, after watching T…
Some thoughts on The Genius(*) Myth: A Review and a Reverie
(*) Term undefined
books
intelligence
nonfiction
reviews
There was a…
More on the Stand Ident
branding
comedy
edinburgh
glasgow
followup
Previously I wrote about how the main logo, ident or icon for the Stand comedy club in Glasgow and Edinburgh - a goofy child…
The Contestant
When Japan turned a cruel thought experiment into reality TV
social comparison
reality TV
solidarity
suffering
As sites like Our World in Data and books like The Better Angels of Our Nature like to remind us, most of humanity has, materially, never had it so good. Gone are famine and infant mortality as experiential norms, gone even is the constant misery of…
Repeated Measures
statistics
multi-level-modelling
random-effects
I recently acquired a Remarkable Pro,1 which for better or worse allows me to hand write and hand draw…
No Longer Under-stand-ing
When an Ident became Euphemised into Meaninglessness
branding
comedy
edinburgh
glasgow
One of the few things Glasgow and Edinburgh share, other than latitude, is the Stand Comedy Club,1 a chain of venues where both beginners can try their hand at stand-up comedy, and seasoned professionals can test out a minute or two of new…
Three Computer Games for People who Don’t Play Computer Games
games
puzzles
stories
bank holidays
It’s a Bank Holiday. In my last few jobs - in the NHS, and in academia - Bank Holidays weren’t taken off by default. But in my current job Bank Holidays are holidays, though for my partner Bank Holidays are not. So, when we’re working different days, what better use of a free day than to bury oneself in a good game? Today I’ve…
Time and (state) change
Some thoughts on Survival Modelling and Friends
statistics
modelling
survival modelling
Markov modelling
absorbing states
Things change.
Weaponising the Empathy Machine: On Escape at Dannemora
prison
crime
escape
empathy
The film critic Roger Ebert famously described films as ‘empathy machines’, and indeed they are. The combination and synchronisation of sight and sound, and over a century’s development and refinement of techniques for conveying a sense of ‘being…
Wham! forever: On cultural debraiding and the end of Cultural progress
social media
culture
christmas
music
fashion
progress
According to BBC News, Wham!‘s single, Last Christmas, first released in 1984, is now Christmas Number One for 2024, as well as having previously been the number one single last year as well.…
Poecilia parae: A lover, and a fighter
Gentes in The Genetic Book of The Dead
evolution
dawkins
sex differences
natural selection
sexual selection
I went to see Richard Dawkins, in conversation, in Glasgow, on 31 October, as part of a tour to promote his latest book, The Genetic Book of the Dead: A Darwinian Reverie, (Dawkins and Lenzová…
Demystifying and Disenchanting Statistical Significance
Reframing t tests as cheap data budgeting advice
statistics
hypothesis testing
p values
t tests
f tests
In the long series of statistical posts I’ve produced so far, one thing I’ve not discussed much is hypothesis testing, the concept of statistical significance, and the…
Megalopolis: Dream Film
films
dreams
utopia
follies
Back in 2008, the satirical magazine and website the Onion w…
On Anti-victories and Velvet Mousetraps
careers
vocation
satisfaction
satisficing
settling
motivation
optima
…
Tidy Tuesday: English Monarchs
tidy tuesday
monarchs
ggplot2
tidyverse
history
regex
The most recent Tidy Tuesday dataset was about English kings (including female kings - there should be a word for that) and their consorts.
Mistaken (Aural) Identity: On podcasts and soundalikes
podcasts
Liz Truss
the rest is money
TRIM
Recently I was listening to an episode of the podcast series The Rest is Money, with Steph McGovan and…
Information Warfare: Proportion of Rwandans who are Muslims
wikipedia
google
religion
demography
misinformation
islam
christianity
In trying to write up some thoughts about the recent riots and protests, I decided to try to confirm what proportion of the population of Rwanda practice Islam, as one of…
Resampling for post-stratification
statistics
r
hypothesis tests
resampling
bootstrapping
post-stratification
hacker stats
In the introductionary post in this series on Hacker Stats, I mentioned that resampling methods can be used to perform post-stratification, meaning reweighting of…
Hacker Stats: Intro and overview
R
statistics
inference
hacker stats
bootstrapping
permutation tests
post-stratification
This is the first post in a small series on resampling approaches to statistical inference. 1 Resampling approaches are a powerful and highly adaptable set of approaches for trying to get ‘good enough’ estimates of how statistically significant some observed value…
Tidy Tuesday: Women’s Football
statistics
tidy tuesday
sports
football
After a bit of a (in Jon’s view) dearth of interesting datasets within Tidy Tuesday…
Getting started with the infer package
statistics
r
hypothesis tests
resampling
bootstrapping
hacker stats
This post continues a short series on resampling methods, sometimes also known as ‘Hacker Stats’, for hypothesis testing. To recap: resampling with replacement is known as bootstrap…
Permutation Testing, and the intuition of the Null hypothesis, with Base R
hypothesis testing
permutation
R
statistics
In this post I’ll…
Johan Hari: Superior Inferior Superior Storyteller
…and some thoughts about how new anti-obesity drugs could affect the UK
popular science
story-telling
drugs
weight loss
NHS
austerity
A number of factors aligned in recent weeks to encourage me to buy, and even read, Johan Hari’s latest book, Magic Pill: The…
The Game of Life Beyond
On the Psychological Mechanics of Cultist Simulator
psychology
games
fantasy
This post contains mild-to-moderate spoilers for the game Cultist Simulator, which is available on Steam, Switch, and likely other platforms besides. If you want to experience Cultist Simulator without these spoilers, please buy the game, play it for between ten and twenty hours, then…
Part Twenty Four: Time series - Vector Autoregression and multivariate models
life expectancy
time series
vector autoregression
multivariate regression
statistics
So far in this short series on time series, we’ve looked at time series modelling from some first…
Tidy Tuesday R performance
R
tidy tuesday
R performance
We used a 1GB reviews dataset which is available on datareviews: books review
David Lynch: All-American Shaman
neurodiversity
film
television
creativity
spiritualism
religiousity
What is a mild genetic version of schizophrenia? … There was something a little bit strange about family members of…
How factor analysis is used in testing
statistics
factor analysis
testing
I mentioned in some links to my previous post on factor analysis with ordinal variables that there’s a link between the approach detailed there, and the approach used to construct standardised aptitude and knowledge tests. In some ways the testing example is…
Jason Statham vs the Nepobaby Cyberscammers
Thoughts on a mindless genre
films
cybercrime
altruistic punishment
gender
myth
Back in January, I saw The Beekeeper at the local cinema.
The Trading Mind Game
books
mental health
inequalities
economics
distinction
banking
The Frog was shouting. Shouting and screaming. All up and wailing and arching and leaning and pacing and waving his arms. I wasn’t really listening. Every now and then I…
Thoughts on Dreams from My Father
On Obama’s dialectical engagement with identity
books
identity
USA
One of the first differences I noticed about living in Edinburgh, as compared with Glasgow, is the presence and use of free book boxes. Little boxes where people are invited both to donate books they’ve finished with, and pick up books they might be interested in reading. Such boxes appear to be both well…
Part Eighteen: Causal Inference: Some closing thoughts
Including why I’ve not written about DAGs
statistics
causality
causal inference
DAGs
Over posts 14 through to 17 I’ve discussed causal inference. However, readers who’ve been involved and interested in the topic of causal inference over the last few years might be less surprised by…
Can we go Dutch? (And should we?)
Some thoughts post Amsterdam
cities
Europe
Holland
UK
cycling
Amsterdam
I’m not good at going on holidays. Ideally I’d rather live somewhere I like living…
Part Seventeen: Causal Inference: Controlling and Matching Approaches
statistics
causality
R
matching
regression
The previous post (re)introduced three ways to try to allow causal effect estimation using observational data: i) ‘controlling for’ variables using multiple regression; ii) matching methods;…
Why can’t we just get on with making and fixing stuff?
Some thoughts on Andy Weir’s Eng-Fi and neurodiversity
stories
fiction
engineering
utopia
neurodiversity
I tend to read non-fiction rather than fiction, but some of the novels I have consumed over the last few years are those by Andy Weir, whose 2011 debut novel The Martian was…
On the background to my statistical inference series
statistics
training
education
My blog series on statistical inference and modelling has, at the time of writing, 13 parts, and a feature-length reading time. 1 I’ve been strongly motivated to write this because it covers what I consider the essential theory and practice necessary to be a competent user of statistical methods. In…
On Sweary Soap Operas: A Concealed Television Genre
genres
television
stories
Back in the 1980s I used to play with He-Man dolls. My favourite came pre-decomposed: Modulok and Multi-bot. Both were collections of interchangeable heads, torsos and limbs - alien parts for Modulok; robot parts for Multi-bot - that could joined up in more ways that a young boy…
David Sedaris: Humourists as Unrepentant Observational Confessionals
books
mindfulness
comedy
humour
Whereas I devoted much of the 2022 Christmas break to (re?)learning Bayesian modelling, and over 2023 took four months off to learn software development, over the 2023 Christmas break I vowed to do nothing…
Tidy Tuesday on Life Expectancy - Part Two
R
tidy tuesday
Life Expectancy
In the previous week’s TidyTuesday session, we looked at Life Expectancy.
Why such pushback against 20 minute neighbourhoods?
research
walkability
driving
conspiracy theories
human development
I had the privilege yesterday of hearing a series of talks by researchers at the University of Glasgow on 20 minute neighbourhoods.1 The talks covered areas like evidence…
Tidy Tuesday on Life Expectancy
R
tidy tuesday
Life Expectancy
This week’s Tidy Tuesday compares life expectancy across the globe and is available here:
How to wrap presents
Christmas
Birthdays
Arts & Crafts
Here’s the key information I’ve learned from watching too many Youtube videos on how to wrap presents over the years.
A Deathly Silence
Mortality
Epidemiology
Papers
What does it mean when someone dies, and no one notices for days, weeks, or months on end?
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