Sean Gabriel 🇬🇧🎸🇬🇧

Read the headline. Nod sagely. Then look at the pic above it. Shake head vigorously. Hilarious juxtaposition.

A stream of stories now coming out of the US saying that AI ‘singularity’ — or recursive self-improvement, I think — is much closer than most folks thought. It means current AI models able to develop the next model without human participation, then the next and the next, ad finitum. Each one more powerful than the previous. Likely to lead to amazing sci/tech breakthroughs. But also huge risks over human loss of control. Exciting and scary.

Hearty congratulations to England on its greatest World Cup victory since 1966. Maybe even greater, since the task was tougher. Perhaps we may dare to hope football is ‘coming home’ after all. Even if not, nothing can detract from that defeat of Mexico on their hallowed home turf, with all the circumstances conspired in its favour.

The monologue from today’s The Times at One with Andrew Neil @TimesRadio The Palace of Westminster is not as big as you might think. Too small, for example, for it to have its own dedicated village idiot. So they take it in turns.  Yesterday it was the turn of David Lammy and the Tory shadow defence spokesman who goes by the name of James Cartlidge. Nope. I’d never heard of him either.  For DPM and Justice Secretary Lammy this was a welcome return to a role at which he excels.  Who can forget his Oscar winning performance on Celebrity Mastermind which, among many comedy gold highlights, peaked when he was asked ‘who succeeded Henry the Eighth’ and answered ‘Henry the Seventh’. Back of the net.  And Lammy didn’t let us down yesterday. He began by intoning gravely that, as Remembrance Sunday approached, he, for one, would never forget the ultimate sacrifice made by those in war to keep as safe and free.  But he, for one, was alone in the Commons chamber, in forgetting to wear a poppy. One had to be smuggled down to him from a Labour backbencher. As chance would have it, from a military veteran.  This was vintage Lammy. But we expect no less of a man who once complained he never saw any police in his area when one was standing just a few yards away from him.  Cartlidge, the Tory defence spokesman —  pay attention now — kept asking an increasingly rattled Justice Secretary if any other asylum seekers had recently been wrongly released from jail. Lammy refused to answer. Cartlidge asked again and again. Again and again Lammy refused to answer.  Inexplicably. Since, unlike Mastermind, this time Lammy actually knew the correct answer. Another migrant had indeed been wrongly released. Cartlidge knew that too.  He rose to deliver the coup de grace with his final question. Only to be shut down by the Speaker because he’d used up his allotted six questions.  Faced with such an easy target as Lammy only the Tories could send into bat someone who can’t count to six.  The predilection of the prison service for freeing prisoners who shouldn’t be freed adds to the people’s perception that huge chunks of the public sector are now run by unaccountable numpties whose political masters are even more useless than they are.  It’s hard to avoid the impression you could land a jumbo jet in Wandsworth prison and clean it out by lunchtime before anybody would notice.  Of course, as with most things these days, it’s all the Prime Minister’s fault. Lammy wouldn’t have been at the dispatch box yesterday if Keir Starmer hadn’t decided to leg it to Brazil for yet another green grifters convention known as COP. Conference of the Parties. More accurately described these days as an Excuse for a Party. This one is COP30 Not long ago Starmer had no plans to attend. After all, the heads of the four biggest CO2 emitters — China, America, India and Russia — aren’t going so what’s the point of a minor player like Starmer turning up?  Especially since the central purpose of this COP is for the Brazilian President to extort tens of billions of dollars from rich countries to finance a new tropical forest fund. Starmer, under pressure from the Treasury, has already made it clear he’s not interested in ponying up a contribution. And quite right too.  Brazil’s president has shown his commitment to the rain forest by driving a massive highway through it so delegates can get to the COP convention site. And parked two dirty diesel powered cruise ships off the coast to house those delegates for whom there are no hotel rooms. Brazil’s airports are also struggling to cope with the influx of private and official jets.  Like Britain’s prisons the whole COP process isn’t fit for purpose. The Paris COP in 2015 decreed CO2 emissions should peak by 2020 and decline markedly by 2030. Last year CO2 emissions reached a new record level. There is no decline.  COP has been reduced to a jamboree for climate change virtue signallers. It’s time to try something new.