AI and Tax-Gate: An Email to The Rest Is Politics

Dear Rory and Alastair

I am a regular listener of the podcast because I find you each and together very listenable. This was proven to me during Rory's silent retreat when I had to hit pause on Alastair and Mehdi Hasan: you can disagree agreeably, but you can unfortunately also agree disagreeably, nauseatingly, schoolboyishly!

The two topics you covered recently, AI and taxes, have sharpened my understanding of you both. I share this understanding here unsolicited because I feel you still leave some things unsaid, and worse, not explored thoroughly. Perhaps it is all in an effort to disagree agreeably, but some points of disagreement are not developed enough. For this, Rory, I lay most of the blame at your feet. It was a delightful moment when you described some of the objections to AI data centres and to fossil fuels in general as a green "hairshirt" to Caroline Lucas and Alastair. However, on other occasions, you are in fact the one in a hairshirt. This is the hairshirt of being a Tory from a privileged background, endowed with a superior capacity to learn and reason. Stop humbling yourself when Alastair teases you about your agitation over wealth taxes. You hate bad ideas, especially when they are popular, ineffective, and self-harming, like a wealth tax. You are enraged by Boris Johnson, Gary Stevenson, Zack Polanski and their ilk of unserious self-promoters who may have stumbled on half of a good idea at some point in their lives but are unfit for the roles they have promoted themselves into because their hearts are not in the right place. Even if their hearts were, you are not sure they are actually bright enough anyway. You don't need to atone for the moral and intellectual superiority you feel by apologising about your upbringing and background. Take off the hairshirt, put on the wig, and hand down your judgments.

Alastair, I also have Trump Derangement Syndrome. But I was shocked when you implied that your views on AI yo-yoed in opposition to Trump's. If true, it is more irrational and irresponsible than many of the things Trump has said and done. You say that you are not convinced by how useful AI actually is and you even talked to a young person recently who said they stopped using it. You say that you are waiting for someone to convince you of its usefulness and future. I suggest you start by having longer conversations probing the staff on your podcast. If the majority of Goalhanger's editors, producers, coders, designers, researchers, pollsters, analysts etc are not making regular use of LLMs and finding significant productivity gains then I suggest you and Rory start looking for a new brain trust and mouthpiece. AI is not the future, it is already a reality. It is OK for you and Caroline Lucas to be left behind in this because you are already made and established, but that is not OK for Izzie Isabel Stanley and her cohorts.

AI enables a new mode of thinking. What looks like outsourcing thinking does not necessarily mean we do less thinking, it is often the opposite because it forces you to clarify your thinking, speeds up iterations of thinking to decision, and frees up more time for more thinking/decisions/results. Even just in my personal life, I use LLM chatbots as a fitness trainer, gardening advisor, career coach, marriage counsellor, DIY manual, sparring partner, financial planner, and so on. Never mind a standalone recursive self-improvement AI system, I and millions of others form an RSI system today together with AI to improve our knowledge and actions directly and continuously.

As a journalist, PR guru, avid reader, and writer, you understand more than most the power of language. It is uniquely powerful because it encodes everything humans can experience and communicate; it is a representation of reality itself and is deployed to alter reality. How can one doubt the power of a non-human actor that masters it? The question is not whether AI is going to be useful, the question is how we harness and control its immense power as it augments more decisions, more processes, more thinking, more humans. Do not let techno-excesses and good writings that call these out like a papal encyclical obscure the big picture. We must have water, we must have wheat, we must have nature, we must have beauty – but we must also have enough energy for superhuman thinking machines to defend and develop ourselves. We must have it all and that is the challenge for the state and politicians, and you and Rory are supposed to tell them how best to get there. No easy answers please.