Jack Martin Leith

🚨 NEW: The first Great British Railways train has been spotted

It is hard to reply cleanly to something that does not contain an explicit question, especially when the subjects range from Brexit to AI, warfare, autonomy, and art. But I think there is a connecting thread. Brexit, in principle, was not necessarily the problem. The problem was that it was self-sabotaged by a lack of alignment between the people who wanted it and the government that had to implement it. There was no clear shared intention, no coherent execution model, and no agreement on what success even meant. So it became self-defeating. Britain’s perception problem, to me, is mostly a self-perception problem. Having lived here for nine years, my experience is that Britons, across class lines, often seem to view themselves as completely separate from the governing class, aristocracy, oligarchy, or whatever one wants to call the layer that actually holds institutional power. The public posture becomes: “they are doing this to us, and all we can do is complain.” But complaint is not agency. Complaint becomes the national substitute for political action. It expresses dissatisfaction, but it does not produce change. Over time, it breeds contempt and compliance at the same time. That seems central to the UK’s national psyche: people do not feel they are part of the government, even though the government is, at least formally, meant to represent them. They feel governed, but not represented. On AI, I do not think the future is either bleak or utopian. We are probably still in the early dot-com stage of what AI will become. What we currently call AI is still largely programmatic, probabilistic semantic modelling. Something closer to real artificial intelligence may require a more public, verifiable, decentralised infrastructure: models, weights, provenance, and records that are not simply owned and hidden inside private systems. Warfare is the part that seems most immediately dark. Autonomous warfare will make conflict increasingly faceless: money, drones, algorithms, and disposable machinery thrown at geopolitical problems. The most optimistic version may be that, once this becomes intolerable, societies are forced to ritualise conflict into something closer to high-stakes sporting competition — almost a Rollerball outcome — because the alternative is endless automated violence without visible human accountability. And art may become one of the only surviving meaningful career paths, not because AI cannot generate content, but because it can generate too much of it. In a world flooded by synthetic production, visible humanity becomes the scarce surface. The differentiator will be whether a person can publicly surface themselves, create with recognisable human direction, and form a genuine relationship with an audience. It may become like the distinction between athletes who use performance enhancers and those who do not: not because the enhanced version cannot perform, but because the unequipped human act carries a different kind of meaning.

🚨NEW: Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander is expected to confirm that HS2 trains will run slower than initially planned, in a bid to cut costs

So we could just have reused the old Great Central alignment after all (the one that was much cheaper but abandoned because it wasn't suitable for high speed).