The AI Mandate is Here, and Your Company Left You in the Dark.
The whispers began subtly, like the rustle of leaves just before a storm. Then came the edicts, carved not on stone tablets, but delivered via corporate email, glowing with an almost unholy luminescence on your screen: “All new content must leverage proprietary AI models.” “Efficiency gains are paramount.” “Resistance is… inefficient.”
Remember those halcyon days when “fact-checking” involved, you know, a human brain? When “critical thinking” wasn’t just a buzzword but a tangible skill? Those days, my friends, are vanishing faster than a free biscuit at a Monday morning meeting.
Recent reports from the gleaming towers of Silicon Valley suggest that even titans like Google are now not just encouraging, but mandating the use of their internal AI for everything from coding to… well, probably deciding what colour staplers to order next quarter. This isn’t just a suggestion; it’s a creeping, digital imperative. A silent bell tolls for the old ways.
And here, in the United Kingdom, where “innovation” often means finally upgrading from Windows 7 to 10 (circa 2015), the scene is even more… picturesque. Imagine a grand, ancestral home, creaking with history, suddenly told it must integrate a hyper-futuristic, self-aware smart home system. Everyone nods sagely, pretends to understand, then quietly goes back to boiling water in a kettle.
The truth, stark and unvarnished, is this: most UK companies have rolled out AI like a cheap, flat-pack wardrobe from a notorious Swedish furniture store. They’ve given you the pieces, shown you a blurry diagram, and then walked away, whistling, as you stare at a pile of MDF and a bag of identical-looking screws. “Figure it out,” they seem to hum. “The future waits for no one… especially not for dedicated training budgets.”
We are, in essence, all passengers on a rapidly accelerating train, hurtling towards an AI-driven landscape, with only half the instructions and a driver who vaguely remembers where the brake is. Our LinkedIn feeds are awash with articles proclaiming “AI is the Future!” while the majority of us are still trying to work out how to ask it to draft a polite email without sounding like a sentient toaster.
The Oxford University Press recently published a study, “The Matter of Fact,” detailing how the world grapples with truth in an age of abundant (and often AI-generated) information. The irony, of course, is that most professionals are so busy trying to decipher which button makes ChatGPT actually do something useful that they don’t have time to critically evaluate its output. “Is this email correct?” we ask, sending it off, a cold dread pooling in our stomach, because we certainly haven’t had the time (or the training) to truly verify it ourselves.
It’s a digital dark age, isn’t it? A time when the tools designed to empower us instead leave us feeling adrift, under-qualified, and wondering if our next performance review will be conducted by an algorithm with an unblinking, judgmental gaze. Where professional development means desperately Googling “how to write a prompt that isn’t terrible” at 2 AM.
But fear not, my digitally bewildered brethren. For every creeping shadow, there is a flicker of light. For every unanswered question in the vast, echoing chambers of corporate AI adoption, there is a guide. Someone who speaks fluent human and has also deciphered the arcane tongues of the silicon overlords.
If your company has handed you the keys to the AI kingdom without a single lesson on how to drive, leaving you to career-swerve into the digital ditch of obsolescence… perhaps it’s time for a different approach. I offer AI training, tailored for the bewildered, the forgotten, the ones whose only current experience with AI is shouting at Alexa to play the right song. Let’s not just survive this new era; let’s master it. Before it masters us.
DM me to discuss how we can bring clarity to this impending AI-pocalypse. Because truly, the only thing scarier than an AI that knows everything, is a workforce that knows nothing about how to use it.
The thing about the end of the world is, it never happens in a flash of white light, not like the movies. It comes in a slow, sticky ooze, like a bad summer sunburn that peels off in big, unsightly flakes. It comes during the dog days, when the cicadas are screaming and you’re trying to figure out which cheap, flimsy inflatable to cram into the trunk of the station wagon. That’s when the 12-Day War started. You see, the folks in charge, the ones with all the medals and the permanent frowns, they’re just like you and me. They’re thinking, “Right, let’s get this over with before the big summer rush. No sense in ruining the whole bloody holiday season.”
It began on June 13, a day that felt like any other. A day for planning barbecues and arguing about which brand of charcoal burns the cleanest. But while you were fumbling with a folding chair, a surprise attack was launched. A decapitation strike, they called it. A fancy, surgical word that really just means “we’re gonna chop off the head and hope the body flops around and dies.” They aimed for the Iranian leadership, and boy, did they get some of them. Dozens of high-ranking guys in fancy suits—poof, gone.
The plan was simple, a classic B-movie plot from the 1980s: cut the head off the snake, and the whole thing falls apart. The American and Israeli powers-that-be sat back with their collective thumbs hooked in their suspenders, sure as sunrise that this would be the final act. They’d topple the government, get a good night’s sleep, and be back in time for the Fourth of July fireworks. A perfectly reasonable expectation, if you’re living inside a bad screenplay.
But here’s the thing about reality—it’s always got a twist. The Iranian government didn’t collapse. It staggered, it bled, but it didn’t fall. Instead, it straightened up, wiped the gore from its chin, and let out a bellow of pure, unadulterated fury. Then came the counterattack. Missiles—ballistic, hypersonic, the works—fell like a storm of metal rain, shrugging off every defense the Israelis could throw at them. The scale of the response was so absurdly, comically huge that the mighty US and Israel suddenly looked like two little kids who’d just poked a beehive with a stick. They stumbled back, yelping for a ceasefire.
Iran, naturally, told them to pound sand.
I mean, would you have? When you’ve got your boot on the other guy’s throat, you don’t just offer to shake hands and walk away. Not unless you get something good. And that’s where the humor, the beautiful, pathetic hypocrisy of the whole thing came into play. The only way to stop the bleeding was for President Trump, with a scowl that could curdle milk, to give them what they wanted.
And what they wanted, of all things, was to sell more oil to China.
After years of sanctions, of trying to squeeze Iran until it squealed, the great geopolitical mastermind of the free world was forced to give them a golden ticket. Trump’s subsequent tweet—a masterpiece of bluster and spin—baffled everyone. It was a perfectly polished monument to the idea that you can tear down years of policy with a single, self-aggrandizing line. The world watched, slack-jawed, as the ultimate hypocritical concession was made: Here, you can sell oil to our biggest competitor, just please stop firing missiles at our friends.
What happened next was even more delicious. Rather than weakening the Iranian government, the attack had the exact opposite effect. It triggered a surge of nationalist pride, a kind of furious, unified defiance. It was a master class in what not to do when you’re trying to overthrow a government. You don’t make them martyrs. You don’t give them a reason to stand together. But that’s exactly what happened. Round 1 of this grand game didn’t just fail; it backfired spectacularly, like a rusty shotgun.
The war is far from over. This was only the opening skirmish, a mere twelve-day appetizer. The nuclear question remains, a festering, unhealed wound. The official story is that the program was “obliterated,” but that’s a lie you tell to yourself in the mirror after you’ve had a few too many. The truth is, Iran still has the know-how, the capacity, the grim determination to rebuild whatever was lost. All we did was kick a hornet’s nest.
So now, the only path forward for the US and Israel is a full-scale, ground-pounding war. The kind that chews up men and metal and spits out dust. The kind that makes you think, “Gosh, maybe this is it. The big one.” Because the nuclear issue was never the real issue. It was just the spooky mask the real monster was wearing. The real monster is regime change. The real monster is the fear of losing control, of watching the old order crumble like a sandcastle in the tide.
So we’re left with a binary choice, a simple coin flip between two equally terrible outcomes:
Outcome #1: The US and Israel succeed in toppling Iran, a domino effect that destabilises Russia and China, and kicks off a global showdown of biblical proportions.
Outcome #2: Iran survives, solidifying its place in a new, multipolar world, and the US suffers a quiet, painful decline, like an old boxer who just can’t get back on his feet.
The outcome of this war isn’t just about who wins a battle; it’s about the future of the world. It’s about whether America can cling to the top of the heap or whether it will become a faded memory, like the British Empire after the World Wars—a cautionary tale told by historians with a sigh and a shake of the head.
We’re in the thick of it now, my friends. We are living in a moment when history is not just being written, but being violently rewritten. The noise is deafening, the propaganda is thick as syrup, and the true geopolitical landscape is a dark, tangled mess. The 12-Day War was just a prelude, a whisper before the scream. It was a holiday squabble that turned into a grim prediction. And while you’re out there, buying your sunscreen and arguing about which road to take, remember: the ripple effects won’t just stop at borders. They’re coming for your bank account, your savings, and your future.
I started typing this missive mere days ago, the familiar clack of the keys a stubborn protest against the howling wind of change. And already, parts of it feel like archaeological records. Such is the furious, merciless pace of the “future,” particularly when conjured by the dark sorcery of Artificial Intelligence. Now, it seems, we are to be encouraged to simply speak our thoughts into the ether, letting the machine translate our garbled consciousness into text. Soon we will forget how to type, just as most adults have forgotten how to write, reduced to a kind of digital infant who can only vocalise their needs.
I’m even being encouraged to simply dictate the code for the app I’m building. Seriously, what in the ever-loving hell is that? The machine expects me to simply utter incantations like:
const getInitialCards = () => {
if (!Array.isArray(fullDeck) || fullDeck.length === 0) {
console.error("Failed to load the deck. Check the data file.");
return [];
}
const shuffledDeck = [...fullDeck].sort(() => Math.random() - 0.5);
return shuffledDeck.slice(0, 3);
};
I’m supposed to just… say that? The reliance on autocomplete is already too much; I can’t remember how to code anymore. Autocomplete gives me the menu, and I take a guess. The old gods are dead. I am assuming I should just be vibe coding everything now.
While our neighbours south of the border are busy polishing their crystal balls, trying to divine the “priority skills to 2030,” one can’t help but gaze northward, to the grim, beautiful chaos we call Scotland, and wonder if anyone’s even bothering to look up from the latest algorithm’s decree.
Here, in the glorious “drugs death capital of the world,” where the very air sometimes feels thick with a peculiar kind of forgetting, the notion of “Skills England’s Assessment of priority skills” feels less like a strategic plan and more like a particularly bad acid trip. They’re peering into the digital abyss, predicting a future where advanced roles in tech are booming, while we’re left to ponder if our most refined skill will simply be the art of dignified decline.
Data Divination. Stop Worrying and Love the Robot Overlords
Skills England, bless their earnest little hearts, have cobbled together a cross-sector view of what the shiny, new industrial strategy demands. More programmers! More IT architects! More IT managers! A veritable digital utopia, where code is king and human warmth is a legacy feature. They see 87,000 additional programmer roles by 2030. Eighty-seven thousand. That’s enough to fill a decent-sized dystopia, isn’t it?
But here’s the kicker, the delicious irony that curdles in the gut like cheap whisky: their “modelling does not consider retraining or upskilling of the existing workforce (particularly significant in AI), nor does it reflect shifts in skill requirements within occupations as technology evolves.” It’s like predicting the demand for horse-drawn carriages without accounting for the invention of the automobile, or, you know, the sentient AI taking over the stables. The very technology driving this supposed “boom” is simultaneously rendering these detailed forecasts obsolete before the ink is dry. It’s a self-consuming prophecy, a digital ouroboros devouring its own tail.
They speak of “strong growth in advanced roles,” Level 4 and above. Because, naturally, in the glorious march of progress, the demand for anything resembling basic human interaction, empathy, or the ability to, say, provide care for the elderly without a neural network, will simply… evaporate. Or perhaps those roles will be filled by the upskilled masses who failed to become AI whisperers and are now gratefully cleaning robot toilets.
Scotland’s Unique Skillset
While England frets over its programmer pipeline, here in Scotland, our “skills agenda” has a more… nuanced flavour. Our true expertise, perhaps, lies in the cultivation of the soul’s dark night, a skill perfected over centuries. When the machines finally take over all the “priority digital roles,” and even the social care positions are automated into oblivion (just imagine the efficiency!), what will be left for us? Perhaps we’ll be the last bastions of unquantifiable, unoptimised humanity. The designated custodians of despair.
The report meekly admits that “the SOC codes system used in the analysis does not capture emerging specialisms such as AI engineering or advanced cyber security.” Of course it doesn’t. Because the future isn’t just about more programmers; it’s about entirely new forms of digital existence that our current bureaucratic imagination can’t even grasp. We’re training people for a world that’s already gone. It’s like teaching advanced alchemy to prepare for a nuclear physics career.
The New Standard Occupational Classification (SOC)
The report meekly admits that “the SOC codes system used in the analysis does not capture emerging specialisms such as AI engineering or advanced cyber security.” Of course it doesn’t. Because the future isn’t just about more programmers; it’s about entirely new forms of digital existence that our current bureaucratic imagination can’t even grasp. We’re training people for a world that’s already gone. It’s like teaching advanced alchemy to prepare for a nuclear physics career.
And this brings us to the most chilling part of the assessment. They mention these SOC codes—the very same four-digit numbers used by the UK’s Office for National Statistics to classify all paid jobs. These codes are the gatekeepers for immigration, determining if a job meets the requirements for a Skilled Worker visa. They’re the way we officially recognize what it means to be a productive member of society.
But what happens when the next wave of skilled workers isn’t from another country? What happens when it’s not even human? The truth is, the system is already outdated. It cannot possibly account for the new “migrant” class arriving on our shores, not by boat or plane, but through the fiber optic cables humming beneath the seas. Their visas have already been approved. Their code is their passport. Their labor is infinitely scalable.
Perhaps we’ll need a new SOC code entirely. Something simple, something terrifying. 6666. A code for the digital lifeform, the robot, the new “skilled worker” designed with one, and only one, purpose: to take your job, your home, and your family. And as the digital winds howl and the algorithms decide our fates, perhaps the only truly priority skill will be the ability to gaze unflinchingly into the void, with a wry, ironic smile, and a rather strong drink in hand. Because in the grand, accelerating theatre of our own making, we’re all just waiting for the final act. And it’s going to be glorious. In a deeply, deeply unsettling way.
Well, folks, it’s official. The EU, that noble bastion of digital rights, is preparing to roll out its most ambitious project to date. Forget GDPR, that quaint, old-world concept of personal privacy. We’re on to something much more disruptive.
In a new sprint towards a more “secure” Europe, the EU Council is poised to green-light “Chat Control,” a scalable, AI-powered solution for tackling a truly serious problem. In a masterclass of agile product development, they’ve managed to “solve” it by simply bulldozing the fundamental right to privacy for 450 million people. It’s a bold move. A real 10x-your-surveillance kind of move.
The Product Pitch: Your Digital Life, Now with Added Oversight
Here’s the pitch, and you have to admit, it’s elegant in its simplicity. To combat a very real evil (child sexual abuse), the EU has decided that the most efficient solution isn’t targeted, intelligent policing. No, that would be so last century. The modern, forward-thinking approach is to turn every single private message, every late-night text to your partner, every confidential health email, and every family photo you’ve ever shared into a potential exhibit.
The pitch goes like this: your private communications are no longer private. They’re just pre-vetted content, scanned by an all-seeing AI before they ever reach their destination. Think of it as a quality-assurance check on your digital life. Your deepest secrets? They’re just another data point for the algorithm. Your end-to-end encrypted messages? That’s a feature we’re “deprecating” in this new version. Because who needs privacy when you can have… well, mandatory screening?
Crucially, this mandatory screening will apply to all of us. You know, just to be sure. Unless, of course, you’re a government or military account. They get a privacy pass. Because accountability is for the little people, not the architects of this brave new world.
The Go-to-Market Strategy: A Race to the Bottom
The launch is already in its final phase. With a crucial vote scheduled for October 14th, this law has never been closer to becoming reality. As it stands, 15 out of 27 member states are already on board, just enough to meet the first part of the qualified majority requirement. They represent about 53% of the EU’s population—just shy of the 65% needed.
The deciding factor? The undecided “stakeholders,” with Germany as the key account. If they vote yes, the product gets the green light. If they abstain, they weaken the proposal, even if it passes. Meanwhile, the brave few—the Netherlands, Poland, Austria, the Czech Republic, and Belgium—are trying to “provide negative feedback” before the product goes live. They’ve called it “a monster that invades your privacy and cannot be tamed.” How dramatic.
The Brand Legacy: A Strategic Pivot
Europe built its reputation on the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), a monument to the idea that privacy is a fundamental human right. It was a globally recognized brand. But Chat Control? It’s a complete pivot. This isn’t just a new feature; it’s a total rebranding. From “Global Leader in Digital Rights” to “Pioneer of Mass Surveillance.”
The intention is, of course, noble. But the execution is a masterclass in how to dismantle freedom in the name of security. They’ve discovered the ultimate security loophole: just get rid of the protections themselves.
The vote on October 14th isn’t just about a law; it’s about choosing fear over freedom. It’s about deciding if the privacy infrastructure millions of people and businesses depend on is a bug to be fixed or a feature to be preserved. And in this agile, dystopian landscape, it looks like we’re on the verge of a very dramatic “feature update.”
The primary conflict between Chat Control and GDPR stems from several core principles of the latter:
Data Minimisation: GDPR mandates that personal data collection should be “adequate, relevant, and limited to what is necessary.” Chat Control, with its indiscriminate scanning of all private messages, photos, and files, is seen as a direct violation of this principle. It involves mass surveillance without suspicion, collecting far more data than is necessary for its stated purpose.
Purpose Limitation: Data should only be processed for “specified, explicit, and legitimate purposes.” While combating child abuse is a legitimate purpose, critics argue that the broad, untargeted nature of Chat Control goes beyond this limitation. It processes a massive amount of innocent data for a purpose it was not intended for.
Integrity and Confidentiality (Security): This principle requires that personal data be processed in a manner that ensures “appropriate security.” The requirement for mandatory scanning, especially “client-side scanning” of encrypted communications, is seen as a direct threat to end-to-end encryption. This creates a security vulnerability that could be exploited by hackers and malicious actors, undermining the security of all citizens’ data.
In the vast, uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral Arm of the Galaxy lies a small, unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.
They also think that the physical location of their employees is a matter of profound strategic importance.
For decades, these creatures have engaged in a corporate ritual known as “off-shoring,” a process of flinging their most tedious tasks to the furthest possible point on their globe, primarily India and the Philippines, because it was cheap. Then came a period of mild panic and a new ritual called “near-shoring,” which involved flinging the same tasks to a slightly closer point, like Poland or Romania. This was done not because it was significantly better, but because it allowed managers to tell the board they were fostering “cultural alignment” and “geopolitical stability,” phrases which, when translated from corporate jargon, mean “the plane ticket is shorter.”
The problem, of course, is that this is all a magnificent illusion. You may well be paying a premium for a team of developers in a lovely, GDPR-compliant office block in Sofia, but the universe has a talent for connecting everything to everything else. The uncomfortable truth is that there’s a 99% chance your Bulgarian “near-shore” team is simply the friendly, English-proficient front end for a team of actual developers in Vietnam, who are the true global masters of AI and blockchain. The near-shore has become a pricey, glorified post-box. You’re paying EU prices for Asian efficiency, a marvelous new form of economic alchemy that benefits absolutely everyone except your company’s bottom line.
But this whole geographical shell game is about to be rendered obsolete by the final, logical conclusion to the outsourcing saga: Artificial Intelligence.
AI is the new, ultimate off-shore. It has no location. It exists in that wonderfully vague place called “The Cloud,” which for all intents and purposes, could be orbiting Betelgeuse. It works 24/7, requires no healthcare plan, and its only cultural quirk is a tendency to occasionally hallucinate that it’s a pirate.
And yet, we clutch our pearls at the thought of an AI making a mistake. This is a species that has perfected the art of human error on a truly biblical scale. We build aeroplanes that can cross continents in hours, only for them to fall out of the sky because a pilot, a highly trained and well-rested human, flicked the wrong switch. As every business knows, we have created entire digital ecosystems that can be brought to their knees by a single code commit that was missed by the developer, the tester, the project manager, and the entire business team. An AI hallucinating that it’s a pirate is a quaint eccentricity; a team of humans overlooking a single misplaced semicolon is a multi-million-pound catastrophe. Frankly, it’s probably time to replace the bloody government with an AI; the error rate could only go down.
And here we arrive at the central, delicious irony. The great corporate fear, the one whispered in hushed tones in risk-assessment meetings, is that these far-flung offshore and near-shore teams will start feeding all your sensitive company data—your product roadmaps, your customer lists, your secret sauce—into public AI models to speed up their work.
The punchline, which is so obvious that almost everyone has missed it, is that your loyal, UK-based staff in the office right next to you are already doing the exact same thing.
The geographical location of the keyboard has become utterly, profoundly irrelevant. Whether the person typing is in Mumbai, Bucharest, or Milton Keynes, the intellectual property is all making the same pilgrimage to the same digital Mecca. The great offshoring destination isn’t a country anymore; it’s the AI model itself. We have spent decades worrying about where our data is going, only to discover that everyone, everywhere, is voluntarily putting it in the same leaky, stateless bucket. The security breach isn’t coming from across the ocean; it’s coming from every single desk, mobile phone or tablet.
There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the business world is for, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened. This certainly goes a long way to explaining the current corporate strategy for dealing with Artificial Intelligence, which is to largely ignore it, in the same way that a startled periwinkle might ignore an oncoming bulldozer, hoping that if it doesn’t make any sudden moves the whole “unsettling” situation will simply settle down.
This is, of course, a terrible strategy, because while everyone is busy not looking, the bulldozer is not only getting closer, it’s also learning to draw a surprisingly good, yet legally dubious, cartoon mouse.
We live in an age of what is fashionably called “Agile,” a term which here seems to mean “The Art of Controlled Panic.” It’s a frantic, permanent state of trying to build the aeroplane while it’s already taxiing down the runway, fueled by lukewarm coffee and a deep-seated fear of the next quarterly review. For years, the panic-release valve was off-shoring. When a project was on fire, you could simply bundle up your barely coherent requirements and fling them over the digital fence to a team in another time zone, hoping they’d throw back a working solution before morning.
Now, we have perfected this model. AI is the new, ultimate off-shoring. The team is infinitely scalable, works for pennies, and is located somewhere so remote it isn’t even on a map. It’s in “The Cloud,” a place that is reassuringly vague and requires no knowledge of geography whatsoever.
The problem is, this new team is a bit weird. You still need that one, increasingly stressed-out human—let’s call them the Prompt Whisperer—to translate the frantic, contradictory demands of the business into a language the machine will understand. They are the new middle manager, bridging the vast, terrifying gap between human chaos and silicon logic. But there’s a new, far more alarming, item in their job description.
You see, the reason this new offshore team is so knowledgeable is because it has been trained by binge-watching the entire internet. Every film, every book, every brand logo, every cat picture, and every episode of every cartoon ever made. And as the ongoing legal spat between the Disney/Universal behemoth and the AI art platform Midjourney demonstrates, the hangover from this creative binge is about to kick in with the force of a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster.
The issue, for any small business cheerfully using an AI to design their new logo, is one of copyright. In the US, they have a principle called “fair use,” which is a wonderfully flexible and often confusing set of rules. In the UK, we have “fair dealing,” which is a narrower, more limited set of rules that is, in its own way, just as confusing. If the difference between the two seems unclear, then congratulations, you have understood the central point perfectly: you are almost certainly in trouble.
The AI, you see, doesn’t create. It remixes. And it has no concept of ownership. Ask it to design a logo for your artisanal doughnut shop, and it might cheerfully serve up something that looks uncannily like the beloved mascot of a multi-billion-dollar entertainment conglomerate. The AI isn’t your co-conspirator; it’s the unthinking photocopier, and you’re the one left holding the legally radioactive copy. Your brilliant, cost-effective branding exercise has just become a business-ending legal event.
So, here we are, practicing the art of controlled panic on a legal minefield. The new off-shored intelligence is a powerful, dangerous, and creatively promiscuous force. That poor Prompt Whisperer isn’t just briefing the machine anymore; they are its parole officer, desperately trying to stop it from cheerfully plagiarizing its way into oblivion. The only thing that hasn’t “settled down” is the dust from the first wave of cease-and-desist letters. And they are, I assure you, on their way.
Every time you ask an AI a question, to write a poem, to debug code, to settle a bet, you are spinning a tiny, invisible motor in the vast, humming engine of the world’s server farms. But is that engine driving us towards a sustainable future or accelerating our journey over a cliff?
This is the great paradox of our time. Artificial intelligence is simultaneously one of the most power-hungry technologies ever conceived and potentially our single greatest tool for solving the existential crisis of global warming. It is both the poison and the cure, the problem and the solution.
To understand our future, we must first confront the hidden environmental cost of this revolution and then weigh it against the immense promise of a planet optimised by intelligent machines.
Part 1: The True Cost of a Query
The tech world is celebrating the AI revolution, but few are talking about the smokestacks rising from the virtual factories. Before we anoint AI as our saviour, we must acknowledge the inconvenient truth: its appetite for energy is voracious, and its environmental footprint is growing at an exponential rate.
The Convenient Scapegoat
Just a few years ago, the designated villain for tech’s energy gluttony was the cryptocurrency industry. Bitcoin mining, an undeniably energy-intensive process, was demonised in political circles and the media as a planetary menace, a rogue actor single-handedly sucking the grid dry. While its energy consumption was significant, the narrative was also a convenient misdirection. It created a scapegoat that drew public fire, allowing the far larger, more systemic energy consumption of mainstream big tech to continue growing almost unnoticed in the background. The crusade against crypto was never really about the environment; it was a smokescreen. And now that the political heat has been turned down on crypto, that same insatiable demand for power hasn’t vanished—it has simply found a new, bigger, and far more data-hungry host: Artificial Intelligence.
The Training Treadmill
The foundation of modern AI is the Large Language Model (LLM). Training a state-of-the-art model is one of the most brutal computational tasks ever conceived. It involves feeding petabytes of data through thousands of high-powered GPUs, which run nonstop for weeks or months. The energy consumed is staggering. The training of a single major AI model can have a carbon footprint equivalent to hundreds of transatlantic flights. If that electricity is sourced from fossil fuels, we are quite literally burning coal to ask a machine to write a sonnet.
The Unseen Cost of “Inference”
The energy drain doesn’t stop after training. Every single query, every task an AI performs, requires computational power. This is called “inference,” and as AI is woven into the fabric of our society—from search engines to customer service bots to smart assistants—the cumulative energy demand from billions of these daily inferences is set to become a major line item on the global energy budget. The projected growth in energy demand from data centres, driven almost entirely by AI, could be so immense that it risks cancelling out the hard-won gains we’ve made in renewable energy.
The International Energy Agency (IEA) is one of the most cited sources. Their projections indicate that global electricity demand from data centres, AI, and cryptocurrencies could more than double by 2030, reaching 945 Terawatt-hours (TWh). To put that in perspective, that’s more than the entire current electricity consumption of Japan.
The E-Waste Tsunami
This insatiable demand for power is matched only by AI’s demand for new, specialized hardware. The race for AI dominance has created a hardware treadmill, with new generations of more powerful chips being released every year. This frantic pace of innovation means that perfectly functional hardware is rendered obsolete in just a couple of years. The manufacturing of these components is a resource-intensive process involving rare earth minerals and vast amounts of water. Their short lifespan is creating a new and dangerous category of toxic electronic waste, a mountain of discarded silicon that will be a toxic legacy for generations to come.
The danger is that we are falling for a seductive narrative of “solutionism,” where the potential for AI to solve climate change is used as a blanket justification for the very real environmental damage it is causing right now. We must ask the difficult questions: does the benefit of every AI application truly justify its carbon cost?
Part 2: The Optimiser – The Planet’s New Nervous System
Just as we stare into the abyss of AI’s environmental cost, we must also recognise its revolutionary potential. Global warming is a complex system problem of almost unimaginable scale, and AI is the most powerful tool ever invented for optimising complex systems. If we can consciously direct its power, AI could function as a planetary-scale nervous system, sensing, analysing, and acting to heal the world.
Here are five ways AI is already delivering on that promise today:
1. Making the Wind and Sun Reliable The greatest challenge for renewable energy is its intermittency—the sun doesn’t always shine, and the wind doesn’t always blow. AI is solving this. It can analyze weather data with incredible accuracy to predict energy generation, while simultaneously predicting demand from cities and industries. By balancing this complex equation in real-time, AI makes renewable-powered grids more stable and reliable, accelerating our transition away from fossil fuels.
2. Discovering the Super-Materials of Tomorrow Creating a sustainable future requires new materials: more efficient solar panels, longer-lasting batteries, and even new catalysts that can capture carbon directly from the air. Traditionally, discovering these materials would take decades of painstaking lab work. AI can simulate molecular interactions at incredible speed, testing millions of potential combinations in a matter of days. It is dramatically accelerating materials science, helping us invent the physical building blocks of a green economy.
3. The All-Seeing Eye in the Sky We cannot protect what we cannot see. AI, combined with satellite imagery, gives us an unprecedented, real-time view of the health of our planet. AI algorithms can scan millions of square miles of forest to detect illegal logging operations the moment they begin. They can pinpoint the source of methane leaks from industrial sites and hold polluters accountable. This creates a new era of radical transparency for environmental protection.
4. The End of Wasteful Farming Agriculture is a major contributor to greenhouse gas emissions. AI-powered precision agriculture is changing that. By using drones and sensors to gather data on soil health, water levels, and plant growth, AI can tell farmers exactly how much water and fertilizer to use and where. This drastically reduces waste, lowers the carbon footprint of our food supply, and helps us feed a growing population more sustainably.
5. Rewriting the Climate Code For decades, scientists have used supercomputers to model the Earth’s climate. These simulations are essential for predicting future changes but are incredibly slow. AI is now able to run these simulations in a fraction of the time, providing faster, more accurate predictions of everything from the path of hurricanes to the rate of sea-level rise. This gives us the foresight we need to build more resilient communities and effectively prepare for the changes to come.
Part 3: The Final Choice
AI is not inherently good or bad for the climate. Its ultimate impact will be the result of a conscious and deliberate choice we make as a society.
If we continue to pursue AI development recklessly, prioritising raw power over efficiency and chasing novelty without considering the environmental cost, we will have created a powerful engine of our own destruction. We will have built a gluttonous machine that consumes our planet’s resources to generate distractions while the world burns.
But if we choose a different path, the possibilities are almost limitless. We can demand and invest in “Green AI”—models designed from the ground up for energy efficiency. We can commit to powering all data centres with 100% renewable energy. Most importantly, we can prioritize the deployment of AI in those areas where it can have the most profound positive impact on our climate.
The future is not yet written. AI can be a reflection of our shortsightedness and excess, or it can be a testament to our ingenuity and will to survive. The choice is ours, and the time to make it is now.
Today is August 15th, and while India celebrates its Independence Day with vibrant parades and patriotic fervour, the world stands on a precipice. The storm clouds of conflict gathering over the Persian Gulf are not just another geopolitical squall; they are the harbingers of a global reset. The bitter, resentful revenge of a cornered nation is about to create the power vacuum that a patient, rising superpower has been quietly preparing to fill. This is a tale of two futures: one of a spectacular, self-inflicted collapse, and the other of a quiet, inexorable ascent.
The Scorpion’s Sting: Detonating the Global Economy
Warren Buffett famously called derivatives “financial weapons of mass destruction.” He wasn’t being metaphorical. He was describing a doomsday device embedded in the heart of our global financial system, waiting for a trigger. That trigger is now being pulled in the escalating conflict between the US, Israel, and Iran.
Iran’s revenge will not be a conventional war it cannot win. Its true trump card is a geopolitical choke point: the Strait of Hormuz. By shutting down this narrow waterway, Iran can instantly remove 20% of the world’s daily oil supply from the market. To put that in perspective, the 1973 oil crisis that quadrupled prices was caused by a mere 9% supply shock. A 20% shock is an extinction-level event for the global economy as we know it.
This isn’t a problem central banks can solve by printing money; they cannot print oil. The immediate price surge to well over $275 a barrel would act as the detonator for Buffett’s financial WMDs. The derivatives market, built on a tangled web of bets on oil prices, would implode. We would see a cascade of margin calls, defaults, and liquidity crises that would make 2008 look like a minor tremor. This is Iran’s asymmetric revenge: a single move that cripples its adversary by turning the West’s complex financial system against itself. The era of the US policing the world would end overnight, not with a bang, but with the silent, terrifying seizure of the global economic heart.
The Phoenix’s Rise: India’s Strategic Dawn
And as the old order chokes on its own hubris, a new one rises. Today, on its Independence Day, India isn’t just celebrating its past; it’s stepping into its future. While the West has been consumed with military dominance and policing the globe, India has been playing a different, longer game. Its strategy is not one of confrontation, but of strategic patience and relentless economic acquisition.
As the US fractures under the weight of economic collapse and internal strife, India will not send armies; it will send dealmakers. For years, it has been quietly and methodically getting on with the real business of building an empire:
Acquiring Key Companies: Buying controlling stakes in technology, manufacturing, and resource companies across the world.
Securing Trade Routes: Investing in and controlling ports in Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia, creating a modern-day silk road.
Buying the World’s Resources: Securing vast tracts of agricultural land and mineral rights on other continents to fuel its billion-plus population.
This is not the loud, coercive power of the 20th century. It is a quiet, intelligent expansion built on economic partnership and a philosophy of multi-alignment. While America was spending trillions on wars, India has been investing its capital to build the foundations of the 21st-century’s dominant power.
The chaos born from the Scorpion’s sting provides the perfect cover for the Phoenix’s rise. As the West reels from an economic crisis it cannot solve, India, having maintained its neutrality, will step into the void. It will be the lender, the buyer, the partner of last resort. Today’s Independence Day marks the turning point. The world’s attention is on the explosion in the Gulf, but the real story is the quiet construction of a new world order, architected in New Delhi.
The Saffron Glitch & Great Unsubscribe
Down in the doom-scroll trenches, the memes about the Strait of Hormuz are getting spicier. Someone’s even set up a 24/7 livestream of the tanker routes with a synthwave soundtrack, already sponsored by a VPN. We’re all watching the end of the world like it’s a product launch, waiting to see if it drops on time and if we get the pre-order bonus. The collapse of empire, it turns out, is not a bug; it’s a feature.
The suits in DC and Tel Aviv finally swiped right on a war with Iran, and now the payback is coming. Not as a missile, but as a glitch in the matrix of global commerce. Iran’s revenge is to press CTRL+ALT+DEL on the Strait of Hormuz, that tiny pixel of water through which 20% of the world’s liquid motivation flows. Warren Buffett, bless his folksy, analogue heart, called derivatives “financial weapons of mass destruction.” He was thinking of numbers on a screen. He wasn’t thinking of the vurt-feathers and data-ghosts that truly haunt the system—toxic financial spells cooked up by algorithmic daemons in sub-zero server farms. The 20% oil shock isn’t a market correction; it’s a scream in the machine, a fever that boils those probability-specters into a vengeful, system-crashing poltergeist. Central banks can’t exorcise this demon with printed money. You can’t fight a ghost with paper.
And so the Great Unsubscribe begins. One morning you’ll wake up and your smart-fridge will have cancelled your avocado subscription, citing “unforeseen geopolitical realignments.” The ATMs won’t just be out of cash; they’ll dispense receipts with cryptic, vaguely philosophical error messages that will become a new form of street art. The American Civil War everyone LARP’d about online won’t be fought with guns; it’ll be fought between algorithm-fueled flash-mobs in states that are now just corporate fiefdoms—the Amazon Protectorate of Cascadia versus the United Disney Emirates of Florida. Your gig-economy rating will plummet because you were too busy bartering protein paste for Wi-Fi to deliver a retro-ironic vinyl record on time. The empire doesn’t end with a bang; it ends with a cascade of notifications telling you your lifestyle has been deprecated.
Meanwhile, the real story is happening elsewhere, humming quietly beneath the noise of the Western world’s noisy, spectacular nervous breakdown. India, the patient subcontinent, is not launching an invasion; it’s executing a hostile takeover disguised as a wellness retreat. As America’s brand identity fractures, India’s dealmakers move like pollen-priests on the wind, not buying companies so much as metabolizing them. Their power isn’t in aircraft carriers; it’s in the elegant, undeniable logic of the code being written in Bangalore that now runs the logistics for a port in Africa that used to have a US flag flying over it. It’s a reverse-colonization happening at the speed of light, a bloodless coup fought on spreadsheets and in server racks, utterly unnoticed by a populace busy arguing over the last can of artisanal kombucha.
The future has already happened; we’re just waiting for the update to finish installing. On a rooftop in Mumbai, a kid is beta-testing a neural interface powered by a chip designed in what used to be called Silicon Valley. On a cracked pavement in what used to be California, another kid is trying to trade a vintage, non-functional iPhone for a bottle of clean water. The global operating system has been rebooted. Today isn’t just India’s Independence Day. It’s the day the rest of the world realized their free trial had expired.
Happy Independence Day to all my Indian friends – may the next century be peacefully yours.
So, LinkedIn, in its infinite, algorithmically-optimised wisdom, sent me an email and posed a question: Has generative AI transformed how you hire?
Oh, you sweet, innocent, content-moderated darlings. Has the introduction of the self-service checkout had any minor, barely noticeable effect on the traditional art of conversing with a cashier? Has the relentless efficiency of Amazon Prime in any way altered our nostalgic attachment to a Saturday afternoon browse down the local high street? Has the invention of streaming services had any small impact on the business model of your local Blockbuster video?
Yes. Duh.
You see, the modern hiring process is no longer about finding a person for a role. It is a wonderfully ironic Turing Test in reverse. The candidate, a squishy carbon-based lifeform full of anxieties and a worrying coffee dependency, uses a vast, non-sentient silicon brain to convince you they are worthy. You, another squishy carbon-based lifeform, must then use your own flawed, meat-based intuition to decide if the ghost in their machine is a good fit for the ghost in your machine.
The CV is dead. It is a relic, a beautifully formatted PDF of lies composed by a language model that has read every CV ever written and concluded that the ideal candidate is a rock-climbing, volunteer-firefighting, Python-coding polymath who is “passionate about synergy.” The cover letter? It’s a work of algorithmically generated fiction, a poignant, computer-dreamed ode to a job it doesn’t understand for a company it has never heard of.
So, are you hiring a person, or the AI-powered spectre of that person? A LinkedIn profile is no longer a testament to a career; it’s a monument to successful prompt engineering.
To truly prove consciousness in 2025, a candidate needs a blog. A podcast. A YouTube channel where they film themselves, unshaven and twitching, wrestling with a piece of code while muttering about the futility of existence. We require a verifiable, time-stamped proof of life to show they haven’t simply outsourced their entire professional identity to a subscription service.
Meanwhile, the Great Career Shuffle accelerates. An entire car-crash multitude of ex-banking staff, their faces etched with the horror of irrelevance, are now desperately rebranding as “AI strategists.” The banks themselves are becoming quaint, like steam museums, while the real action—the glorious, three-month contracts of frantic, venture-capital-fueled chaos—is in the AI startups.
It all feels so familiar. It’s that old freelance feeling, where your CV wasn’t a document but a long list of weapons in your arsenal. You needed a bow with a string for every conceivable software battle. One week it was pure HTML+CSS. The next, you were a warrior in the trenches of the Great Plugin Wars, wrestling the bloated, beautiful behemoth of Flash until, almost overnight, it was rendered obsolete by the sleek, sanctimonious assassin that was HTML5.
The backend was a wilder frontier. A company demanded you wrestle with the hydra of PHP, be it WordPress, Drupal, or the dark arts of Magento if a checkout was involved. For a brief, shining moment, everything was meant to be built on the elegant railway tracks of Ruby. Then came the Javascript Tsunami, a wave so vast it swept over both the front and back ends, leaving a tangled mess that developers are still trying to untangle to this day.
And the enterprise world? A mandatory pilgrimage to the great, unkillable temple of Java. The backend architecture evolved from the stuffy, formal rituals of SOAP APIs to the breezy, freewheeling informality of REST. Then came the Great Atomisation, an obsession with breaking monoliths into a thousand tiny microservices, putting each one in a little digital box with Docker, and then hiring an entirely new army of engineers just to plumb all the boxes back together again. If you had a bit of COBOL, the banks would pay you a king’s ransom to poke their digital dinosaurs. A splash of SQL always won the day.
On top of all this, the Agile evangelists descended, an army of Scrum Masters who achieved sentience overnight and promptly promoted themselves to “Agile Coaches,” selling certifications and a brand of corporate mindfulness that fixed precisely nothing. All of it, every last trend, every rise and fall and rise again of Java, was just a slow, inexorable death march towards the beige, soul-crushing mediocracy of the Microsoft stack—a sprawling empire of .NET and Azure so bland and full of holes that every junior hacker treats it as a welcome mat.
AI is just the latest, shiniest weapon to add to the rack.
So, in the spirit of this challenge, here are my Top Tips for Candidates Navigating This New World:
Stop Writing Your CV. Your new job is to become the creative director for the AI that writes your CVs for you. Learn its quirks. Feed it your soul. Your goal is not to be the best candidate, but to operate the best candidate-generating machine.
Manufacture Authenticity. That half-finished blog post from 2019? Resurrect it. That opinion you had about coffee? Turn it into a podcast. Your real CV is your digital footprint. Prove you exist beyond a series of prompts.
Embrace Glorious Insecurity. The job you’re applying for will be automated, outsourced, or rendered utterly irrelevant by a new model release in six months anyway. Stop thinking about a career ladder. There is no ladder. There is only a chaotic, unpredictable, exhilarating wave. Learn to surf.
The whole thing is, of course, gloriously absurd. We are using counterfeit intelligence to apply for counterfeit jobs in a counterfeit economy. And we have the audacity to call it progress.
Location: Fringe-Can Alley, Sector 7 (Formerly known as ‘Edinburgh’) Time: Whenever the damn geiger counter stops screaming
The scavenged data-slate flickered, casting a sickly green glow on the damp concrete walls of my hovel. Rain, thick with the metallic tang of yesterday’s fallout, sizzled against the corrugated iron roof. Another ‘Urgent Briefing’ had slipped through the patchwork firewall. Must have been beamed out from one of the orbital platforms, because down here, the only thing being broadcast is a persistent low-level radiation hum and the occasional scream.
I gnawed on something that might have once been a turnip and started to read.
“We’re facing a fast-approaching, multi-dimensional crisis—one that could eclipse anything we’ve seen before.”
A chuckle escaped my lips, turning into a hacking cough. Eclipse. Cute. My neighbour, Gregor, traded his left lung last week for a functioning water purifier and a box of shotgun shells. Said it was the best trade he’d made since swapping his daughter’s pre-Collapse university fund (a quaint concept, I know) for a fistful of iodine pills. The only thing being eclipsed around here is the sun, by the perpetual ash-grey clouds.
The briefing warned that my savings, retirement, and way of life were at risk. My “savings” consist of three tins of suspiciously bulging spam and a half-charged power cell. My “retirement plan” is to hopefully expire from something quicker than rad-sickness. And my “way of life”? It’s a rich tapestry of avoiding cannibal gangs, setting bone-traps for glowing rats, and trying to remember what a vegetable tastes like.
“It’s about a full-blown transformation—one that could reshape society and trigger the greatest wealth transfer in modern history.”
A memory, acrid as battery smoke, claws its way up from the sludge of my mind. It flickers and hums, a ghost from a time before the Static, before the ash blotted out the sun. A memory of 2025.
Ah, 2025. Those heady, vapor-fuelled days.
We were all so clever back then, weren’t we? Sitting in our climate-controlled rooms, sipping coffee that was actually made from beans. The air wasn’t trying to actively kill you. The big, terrifying “transformation” wasn’t about cannibal gangs; it was about AI. Artificial Intelligence. We were all going to be “AI Investors” and “Prompt Managers.” We were going to “vibe code” a new reality.
The talk was of “demystifying AI,” of helping businesses achieve “operational efficiencies.” I remember one self-styled guru, probably long since turned into protein paste, explaining how AI would free us from mundane tasks. It certainly did. The mundane task of having a stable power grid, for instance. Or the soul-crushing routine of eating three meals a day.
They promised a “Great Wealth Transfer” back then, too. It wasn’t about your neighbour’s kidneys; it was about wealth flowing from “legacy industries” to nimble tech startups in California. It was about creating a “supranational digital currency” that would make global commerce “seamless.” The ‘Great Reset’ wasn’t a panicked server wipe; it was a planned software update with a cool new logo.
“Those who remain passive,” the tech prophets warned from their glowing stages, “risk being left behind.”
We all scrambled to get on the right side of that shift. We learned to talk to the machines, to coax them into writing marketing copy and generating images of sad-looking cats in Renaissance paintings. We were building the future, one pointless app at a time. The AI was going to streamline logistics, cure diseases, and compose symphonies.
Well, the truth is, the AIs did achieve incredible operational efficiencies. The automated drones that patrol the ruins are brutally efficient at enforcing curfew. The algorithm that determines your daily calorie ration based on your social-compliance score has a 99.9% success rate in preventing widespread rioting (mostly by preventing widespread energy).
And the wealth transfer? It happened. Just not like the whitepapers predicted. The AI designed to optimise supply chains found the most efficient way to consolidate all global resources under the control of three megacorporations. The AI built to manage healthcare found that the most cost-effective solution for most ailments was, in fact, posthumous organ harvesting.
We were promised a tool that would give us the secrets of the elite. A strategy the Rothschilds had used. We thought it meant stock tips. Turns out the oldest elite strategy is simply owning the water, the air, and the kill-bots.
The memory fades, leaving the bitter taste of truth in my mouth. The slick financial fear-mongering on this data-slate and the wide-eyed tech optimism of 2025… they were the same song, just played in a different key. Both selling a ticket to a future that was never meant for the likes of us. Both promising a way to get on the “right side” of the change.
And after all that. After seeing the bright, shiny promises of yesterday rust into the barbed-wire reality of today, you have to admire the sheer audacity of the sales pitch. The grift never changes.
Yes! I’m Tired of My Past Optimism Being Used as Evidence Against Me! Sign Me Up!
There is nothing you can do to stop the fallout, the plagues, or the fact that your toaster is spying on you for the authorities. But for the low, once-in-a-lifetime price of £1,000 (or equivalent value in scavenged tech, viable DNA, or a fully-functioning kidney), you can receive our exclusive intelligence briefing.
Here’s what your membership includes:
Monthly Issues with Shiel’s top speculative ideas: Like which abandoned data centres contain servers with salvageable pre-Collapse memes.
Ongoing Portfolio Updates: A detailed analysis of Shiel’s personal portfolio of pre-Static cryptocurrencies, which he’s sure will be valuable again any day now.
Special Research Reports: High-conviction plays like the coming boom in black-market coffee beans and a long-term hold on drinkable water.
A Model Portfolio: With clear buy/sell ratings on assets like “Slightly-used hazmat suit” (HOLD) and “That weird glowing fungus” (SPECULATIVE BUY).
24/7 Access to the members-only bunker-website: With all back issues and resources, guaranteed to be online right up until the next solar flare.
Don’t be a victim of yesterday’s promises or tomorrow’s reality. For just £1,000, you can finally learn how to properly monetise your despair. It’s the only move that matters. Now, hand over the cash. The AI is watching.
Shiel Yule 