The left is missing out on AI (Odds and Ends #87)

Plus middle-class conspiracism, scarily impressive humanoid robots, and rewiring the Civil Service

Photo by Hitesh Choudhary on Unsplash

POD! On YIMBY Pod this week, Martin tells the maddening story of how just one planning complaint has scuppered a neighbourhood battery storage scheme in Banbury, and I explain why Europe needs to panic and build its own independent space launch capability. Plus we speak to Zion Lights about her excellent new book Energy is Life! Listen here, or wherever you get your pods.

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Hello! It’s time for Odds and Ends, your regular round-up of the most interesting links I’ve seen this week. I’ll be honest, there’s lot of AI chat this week, but it’s not my fault that it’s the most important thing happening in the world at the moment, and that understanding this technology is going to be critical if we want to build the future!

So without further ado, this time I’m featuring some entirely human-written links about:

• AI & the left: why it’s missing the moment; why I’m not the only Substacker who’s been AI-pilled; and some playful humanoid robots that should freak us out.

• Power & institutions: why Americans assume everyone’s corrupt — and what it would take to properly rewire the civil service machine.

• Culture & media: Behind the scenes of how the Olympics is broadcast… and why we might need to push the “Hollywood is being destroyed by AI” clock forward to… next week.

But first, one more thing before we hit the paywall…

A vision of an agentic future (Tom Loosemore)

This might surprise you, but there’s not actually a single government website you can visit to discover what benefits you’re entitled to. So Tom Loosemore, one of the heroic founders of GOV.UK, vibecoded MissingBenefit.com on a train journey.

Don’t worry, it’s not an official government website, and it makes that very clear. But Tom created it to make a broader point that isn’t really about benefits.

The website has been built in two halves. There’s the frontend – the graphics, the HTML layout and the things we see in the web browser. Then there’s the actual benefits calculator logic, which Tom has built as an API – an interface that lets other software, not just humans, make benefit calculations.

So what’s interesting about this is that hints at the ‘agentic’ future that many AI types predict. In essence, the argument is that someday soon, we may not just access websites and other digital services like we do now. Instead, our AI ‘agents’ will do the hard work for us – and it is the API that provides the ‘interface’ through which the likes of ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Grok will work out our benefits entitlements, if we ask them to.

And when you think more deeply about it, this could completely change how the government has to think about public services. If agents are mediating interactions between citizens and government, government services will need to be built not just for humans, but for robots too. So that you can say “Hey Siri, renew my passport”. Or better yet, perhaps future Siri will just know your passport renewal is coming up, and will submit your application for you, using a government API.

Anyway, I thought this was a really interesting experiment, and Tom tells me that he’s keen for people to play with the MissingBenefit website and API, to help identify bugs and better understand how to build systems like this. So if you’re sufficiently nerdy – and let’s be real, you’re reading my newsletter so you probably are – go and have a go!

Now let’s get on with the rest of the links.