andrew smith author

What a timely, perversely joyful song, led by the timeless, ageless Sparks - brilliant to see it on Kimmel. youtube.com/watch?v=q6sa6p…

I just finished reading a fascinating (hi)story of the east coast ("Silicon Alley") part of the dotcom boom and bust by @wiresmith -- andrewsmithauthor.com/books/totally-…

Devil In The Stack by Andrew Smith: The real Moriarty was the godfather of computers trib.al/vHkSmot

@kareem_carr Hi Kareen. In case it's of interest I wrote a book about this, published last year and called *Devil in the Stack*, in which I learnt to code so I could understand what Big Tech is doing and how many of their claims are true. The only way we can resist is to know what they know!

There's a toxic culture coming out of the AI industry that keeps trying to get us not to think. The message is everywhere. Don’t read the code, just vibe-code. Don’t try to understand all the text, just let AI summarize it. Don’t bother educating yourself, it’s too late. Don’t worry about the errors. Trust that everything will be fixed in the next version. The theme is the same. Don’t think too hard. Just keep swallowing the slop.

It may be that while these guys understand code they have less than no understanding of people, how brains work or what consciousness is (ie things no one fully understands beyond the near-certainty that they have almost nothing in common with a manufactured database).

One of the greatest ever anti-war (Iraq) speeches by the late, great Tony Benn: “What fools we are to live in a generation for which war is a computer game for our children and just an interesting little channel for news item. Every Member of Parliament tonight who votes for the Government motion will be consciously and deliberately accepting responsibility for the deaths of innocent people if the war begins.”

I know it's not conscious. How come he's CEO is he doesn't?

So loved doing this event in London, discussing *Devil in the Stack* with a nod to unsung Colossus codebreaking computer builder Tommy Flowers. Streaming now on Radio Sohemia.

Am I alone in being a lifelong Labour voter who has recently come to doubt they will ever vote Labour again? I suspect not.

Oracle just told every AI company on earth the same thing. Your models are worthless. Not the technology, talent or the billions spent training them. But the data they were trained on. Larry Ellison, the man who built Oracle into the backbone of global enterprise just dropped a bombshell. He said ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok, and Llama, all of them are training on the exact same data.​ The entire public internet, every Wikipedia page, Reddit thread and every news article. That means they're all converging essentially becoming the same product with different logos.​ Ellison's word for it is commodities. But here's where it gets dangerous. He says the real gold isn't public data, It's private data.​ The medical records in hospital systems, the financial data in bank vaults. The supply chain secrets of every Fortune 500 and guess where most of that data already lives. Not Google, Amazon or Microsoft but inside Oracle.​ Oracle databases hold most of the world's high value private enterprise data. So Oracle just launched something called AI Database 26ai.​ It lets the top AI models, ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok, Llama reason directly over a company's private data, without that data ever leaving the vault.​ They're using a technique called RAG, Retrieval Augmented Generation. The AI doesn't train on your data, it searches it in real time.​ Think about what that means. A bank could ask AI to analyze every loan it's ever made without exposing a single customer record. A hospital could have AI diagnose patients using its full medical history without violating HIPAA.​ A defense contractor could let AI reason across classified operations without data leaving a secure environment.​ Ellison is betting this is bigger than the training market. Bigger than the GPU boom. Bigger than the data center buildout.​ He called it the largest and fastest growing market in history.​ The numbers back the ambition. Oracle's remaining performance obligations just hit $523 billion. That's contracted revenue not yet delivered and $300 billion of it comes from OpenAI alone.​ Cloud revenue hit $8 billion in a single quarter, OCI grew 66 percent and GPU revenue surged 177 percent.​ But here's the part nobody's talking about. If private data becomes the real AI moat, then whoever controls the database controls the future of AI.​ And that's a level of power that should make everyone uncomfortable.

Heathrow yesterday. Who says robots can't be fun? (couldn't resist this)

@robskievans @wiresmith I interviewed Andrew in 2013 (blimey!) for @AviationXtended and that episode is still available to listen to / download. aviation-xtended.co.uk/ep-09-space-ex…

@patrickc Wow. This is a lovely thought but hard to see evidence for atm. Hope you're right because the tech industry is at an all-time low in most non-participants' eyes. I see a growing contempt for its products among my kids' generation.

Two conversations this weekend make me think that there's a vibe shift afoot in Silicon Valley around what one should work on and what is worthwhile. Culturally, it feels like the moment is ripe for new frameworks: • Davos expert morality is stale and discredited. • It's also apparent that the "just be super based" Counter-Enlightenment is not really an answer. (Yes, woke went too far, but simply inverting it doesn't work.) • EA is no longer the automatic default for smart people. • There's increasing skepticism of slot and slop machine dynamics. Overall, "what is worthy and valuable?" feels like it's becoming more central.

@wiresmith’s Moondust by far the best book I have ever found in a bargain box, felt a travesty to be on fire-sale! Novel idea about coming back down - becoming ever more timely. Rare to hear him speak on it. Armstrong companion doco also excellent. 🧑‍🚀 🌒 🚀

@quynhanderson @SimonHuntCityAM Hi Quynh! Sorry for slow reply - just seen this. Yes Devil in the Stack is available on Amazon in the US and UK (different editions). I try to buy from bookshop.org, though, as they treat authors better! uk.bookshop.org/p/books/devil-…

@SimonHuntCityAM Is your book available on amazon?

1 down, 51 to go! This book by Graphcore's Nigel Toon comes out next month. Stay tuned for the review.

RIP Jimmy Cliff. Had the honor of sharing a stage with him once, in a football stadium in Reims, France (with my own band A Popular History of Signs). Can honestly say I've never seen a more magnetic performer. youtube.com/watch?v=7Znh0O…

@Evatheking250 Hi Evangile! Thanks so much for your interest in "Devil in the Stack". Actually that photo is a different Andrew Smith - a YA novelist (confusing I know). For what it's worth, this is me:

Meet **Andrew Smith** — author of *Devil in the Stack*, exploring how code shapes..🔍 Author 👉 andrewsmithauthor.com Book 👉 amazon.in/Devil-Stack-Se… Featured by Dr. Bickmore’s YA Wednesday 👉 drbickmoresyawednesday.com #AndrewSmith #DevilInTheStack #YALit #TechEthics

Really glad people are picking up on this :-)

Andrew Smith, author of DEVIL IN THE STACK, reveals the actual man behind the machine (the world’s first digital electronic computer, that is) in this article in the Guardian. theguardian.com/world/2025/oct…

@SimonHuntCityAM @SimonHuntCityAM Loving your 46/52 pick with "Devil in the Stack" by Andrew Smith! The way it blends a personal coding journey with the history of logic is both engaging and insightful great choice! Where can we get our hands on this gem to read it ourselves? someone asked.