Our Health in Safe Hands

39 Victoria Street 

“Humphrey.” 

“Yes, Minister?” 

“I want to develop a reputation for having a safe pair of hands.” 

“That would indeed be a welcome change.  Appointing Amanda Pritchard to succeed Sir Simon as Chief Executive of NHS England is an excellent start.” 

“Thank you.  I believe Lady Harding is now in the running to take charge of all our gas and electricity supplies in the run up to Zero Carbon 2050. Goodbye National Grid.” 

“I understand that there will be the politically appointed overall controller, but I could not possibly speculate as to who that might be, who will ‘help steer the country towards its climate targets, at the lowest cost to energy bill payers, by providing impartial data and advice after an overhaul of the rules governing the energy system to make it “fit for the future”.’ What could possibly go wrong?” 

“Quite right, Humphrey.  Nothing at all. Saving our NHS is far more important than protecting our energy supply.” 

“Indeed, Minister. Amanda Pritchard has worked in the NHS since she left Oxford nearly 25 years ago and her father was the Bishop of Oxford.  Thus our two national religions entwine as one.” 

“And you tell me that, apart from doling out the money once a year, she doesn’t really have anything to do.” 

“Correct. We have taken all the requisite steps to ensure that the Chief Executive is not over-burdened.  The hospitals are now mostly independent foundation trusts with their own governance, GPs have always been independent contractors and we are turning over the rest of the front line to Integrated Care Systems (ICSs) which, as you know Minister, are the 40 something independent partnerships linked to local authorities and dealing also with social care.” 

“Yes, that’s all in my predecessor’s Health and Care Bill which I seem to have been lumbered with.  A right old dog’s breakfast. Amanda has always been a manager in the NHS so excluding any responsibility for medical and care practices is not so daft.  Presumably she has charge of all the administration?” 

“We have been over this before, Minister, but legal, IT and business services are all outsourced to arm’s length bodies and we ourselves make the decisions on pay and staffing.” 

“That is also daft, Humphrey.  Now we are going to have all these local ICSs, why don’t they just pay the market rates in their own areas to get the staff they need?” 

“We have a National Health Service, Minister, and the unions would not like that at all. It would be a pay code lottery. We deal with the nation’s health, not with individuals.” 

“I expect you will tell me that our management of adult social care is not so much ‘safe hands’ as ‘hands off’.” 

“Yes, indeed, Minister.  We have a strict policy of non-interference.  We have been under pressure for some years to come up with a policy for adult social care, or a green paper, or something like that but, as Macbeth put it so neatly. ‘anticipation is better than realisation.’”  

“Yes, Macbeth was good on social care and I gather my predecessor had similar views. When the Treasury insisted, at the outset of the pandemic, that he reduced the pressure on hospital beds and the cost of social care, he solved both at a stroke by shipping all the bed-blockers, infected by Covid in the hospitals, out to care homes which speedily freed up beds there too.  Brilliant.” 

“Possibly, Minister, but it did incur a degree of odium.  Our policy of non-interference is far safer.  The local authorities have to deal with social care and receive financial support from the Ministry of Housing. The more affluent citizens pay for themselves.  We are not even contaminated by a single arm’s length body though we do provide a junior minister to express concern and sympathy on the Today programme when called upon to do so.” 

“Well, I’ll tell you where it does not cut the mustard, Humphrey, and that’s jabs, the pingdemic and travel quarantine. None of those make any sense to me.” 

“It is possible that our briefing has been inadequate, Minister. If something is self-evidently stupid, like insisting on self-isolation when the person pinged has had both jabs, we either say we are following the science, or provide an utterly irrelevant response, such giving our world-leading vaccination programme time to complete or proof that the test and trace system finally works or mentioning the ladies BMX gold medal.” 

“I took a lot of incoming last week, Humphrey, about making the French quarantine because of a few, and declining, Covid cases in La Réunion. At least, that’s what Dominic Raab said on the Today programme.  I’m all for sticking it to the Frogs but that does seem to be taking it too far.” 

“We are only following the science, Minister. The UK Biocentre advised it because France has a higher level than us of the Beta variant. They need time to study it and its resistance to vaccines.” 

“That’s piffle, Humphrey.  They’ve been studying the Beta variant since it emerged in South Africa last October so they must know all they need to know by now.  Furthermore, its prevalence in Metropolitan France is very low and a lot lower than Spain.” 

“I fear you are correct, Minister.  The truth is that we were put under pressure to do this by the Home Office.” 

“The Home Office?  What on earth does it have to do with them?”  

“It’s the migrants.  The Home Office is very embarrassed by all these migrants crossing the Channel in rubber boats.  They’d like to sink the boats and make them swim for it but they have to show compassion, pick them up and take care of them until some time in the next decade when they can be arsed, sorry Minister, find the resources to consider their asylum applications.” 

“I know all that but I don’t see the connection with Covid testing.” 

“The Home Office gave the French £114M to curb these crossings in the five years to 2020 and we’ve now promised them another £55M.  All that’s happened is that the numbers crossing have escalated and the French rubber boat business is soaring. I believe the manufacture of rubber boats, with our help, is the only growth sector in the French economy. No doubt the French coastguards have to push them off the beaches to make room for more.” 

“That’s a shocking thing to say, Minister, I am sure the French government is fully cooperating in their usual manner.” 

“The whole thing is a nonsense because asylum seekers are supposed to remain in the first safe country they reach and France is certainly safe.  Come to think of it, the whole population of La Réunion is under 900,000 and as that’s part of France they could send them there.” 

“Yes, I suggested that but my opposite number at the Home Office said it would be considered divisive.  We need another means of annoying them and especially drawing attention to their vaccination incompetence.  It would be safer, legally speaking, to play the health card.” 

“I take it that’s the joker?  Very droll, Humphrey, and the French are unlikely to see the humour.” 

“Indeed, indeed.  A safe pair of hands never drops the ball and the safest way of doing that is never trying to catch it in the first place.” 

In praise of price gouging

Of course there should be a look at what is happening in the shipping sector.

Shipping costs from Asia have surged in recent months, with the price of a 40-foot container from Shanghai to Rotterdam rising to over $13,000 from about $2,000 last November. There have been ever larger rises in the cost of getting goods into the UK, eroding businesses’ margins on imported products and leading to price rises.

The surge has been driven in part by pandemic-related bottlenecks at ports, but several businesses told The Telegraph they believe some shipping companies are effectively price gouging.

Price gouging is desirable.

“The shipping companies are profiteering from the Covid pandemic,” he added. “The UK government along with the other larger global economies must act together to insist these costs are controlled to a manageable level.”

So is profiteering desirable.

The Competition and Markets Authority is considering the complaints heard by The Telegraph ahead of a decision on whether to launch a full investigation. A spokesman said: “We are aware of increases in the cost of international shipping and have received reports of market issues and allegations of collusion and price fixing – all of which we are taking seriously. As such, we welcome additional information and evidence of any alleged breach of competition law.

Collusion and price fixing - or to be accurate, collusion in price fixing - is not desirable.

The investigation, the look at, should therefore be attempting to distinguish between the two.

This applies to the price system in general, not just shipping but let us use this current example. The general economic shutdown and subsequent boom during reopening has led to shipping costing a different amount than it did before. Prices of shipping should thus change. This is how a market system allocates that scarce resource - here, shipping capacity - across the alternative possible uses of that scarce resource.

This is not just how the system does work it is also how it should work. It now costs more to get something from China. That then changes the calculation of what should be got from China. As opposed to somewhere else, or produced domestically, or done without altogether. This is not an error, it’s the very point of the price system itself.

Price gouging is thus to be welcomed as it’s that vital part of the fine tuning of our world. Who produces what, where? That some accustomed to the current set up don;t like these changes is unfortunate but also the point. Those changes in prices are the message that they should be doing something else. Reality has changed so, therefore, so too should their actions.

If some use these fluctuations to collude and therefore by cartel force up prices and their profits this is not desired. Those found to be doing so should be both uncovered and punished. If any are of course.

Which brings us back to the original point. Yes, fine, investigate. If there is evidence of price gouging then this is evidence of how the system is supposed to work and nothing need be done. Nothing should be done either as this is how said system is supposed to work. That balance of supply and demand has changed therefore prices should. If there is evidence of collusion then punishment should righteously be meted out.

The purpose of the investigation is therefore to ascertain which is happening - not, not at all, to return prices to their previous levels.

Meddling in our lives

There is a mindset within the Department of Health and Social Care that should not be there. A group of people there, perhaps most of them, seem to think that it is their job to make people live as the Department’s personnel think they should live, rather than as people might choose to live. They use both punishments and incentives to bring this about.

The punishments they advocate, and sometimes secure, are things such as taxes on sugar and fizzy drinks and minimum pricing on alcohol. They want people made to feel bad about exercising their own eating and drinking preferences by requiring calorie counts on foods and in restaurants and pubs. The idea is to make people sufficiently guilty that they will no longer enjoy themselves when they do what they want to do instead of doing what the Department wants.

They seek bans on the advertising of what they call “junk” foods, ones that contain more fats and sugars than they would have people eat. In particular, they seek to stop advertising that might be seen by young people, so they try to secure laws that limit the times at which it can be shown. They sought, and still seek a blanket ban on the promotion of what they regard as unhealthy foods, and used a definition that would ban advertising the traditional foods that counties and localities take pride in, food such as Cumberland and Lincolnshire sausages, Cornish pasties, or Melton Mowbray pork pies.

There is scant evidence that advertising bans would be effective in changing behaviour. Estimates suggest that the ban on advertising the so-called “junk” foods to children might make a caloric difference equivalent to about one doughnut every three months.

The incentives, as opposed to punishments, they propose include discounts on clothes for those who can show they meet healthy eating targets, though it remains unclear how such records could be kept without intrusive surveillance into people’s lives. It is also unclear whether ten percent off T-shirts would lead people to avoid putting on weight more than the known drawbacks of obesity already do.

Obesity is indeed a problem, but these are not the ways to address it. The claim that curbs on freedom are justified because of the costs that would otherwise fall on the taxpayer is specious. If the aim were to save taxpayer funds, shorter lifespans would achieve far more savings on state pension payouts. It is not and never has been about money; it is about power. It is about using the power of the law to control what other people do and how they might live.

It is not an attitude that belongs in government, and it should be removed. Government may well advise us and publish information that enables us to make our choices with greater knowledge, but when it makes those choices for us, it steps over a line that should not be crossed in a free society.

Perhaps we should do this, yes

A demand so shameless in its self interest:

Eurostar chief demands airline tax to help save rail link to France

Sorry, what?

Damas does not support the idea of a similar ban on airlines flying to destinations served by Eurostar. “If you do not want to ban, but give an incentive, it is very easy,” he says “If you just work with the taxation system. If you take just £1. Take £1 more in taxing fuel for aircraft, and take that £1 as a reduction in access charges on the railway.”

That is, you must tax my competition in order to subsidise me.

It is not because this is a French company that the correct answer is that Anglo Saxon Wave. It’s because this is a demand that is entirely shameless in the effrontery of its naked self interest.

Sadly international business relationships rarely do use that two word phrase that so commonly follows the “Yer what?” question.

At which point perhaps we should in fact give in. That £1 tax on all flights between Folkestone and Calais. And much good may it do them.

A significant error in Ed Miliband's demands about climate change

Leave aside the more general background concerning climate change and consider just this point from Ed Miliband:

This is not simply failing to protect us from the biggest long-term threat we face; it’s economically illiterate too.

The case for investing now is not just clear as a question of intergenerational equity, it’s also the only conclusion to draw from a hard-headed fiscal analysis of the costs and benefits. The Office for Budget Responsibility tells us that the costs of acting early are surprisingly small relative to our national income – in the central scenario, an average annual investment in net terms of just 0.4% of GDP between now and 2050.

Meanwhile, we know that inaction is entirely unaffordable, leaving massive costs of climate damage racked up and left for future generations.

This assertion is wrong because it’s economically illiterate.

It’s assuming static technology and the truth is that we live in a world where technology - and the prices for the different variations of it - changes.

Again, stay within the logical structure Miliband is using. There are costs in the future to climate change. There are costs today to avoiding that future. If technology - and therefore those avoidance costs - is static then yes, it could be true that action now is desired. But if technology is changing then this equation changes. It is possible - possible only - that the reduction in costs of the avoidance by delaying a year is greater than the damages from the delay as the price of the necessary technologies declines in that year.

For example, it is said that the costs of solar power decline by 20% a year. Alternatively that they have declined by 80% in this past decade. Well, OK, so imagine that we’d carpeted the country with solar panels a decade ago or waited until now to do so. The cost of the move to solar power would be 80% lower through that decade of delay. The costs of the damages in the future through that delay would be?

We do in fact know, or at least can estimate, those climate damage costs of delay. A decade back solar power was not price competitive even adding the social cost of carbon to the fossil fuel alternatives. This is why those amazingly high feed in tariffs. Therefore the gain from the delay caused price reductions is greater than the costs from said delay.

The point here is the logical one, that doing everything now is necessary - or even desirable - just is not true. The prices of those fossil fuel alternatives are changing. Therefore the optimal amount of them is changing too. We’ve even a very large report explaining all of this in detail, the Stern Review. The very place that Mr. Miliband oft claims to gain his proof for the necessity of action from. We suggest he goes read it again with perhaps more attention to detail this time.

Does the spread of mobile phones indicate a rising need for personal communications?

To ask that question is to betray a certain Forrest Gump-like innocence. For clearly that’s not what has happened. Instead we’ve found - or developed - a new technology to meet an extant human desire or need. That is, the spread of an activity, or manner of achieving something, can be because of one of those technological developments rather than any change in human desires. Therefore proof of the spread cannot be taken as an increase in the need:

A decade ago, the emergence of mass food banks in the UK could genuinely be described as shocking. The image of families queueing in their local church for a box filled with pasta and beans has not only since been normalised, it has spread.

This does not simply mean the number of food banks has grown in recent years – there are now more than 1,300 such places in the Trussell Trust’s network, compared to fewer than 100 in 2010, as well as hundreds more independent ones – but also that these have opened the door for other types of donation centres, each set up by community groups and charities in response to growing need.

Food banks are a technology, for all methods of organising something are a technology. They arrived in Britain after the turn of the century. It is not logically sound to assume, or as above insist, that the spread is due to increasing need. It could be, note could be, that we are now able to meet an extant need or desire.

Which is what we think it is. One advantage of that increasing speed toward the grave is that memories and experience are long enough to recall what it used to be like. The British welfare system always did have holes in it. Payments sometimes did get delayed - we directly and specifically recall an 8 week wait for unemployment benefits that happened to one acquaintance.

That is, food banks are a solution to the efficiencies of the state run welfare state. At which point the insistence that they must be nationalised seems more than a little odd. Why would we want to put the solution into the hands of those who caused the original problem?

So, just what is ethical fashion then?

The Guardian tells us that cheap, or fast, fashion is unethical. The reason being that those working in the factories are making less than some think they should be making. This strikes us as being remarkably obtuse about ethics.

We bow to no one in our insistence that of course the consumer should express their preferences. If a label claiming “sustainability” or “ethical” adds to utility maximisation then not only go for it if you wish to, you should go for it. And yet:

In 1970, for example, the average British household spent 7% of its annual income on clothing. This had fallen to 5.9% by 2020. Even though we are spending less proportionally, we tend to own more clothes. According to the UN, the average consumer buys 60% more pieces of clothing – with half the lifespan – than they did 15 years ago. Meanwhile, fashion is getting cheaper

Clearly this process is making us, us here, richer. We are gaining more - much more - for a smaller portion of our income. Clothing poverty was, after all, a real thing. “Sunday best” is now just a phrase and one that we expect to drop out of the language as the actual experience - of having just the two sets of clothes, workaday and that Sunday set - rolls on to being a century and more old.

We’d also essay a supposition. Those collarless shirts that have been so popular these past few years. An older phrase for them is “grandad shirts” when shirts were made with detachable collars. So that one could wear the same shirt for several days but with a clean collar each one. A generation before that there were also detachable cuffs. Both shirts and the washing of them were expensive. Or read old novels, the phrase “fresh shirt” and the putting on of it. No one writing now would emphasise that for it’s assumed rather than the event it used to be.

So, our experience is better. What about those factory workers?

Their research suggested that the textile factory in Izmir received just €1.53 for cutting the material, sewing, packing and attaching the labels, with €1.10 of that being paid to the garment workers for the 30-minute job of putting the hoodie together. The report concluded that workers could not have received anything like a living wage, which the Clean Clothes Campaign defined, at the time the report was released, as a gross hourly wage of €6.19.

The Clean Clothes Campaign has some very odd ideas about what a living wage is. In Turkey they seem to think that it’s 120% or so of the average national wage. Well, OK, maybe that is the income required to gain the lifestyle that the campaign thinks all should live at. It rather becomes an ethical question as to how to get there, doesn’t it?

At which point, Paul Krugman:

.... the wages earned in one industry are largely determined by the wages similar workers are earning in other industries....(...)...Second, the link between productivity and wages is thoroughly misunderstood. Non-economists typically think that wages should reflect productivity at the level of the individual company. So if Xerox manages to increase its productivity 20 percent, it should raise the wages it pays by the same amount; if overall manufacturing productivity has risen 30 percent, the real wages of manufacturing workers should have risen 30 percent, even if service productivity has been stagnant; if this doesn't happen, it is a sign that something has gone wrong...(...)...It is a fact that some Bangladeshi apparel factories manage to achieve labor productivity close to half those of comparable installations in the United States, although overall Bangladeshi manufacturing productivity is probably only about 5 percent of the US level. Non-economists find it extremely disturbing and puzzling that wages in those productive factories are only 10 percent of US standards.

Those numbers are a little old but the points still stand. Wage rates are set across an economy, not by individual factory. Krugman again:

But matters are not that simple, and the moral lines are not that clear. In fact, let me make a counter-accusation: The lofty moral tone of the opponents of globalization is possible only because they have chosen not to think their position through. While fat-cat capitalists might benefit from globalization, the biggest beneficiaries are, yes, Third World workers.

Those textile factory jobs are better than a life staring at the south end of a north moving water buffalo. Which is why people voluntarily take them. This biggest advertisement for the process being Bangladesh, the country most reliant upon the schmutter trade. Yes, wage rates are low by our standards. They’re also double what they were a decade back and quadruple those of the turn of the century. As one of us put it in somewhat salty fashion, this does actually work as a method of reducing poverty.

Those Third Worlders are becoming less mired in destitution. We benefit too. Perhaps that second shouldn’t matter ethically but it is the vital ingredient that makes the process self-supporting. That we gain is the feedback that keeps the development cycle going.

Which gives us two very different possible ethical approaches. To purchase less but more expensively, thereby paying those living wages to whatever small number of people is required to produce that restricted consumption. Or, when passing that shop of £1 t-shirts, looking at that screen of 50 pence bikinis, buying the second and the third selection because why not aid the poor?

We insist that the ethical choice here is the hyperconsumption of fast fashion. As we’ve been known to remark, ethics require that we buy those things made by poor people in poor countries. For who wouldn’t - or perhaps who shouldn’t - prefer to make entire countries rich?

The next billionaires

Most of us have taken on board the coming reality that will involve such technologies as self-driving electric cars, people-carrying drones, lab-grown meats and artificial intelligence, and we fully expect that some people in the forefront of these developments will become billionaires, if they are not already. It is worthwhile, however, to look beyond these innovations to speculate what might be the next breakthroughs that could generate a subsequent crop of billionaires.

One approach is to look at the problems that afflict some people’s lives, and which they would happily pay to resolve, or which others might pay for on their behalf. Malaria, for example, kills an estimated million people each year, a majority of them being children under five years old. Its fatalities have been reduced by the spread of insecticide-impregnated mosquito nets, and promising experiments have been conducted using mosquitos genetically-modified to kill the plasmodium parasite. The real breakthrough, though, will be a vaccine that makes people resistant to it. The team that develops one could become very rich because this is something that the world will pay for. And Nobel prizes would be an added bonus.

Worldwide obesity is a problem awaiting a solution. Governments have tried behaviour changes such as sugar taxes and advertising bans on so-called junk foods, but these do not seem very effective. There will be huge rewards if someone can come up with a non-surgical medical solution, perhaps a treatment that alters the body’s response to food, or a medication that changes the metabolic rate.

Dementia has become a progressively more serious problem as people’s life expectancy has increased, and has huge resulting financial as well as emotional costs. If anyone can develop an effective treatment to prevent and reverse the degenerative process, it would be a huge commercial success as well as a boon to humanity.

A less destructive problem is male pattern baldness. Men might accept its inevitability, but no-one likes it. Present transplant technology is invasive, and there might be a solution by growing hairs in lab dishes from modified cells and inserting them to fill the bare patches. Even better would be a treatment that persuades the body’s own cells to grow hairs in the places required. Men the world over would pay to retain or regrow their youthful hair.

Many people would prefer to stay younger-looking for longer in life, and people pay fortunes for cosmetic treatments that postpone the appearance of age. They would pay for a medical treatment that achieved this, perhaps by lengthening the telomeres, perhaps by CRISPR technology. Fortunes will be made when this is achieved.

The pandemic has led to great strides being made in the understanding of how viruses work, and it is entirely possible that there might finally be the elusive cure for the common cold. It might be that as strains are identified each year, a vaccine could be administered alongside the annual flu vaccine (and possibly now the annual covid vaccine) that will give immunity for most recipients to the common cold as well.

Allergies can blight the lives of those afflicted by them, including pollen allergies such as hay fever. Present treatments work to suppress the symptoms in some people, but what is really needed is a process that can make people resistant. It might be done using nano gene technology of the type now being used to target certain cancer cells.

On a lighter note, there are riches to be gained for someone who develops an instant hangover cure. It might be a pill left at the bedside table before a night out that would prevent a hangover emerging in the morning, or it might be one taken in the morning that delivers recovery within minutes. Again, this could be a business worth billions.

Midges, the little biting insects that blight the West of Scotland’s summers, cost the Scottish economy billions of pounds in lost tourist income as potential visitors are deterred. If a biological process could be developed to extirpate them, it would be a major boon to the local inhabitants as well as to the economy. Some environmentalists might object, but the niche occupied by the pests would soon be filled by less offensive insects.

Terrorism will remain a problem as long as there are terrorists, and there are possible avenues that might lead to technological ways of combating it. It might be possible in principle to develop a type of radiation that could prematurely detonate explosives, including bullets, within its range. It might even be possible to detect the subtle changes in the brain that take place when someone goes down the route of extremist fanaticism. Since these will probably be developed, if at all, by military establishments, neither of these are likely to make people rich.

It would be good for the country if these, barring the last one, could be developed in the UK, and government could play a role by making such initiatives easier to undertake, to attract investment funding, and made more rewarding to those who put in the effort and take the risks of developing them.

How the justification changes in only a generation or two

Apparently it’s necessary to abolish capitalism in order to beat climate change:

Alas, it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.

...(...)...

... it’s the obsession with economic growth at any cost.

This is, of course, untrue. As the basic analysis underlying all climate change murmuring insists - and yes, this underpins Nordhaus and his Nobel, the Stern Review, the IPCC, COP this and that, all of it - beating climate change is entirely consistent with the continued existence of capitalism. Indeed, given that the task is to foster technological change then that mixture of capitalism and free markets is exactly what is required, for that’s the system which best fosters technological change.

It’s also untrue that capitalism - or markets for that matter - demands economic growth at any cost. It’s an efficient manner of gaining that growth, true, but the growth itself is something more generally desired. Humans do like economic growth. After all, few of us like the abject poverty which is the alternative.

But here’s the bit we find fascinating. A generation and two back that socialism that is touted as the alternative to capitalism was so touted on the basis that it was more efficient. That scientific planning, scientific socialism, would produce more growth than that horrible wastefulness of capitalism and market competition. This was the argument for both the horrors of the Soviet system and the dreary boredom of post-WWII nationalisations alike. More growth through socialism.

Well, that didn’t work out well. So now the argument is that we must have socialism in order not to have growth. At which point the argument can be seen to be as threadbare as it actually is. If the answer is still that we must have socialism but the reason why has reversed polarity then clearly we’re in the grip of a religious mania, not a logical analysis. It’s now as with the insistence that yes, but you didn’t put enough virgins into the volcano.

New technologies and the sorting process of the market

Andrew Orlowski points out that Artificial Intelligence is not, in fact, all that good.

For years policymakers have believed that machine learning – the foundation of the current wave of AI hype – is fundamental to advances in robotics that will herald a “Fourth Industrial Revolution” – but the two don’t really go well together at all, or at least not using currently fashionable methods.

“Data-hungry, idealised algorithms simply fail,” leading researcher Filip Piękniewski told me. “The reality is we don’t know how to build control systems for machines that would be anywhere as robust as our own brains but we just love to fool ourselves into thinking we can do that,” The veteran robotics expert and former head of MIT’s AI lab Rodney Brooks was even more scathing about OpenAI’s defence that the “market wasn’t ready” for such wonders as the Cube-dropping Cube solver. “Perhaps the ‘problem’ is that the market is mature and understands what is valuable and not.”

The logical suggestion then follows, perhaps politicians should stop investing in or directing AI in the search for a Hail Mary Pass around current problems.

This does not mean we should all be ignoring AI of course. It just means that we’ve already got a method of sorting through the varied claims - the market.

A new technology, whatever it is, will work on some human problems and not on others. The Grand Task is to sort through those problems we wish to solve, test whether this new tech aids or not, then kill off the failures and do more of the successes. Which is exactly what free market capitalism does - it is, rather, the saving grace of the system. It also contains its own feedback loops - profit is the signal that a problem is being solved, as people wish to have it solved, losses are the signifier of a dead end.

Thus it is exactly when a new technology appears over the horizon that we must use that free market capitalism to test it. As, for example, the financial markets have been. High Frequency Trading, or perhaps arbitrage using algorithms to the extent the two differ, is exactly that AI. Crunch the numbers, read the patterns and without knowing anything about why they are trading upon the back of the pattern recognition. This works, even to the point that the original excess profits have now been competed down to perhaps below the cost of capital. All we’re left with is more efficient capital markets which are cheaper for the retail investor to use.

Shame, eh?

Or, as we’ve pointed out before, it’s exactly when we don’t know that we need to use markets to find out.