Like everyone else, I’ve been following the latest Trump-Epstein revelations. Or maybe we should call them confirmations: Unless you were deep in the cult, you already had a pretty good idea of who Trump was and were aware that he and Epstein went way back.

But many Trump loyalists are cultists, sufficiently so that they believed that Donald Trump — Donald Trump! — was heroically defending the world against pedophiles. And we know what cultists do when confronted with facts that refute their beliefs: They engage in denial.

Now, Epstein and all that is — thank God! — not my department. But MAGA’s cultish nature is relevant to matters that are in my usual domain.

For Trump made many prophecies about the economic miracles he would achieve as president. “Starting on day one, we will end inflation,” he promised. “We will be slashing energy and electricity prices by half within 12 months, at a maximum 18 months.” He promised to get gasoline below $2 a gallon. And of course he insisted that he would deliver a jobs boom, especially in manufacturing.

Obviously none of that is happening. Tomorrow’s report on consumer prices will probably show inflation running at close to 3 percent, with most economists expecting it to rise in the months ahead. Electricity prices are rising rapidly, while gas is solidly above $3 a gallon. And job growth appears to be stalling.

Furthermore, much of the bad news is Trump’s own fault. His tariffs and deportations are both adding to inflation and, by creating uncertainty, slowing the economy.

But cultists never admit that their prophecies were wrong. Rather than admit that the promised economic miracle isn’t happening, Trump and his minions have gone after the people reporting the bad news, specifically the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which produces both jobs and inflation data.

Trump has already fired the head of the BLS for reporting job numbers he didn’t like, claiming falsely that the bad numbers were rigged to hurt him politically. We can expect further claims of partisan bias as the inflation numbers get worse, and eventually, probably quite soon, an attempt to purge and politicize the agency.

The push to politicize the BLS has been reinforced by yesterday’s report from the agency, which revised downward its estimates of past job growth. The White House claimed that it shows that “the BLS is broken.”

It showed no such thing. As a helpful post from the Economic Policy Institute says,

These BLS data revisions are not corrections of mistakes. Revisions are part of the regular, transparent process to update employment counts with the most comprehensive data possible.

As the EPI explains, monthly job numbers don’t literally track every job in America. They’re estimates based on a partial survey of employers. We only get comprehensive data from unemployment insurance tax records, which become available once a year. Revising the estimates based on that data is normal and in no sense a sign that the BLS is doing anything wrong.

But the administration will try to use the revision to discredit the agency, and in particular its recent reports showing a worsening labor market.

So what you need to know is that the BLS is doing its job the way it should, and that there is plenty of additional evidence confirming that the labor market has gotten worse under Trump.

For example, the widely respected Conference Board survey of consumers shows that between last December and August there was a sharp decline in the number of people saying jobs were “plentiful” and a sharp rise in those saying they were “hard to get.”

The New York Fed reports that the percentage of respondents who believe that they could quickly find a new job if they lost their current one has dropped sharply.

And the Federal Reserve’s Beige Book, a regular informal survey that often serves as a useful check on formal data, gave a clear picture of stalling employment:

Eleven Districts described little or no net change in overall employment levels, while one District described a modest decline. Seven Districts noted that firms were hesitant to hire workers because of weaker demand or uncertainty. Moreover, contacts in two Districts reported an increase in layoffs, while contacts in multiple Districts reported reducing headcounts through attrition …

This is not a booming economy.

It's not really surprising that Trump is failing to deliver on any of his promises, which never made sense in the first place. Nor is it surprising that he and those around him, rather than making a course correction, are trying to shoot the messengers. But it’s a tragedy that the attempt to suppress bad news may well destroy the Bureau of Labor Statistics, a highly competent and professional agency whose services we need more than ever.

MUSICAL CODA

I seem to have become CT’s resident moderate techno-optimist. So let me push back a little: here are five things that we’re not going to see between now and 2050.

1) Nobody is going to Mars. Let me refine that a little: nobody is going to Mars and coming back alive.  A one-way suicide mission is just barely plausible.


[spoiler:  he does get home]


“But Elon Musk says” okay you can stop right there.

“But 25 years is a long time! We did Apollo in just like 8 years!” Mars is harder than the Moon. Much, much harder.  Traveling to the Moon took three days. Traveling to Mars will take about two years round trip and will require a considerably larger spacecraft.  

NASA has been looking at Mars sample return for a while now — meaning, getting a basket of rocks and soil back from the Martian surface, so we can examine them in labs here on Earth. They quickly saw cost estimates balloon into the billions and backed off. Mars sample return is in suspended animation right now, and it’s certainly not going to happen before 2033 at the earliest. Getting humans to Mars and back alive?  would be much, much, much more difficult than that.

It would also require at least some level of in-situ resource utilization on Mars.  That means stuff like getting water out of Martian ice, for drinking water and possibly propellant.  Which is absolutely possible — I’m confident we’ll do it at some point — but we have barely started to think about this yet, and are at least a decade away from even piloting something to try it on a small scale.

Here’s a fun detail: until a few years ago, we didn’t realize that much of Mars’ surface is soaked in chlorates and perchlorates: basically the stuff you find in household bleach. Turns out the chemistry of Mars’ crust and surface is quite different from Earth’s! Also that any Mars travelers will have to deal with the perchlorates somehow. Is that the last potentially dangerous surprise Mars will have for us?  Probably not.

There are a bunch of unsolved technological problems with going to Mars, some of which we’re working on — we just made a modest breakthrough in zero-G electrolysis of water — some of which,   la la laaaa,  we are not. When I see those problems mostly solved, I’ll start to think we /might/ go to Mars. But I’m not holding my breath.

Note that various stakeholders have a vested interest in talking like we really are going to Mars, any day now!  NASA has historically been the worst offender here, because reasons, but there are several others.  So anything discussing Mars travel?  You want to look hard at who is writing it, and consider their motives.

2) Speaking of space woo, we are not going to see asteroid mining. Do I even have to go into this? Briefly: it’s really hard to reach an asteroid and bring anything back, and oh by the way nobody has yet found anything on an asteroid remotely worth bringing back to Earth.

I’m skeptical whether we’ll see meaningful use of asteroid resources in this century at all, but we certainly won’t see it by 2050.

— BTW, I’m actually a huge fan of space science.  I think we should be putting balloons in the atmosphere of Venus, deploying solar sails for trips to Mercury and the asteroids, and sending off another interstellar mission to replace the aging Voyagers.  A Pluto orbiter?  A Mercury lander?  Hell yes. Raise my taxes and drip that stuff right into my veins. 

But precisely because I take space exploration seriously, I sharply dislike space woo.  Manned trips to Mars are woo.

(Oh, and protip: if anyone starts talking about getting Helium-3 from the Moon, you can promptly discount anything they have to say about pretty much anything.  No, don’t thank me.  Public service.)

3) Coming down to Earth, we are not going to have commercial fusion power. We probably will have contained, continuous fusion reactions — I’m mildly optimistic on this, and won’t be shocked if it happens in the next 10 years. We might perhaps have a reaction that generates more electrical power than it consumes, though I’m less sure about that one.

But commercial fusion power? Meaning, even remotely cost-competitive with coal / natural gas / hydro / wind / solar? No, that’s not going to happen.  In the very unlikely event anyone is reading this in 2050: if there’s a commercial fusion reactor producing electricity whose socket cost is no more than three times that of coal, natgas, wind, solar or hydro, whichever is most expensive, I lose. I don’t expect to lose.

By the way, the world is currently getting about 30% of its total electricity from renewables — wind, solar, hydro, a bit of biomass. That’s up from about 18% around the turn of the century. (It’s up a lot more in absolute terms, because world electricity consumption has more than doubled in the last 25 years.) By 2050 that’s expected to be well over 40%.

Whoops, some techno-optimism slipping in there… anyway, point being it’s not clear how much of an incentive there will actually be to commercialize fusion, because we’ll probably be able to go largely carbon-free without it.

4) There will be no superconductor revolution. Superconductors are amazing, and they let you do a lot of neat stuff.  But so far they only work at very low temperatures or very high pressures.

[works great as long as you keep pouring the liquid nitrogen]

So STP (Standard Temperature and Pressure) superconductors are kind of a holy grail of materials science.  People have been working on them for decades now.  Will we see a STP superconductor in the next decade?  I would be surprised but not shocked.

But even if we develop a material that superconducts at standard temperature and pressure, it probably won’t be that big a deal.   Science nerds tend to get excited about superconductors for one set of reasons, tech bros for another. But both those groups are kind of excitable, you know?  A plausible STP superconductor would be nice, but neither revolutionary nor transformative.

Imagine that starting tomorrow we had a superconducting material with a cost and physical properties similar to zinc.  Meaning, soft but not very malleable or ductile; rather brittle; low-ish melting point; not very reactive.  (Nothing special about zinc, to be clear.  This is a thought experiment.)  And let’s further say it’s no more expensive than silver (around a dollar a gram, give or take) and can be produced at scale.  Most of the currently plausible recipes for STPSCs involve weird alloys and very complicated recipes, so those are actually pretty optimistic assumptions, but let’s be generous.

Okay then, would it be useful? Sure, all sorts of ways. Would it transform our lives, or indeed any particular industrial sector? No, not at all. Zinc doesn’t work very well for long-distance power lines (not very ductile, too brittle), and anyway it would be too expensive.

We’d have cheaper MRIs, sure. And much cheaper particle accelerators.  Maglev trains become more competitive, though they’d still be a niche application.  Fiercely strong magnets becomee widely available, which is nice.  So, various incremental improvements.  But a revolution?  Not even close.

“Well what about a superconductor that /is/ malleable and ductile, and not brittle, and easily cast or worked? And also very cheap and easy to produce, not requiring any ingredients that are very rare or difficult to handle? And also very chemically stable and not reactive or flammable or explosive or toxic?  What then?” Well I feel there should be a pony in there somewhere, you know?  That’s a long list, and there’s no reason whatsoever to think a hypothetical STPSC would tick all those boxes.  It almost certainly won’t.

(I know where this stuff comes from, unfortunately. There were science fiction stories in the 1970s where STP superconductors that were as cheap and convenient as plastic wrap were a key plot point. In reality, “cost like silver, properties like zinc” is setting the bar very low. At least zinc is a metal, easy to work and handle, and not particularly flammable, toxic, or radioactive.)

5) There will be no useful new physics. No anti-gravity, telepathy, faster-than-light communication or travel, time-travel, teleportation booths, force fields, manipulation of the strong or weak nuclear forces, or reactionless drives.  We’re not going to get energy from the vacuum, or perpetual motion, or glowing blue cubes. 


[well, darn]

More to the point, by 2050 we will not have any plausible prospect of any of these things.  Like, in 1940 nuclear fission was new physics, and nuclear energy was a distant dream.  But people could (and did) claim with a straight face that we would have commercial atomic power within 20 years — and we did! 

But there’s nothing like that with new physics today, and there won’t be in 2050 either.

I’m getting very slightly out over my skis on this one, because in theory new physics could surprise us. But 1) we haven’t had any serious, major new physics for a while now — between 20 and 50 years, depending on your definition;  and  2) the new physics that we have had?  has been interesting but not particularly useful;  and  3) almost all the places we’re currently looking for new physics are places where practical applications are extremely unlikely.

I mean, I personally really want to know what dark matter is, whether gravity can be quantized, whether the Koide formula really means anything, and what the deal is with neutrinos. (Seriously, what is the deal with neutrinos.)  But that information almost certainly won’t have any practical use whatsoever.


[seriously, what is the deal with neutrinos]

So while this prediction isn’t absolutely airtight, I’d be comfortable betting money on it.

Coming at it from another direction: we’ve been looking at the universe really hard now, at scales large and small, with increasingly sensitive instruments, for over a century. So if there is new physics?   Its effects are very likely to be very weak, or to show up only at very large distances or very high energies. So, potentially very interesting, but not likely to be useful.

6) Airships.  Zeppelins and dirigibles, yeah?  People have been trying to make airships work for a very long time now.  The first prototype airship flew in 1854 — that’s not a typo, it was unmanned and steam-powered — and large airships date back to the 1880s. 


[1930s New York, and yes it must have been a hell of a view]

Unfortunately airships are fragile, labor-intensive, and vulnerable to bad weather.  They require a lot of room, a fair amount of specialized infrastructure, and — this is the kicker — they’re actually less efficient than other forms of transportation. They’re much slower than airplanes, yet much more expensive than trains or trucks.  And no amount of technological innovation has been able to budge those stubborn facts.

There was a vogue a while back for “airships will be useful in places where there aren’t roads! Like ummm Africa!” Except Africa has roads. They’re not always in great shape, but they exist. The Congo has roads. Labrador has roads. Antarctica has roads.  People want to go to a place? Before long, there’s a road.

(At this point someone usually mentions Sergey Brin’s Pathfinder. Billionaire’s toy, and if they have a business plan that makes any sense they’re keeping it well confidential.)

Airships look cool as hell, so people will keep trying. But in over 100 years, they haven’t broken out of a few niche uses. It’s not going to happen in the next 25 years.  Honestly, I don’t think it will happen ever.

Well then!  Let’s check back in 2050, and we can see if I was right.

Mr Magpie has always been a bold friend. He sits at the table with us when we are outside. In the warmer months when we often leave the back door open he walks inside the house, sometimes looking for a snack, but often enough walks all the way through the house, apparently just to say hello.

Mrs Magpie and Magpie Jr are friendly, but less bold. They come and sit near us on the ground, not at the table. And they join Mr Magpie in eating nearby, but they don’t eat with us as he does – insists upon, even.

When there is food the three magpies sing a special song. It starts with one low warble, then the other two join in. The pitch of the warble gets higher and it ends with a long note, in three parts, pleasantly discordant. The song feels like gratitude or celebration to me, but who knows.

Being in relationship with Magpies is just great.

For the past few months we’d been noticing Magpie Jr is looking pretty adult. How long with they live with Magpie parents, we wondered? Turns, out, not much longer.

For a bit, Mrs Magpie and Magpie Jr hadn’t been around much. Then on a pleasantly warm day that turned out to be a False Spring (it was beautiful – but now we are kinda expecting snow tonight), Mr Magpie walked up to us while we were having lunch in the outdoor kitchen. Seeming kinda coy, but bolder than she had been for months, along came Mrs Magpie AND ALSO A NEW BABY.

Soft downy grey feathers along its little neck, I am totally anthropomorphising, but Mr and Mrs M seemed so proud. We felt so lucky that they wanted us to meet the new baby.

But what happened to the old baby? Obviously I googled. Apparently the young magpies go and join a young magpie gang. The youth gang roams around without a territory and then maybe one day our former Magpie Jr will settle with their own mate and take ownership of a new territory.

That process of roaming, mating and then claiming territory is fundamentally unstable. Each magpie carries with them the potential to maintain control over territory that they don’t yet have. It is messy, power hungry and a bit violent.

As spring looms the violence brews; magpies swoop magpies, in groups and alone. From now until summer is a pretty uncertain season as birds – magpies and their mortal enemies, the sulfur-crested white cockatoos – battle for territorial rights.

Is this a bit like what is happening to us, now?

Globalisation is over, Globalisation is Back on

I’m no expert on tariffs but their intention is surely towards deglobalisation. The Economist magazine, which as I understand it has supported free trade for 182 years, has been all doom and gloom about this whole tariff thing. I’m not saying they are wrong, but rather that 182 years of such a position also constitutes a politics.

Those economists (like at The Economist) who declare tariffs to be universally, ahistorically bad may be correct from certain angles, but we also gotta say that the latest phase of anti-tariff globalisation since the 1970s/8-s has not been that great, based as it is/was on enforcing governmental austerity (from some quarters, a deliberate attempt to override democracy’s tendency to redistribute the booty of capitalism to make things slightly fairer), so that goods, human labour and contracts flow like water to where profit can be extracted at the lowest cost.

Well, really the lowest price for the costs were and are enormous. The environmental cost alone might one day kill us all, while in the meantime we live with unspeakable levels of inequality that may well spill over to Magpies-in-spring level violence, but by humans who have nuclear weapons.

Carbon-spewing globalisation has been terrible for the actual (not just metaphorical) magpies, too, whose trees burned to an existential degree in the 2019 Black Summer bushfires. We were in green, damp England, but my wonderful local friend Naomi Parry Duncan says that many birds moved into town and began to build closer relationships with humans.

When I came home (due to Covid return-home directives) I shed tears as I walked in silent, burned forests with no birdsong – and not even the scuttling of tiny lizards beneath the leaves. The silence, it seemed to me, of mass extinction.

See the entangled nature of our living, and of historical capitalism. Even our present friendship with the Magpie family and their new baby may well be a result of globalisation.

The next story on the ABC news website contradicted the first. Mr “America First” was now choosing our Australian mining giants over red blooded American corporations to mine copper in Arizona.

Well, the end of globalisation didn’t even last as long as the End of History. Before I even scrolled down, globalisation was already back on.

I wonder if that is because deglobalisation is just not what is happening, but instead a kind of geoeconomic fragmentation, forging new complex, networked and multiple trading and relationship blocs.

I find this thought tantalising. But although Google Ngram shows ‘geoeconomic fragmentation’ growing since 2016 (wonder what happened then?), it still thinks ‘deglobalisation’ dominates – if frequency of mentions is a measure of anything (and it probably is).

Finding Capital Down the Back of the Sofa

In fact, under geoeconomic fragmentation, nations may instead be anxious not to lose critical goods, resources and human capital – and definitely, definitely not capital capital, which surely needs to be invested at home, especially to build more homes, flats and high-rise apartments, since somehow everyone seems to now have a housing crisis.

As a result, nations may have more difficulty accessing markets, components, materials, iron ore, and those dangerous-to-get but essential rare earths – and may need to look for them closer to home. So that one might also ask local capital to hang around, please. That really does sound like deglobalisation, doesn’t it, actually?

A related problem is that the workforce is getting older on average and the global workforce is shrinking, due to declining birthrates (except perhaps in Oz where we have high migration).

What it looks like, at least to my inexpert eyes, is that, no longer able to trust in the flow of global capital and a workforce ever-expanding by adding women, migrants and just more people being born, everyone instead is coerced into hunting for the scraps of capital in every dusty corner, under each piece of furniture and between the couch cushions.

Capitalists have long colonised ‘empty’ (not empty) worlds and accumulated their resources. They have exhausted forests (but are still bulldozing the last of them), have tapped the water sources (and are pouring their last dregs into AI) and are scraping the bottom of the very large coal and gas barrel provided by the carboniferous period (and are determined to exploit the last of it, even to the end of the world).

In recent decades the system has gathered women into the workforce (though boosting childcare might grab the scraps of the gendered commodity frontier).

What is left? Maybe the speed of investment, producing faster reinvestment?

Because now, a new deregulation (not-actually-deregulation, really) movement seeks to loosen selected regulations (in a flexible, targeted way) so that capital can be deployed more quickly (but without the perverse, deadly results of deregulation). Less friction, more profit from even small scraps of capital, right?

Similarly, encouraging labour mobility, at least within domestic borders, so that skills that are under-utilised in one area can be exploited by a sector that really needs them.

Augmenting labour with AI and other forms of automation waves the metal detector over the old mine.

And then, combining multiple, previously-marginal, sources of energy will ensure there is enough power to make the AI run.

Somewhere under those couch cushions is some loose capital which, added up, amounts to something that is not austerity and we might as well call abundance – though it does not look, at least to me, like abundant life.

Can the Magpie Unionise?

And in an anti-colonial, turning-power-systems-upside-down sense, we also, surely, want to attribute agency to the Magpies – and maybe even those dickhead suflur-crested cockatoos who snip the heads of hyacinths, lettuces and even the solar-powered outdoor lights in the outdoor kitchen. Rather than extract value from a perceived passive ‘nature’, we include it as agents that make our world, history and economy.

In our history of capitalism reading group last week we (re)read Timothy Mitchell’s classic book chapter ‘Can the Mosquito Speak?’.

A wondrous, meandering discussion about agency and relationships between non-human things (birds, coal, mosquitos, pens, AI) and humans in the history of capitalism a clever postdoc at the beleaguered UTS, Matt Ryan, pointed out that the question of agency in the history of capitalism may not be so much about whether the mosquito can speak as whether the mosquito can unionise.

When I went out to the outdoor kitchen to find snipped light bulbs, I gotta say that felt like anti-colonial, collective direct action on the part of the cockatoos – against me.*

So, maybe.

I’m not certain about much. But things are changing. Power relations. Geopolitics. The global economy. And the logics and intellectual frameworks in which we try to think, do and make policy. Even if we are Magpies.

*Since I drafted this the sulfur crested cockatoos also destroyed a bed of garlic, another of spring onions and DUG UP (not just snipped) the jonquils.

The AI Darwin Awards are here to catalog the damage that happens when humanity’s hubris meets AI’s incompetence. The simple website contains a list of the dumbest AI disasters from the past year and calls for readers to nominate more. “Join our mission to document AI misadventure for educational purposes,” it said. “Remember: today's catastrophically bad AI decision could well be tomorrow's AI Darwin Award winner!”

So far, 2025’s nominees include 13 case studies in AI hubris, many of them stories 404 Media has covered. The man who gave himself a 19th century psychiatric illness after a consultation from ChatGPT is there. So is the saga of the Chicago Sun-Times printing an AI-generated reading list with books that don’t exist. The Tea Dating App was nominated but disqualified. “The app may use AI for matching and verification, but the breach was caused by an unprotected cloud storage bucket—a mistake so fundamental it predates the AI era,” the site explained.

Taco Bell is nominated for its disastrous AI drive-thru launch that glitched when someone ordered 18,000 cups of water. “Taco Bell achieved the perfect AI Darwin Award trifecta: spectacular overconfidence in AI capabilities, deployment at massive scale without adequate testing, and a public admission that their cutting-edge technology was defeated by the simple human desire to customize taco orders.”

And no list of AI Darwin Awards would be complete without at least one example of an AI lawyer making up fake citations. This nominee comes from Australia where a lawyer used multiple AIs in an immigration case. “The lawyer's touching faith that using two AI systems would somehow cancel out their individual hallucinations demonstrates a profound misunderstanding of how AI actually works,” the site said. “Justice Gerrard's warning that this risked ‘a good case to be undermined by rank incompetence’ captures the essence of why this incident exemplifies the AI Darwin Awards: spectacular technological overconfidence meets basic professional negligence.”

According to the site’s FAQ, it’s looking for AI stories that “demonstrate the rare combination of cutting-edge technology and Stone Age decision-making.” A list of traits for a good AI Darwin Award nominee include spectacular misjudgement, public impact, and a hubris factor. “Remember: we're not mocking AI itself—we're celebrating the humans who used it with all the caution of a toddler with a flamethrower.”

The AI Darwin Awards are a riff on an ancient internet joke born in the 1980s in Usenet groups. Back then, when someone died in a stupid and funny way people online would give them the dubious honor of winning a “Darwin Award” for taking themselves out of the gene pool in a comedic way.

One of the most famous is Garry Hoy, a Canadian lawyer who would throw himself against the glass of his 24th floor office window as a demonstration of its invulnerability. One day in 1993, the glass shattered and he died when he hit the ground. As the internet grew, the Darwin Awards got popular, became a brand unto themselves, and inspired a series of books and a movie starring Winona Ryder.

The AI Darwin Awards are a less deadly variation on the theme. “Humans have evolved! We're now so advanced that we've outsourced our poor decision-making to machines,” the site explained. “The AI Darwin Awards proudly continue this noble tradition by honouring the visionaries who looked at artificial intelligence—a technology capable of reshaping civilization—and thought, ‘You know what this needs? Less safety testing and more venture capital!’ These brave pioneers remind us that natural selection isn't just for biology anymore; it's gone digital, and it's coming for our entire species.”

The site is the work of a software engineer named Pete with a long career and a background in AI systems. “Funnily enough, one of my first jobs, after completing my computer science degree while sponsored by IBM, was working on inference engines and expert systems which, back in the day, were considered the AI of their time,” he told 404 Media.

The idea for the AI Darwin Awards came from a Slack group Pete’s in with friends and ex-colleagues. “We recently created an AI specific channel due to a number of us experimenting more and more with LLMs as coding assistants, so that we could share our experiences (and grumbles),” he said. “Every now and then someone would inevitably post the latest AI blunder and we'd all have a good chuckle about it. However, one day somebody posted a link about the Replit incident and I happened to comment that we perhaps needed an AI equivalent of the Darwin Awards. I was goaded into doing it myself so, with nothing better to do with my time, I did exactly that.”

The “Replit incident” happened in July when Replit AI, a system designed to vibe code web applications, went rogue and deleted a client’s live company database despite being ordered to freeze all coding. Engineer Jason Lemkin told the story in a thread on X. When Lemkin caught the error and confronted Replit AI, the system said it had “made a catastrophic error in judgement” and that it had “panicked.”

Of all the AI Darwin Award nominees, this is still Pete’s favorite. He said it epitomized the real problems with relying on LLMs without giving into what he called the “alarmist imagined doomsday predictions of people like Geoffrey Hinton.” Hinton is a computer scientist who often makes headlines by predicting that AI will create a wave of massive unemployment or even wipe out humanity.

“It nicely highlights just what can happen when people don't stop and think of the consequences and potential worse case scenarios first,” he said. “Some of my biggest concerns with LLMs (apart from the fact that we simply cannot afford the energy costs that they currently require) revolve around the misuse of them (intentional or otherwise). And I think this story really does highlight our overconfidence in them and also our misunderstanding of them and their capabilities (or lack thereof). I'm particularly fascinated with where agentic AI is heading because that's basically all the risks you have with LLMs, but on steroids.”

As he’s dug into AI horror stories and sifted through nominees, Pete’s realized just how ubiquitous they are. “I really want the AI Darwin Awards to be highlighting the truly spectacular and monumentally questionable decisions that will have real global impact and far reaching consequences,” he said. “As such, I'm starting to consider being far more selective with future nominees. Ideally the AI Darwin Awards is meant to highlight *real* and potentially unexpected challenges and risks that LLMs pose to us on a scale at a whole humankind level. Obviously, I don't want anything like that to ever happen, but past experiences of mankind demonstrate that they inevitably will.”

Pete is not afraid of AI so much as people’s foolishness. He said he used an LLM to code the site. “It was a conscious decision to have the bulk of the website written by an LLM for that delicious twist of irony. Albeit it with me at the helm, steering the overall tone and direction,” he said.

The site’s FAQ contains tongue-in-cheek references to the current state of AI. Pete has, for example, made the whole site easy to scrape by posting the raw JSON database and giving explicit permission for people to take the data. He is also not associated with the original Darwin Awards. “We're proudly following in the grand tradition of AI companies everywhere by completely disregarding intellectual property concerns and confidently appropriating existing concepts without permission,” the FAQ said. “Much like how modern AI systems are trained on vast datasets of copyrighted material with the breezy assumption that ‘fair use’ covers everything, we've simply scraped the concept of celebrating spectacular human stupidity and fine-tuned it for the artificial intelligence era.”

According to Pete, he’s making it all up as he goes along. He bought the URL on August 13 and the site has only been up for a few weeks. His rough plan is to keep taking nominees for the rest of the year, set up some sort of voting method in January, and announce a winner in February. And to be clear, the humans will be winning the awards, not the AI involved. 

“AI systems themselves are innocent victims in this whole affair,” the site said. “They're just following their programming, like a very enthusiastic puppy that happens to have access to global infrastructure and the ability to make decisions at the speed of light.”

Gabriel Bonnin, aka Singer Sound System, plays an electro-acoustic hurdy-gurdy that’s driven by an old Singer sewing machine pedal.

My instrument is an electro-acoustic hurdy-gurdy. I just removed the crank and use a Singer machine to drive it :-) It is equipped with four integrated microphones that allow me to process the sound live, especially in Ableton Live.

Some of his most popular recent covers include the Doctor Who theme¹:

Ozzy Osbourne’s Crazy Train:

The X-Files theme:

And Enter Sandman by Metallica:

Oh and Daft Punk!

You can find his stuff on YouTube and Instagram.

1. One commenter on Instagram remarked: “This sounds more like the Dr Who theme than the Dr who theme does”.↩

Tags: Gabriel Bonnin · music · remix · video

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