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20 things we learnt from TfL FoI requests in September 2026 1) Since Superloop routes were introduced, the most used is the SL8 (22.7m passengers) followed by the SL9 (12.7m) and SL7 (10.5m). Already twice as many people have ridden the SL11 (2.2m, introduced January 2026) than have ridden the SL6 (1.1m, introduced July 2023). 2) The estimated final cost for Ickenham's new disabled car park is £1.88m. This is 25% higher than the estimate given in an FoI response a year ago. It equates to £625,000 per parking space. 3) The total cost of withdrawing bus route 347 was £13,325 (consultation £8400, removing seven bus stops £1225, removing timetables £700, changing e-tiles at bus stops £3000). 4) The most common bus-train interchange at Putney Bridge is from the last stop on route 265 to the station. The least common interchange is from bus route 424 at bus stop FH to the station. 5) There are no plans to use double deckers on route 108 due to the height restrictions in the Blackwall Tunnel, obviously. 6) 46% of roads on the TfL Road Network have a 20mph speed limit, up from 14% in 2021. 7) The new Piccadilly line trains are expected to use a synthetic (text-to-speech) voice for on-board announcements. There are no current plans to use this voice on any other train stocks. 8) 36 people work in the TfL pensions fund department, of whom 10 have line management responsibility. 9) Central, Jubilee, Northern, Victoria and all sub-surface lines are fitted with LCF (Low Coefficient of Friction) stick lubrication applied to the wheel flange root of selected wheelsets on every train. All lines use the same lubricant, "KELSAN LCF" manufactured by L.B. Foster. 10) The calming pod being trialled at Ealing Broadway station is not bomb-proof. 11) Once the scrappage of old DLR trains recommences in early 2027, TfL expect to be removing between two and four vehicles every 5 weeks. 12) The cycle hire docking station that's most usually full is Chadwell Street, Angel (18 spaces). The docking station that's most usually empty is Queen Street, Bank (36 spaces). 13) Of TfL's portfolio of 900 railway arches across London, 102 have been empty for over a year. 14) The total operating cost for the Woolwich Ferry in 2025/26 was £11.3m. 15) TfL have stopped sharing audio announcements via FoI requests because "basically people are using the voice on AI tools to get the voice artist to say anything they want which very obviously impacts on the voice artists' commercial interests in a variety of ways." 16) Last year there were 1,984,485 hires of Santander bikes in Westminster, 21% of which were e-bikes. The borough with the second highest total was Tower Hamlets with 1,213,015 hires, 16% of which were e-bikes. 17) The TfL mode with the highest CO₂ per passenger kilometre, by far, is Buses with 65.8gCO₂e/pkm. All other modes have emissions between 22 and 31, the lowest being the Tube with 22.8gCO₂e/pkm. 18) Expected completion dates for future railway projects (subject to planning, funding etc) are as follows: West London Orbital (2035), Old Oak Common Elizabeth line (2036-2039), DLR Thamesmead extension ("in the 2030s"), Bakerloo line extension (2040), Crossrail 2 (early 2050s). 19) The DfT are part-funding a two-year upgrade programme to build barcode readers directly into some TfL ticket gates. In the meantime handheld scanners are in use at the six stations experiencing the highest volume of barcoded tickets, namely Farringdon, Finsbury Park, Kentish Town, Moorgate, Old Street and Stratford. 20) TfL are not able to tell you "how many completed fares Uber has completed in the West Lancashire area since they have been operating in that region" and suggest you contact West Lancashire council instead. This month's most obsessive request: a 1673-word submission about repairs to Barons Court station which ends thus: "The correct response was not “TfL is not aware.” The correct response was: we will inspect the station, investigate the defects, and challenge those who inspected or signed this work off. That is your duty. It is not my duty to assemble a case file for you. I have already told you what is on site: flaking and chipped paint, rust coming through, overcoating without proper preparation, furniture paint failing, and a colour scheme that has not been justified. In your own letter you accepted that chipped paint on newly painted platform furniture requires remedial action. You cannot accept that and then declare yourselves unaware of the rest. I am not required to keep sending photographs and videos in order to make TfL look at its own station. Your attachment limits are your problem. If you need to see the defects, send someone to the platform. I expect named responsibility, documents and inspection. I do not expect another letter that protects the organisation and writes as if I had not seen the station."
Belated transport news I missed reporting on several transport stories while I was away so here's a brief catch-up. 🚦 This Saturday the gyratory at St Paul's is being tweaked. The southern end of King Edward Street is being pedestrianised (to create Greyfriars Square) so traffic has to go a diffferent way and so do local buses. Precisely where the 4, 8, 25, 56, 76 and 133 stop will be altering, and route 100 has already been extended to St Bart's. TfL have produced a ridiculously complicated map to try to explain things (my head exploded), so if you need to catch a bus the City of London's vastly oversimplified version should be clearer. 🚡 It amazes me that every time I do one of these round-ups there's a new thing at the cablecar but there always is. This time it's an interactive audio guide you can listen to on the way across with different stories in either direction. It's narrated by Engi-Bear, the cablecar's lumpen mascot, and produced by an Italian software team called POPGuide. You need to bring your own headphones (and indeed your own phone). The unusual thing is that it costs £1, just £1, when they could have given it away for free or tried to make more money out of it. Upselling has never been so flaccid. 🚇 TfL have added another weekday closure of most of the Piccadilly line to their already excessive roster of downtime, specifically Wednesday 28th - Friday 30th October (immediately before a full line closure at the weekend). Whatever is wrong with the new trains must be proving intractable, given it'll be at least next spring before any member of the public gets on board, fingers crossed. 🚌 London's next dead bus is the 349 which is being withdrawn on Saturday. Expect bloggage. On the same day the latest Superloop route is being introduced, the SL12 from Gants Hill to Rainham. The good news that it'll be free to use for the first week, should you happen to live in the area. TfL have produced a route diagram and a long list of stops in both directions, but not a map because that would be too useful. I cannot overemphasise enough how remote the Rainham terminus is, so expect bloggage there too. 📽️ In mid-August TfL published their Advertising Annual Report, a glossy 49 page compilation of all the showiest campaigns of the last year. It reads like a bunch of talented professionals congratulating themselves on a job well done, but unfortunately that job is to make their advertising more and more difficult to miss. Key phrases include "empowering brands to unlock creativity and turn heads" and "innovation remains central to our shared focus". The scariest project is a "plan to deliver world-first, ten-metre-long digital corridor wraps in selected Elizabeth line stations", i.e. huge moving screens you can't take your eyes off. It's so controversial they've made a full-scale mock-up at UCL "to evaluate how digital corridor wraps might impact the experience of customers who are neurodivergent or disabled". See photo. increasing distraction, forever designing formats it's more and more impossible to take our eyes off. 📱 The report also suggests you could be seeing a lot more adverts on TfL Go in future. At present the app generates 76 million page views a month but only made £5,000 in revenue last year, thus "TfL Go represents a significant long-term growth opportunity". 🚌 If you enjoy those free heritage bus days when the London Bus Museum floods a historic route with vintage vehicles, the list of planned events has extended. Route 106: 3rd October 2026. Route 6: 20th March 2027. Route 107: 13th June 2027. Route 85: 2nd October 2027.
Slim Summer Saturday 31 underblogged things I did in July Wed 1: Malted wheats for breakfast. Thu 2: The buzzer wasn't working. Fri 3: Surrounded by school trip. Sat 4: Freezer so needed defrosting. Sun 5: Victoria didn't have any. Mon 6: Sara Cox pefectly adequate. Tue 7: It's always New Malden. Wed 8: Photo of five shoes. Thu 9: Aww, Bonnie Tyler's died. Fri 10: Lawnmower shop still trading. Sat 11: Chatted with the architect. Sun 12: Slightly overcooked pizza, meh. Mon 13: Hurrah, Only Connect's back. Tue 14: Awake much too early. Wed 15: A dry St Swithins. Thu 16: Sorry I hit you. Fri 17: 219 unread emails, sorted. Sat 18: Massive party across paddock. Sun 19: It could be Remy. Mon 20: Farewell Hot Podium Guy. Tue 21: Cider House is booked. Wed 22: To Carshalton and back. Thu 23: Flight Patterns proved hypnotic. Fri 24: Prog Rock Prom excellent. Sat 25: Much better around dogs. Sun 26: Romford got a downpour. Mon 27: Sold out of crumpets! Tue 28: Enjoyed Ben Elton's autobiography. Wed 29: Stupidly wore long sleeves. Thu 30: Met the line lady. Fri 31: It was under France.
30 things we learnt from TfL FoI requests in June 2026 1) In the last 5 years no accidents have been recorded at Liverpool Street Station involving pushchairs being taken through ticket barriers. 2) During 2025 defibrillators were used on 50 occasions across the London Underground network. In each case the pads were required to be replaced. 3) Tube station poster withdrawal information: "We are moving away from posters with first & last times (with the exception of the Metropolitan line which is due to the frequencies on some parts of the line). They are being phased out and replaced with versions such as the attached, which directs customers to the online part of the website where comprehensive timetable information is available." 4) More people catch a southbound bus outside Hayes & Harlington station than catch a northbound bus (10% more, in fact). 5) Bus-related products licenced by TfL include The London Toy Company Bus Pull-along, Corgi New Routemaster Paddington set, Sun Star Models Routemaster, Bachmann EFE Road Leyland 'Seadog', London Sock Exchange socks, Uniqlo bags and Budgy Smuggler Bus Trunks. 6) The borough with the most roundabouts is Hillingdon with 99, followed by Bexley (63), Greenwich (53), Newham (52) and Brent and Enfield (50 each). The City of London has only one roundabout. Other boroughs with fewer than 10 roundabouts are Hackney (2), Islington (6), Camden and Hammersmith And Fulham (7 each) and Lambeth and Kensington And Chelsea (9 each). 7) All Elizabeth line stations have at least two ticket machines except Iver which has only one. Paddington has eight. 8) Thus far the Acoustic Rail Grinding Unit has been trialled in four locations: Epping → Debden (786m of Rail Defect Removal), West Ruislip → South Ruislip (1220m of Rail Defect Removal), Chalfont and Latimer → Chesham (4857m of Liner Rail Grinding), Hillingdon → Eastcote (1706m of Corrective Rail Grinding). 9) In January a planned safety review of bus stop bypasses was withdrawn. This is because some of the implementation dates of bus stop bypasses had been recorded incorrectly. No tenders have yet been issued for a replacement report. This will only happen after the database of bus stop bypasses has been reviewed. 10) The next tube map is due to 'go live' on 6th July 2026. 11) TfL do plan to reopen the stairs up to platform 1 at Notting Hill Gate, but as yet no maintenance has taken place as they are still trying to identify the source of the water ingress. 12) The electric buses on route 323 were requistioned to operate the Silvertown Cycle Shuttle in April last year. There are no plans for route 323 to revert to Zero Emission in the near future. 13) In September 2023 TfL adopted a staff policy which no longer allowed 5 working days to be compressed into 4 days with the same working hours. Individuals with pre-existing arrangements were unaffected. 14) Just to confirm, the Hopper hour is actually 62 minutes and the weekday peaks are actually 06:35-09:27 and 16:05-18:57. 15) TfL have been seeking a new vision for the London Cable Car. "The vision intends to see the LCC go from being a transport mode to one of London's must-do tourist attractions and, importantly, a commercialised leisure attraction." A preferred option has been outlined in a 44 page report, but alas so heavily redacted that it's impossible to guess how ghastly it will be. 16) £428,797.11 was spent installing netting across London Underground buildings between May 2025 and April 2026, including £104,847.46 to install netting at Northfields depot. 17) Bus drivers cannot talk to each other via their radios, they are only able to communicate with their specific route operator (or an emergency operator). 18) Five Central line trains have now been refurbished (up from two this time last year). It's expected that 6 further trains will enter service during this financial year, then 18 in 2027/28, 31 in 2028/29 and 25 in 2029/30. 19) Following discussions with the London Fire Brigade, community libraries have been reinstated at Acton Town, Cockfosters, Ealing Common, East Finchley, High Barnet, Kew Gardens, Kilburn, Northfields, Morden, Oakwood, Ravenscourt Park, Stamford Brook, Willesden Green and Woodside Park stations. 20) No DLR services are scheduled into Platform 3 at Mudchute in the current standard timetable, although it is occasionally used for during unusual/special service patterns (i.e. partial network closures). 21) A charge is levied on requests to close a bus stop as well as for bus diversions where highway works are taking place. The current charge is £256 for the first day of bus stop closure and £86 a day thereafter. The bus diversion charge is a minimum of £1422. Diversion charges combine bus stop charges with consumables. 22) Last year the KSI risk rate for cyclists (Killed or Seriously Injured) was 0.980 per million km collectively travelled. Cyclists are 200 times more likely to be seriously injured than killed. 23) TfL's total advertising estate is as follows: i) at bus shelters 8382 static panels, 843 digital and 204 scrolling. b) at stations 16,479 static panels, 961 digital, 78 scrolling, 41 landmarks, 778 gatelines and 11,520 static on lifts, stairs and escalators. c) on trains 123,632 carriage panels. d) roadside 170 sites. 24) TfL's northernmost dedicated toilet facility for bus drivers is at Waltham Cross bus station, the easternmost is at Bluewater bus station, the southernmost is at Coulsdon Cane Hill Drive and the westernmost is at Uxbridge Belmont Road. 25) Since 2020 only three passengers have been fined for causing noise-based annoyance on the railway, two of them for singing. 26) Around 26% of 60+ Oyster photocard holders fail to complete the address check each year and need to reapply (if they remain eligible). 27) TfL have de-looped two gyratories (Stockwell and Archway) and four roundabouts (Elephant & Castle, Highbury, Old Street and Westminster Bridge South) since 2007. Other authorities have de-looped Aldgate, Brixton Hill, Stratford, St Paul’s, Walthamstow, Whipps Cross and the Kender Street Triangle. Gyratories under future consideration include Greenwich Town Centre, Holborn, Ilford and Shepherd's Bush. 28) There has been no left turn off the A2 Falconwood slip road into Riefield Road since 1978. 29) Mobile coverage is now available in 58% of tube stations and 45% of tunnels (and is planned to reach 100% by the end of the year). 30) TfL estimate that there are half a million mice living across the London Underground network.
More in life
This is a weird moment. I have a hunch that we’ll look back later and tell ourselves stories in which it seemed obvious where things were going. So I wanted to lay down a little time capsule and register just how confusing everything felt at the time. This is a personal view from the trenches. 1. If you’re a normal person, you may feel that AI has been good at math for a long time.1 But for “real” math, this is roughly what it felt like: When Feeling 2024 LLMs are toys Summer 2025 LLMs are interesting toys Early Autumn 2025 LLMs can do useful stuff sometimes Mid Autumn 2025 …a lot of stuff Late Autumn 2025 …a lot Early 2026 holy god Even having been astonished by AI progress in the past, it was still astonishing to see AI move in a matter of months from a mildly-useful toy to something that many people now consider almost impossible to do without. 2. Personally, I’d say that current AI makes me around 50% more productive at “doing math”. That’s despite the fact that AI can now often do in a few minutes things that would have taken me hours to do myself. The main reason is that my concept of “doing math” involves various steps, like coming up with ideas for theorems, trying to prove them, writing things down, reorganizing everything to make it more clear, and so on. AI is good at some parts of this, but still pretty bad at others, so the overall speedup isn’t as high as you might expect. (Even if planes could go 10× faster, your door-to-door travel time from your apartment in London to your friend’s place in Rome wouldn’t decrease that much, because you still have to get to the airport and wait to board.) 3. But then, I’m still (sort of; more on this later) trying to follow my old “doing math” workflow, just automating certain parts of it. That can’t be right, can it? If we found a way to make batteries at 1% of the current cost, we wouldn’t just say, “cool, batteries are cheap now”. We’d find all sorts of new ways to use batteries that didn’t make sense before, and change the ways we generate power to account for all these new batteries. Probably our whole energy system would end up transformed. Analogously, AI being good at proofs should lead to a very different equilibrium. But what is that?2 4. It seems healthy, at the moment, to maintain a fluid view of what “doing math” means. But at bare minimum it surely involves understanding the math that “I” am “doing”. So long as that’s part of the workflow, it would seem to impose a limit on how quickly “I” could “do” math, no matter how good AI is. One obvious conclusion would be that my tiny organic brain should be removed from the workflow entirely. Maybe! But it’s interesting to speculate about how much faster things could go while still keeping a human brain in the loop. I think the answer is: A lot. 5. Contrary to what you may have heard, humans are not obsolete for math. Not yet. The most obvious reason is that AI is still bad at writing. People often complain that AI writing overuses various patterns or lacks a unique voice or whatever. I don’t disagree, but I always felt like there was a deeper issue that I couldn’t quite put my finger on. With math, this becomes very clear: The problem is it doesn’t make any goddamned sense. Really, I think it’s deeper than being bad “at writing”. It seems like AI is bad at thinking in certain ways that manifest as bad writing. 6. When novices do math, they often create “spaghetti-code math”: Imagine a long document with lots of equations, but if you point at any one equation, it’s hard to say what assumptions underpin it, or how it fits into the bigger picture. Any random idea that was mentioned 17 pages ago might be used again at any time with no warning. With experience, people learn to break complex arguments down into modular pieces with a good “API”, in the sense that the assumptions and conclusions for each part are relatively simple. Somehow, AI has developed these amazing technical skills, while still being bad at creating abstractions So the arguments it gives are long and tangled and bewildering. This is what makes AI math seem so alien. 7. Now I know what you’re thinking. Maybe AI isn’t bad at creating abstractions. It’s just bad at creating abstractions that work for you, human with tiny organic brain. From a distance, that seems plausible. And it might be true to some degree. I have high-bandwidth access to a human brain. It’s not crazy to imagine that this gives me an advantage in predicting how a human brain would react to a given presentation of ideas. But still, I claim that current AI is objectively bad at creating abstractions, regardless of if the consumer of those abstractions is human or artificial. Here’s why: If I ask AI to prove something hard, it will produce a proof that starts simple and gradually descends into a rampage of complexity. If I tell it to break that proof down into self-contained pieces, it will produce lemmas that each take a full page just to state. If I ask, “Why? Why have you done this to me?”, the AI will say, “This is as simple as it gets. It’s not that bad. What’s your problem?” But if I argue with the AI for a while, I can start to understand the basic contours of the argument. And I’ll ask, “Why don’t you first just try to prove blah using only assumptions blahblah, without worrying about blahblahblah? Wouldn’t that be easier?” Often, this doesn’t work, either because my idea was bad, or because the AI isn’t smart enough to do it. (Which one? Who knows!) But after a few attempts, I can usually find something that that works, and the AI can use it to re-write the proof in a somewhat simpler way. If I repeat this many times, I can gradually chip away at the complexity. But maybe that’s still just making the proof easier for humans to understand? No! For one, this usually makes the proof shorter, and sometimes dramatically shorter. More importantly, during this process, someone (maybe me, maybe the AI) will often realize that there’s a different proof strategy that gives a stronger result. Instead of proving x < 9.7, now we can prove x < 7.1. Thus, artisanal human abstractions are “objectively” useful. 8. Some people might claim that it’s already possible to automate some of what I’m doing with some multi-agent Rube Goldberg thing. I’m not sure, because my experience has been that investing lots of time into clever AGENTS.MD or custom skills or harnesses isn’t a great use of time. That stuff is somewhat helpful, but things are changing so fast that the knowledge has a short half-life. Also, the majority of information about these tricks seems to come from people who are excited about the technology itself. On the other hand, the automator told me to try typing, “ask independent agents for an adversarial review”, and I’ve found those seven words to be quite helpful. I wish I could find a source with boring best practices for people who are happy to stay away from the bleeding edge. 9. Another reason AI doesn’t improve my productivity more is that it is often the green light, the orgastic future that recedes before me. I’ll ask AI to do something, and it will almost seem to do it. So I’ll ask for changes, and it seems to help, but it’s still not quite right. Hours later, I’ve accomplished nothing and learned nothing. Eventually, I start over, either doing it myself or with AI on a very tight leash, and I’m done in 30 minutes. Each time this happens I feel foolish and tell myself not to do it again. But it’s very hard to judge in real-time. 10. Of course, I’m not claiming that AI is intrinsically bad at writing or thinking or abstraction-making. It’s gotten better at all of these and I expect it will continue to do so. All I’m saying is that as of Autumn 2026, humans still have a lot to contribute, and it’s not just better exposition. 11. Did AI actually get much better at math in Autumn 2025? Or perhaps, in the grand scheme of things, human math ability falls into a narrow range? 12. Some people are responding to the new reality by gleefully using AI to generate lots of semi-OK-ish papers and puking them up on arXiv. I understand the incentives that drive this. In some sense, it seems like the logical response to the new reality. (After inventing cars, we started taking a lot more low-value trips.) But I don’t think this is socially useful, and I tend to think everyone will soon agree that this is embarrassing. But… I’m not sure. Maybe it is socially useful? And I find myself feeling vaguely jealous of the people who are wired this way, who instead of feeling blinkered, see opportunity and plunder. 13. Want an optimistic pro-AI, pro-progress take? OK. If I take my old “doing math” workflow, AI makes it strictly better. A lot better. It’s like having a hyper-conscientious intern that is smarter than me in many ways, works at incredible speed, and knows approximately everything. Yes, AI sucks at writing and making abstractions. But if I’m disciplined and try to mostly do the math “myself” while asking the AI for help, I can explore ideas much faster than before, make far fewer mistakes, and produce something just as clear as before, while developing just as much understanding. I can ask, “What happens if you do a Kofuni expansion?”, and get an answer instantly. I can ask for illustrations or interactive visualizations and see them instantly. Arguably, we’re incredibly lucky to be alive at this moment, when these new tools have opened up this new territory to explore. 14. And isn’t that what I wanted? Back in 2024, I bemoaned that what AI most seemed to struggle with was getting the facts straight: Perhaps the old science fiction robots were a projection of our fantasies. I want my style and voice to be precious and uncopyable. I want an AI assistant that will tirelessly hunt down facts while I provide creativity and panache and magic. But that’s not how it is. So we should remember: In a scenario where AI is useful but humans retain some comparative advantage, we might not like where that comparative advantage lies. At least with math, and at least for the moment, I get to be Kirk, while the AI is Spock. (Even with other types of writing, my impression is that since 2024, AI has improved more along Spock dimensions than along Kirk dimensions.) So that’s nice. 15. In the last few months, it frequently happens that a collaborator will use AI to generate something, and then send it to me and ask me to check if it’s useful. I can see why this seems reasonable. (Really, I do.) But when it happens a lot, one can’t help but wonder what the point of the human collaborator is. 16. On the other hand—with creative writing, my advice is not to use AI to write, at all. Ask questions if you want, but write every damned word yourself.3 With math, I don’t feel like such a hard line makes sense. It seems that creating something good still requires a lot of human involvement, to the point of agonizing over notation, repeatedly re-organizing things, and heavily editing individual sentences. Still, I find that if people make that effort, they can create something just as good as they could by hand, while still being perhaps 50% AI written.4 So I don’t mind if people send me “centaur math”, provided they take responsibility for the contents. The problem is that when working with AI, it takes constant paranoid vigilance to avoid letting things slip beyond your understanding. I often find myself wanting to awkwardly ask people, “OK, you obviously used AI to make this… which is OK… but how much of this do you vouch for? If we have a meeting to discuss it, will you crumble the moment I start asking questions?” 17. When I’m in abstraction-creation mode, I feel like I’m doing something intelligent. When yell at AI about bad notation and writing, I feel like I’m providing taste. But I often find myself giving feedback that seems incredibly basic. Things like: This is a mess, clean it up. Or: Do you need that assumption? Or: If you can’t solve this problem, why don’t you create a simpler version and try to solve it first? On the one hand, I guess a lot of what good human managers do amounts to giving very basic feedback. On the other hand, it’s hard to imagine that I have much durable advantage in doing this kind of thing. So I wonder how much durable advantage I have in abstraction-making or taste, too. 18. A common reaction to AI getting better at proofs is that humans need to focus more on exposition. This has an obvious Bourdieu-esque criticism: Human painters used to strongly value photo-realism, but after cameras were invented they convinced everyone that, oops, photo-realism isn’t important, what matters is expression, which coincidentally cameras can do. Isn’t a shift towards exposition in math just a way for humans to move the goalposts and justify their own continued relevance? The only credible way I see to avoid that criticism seems to be to bite the bullet and say that, in fact, math should have already have focused more on exposition, even before AI. Personally, I strongly believe that this is true. 19. I think the biggest reason I’m not more productive is: What’s the point? In the past, if you came up with an elegant proof, you’d tell yourself, “I made a thing! Other people will read and use my thing! I am advancing human progress.” You can still tell yourself that now. But you have to wonder, will anyone actually read your proof? Or will they just ask another AI to explain it to them? Will your proof help their AI explain it better? For how long? If you just waited a year, would some other AI produce that same proof independently? Alternatively, if you’re a normal person, you might think that LLMs still struggle with basic arithmetic? ↩ AI progress is so fast, compared to society’s ability to adjust, that we may never actually see what “the current equilibrium” looks like. ↩ This essay, if you’re wondering, was created by writing every damned word myself and not asking AI anything. ↩ You could have a whole debate about what that precentage means. It’s not the number of words written by AI that really matters, in my opinion, so much as who is responsible for the overall structure of the ideas. ↩
I always liked stories about eccentric royals doing mad things. Queen Christina of Sweden reportedly had a miniature cannon made for firing tiny cannonballs at fleas in her bedroom. Louis XIV made a proto-reality-show of his daily routines, allowing an audience of courtiers the honor of watching him dress, bathe, and use the toilet. Peter the Great famously returned from […]
The (Re)insurance AI Landscape
to become the version of yourself needed in the next chapter
