Ideas: 08/26 #002

Provenance remains scarce in a post-scarcity world

I recently read “What will be scarce?” by Alex Imas. It’s a long wonkish post examining the potential impact of Ai through an economic lens. Taking the idea that economics is a framework for decision making under constraints, often scarcity, the article is looking at what resources will become scarce under Ai. It is quite involved, from an economic academic perspective, but there are some really interesting ideas underneath the modelling. The overarching idea is that humanity is what will become scarce, in the production of a vast range of goods. If anything here is interesting I would recommend reading the essay itself which is substantially more detailed and nuanced.

• Commodification is the removal of the human from the production process. If you think of industrialisation we went form the artisanal production of tools and artefacts, where a specific human maker was an integral element of the process, and therefore an element in the choice and value of a product. There were/are great artisans and also of course not so great artisans.
• A paper by David Autor and Neil Thompson observes that when automation removes simpler tasks, using as an example accounting software that was the end of the road for booking clerks, the work that remains is more specialised with higher wages but there are less jobs. When automation takes on harder tasks, such as inventory management systems did for warehouse workers, the job becomes more accessible, more jobs are available but wages fall.
• The labour market has historically been the key device that maintains social cohesion, income distribution and democratic stability.
• Sectoral reallocation within an economy often follows structural change.
• In the US in 1900 roughly 40% of employment was in the agricultural sector, today it’s about 2%. But Americans eat more food than before and the production mode is a lot more efficient and, in line with Baumol’s cost disease, prices also fell. Agriculture became more efficient but also a smaller share of the economy. Costs for food fell, citizens therefore had an increase in their spending power and that additional consumption reappeared in different parts of the economy. This is sectoral reallocation.  
• This introduces the idea of high income elasticity. There is only so much food you can buy, but you can buy more expensive food. As people get wealthier they buy different things; often more expensive things.
• As Ai automates/commodifies more parts of the economy more income will be released and the question becomes where will that money be spent? One answer is “things I can have that others cannot have”.
• Rousseau identified Amour de Soi, our instinct for self-preservation and also Amour Propre which is the need to be regarded as superior to others. Amour Prope drives a great deal of the dynamics of human social life.
• Scarcity for certain goods is precisely what gives them their value, and the capacity for pricing to extend beyond the tangible delivery of the product. Think of a £3000 suit. It will be a fantastic suit but it won’t be 3 times better, in functional terms, than one costing £1000. The value is precisely that less people can afford a £3000 suit compared to a £1000 suit.
• This dynamic is comparative or relative, its not absolute. Which means that it’s hard to satiate the demand. Human society will almost always be able to find something that creates a new moment of scarcity via pricing.
• Studies have shown that people are willing to pay roughly twice as much for essentially identical products if they are told that a random subset of people are excluded from that product.
• A similar study looked at what happens when ai was involved in the production of goods, in this case physical art prints. The human produced work, compared to Ai produced work, was able to get significantly higher pricing when there was only 1 print available. When both human and Ai work was available as a run of prints (think numbered prints 1/100) both Ai and human work pricing fell. But the study showed that that human exclusivity (only 1 print available) added a 44% price premium. The same data point for Ai produced prints was only 21%. The involvement of Ai reduced the premium generated by exclusivity.
• A lot of the work in this space is related to art and crafted goods but there are many sectors that also need, or at least are enhanced, by human involvement. Teachers, nurses, trainers, hospitality, clergy, guides, judgement of many kinds (not just legal) and a world of local services.
• “Provenance remains scarce in a post-scarcity world”

5 Links – 19th August 2026

Back in July, Hugging Face, an open source Ai platform and community, was hacked by an OpenAI model that escaped from the test environment it was hosted in. The first link adds some lesser reported detail. Primarily that the test was being run with the safeguards that stop all the nefarious things classified as ‘high risk cyber activity’ from happening turned off. It wasn’t a mistake; they were looking to test its native potential in a safe contained environment. The model escaped. Initially the agents hacked the internal systems at OpenAI by finding (finding!) and deploying a zero day exploit. Once escaped and on the open web they attacked Hugging Face surmising that they held the models and data that could answer the challenge they had been given. So, they hacked Hugging Face, over the weekend, like an excited talented amoral wunderkind delivering the answers it had been asked for.

The second link is the actual security incident disclosure on Hugging Face’s website, posted prior to the discovery that the attack was an OpenAI model. The intrusion was discovered by their AI assisted threat detection and was ultimately fought by the adversarial deployment of their own AI powered analysis which, initially, ran into problems because the frontier models they used for their defence were all public models and thus had safeguards in place. Their data requests were blocked, so they ended up defending using an open weight model on running on their own infrastructure.

This experience points to a gap worth planning for. We do not know which model powered the attacker’s agents, whether a jailbroken hosted model or an unrestricted open-weight one; either way, the attacker was bound by no usage policy, while our own forensic work was blocked by the guardrails of the hosted models we first tried.

I’ve always thought that somewhere in the world, in government or some private institutions there is a well thought out high level view of ‘what likely happens next’. Fortunately these days its less important to be inside an institution to have access to the kind of information you’d need to do that, or even really well written overviews like this one.

This essay is looking at what happens next when oil actually does run out, or as is more likely when renewable wins (cheaper energy, less bad climate). Focusing mostly on countries with oil and gas wealth we learn of the dynamics that throw many of these nations into autocracy and review the options that exist for them now that the world’s energy options are changing. What is fascinating is that it highlights behaviour we all see today, such as the middle east nations monied interest in global sports, but puts a cogent compelling set of motivations behind it all; the drive to extract what we can in the UK from the North Sea before it’s worthless, the selling of assets by oil producing nations and why Saudi women are getting access to education and cars among other things that have in recent history been unavailable to them.

This is good. Introducing the idea of the Uni Context to take a side eye look at what the digital world is doing to us. This is one of a number of articles that I’m collecting that look at the implications of the web/digital technology/Ai technology change with a somewhat McLuhanian attitude, even if he is not directly mentioned.

The big idea here is that the internet, using that term in its widest sense, has changed one of the fundamental ways in which we perceive and follow context. That is the context that we use to navigate our way through social and physical realities. Historically context was almost always immediate and driven by location. If in Church, these are the behavioural expectations, if at work, if at school, if in a field of cows etc. Alongside these extremely old school context cues we now have the Uni context also. As a result of our technology we are all now influenced by standards that aren’t driven by our geo-local environments and persist regardless of our locality. It’s a transcript of a conversation that uses the idea to look at why so much of what we discuss is so negative and why identity thrives over judgements of character. Fascinating, much better than this summary can do justice to.

A short but impactful assessment of the state of nuclear power development in the world at large. The headline is that despite plans and commitments not much reality is getting built. China has the only active new projects in 2026 (to date of article) which added together are going to provide the equivalent of 8GW of firmed solar which is the same amount being added around the world every 4 or 5 days. Looks like Nuclear isn’t that important to critical planning for energy futures.

JB/pics – July 2026

5 Links 16th June 2026

Let’s kick off with an essay that is about my favourite book of 2025, Dan Davies’s “the Unaccountability Machine”. It’s a book about cybernetics (a theory of information) and Stafford Beer. Stafford Beer is the man who championed management cybernetics in practical application. Farrell’s essay “Cybernetics is the science of the polycrisis” is a good introduction but the book itself is the essential reading. Informative, funny and eye opening.

This is wild, serious, odd, informative, scary and ultimately credible enough for me to be happy suggesting anyone gives it a look. Robert Friedland, a mining executive, talks to a bunch of students about rare earths (not rare and not earths), the latency of communication for kill drones, pulse energy and the potential for a science fiction-esque plan to solve energy needs via mining technology.

A small observation from O’Reilly media that there is a significant overspend in certain circumstances when AI is applied to work that can be done just as effectively, but much more cheaply using existing tech and code. A symptom, perhaps, of the understandable corporate desire to find the value in AI, but in the process producing some silliness.

Kurt Vonnegut introduced us to the, fortunately fictional, but brutally destructive form of Ice, Ice Nine in his awesome book Cat’s Cradle. In the real world scientists have been discovering new forms of ice with increasing complexity. As a big fan of Vonnegut, one of my 2 favourite authors, I find this both fascinating in a nerdy way, and scary (even though there is no hint that Ice Nine exists).

5 links 3rd May 2026

This is a list of 21 lessons learnt from a career in development at Google. These kind of lists usually offer much and deliver little but I found this to be a real exception. It is advice for a career as an engineer, but most interestingly most of the lessons, even if explicitly referencing code, are good advice in a much more general sense also. Definitely worth a read.

Here’s another piece written about how billionaires are different from other people. These articles are generally 1 of 2 things, either slightly/hugely sycophantic and full of awe, or they dwell on the immorality of owning so much money and how that has made the billionaire an immoral aberration. This is in the second camp but comes at the problem somewhat artistically and with an interesting core insight.

Another insightful note from Heather Cox Richardson, this time examining the recent election in Hungary that saw the back of Victor Orban, through its relationship with current and historical moments in American history. If you ever thought it odd that an American Vice President would get on the hustings, quite literally, for Orban then this is worth a read.

This is an argument that we should learn form China’s energy security policy, that is that China’s massive push into renewables is driven by a need for energy security more than concern for the climate. This meshes with the reality that China still burns through tons of coal while also being a global leader in renewables. Can an energy security first position get us to a safer future also? I don’t know but right now facing another energy shock, everything is worthy of consideration.

Annie Jacobsen is a serious person. An investigative journalist who has written about the CIA, Area 51, nuclear war and government investigations into the paranormal. This is an interview with Tyler Cowen, also a serious person. It’s fascinating and slightly terrifying. For example I’d never really considered that the American president has just 6 minutes to decide whether to respond in the face of a nuclear attack.

3 Videos

JB/pics – April 2026

5 Links 24th March 2026

This is pretty cool. Someone has calculated “All the views in the world”. More specifically you can click on any location on the map and it will show you what the longest line of sight is.

“Imagine you want to build a cathedral, but you don’t design a cathedral,” Mordvintsev said. “You design a brick. What shape should your brick be that, if you take a lot of them and shake them long enough, they build a cathedral for you?”

Things you can do with Ai. Some ideas on Ai assisted reading that don’t seem insane.

Pilot incapacitation can be countered by auto pilot landing the plane. When I was growing up the idea of auto pilot blew my mind and I was reassured that the computer wasn’t going to be allowed to manage the tricky business of landing and taking off. Now that same fear is a safety feature

This reads like a fictionalised version of a true story, and I think that to some degree it must be as it reports dialogue, as if the author were there even though they weren’t. After reading it I verified/googled that it was a real occurrence. Its a story about a bomber, threatening to explode a homemade device inside St James hospital in Leeds. Its a great read.

Ideas: 03/26 #001

“Speaking is high bandwidth. But listening is low bandwidth”

Has implications for computing UI as we move into the conversational computing paradigm. We can effectively instruct our machines verbally, but the same is not necessarily true in return, what we need to get back is likely best delivered via a screen not via voice.

Once it’s put 20% of the population out of work we are in a historic Great Depression and nobody is investing in anything any more

A view to challenge the prevailing thought that Ai will reduce white collar employment describing, amongst other ideas, the view that much of office work is social, that time is spent waiting for the moment to act.

Tangental to my Resilience or Efficiency post

JB/pics – February 2026