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When Nobody Knows How It Works Anymore: AI, Cognitive Offloading and Lost Expertise

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Editorial image generated by the author. In 1958, Leonard Read published a peculiar little economics essay called I, Pencil . Its narrator was an ordinary wooden pencil, and its central boast was that no single person knew how to make it . That sounds, at first, remarkably like one of the anxieties now surrounding artificial intelligence. We increasingly rely on systems whose workings we do not fully understand while handing them tasks we once had to perform ourselves. Eventually, perhaps, we forget how. But I, Pencil was not a warning about lost knowledge. It was an argument for the enormous productive power of not knowing everything. The wood, graphite, lacquer, metal and machinery involved in making a pencil depend on different people possessing different pieces of knowledge. Nobody has to understand the entire process for the process to work. That makes the pencil a better starting point for thinking about AI than it first appears. The problem is not that arti...
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Slow Horses Season 2 Review: The Cold War Refuses to Stay Buried

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Official promotional image for Slow Horses Season 2. Apple TV+ promotional material, used for review and commentary. Season one of Slow Horses asked what happens to intelligence officers MI5 has written off. Season two asks what happens when MI5 has written off the past. Adapted from Dead Lions , the second of Mick Herron’s Slough House novels , Apple TV+’s six-episode second season begins with the death of a former agent and a warning about Russian “cicadas”: sleeper agents planted in Britain during the Cold War and left dormant until they are needed. What looks at first like an old spy following an old suspicion expands into several connected investigations, concealed identities and political schemes. The sleeper-agent plot brings the series’ Cold War inheritance closer to the surface, but its real advance lies elsewhere. The slow horses are no longer merely proving that they retain useful skills. They are discovering that a correct conclusion does not compensa...
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Starlink Mobile Is Building the Cellular Network Backwards

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SpaceX's latest spectrum deal has unnerved America's mobile operators. The threat is not that satellites will make cell towers obsolete, but that a company starting with the satellite layer might need a different mix of towers, spectrum and capital to compete. On 9 October 2026, America's biggest mobile operators suffered a remarkable sell-off. T-Mobile fell by roughly 13%, AT&T by nearly 10%, and Verizon by almost 9%. Across the same trading session, shares in the companies that own mobile towers rose sharply. Crown Castle gained about 16%, American Tower more than 9%, and SBA Communications more than 7%. The contrasting reactions, documented in Reuters' account of the sell-off , were responses to the same development. The previous day, SpaceX had announced an agreement to buy Grain Management's nationwide portfolio of 800 MHz mobile spectrum, a deal reportedly worth around $8 billion. Grain's announcement confirmed that the sale remained subject to a...
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Where’s My Flying Car? Tesla’s Roadster Has Learned to Backflip

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After decades of complaints about the missing flying car, Tesla has finally demonstrated something approaching one. At an event in Texas on 15 October 2026, its new Roadster drove upside down along a ramp using a suction system, then used thrusters developed with SpaceX to turn in mid-air and jump over other vehicles. The result looked less like an everyday transport solution than an audition for a science-fiction stunt show. It was also undeniably impressive. Image: Tesla Roadster. Official promotional material from Tesla. The next-generation Roadster was first unveiled in 2017 , when deliveries were expected to begin in 2020. Tesla now says production will start in 2028, and the airborne manoeuvres remain a prototype demonstration rather than an approved way to travel to work. After years of waiting, humanity has acquired a car capable of aerial gymnastics, but not necessarily one that can take its owner to the supermarket. Perhaps we should have been more specifi...
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When Intelligence Acquires a Body: Will Robotics Follow the AI Explosion?

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Editorial image generated by the author. AI may be giving robotics a scalable intelligence layer. But intelligence can spread like software; robots still have to be built. For most of the recent AI boom, the revolution has remained strangely immaterial. Robotics is the obvious missing half. Models can write software, analyse documents, generate images, design molecules, translate languages and increasingly operate computers, yet most of the physical world still functions much as it did before ChatGPT appeared. Warehouses contain human workers. Builders carry materials around construction sites. People clean hotel rooms, stock supermarket shelves and load washing machines. The usual explanation is straightforward. Manipulating information is easier than manipulating the physical world. A better AI model can be copied to another server almost instantly; a better robot must be manufactured. Software can attempt a task a thousand times without breaking anything. A robot dropping a g...
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PISA 2025 Is a Bad Ranking. But It May Be a Very Good Alarm

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Editorial image generated by the author. PISA 2025 brought the OECD average to its lowest recorded level in reading, mathematics and science. The newest fall was concentrated in reading and mathematics: reading is down 28 points since 2015 and mathematics 22. One in five 15-year-olds across the OECD now performs below the baseline level in all three core subjects. The obvious conclusion is that schools are failing. The awkward part is that PISA is not particularly good at telling us which countries have the best schools. National populations differ, immigration and socioeconomic background matter, participation rates vary, and students have little personal incentive to perform well on a test with no consequences for them. Even apparently precise country rankings contain enough uncertainty to make some movements up or down the table meaningless. Yet those weaknesses do not make the long-term decline disappear. The important signal in PISA 2025 is less that one countr...
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