Paul Buckingham - Blog Philosophy and life in general

Time magazine tells us that their ‘Person of the Year’ is a “powerful way to focus the world’s attention on the people that shape our lives. And this year, no one had a greater impact than the individuals who imagined, designed, and built AI”.

Time says that it recognises “a force that has dominated the year’s headlines, for better or for worse. For delivering the age of thinking machines, for wowing and worrying humanity, for transforming the present and transcending the possible, the Architects of AI are TIME’s 2025 Person of the Year.”

I’m not actually certain where Times got its idea that we now have ‘thinking machines’. We don’t. But their overall thesis was born out when in January the people seen as important by the incoming administration gathered in Washington, D.C., to attend the inauguration of the new President. Prominent were the chiefs of the big U.S. technology companies. ‘The Techbros’ had arrived in force.

But the same day, the Chinese company, DeepSeek, released a new, cheaper, artificial-intelligence chip that caused a fall in the share price of the hitherto unchallenged AI chip-maker, Nvidia. The next day, the Techbros went back to the White House in order to pledge an investment of $500 billion to build AI data centres around the U.S.

This fitted with the view taken by Time: as they put it: “whatever the question was, AI was the answer. We saw it accelerate medical research and productivity, and seemed to make the impossible possible. It was hard to read or watch anything without being confronted with news about the rapid advancement of a technology and the people driving it. Those stories unleashed endless debates about how disruptive AI would be for our lives. No business leader could talk about the future without invoking the impact of this technological revolution. No parent or teacher could ignore how their teenager or student was using it.”

But if the past is a reliable guide then, although the future will probably bring significant change, there is likely to be little actual benefit straight-away. Indeed, it is clear from business surveys that although vast amounts have been spent on the introduction of AI-based technology, little financial benefit is being seen from it.

Just like in the days of the Industrial Revolution, it takes a lot of time to work out how best to benefit from the new systems and inventions.

In the cotton mills powered by water or steam, the emphasis was on a centralised power source, distributed by belts and pulley wheels throughout the factory. When electric motors came along they were slotted into where the original power source was and used the same inefficient power distribution system. It was only when new factories started to be constructed that they were able to take advantage of the fact that electric motors can be small and can each be placed where needed throughout the factory, the only connection being the electric wiring. It was after that change came about that major benefits began to be seen.

AI can though feel like magic. As Time told us “In the past few weeks alone, we’ve learned that it could facilitate communication with whales, solve an unsolved 30-year-old maths problem, and outperform traditional hurricane-prediction models. They’re getting to be at least as good as doctors in analysing scans and symptoms in order to produce a reliable diagnosis.” This week it was reported that they can do the calculations in seconds needed for nuclear fusion which once took days.

The speed of adoption of AI has been without precedent. “Every industry wants it … and every nation needs to build it,” says Jensen Huang, who leads Nvidia, the world’s most valuable company. In an interview, he told TIME: “This is the single most impactful technology of our time.” Of course, he would say that wouldn’t he. And certainly, as we have discussed before, the ability of AI to recognise patterns is astonishing, constantly improving and potentially very useful.

But the Large Language Models are already languishing, showing little sign of significant improvement in their outcomes.

Only last week, a very important case was decided in the employment tribunal in Scotland. The governing Scottish National Party has been in the lead in promoting trans rights: it was a case challenging their policies which ended up in the Supreme Court with the judgment that, in the equalities legislation, sex means biological sex.

This latest case also dealt with equalities law - as operated by a hospital in Fife. It related to the supposed ‘right’ for a male doctor who ‘identified’ as a woman (not even operated on) to use a changing room also used by a nurse who was an actual woman. It took less than 24 hours for the 300 page judgement to unravel. It seems that someone involved in preparing the judgement had used an LLM in its drafting. And guess what, it had hallucinated, coming up with erroneous and non-existent citations to support the judge’s rather controversial findings. Oops!

But there are other underlying problems with the AI tech. ‘Time’ admits that all this progress comes with trade-offs: “The amount of energy required to run these systems drains resources, both electricity and water (for cooling). Jobs are likely to go up in smoke. Misinformation proliferates as AI posts and videos make it harder to determine what’s real.” Large-scale cyberattacks are possible without human intervention. The bots can simply be given basic instruction as to what to attack and left to go on their way.

And ironically, as Google increases its involvement in AI, its use as an actual search engine diminishes – its own LLM is coming up with its own answers to the original search questions we type in. This means that the original business model is now far less profitable, because there are not nearly as many hits on individual web-sites with Google able to take its share of the profit. And of course the individual web-sites are seeing far less traffic than they used to.

But there is a far more shadowy effect from AI. It has created immense, some would say absurd, valuations for the companies involved. In turn, this has made the Techbros richer than Rockefeller. And with that has come a form of competition amongst the billionaires which demands even higher valuations.

These though are not based on current profitability, but the promise of ‘jam tomorrow’. and so arguably they create a bubble.

In order to try to shore-up their position, they have turned their gaze to Europe (and the UK) which they see as standing in their way because of the regulatory frameworks being imposed. As the boss of MI6 said in her speech on Monday, we can see that there is a grab for power amongst a handful of business leaders. With the backing of the Trumpster, they have claimed that they are being targetted unfairly by the EU in its attempts to regulate them. Musk goes further, saying that the users of X should be entitled to absolute free speech.

This is underlined by the National Security Strategy document issued by the White House. This attacks Europe (apart from Hungary) saying that it is so weak in its response to immigration that it is shortly to undergo ‘civilisational erasure’ - a re-branding of the ‘Great Replacement’ conspiracy theory so beloved of racists everywhere.

And so these good folk, having our best interests at heart, feel justified in trying to intervene in Europe in order to forestall erasure of its historic character (whatever that is). They say this is coming about through ‘unchecked immigration and declining birthrates’ and its ‘censorship of free speech and suppression of political opposition’.

The strategy however says it has ‘great optimism’ for the rise of ‘patriotic European parties’. They are now saying quite openly that the US will cultivate transatlantic ethno-nationalist movements. The Techbros have the money to support extremist European parties and have every motivation to do so.

But we know that this is ultimately all about the avoidance of regulation and so the enhancement of their profitability.

It’s long past time that we started putting up a spirited resistance. We’ve rolled over far too often.

Paul Buckingham

18 December 2025

	Person of the Year

	Time magazine tells us that their ‘Person of the Year’ is a “powerful way to focus the world’s attention on the people that shape our lives. And this year, no one had a greater impact than the individuals who imagined, designed, and built AI”. Time says that it recognises “a force that has dominated the year’s headlines, for better or for worse. For delivering the age of thinking machines, for wowing and worrying humanity, for transforming the present and transcending the possible, the Architects of AI are TIME’s 2025 Person of the Year.” I’m not actually certain where Times got its idea that we now have ‘thinking machines’. We don’t. But their overall thesis was born out when in January the people seen as important by the incoming administration gathered in Washington, D.C., to attend the inauguration of the new President. Prominent were the chiefs of the big U.S. technology companies. ‘The Techbros’ had arrived in force. But the same day, the Chinese company, DeepSeek, released a new, cheaper, artificial-intelligence chip that caused a fall in the share price of the hitherto unchallenged AI chip-maker, Nvidia. The next day, the Techbros went back to the White House in order to pledge an investment of $500 billion to build AI data centres around the U.S. This fitted with the view taken by Time: as they put it: “whatever the question was, AI was the answer. We saw it accelerate medical research and productivity, and seemed to make the impossible possible. It was hard to read or watch anything without being confronted with news about the rapid advancement of a technology and the people driving it. Those stories unleashed endless debates about how disruptive AI would be for our lives. No business leader could talk about the future without invoking the impact of this technological revolution. No parent or teacher could ignore how their teenager or student was using it.” But if the past is a reliable guide then, although the future will probably bring significant change, there is likely to be little actual benefit straight-away. Indeed, it is clear from business surveys that although vast amounts have been spent on the introduction of AI-based technology, little financial benefit is being seen from it. Just like in the days of the Industrial Revolution, it takes a lot of time to work out how best to benefit from the new systems and inventions. In the cotton mills powered by water or steam, the emphasis was on a centralised power source, distributed by belts and pulley wheels throughout the factory. When electric motors came along they were slotted into where the original power source was and used the same inefficient power distribution system. It was only when new factories started to be constructed that they were able to take advantage of the fact that electric motors can be small and can each be placed where needed throughout the factory, the only connection being the electric wiring. It was after that change came about that major benefits began to be seen. AI can though feel like magic. As Time told us “In the past few weeks alone, we’ve learned that it could facilitate communication with whales, solve an unsolved 30-year-old maths problem, and outperform traditional hurricane-prediction models. They’re getting to be at least as good as doctors in analysing scans and symptoms in order to produce a reliable diagnosis.” This week it was reported that they can do the calculations in seconds needed for nuclear fusion which once took days. The speed of adoption of AI has been without precedent. “Every industry wants it … and every nation needs to build it,” says Jensen Huang, who leads Nvidia, the world’s most valuable company. In an interview, he told TIME: “This is the single most impactful technology of our time.” Of course, he would say that wouldn’t he. And certainly, as we have discussed before, the ability of AI to recognise patterns is astonishing, constantly improving and potentially very useful. But the Large Language Models are already languishing, showing little sign of significant improvement in their outcomes. Only last week, a very important case was decided in the employment tribunal in Scotland. The governing Scottish National Party has been in the lead in promoting trans rights: it was a case challenging their policies which ended up in the Supreme Court with the judgment that, in the equalities legislation, sex means biological sex. This latest case also dealt with equalities law - as operated by a hospital in Fife. It related to the supposed ‘right’ for a male doctor who ‘identified’ as a woman (not even operated on) to use a changing room also used by a nurse who was an actual woman. It took less than 24 hours for the 300 page judgement to unravel. It seems that someone involved in preparing the judgement had used an LLM in its drafting. And guess what, it had hallucinated, coming up with erroneous and non-existent citations to support the judge’s rather controversial findings. Oops! But there are other underlying problems with the AI tech. ‘Time’ admits that all this progress comes with trade-offs: “The amount of energy required to run these systems drains resources, both electricity and water (for cooling). Jobs are likely to go up in smoke. Misinformation proliferates as AI posts and videos make it harder to determine what’s real.” Large-scale cyberattacks are possible without human intervention. The bots can simply be given basic instruction as to what to attack and left to go on their way. And ironically, as Google increases its involvement in AI, its use as an actual search engine diminishes – its own LLM is coming up with its own answers to the original search questions we type in. This means that the original business model is now far less profitable, because there are not nearly as many hits on individual web-sites with Google able to take its share of the profit. And of course the individual web-sites are seeing far less traffic than they used to. But there is a far more shadowy effect from AI. It has created immense, some would say absurd, valuations for the companies involved. In turn, this has made the Techbros richer than Rockefeller. And with that has come a form of competition amongst the billionaires which demands even higher valuations. These though are not based on current profitability, but the promise of ‘jam tomorrow’. and so arguably they create a bubble. In order to try to shore-up their position, they have turned their gaze to Europe (and the UK) which they see as standing in their way because of the regulatory frameworks being imposed. As the boss of MI6 said in her speech on Monday, we can see that there is a grab for power amongst a handful of business leaders. With the backing of the Trumpster, they have claimed that they are being targetted unfairly by the EU in its attempts to regulate them. Musk goes further, saying that the users of X should be entitled to absolute free speech. This is underlined by the National Security Strategy document issued by the White House. This attacks Europe (apart from Hungary) saying that it is so weak in its response to immigration that it is shortly to undergo ‘civilisational erasure’ - a re-branding of the ‘Great Replacement’ conspiracy theory so beloved of racists everywhere. And so these good folk, having our best interests at heart, feel justified in trying to intervene in Europe in order to forestall erasure of its historic character (whatever that is). They say this is coming about through ‘unchecked immigration and declining birthrates’ and its ‘censorship of free speech and suppression of political opposition’. The strategy however says it has ‘great optimism’ for the rise of ‘patriotic European parties’. They are now saying quite openly that the US will cultivate transatlantic ethno-nationalist movements. The Techbros have the money to support extremist European parties and have every motivation to do so. But we know that this is ultimately all about the avoidance of regulation and so the enhancement of their profitability. It’s long past time that we started putting up a spirited resistance. We’ve rolled over far too often. Paul Buckingham 18 December 2025
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