Category: Technology

The digital world – a public nuisance?

Posted on by The Information Badger in AI, Business, Digital technology, Information Technology, Life, Risk, Science, Technology, Transformation, Wellbeing

The old coin/card ticket machines in the local High Street’s car park have been replaced by swanky touch-screen units that only take contactless payment. To be fair, there’s one new machine in the car park that still purports to take coins and contactless payment, although nobody has so far been able to get it to actually accept coins! There’s something else too. It’s an open-air car park and the screens on the new units are hardly readable on a bright sunny day. The new machines are straightforward to use once you know how, but earlier this week the only functioning machine was the one purporting to take coins as well as contactless payments. There was a queue, which the Badger joined, but the pensioner at the head of the queue was having trouble getting the machine to accept their contactless card payment. Giving up, they tried coins instead, and that didn’t work either. The flummoxed pensioner thought there was something wrong with their bank card. A kind lady stepped in and said she’d pay for the pensioner’s ticket using her own card. That didn’t work either, causing the lady and the pensioner to grumble ‘The digital world is a public nuisance’.

The Badger subsequently cogitated on whether the digital world is indeed a public nuisance. Putting the legalities of what constitutes a public nuisance to one side, whether the digital world’s a nuisance depends on your perspective. Grandparents, parents, young adults, and children have different perspectives, but research across this age spectrum apparently suggests that views are not purely yes or purely no, but definitely not neutral. Many think the digital world enhances social interactions, learning opportunities, business efficiency, innovation, convenience, and so on. However, many believe it’s become a nuisance because a) it’s dominated by self-interested major corporations who put their profits rather than users first, and b) it lessens person to person physical contact, encourages excessive screen time, distorts our sense of reality, erodes personal privacy, is an enormous source of mis and disinformation, and causes mental, health, and behavioural issues in young adults, children, and vulnerable groups.

Does the Badger think the digital world’s a public nuisance? No…but beginning to lean towards yes! No, because a lengthy career in the IT industry showed that in the right hands, with good laws, controls, and ethical and moral human behaviour within acceptable societal norms, the digital world produces enormous benefits and is a good servant to mankind. Why leaning towards yes? Because although the science relating to the digital world’s impact on humanity has been too slow over the last few decades, it’s now confirming that nuisances are real and often harmful. It’s thus reasonable to conclude that mankind is fast becoming a servant to the digital world when it should be the other way round, and that AI is destined to reinforce this in the coming years…

More STEM-educated MPs needed for effective national leadership

Posted on by The Information Badger in AI, Education, Engineering, Information Technology, Leadership, Politics, Science, Technology

The lawn’s brown, the flowers and trees look decidedly sad, and there appears to be fewer bumblebees, honeybees, and small birds than usual. There are, however, a greater number and variety of butterflies than normal. These were the Badger’s first thoughts when sitting in the shade contemplating the world after entertaining his grandson at the weekend. His thoughts then wandered into the realities of the current world that his young grandson’s generation face. It’s been an exceptional UK summer, with blue skies and high temperatures across much of the nation. For a nation that is renowned for talking about the weather, the heat brings mixed blessings – there are water shortages, hosepipe bans, and a high risk of destructive vegetation fires. Many people are wringing their hands and banging the climate change drum, but the Badger’s grandson is taking the heatwaves in his stride! He thinks it’s much better having good weather in the school holiday period so that he can be outdoors rather than housebound due to rain and gloom.

The Badger’s thoughts moved onto matters oblivious to his grandson. Things like, for example, the fact that being big and powerful doesn’t mean you’ll succeed (as the Ukraine and Middle East conflicts illustrate), and that with AI the world’s embarked on its most dangerous period of change ever. Whilst there’s much worry due to fossil fuel emissions and climate change, the consumption of resources driven by AI and other technological developments also have major consequences for the planet that hence the future life of the Badger’s grandson’s generation. With a sigh, the Badger’s cogitations concluded that the nature and predisposition of humans, and self-serving leadership dynamics, are at the heart of many of the world’s woes.

The self-serving leadership conclusion prompted the Badger to explore the educational background of the current UK Cabinet. This revealed that only one current UK Cabinet member has studied a STEM subject at university; a situation that’s essentially unchanged from Kier Starmer’s Cabinet. It also revealed (see here) that of the 650 elected Members of the UK Parliament, ~83% have university degrees but only 17% have a STEM degree, a proportion that’s barely changed in 20 years. With ~ 46% of UK undergraduates in the country studying STEM subjects, a measure of 17% suggests significant STEM underrepresentation in the country’s political and governmental circles. No wonder, the Badger mused, that the country has not been firing on all cylinders during this century.

Life today is dominated by science, technology, engineering and maths. In an era of AI and rapid, AI-enabled, science and technological advances, surely there must be more STEM-educated people around the UK Cabinet table for effective national leadership? Of course, there should. Afterall, STEM-educated people, as noted here, base decisions on data and unspun truth, both essential if the nation’s ever to have the leadership needed to get its mojo back…

AI IPOs – Look, Listen, and Learn…

Posted on by The Information Badger in AI, Business, Delivery, Information Technology, Leadership, Technology

The young Badger was given some advice by his new boss when joining a dynamic IT company many years ago, namely ‘Look into everything that’s put in front of you, especially numbers. Listen quietly and closely to everything that others say. Learn from situations and from the good practices and behaviours of others. Heed this advice and you’ll do well’. Decades later that advice is as good today as it was then. As the Badger’s witnessed over the years, not everyone takes such advice on board. He’s been amazed many times that some people running projects or business units have not taken the trouble to ‘look, listen, or learn’ in order to understand the underlying performance of their areas of responsibility.

Looking at, understanding, and being able to explain what’s driving the metrics is important in managing any business or project activity. It’s crucial to leadership, being in control, and instilling confidence in others. One of the young Badger’s first formative experiences was at a CEO review of a business unit’s operational performance. The CEO was a demanding, numbers-focused individual, and the business unit leader had the reputation of being a handwaving optimist with a reluctance to hear bad news. The review did not go well. It quickly became clear that the unit leader’s view of their business was completely at odds with the trends in the unit’s metrics. The irritated CEO raised their voice and said ‘It’s not wrong to make a profit, and if you don’t know your numbers then you don’t know your business’. A lecture followed, pointing out that understanding financial and other metrics was crucial to successful business management. It was an uncomfortable review to witness, but it reinforced to the Badger that the advice he had received was sound. Shortly thereafter, the business unit leader was replaced.

In the AI world, SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic are progressing IPOs. The Badger’s applied the look (at the numbers), listen (to a wide variety of knowledgeable commentators), and learn (from the history of the digital revolution over 30 years) advice from years ago to assess if these IPOs might be good investments for members of the public. He concluded that they are speculative investments. AI may be a transformative technology that cannot be ignored but investing through a fear of missing out (FOMO) rather than rational assessment is rarely a good idea. Huge sums are being spent on building the necessary infrastructure, but so far none of these companies have made a profit from AI. This short YouTube video neatly explains the AI race in an easily understandable way. It ends making the point that building AI is one thing, but making money from it over the long term is the real challenge. The Badger’s decided that wariness is always sensible when no profits have been made so far, but a huge pot of gold is promised in the future…

Digital slop…

Posted on by The Information Badger in AI, Business, Information Technology, Life, social media, Technology

Over the years, the Badger’s been involved in company acquisitions, and he’s also been on the receiving end when his employer was itself acquired by another company. Experiencing both sides of the equation has been valuable and educational. Acquisitions normally follow standard processes. When the transaction is finally agreed and completed, the subsequent integration activities also follow fairly standard processes. This week the Badger was asked about his view on ‘digital slop’, and – oddly – this triggered a memory from way back in 1997 when the Badger attended a post-acquisition leaders conference following the purchase of a Dublin-based company in the telecommunications software market. This company had products in the short messaging services (SMS) sector, and the conference took place in a rural hotel in the Irish countryside some distance from the city.

Why did ‘digital slop’ trigger this particular memory? Probably because a memorable element of the conference was a presentation by a leader from the acquired company on their vision of the future for mobile phones and telecommunication software products. They described a vision of the future in which everyone had an internet-connected mobile phone which enticed them to enter a shop every time they walked past one in a shopping mall or on the High Street! It was an interesting presentation which occurred during the year of Amazon’s IPO, before Facebook existed, and shortly before Google was founded. Most conference attendees could see its technological feasibility, but most questioned why people would want to be bombarded with ‘marketing and adverts’ as they walked through a mall or along a High Street. Most, including the Badger, thought members of the public would say ‘I don’t need this, I don’t want this, and I don’t trust this’.

It was these 1997 words that underpinned the Badger’s answer about today’s ‘digital slop’, a phrase that’s emerged in recent years to describe the huge growing volume of dubious online content produced using AI tools. Digital technology has changed the world since 1997, AI continues to change it under our feet, and AI-enabled ‘digital slop’ does little for humanity except add to the mass digital exploitation of people. People have come to learn with social media over the years that dubious content, online misinformation, and addictive scrolling are not bugs but features of the system, and that they are becoming ever-more slaves to algorithms that don’t have their best interests at heart. Countering this requires an iron will and some disciplined personal behaviour. In relation to AI produced ‘digital slop’, perhaps ‘I don’t need this, I don’t want this, I don’t trust this, and I don’t consume this’ is a better mantra for today than the 1997 words. AI is a powerful technology that cannot be ignored, but the general public probably need more attitude and behavioural alignment with these words if humanity is to resist its mounting digital slavery…

Studying at University, the electronic pocket calculator, and AI…

Posted on by The Information Badger in AI, Education, Engineering, Information Technology, Learning, Opinion, Technology, universities

Last week the Badger wrote about his nephew’s burst of doubt about whether AI renders going to university pointless. He messaged this week to say thank you for the Badger’s guidance and to confirm that AI is not going to get in the way of fulfilling his dream of studying a STEM subject at university. Good! The Badger has no doubt that he’ll get to university and do well in his chosen subject. The Badger say’s this not through optimistic rose-tinted glasses of family connection, but because his nephew ended the message saying ‘I’ve concluded that while AI provides an additional set of tools, I don’t expect to use them to cut corners and do the thinking and work for me because this technology won’t help me be me, or help me develop the independent thought processes, behaviours, and skills that people like Tim Berners-Lee acquired when they did their degree at university’. This sentence got the Badger thinking.

When Tim Berners-Lee did his undergraduate degree at university there were no laptops, tablets, smartphones, or desktop personal computers, and no AI. In fact, the pocket calculator was a recent innovation! It’s easy to forget that it was only ~50 years ago that the emergence of electronic pocket calculators started to make rapid calculations accessible to a wide personal and professional audience. When they first hit the market, the Badger was just starting his degree course. He and most other students on the course had soon bought a pocket electronic calculator. The Badger purchased a Sinclair Cambridge for £19.95. Others bought a Sinclair Scientific costing £49.95, a price that was beyond the Badger’s means. By the end of his degree, however, the Badger had upgraded to a Texas Instruments SR-51, which served as a great workhorse for many years. But here’s the point. Calculators became an essential tool, but they didn’t fundamentally change the content of our degree course, or the concepts, methods, processes, practices, ways of thinking, practical skills, and interactions that were at the heart of the subject matter.

Many of today’s tech leaders went to university in the 1980s and 1990s when every student had an electronic pocket calculator, and rudimentary personal computers were very limited compared with those of today. They’ve all done well without AI. Of course, AI is different to the pocket calculator, but let’s not lose sight of the fact that it’s a tool. Those studying for a degree today should use this tool responsibly, because outsourcing your thinking and development to this technology just to gain a qualification serves no useful purpose, especially if you value your independence, freedom of thought, personal creativity, and the maximisation of your career options. As the Royal Observatory recently put it, AI can ultimately trivialise human intelligence. The whole point of going to university is ultimately to grow human intelligence, not trivialise it.

AI in the dock?

Posted on by The Information Badger in AI, Business, Information Technology, Legal matters, Life, Technology

Consider this scenario. Someone approaches an individual and asks them to provide answers to some questions. The individual performs some Google searches of the internet, consults books in a local library, and then pieces together the answers to the questions. These are then communicated to the requestor face to face, or by phone or video call. The requestor uses the answers to commit a wicked crime for which they are prosecuted. The person providing the answers to the requestor’s questions is deemed by law to have some culpability for the crime and so they are prosecuted too. Now consider the same scenario but with the perpetrator directly asking ChatGPT (or similar) the same questions. The AI’s answers are used to commit the same wicked crime for which the perpetrator is prosecuted. The AI, however, does not have the same legal culpability for the crime as the individual noted above.

Reports that Florida’s attorney general has opened a criminal investigation into whether ChatGPT provided advice to a murdering gunman last year, see here for example, made the Badger wonder about the following question: ‘Are people using AI professionally or personally really aware of where the boundaries of responsibility sit?’ Probably not, was the conclusion after musing in the Spring sunshine. If a doctor follows a wrong diagnosis delivered by an AI, is the doctor responsible or the hospital, the engineers who built the AI model, or some other organisation in the chain? Some who build and deploy AI models appear to think such responsibility questions can be sorted out later when something goes awry and causes a crisis. This is never a sensible approach.

The more AI develops, the more it impacts important aspects of everyone’s life. However, it isn’t obvious, at least to the Badger, that professionals or the public understand much about how AI arrives at its answers. The Badger, who’s not a lawyer, thus spent a little time exploring how the law deals with the question of responsibility when someone takes action guided by AI’s output. It appears that you – not the AI vendor nor the algorithm – but you the user are legally responsible. This means that anyone – organisations, professionals, or members of the general public – using AI is always responsible and liable for the actions taken on guidance from AI. Organisations and humans can be sued, but AI cannot. When AI makes a mistake, liability flows to the humans and organisations that deployed it and used it,

That’s not really a surprise, but it’s a reminder for all users that they are more likely to find themselves in the dock than AI. It’s also a reminder that proper human consideration and diligence is imperative before acting on AI’s outputs. The Badger also thinks it’s a reminder that we must never allow AI to autonomously rule the world…

Digital backlash…

Posted on by The Information Badger in social media, Online Services, Technology, Life, Information Technology, AI, Digital technology, Backlash

The Artemis mission around the dark side of the moon, the sight of humanoid robots running a half marathon (here and here), Anthropic’s Claude Mythos AI model and comments by ex-PM Rishi Sunak, all illustrate the power and relentless advance of digital technology. Having a decades-long career in the IT industry, it’s been routine for the Badger to deal with perpetual change in digital technology. The rapidity of that change kept the Badger and his colleagues motivated, challenged, learning and eager for new skills, and greatly satisfied when systems were delivered to clients and put into operational use. With this background you might think the Badger is an ardent digital technophile today, but he’s not. He’s ‘neutral’ with no strong affinity for, or aversion to, digital technology. He’s not overly enthusiastic about digital technology’s constant impact on our lives, but not overly critical of it either. Why is that?

The answer lies in three points: there’s no putting digital advances back in the box once they exist, not all digital technology is good for society, and digital technology dominated by a handful of individuals, corporations, or countries does not lead to a focus on benefiting humanity as a whole. Regarding the first point, innovation is a human attribute that will always produce advances, and there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s the second and third points which have moved the Badger to ‘neutral’ over the last decade, because digital technology has taken over our lives by stealth, driven ostensibly by agendas set by giant US and Chinese corporations controlled by a handful of individuals. Regulators have been slow, and tech giants have strongly resisted the introduction of sensible new laws that benefit wider society at every turn because of the threat to their own agendas. Digital advances have infiltrated society by default and diffusion without too much regard for the impact on the public. AI simply illustrates the point. Philosophical objectivity is thus at the heart of why the Badger’s become a neutral rather than ardent technophile.

Everyone today is more aware than ever before of digital technology’s downsides. There’s a growing willingness for the public to push back on the digital world. The UK government backtracked on Digital ID ambitions after a backlash, there’s a growing backlash against AI in the US (see here, here, and here), Swedish schools are cutting back on digital learning and returning to books, pen, and paper, numerous countries are  moving to ban social media for under 16s, a ban on children using smartphones at school has just been announced in the UK, and big tech has just lost a landmark social media addiction case. Society’s pushing back and questioning an unrestrained digital world more and more, and this backlash seems likely to grow with time. Indeed, with the world as it is today, the Badger’s unlikely to move from a neutral affinity any time soon…

OpenAI pausing Stargate UK is hardly a surprise!

Posted on by The Information Badger in AI, Business, Data Centres, Delivery, Energy, Information Technology, Technology

As widely reported (see here for example), OpenAI is pausing its multi-billion-dollar Stargate UK project. The project was first announced in September 2025 with the declared purpose of ensuring ‘OpenAI’s world leading AI models can run on local computing power in the UK, for UK – particularly for specialist use cases where jurisdiction matters. This will help power the UK’s future economy, boost its global competitiveness, and deliver on the countries national AI Opportunities Action Plan’. The UK government’s AI Opportunities Action Plan had been announced in January 2025 as a focus for ramping up AI adoption to boost economic growth, jobs, and improvements to people’s everyday lives. A year later, in January 2026, a seemingly positive  progress update was published. The government’s thus likely to be wringing its hands about OpenAI’s pause. Why? Because it puts a dent in the country’s desire to be an ‘AI superpower’, especially when the company asserts that regulation and high energy costs are obstacles. The Stargate UK pause, however, is hardly a surprise given that the holistic situation faced by OpenAI today is really no different to when the project was announced last September.

OpenAI announced the project on the date President Trump started his state visit to the UK. With tariffs as a backdrop, the pressure on the UK government to make the visit a success was huge, and a centrepiece during the visit was the signing of a technology partnership involving new investment and cooperation on AI. Domestically, the government needed this to promote its growth agenda, but a ‘technology partnership’ and tangible realities are different. Given the pressure for the visit to be a success, OpenAI’s Stargate UK announcement was part of an overall joint PR strategy – at least that’s what the Badger senses. At that time, the UK had some of the highest costs for electricity in the world, and that’s still the same today! If there’s one thing an aspirant AI superpower needs, it’s economically competitive electricity and so it can hardly be a surprise when a commercial company focused ‘on the business case and numbers’ decides to hold off further investment. Additionally, there’s uncertainty about changes to UK law to allow AI firms to train their systems using copyrighted works, ongoing investor anxiety about an AI bubble, the fact that OpenAI hasn’t delivered a profit yet and is forecast to make losses of ~$44 billion before becoming profitable in 2029, and that OpenAI is facing massive competition from Google (and others) which is raising significant questions about its future. All of these points were material when Stargate UK was announced 7 months ago, and they remain so today.

A sceptic could thus be excused for thinking that the project was driven by a geopolitical public relations necessity in the first place. For the Badger, with his instincts rattling from experience, it’s thus hardly a surprise that Stargate UK is paused…   

AI and progress towards nuclear fusion for power generation…

Posted on by The Information Badger in AI, Energy, Engineering, Information Technology, Nuclear Fusion, Science, Technology

When the radio alarm signals that it’s time to rise and prepare for the day ahead, it’s easy to doze for a few extra minutes without listening to the programme being broadcast from the radio. Sometimes, of course, there’s something in the babble which grabs your attention, sharpens alertness, and forces you to concentrate on whatever’s being said. That’s exactly what happened with the Badger earlier this week, The babble included an item of interest because it related to the Badger’s post-doctoral research many decades ago. That item was about the scientific and engineering drive to harness the power of nuclear fusion for the generation of limitless, sustainable, carbon-free electricity.  

The item covered the UK government’s written statement on the UK’s Fusion Strategy, it’s investment in STEP  – building a prototype fusion plant in Nottinghamshire by 2040 – and its investment in the world’s most powerful fusion-dedicated AI supercomputer to accelerate fusion design, modelling, and operations. It asserted that this is the most ambitious push yet to establish the UK’s complete energy independence from foreign price shocks. Investing £45m in this supercomputer, part of a wider government effort in AI and supercomputing infrastructure that has already seen a separate £36m supercomputer investment at the University of Cambridge, is a step along the road. However, let’s face it, it’s a tiny step when the country spends >£60bn on Defence, >£300bn on Welfare, and >£90bn on Education.

Harnessing nuclear fusion is the holy grail of getting clean, limitless energy. It’s been that way for as long as the Badger can remember and so has its reputation for always being ’50 years away’. The scientific and engineering challenges to be overcome in order to build and operate a commercially viable nuclear fusion reactor are enormous. However, there’s been huge advances over the last 30 years or so, a timeline that in parallel has also seen huge advances in computers and information processing. The latter has already helped enormously in getting fusion to its current position and there’s little doubt that further computing advances, particularly in AI and machine learning, will continue to accelerate progress towards achieving the holy fusion grail of large scale, carbon-free, sustainable energy on this planet.

But with the first experimental reactors currently forecast to start operating around 2040 and beyond, usable power from fusion still seems ’50 years away’ in practice. Generation Alpha and their children are thus likely to be the first generations to use power from viable fusion reactors. So, here’s a thought. Enormous amounts of money are being spent on AI across the globe. In comparison, a pittance is being spent on getting to power-generating fusion reactors that will hugely benefit our planet. Unless there’s a 1960’s-like ‘let’s go to the moon’ moment for fusion, the Badger can’t help but feel that it will always be ’50 years away’ regardless of investments in dedicated AI supercomputers…

Nuclear Power for AI Data Centres…

Posted on by The Information Badger in AI, Data Centres, Information Technology, Nuclear Power, Science & Engineering, Small Modular Reactors, Technology

According to the World Nuclear Industry Status Report, whose data can be explored visually here, there are 407 operational nuclear reactors currently generating electricity across the world. Of these, 94 are in the USA, 62 are in China, 57 are in France, and 34 are in Russia. The average age of the world’s operational reactors is 32.6 years, and they generate ~9% of global electricity. There are ~11,800 data centres worldwide with a rapidly growing proportion incorporating AI-specific infrastructure. Whereas traditional data centres require 10-15KW of electricity per rack, AI data centres need 40 – 250 KW per rack to support the heavy computational demand of AI models. So, where’s this extra electricity coming from? It’s a question brought into sharper focus by the conflict in the Middle East and its potential impact on the availability and price of gas which is used to generate ~20% of electricity globally.

All the major tech giants have been considering this question for some time. They want a reliable electricity supply and low emissions for their AI endeavours and are thus turning to nuclear power. For example, Microsoft wants to restart a Three Mile Island reactor mothballed in 2019, and Meta have signed a trio of nuclear deals  securing enough electricity to power ~5 million homes for its AI data centres. It takes some decades to build new, large-scale, nuclear reactors like those currently connected to electricity grids, and the surge in power demand for AI data centres is surpassing the planned new generation and transmission capacity. Amazon and most of the tech giants are thus keen to harness Small Modular Reactors (SMR) to sustain AI growth. SMRs are new with just two in the world currently operable. However, you’ll see from the World Nuclear Association’s SMR project tracker that we can expect many more to come on stream over the next decade.

Nuclear SMRs will thus be key providers of the power for the AI data centres needed to underpin this digital technology’s ever more rapid momentum. Is that a problem? No, provided there’s strict regulatory control before, during, and after SMRs are built and put into service, and that global institutions exist with real teeth to ensure that commercial organisations and nation states do not flout the necessary balance between AI self-interest, the greater good, and the proliferation of nuclear material. That may be a tall ask in a world which is full of conflict, extremism, and volatility, and is already embarked on a huge race for AI dominance. SMRs, however, are new and things may not go to plan. If SMR delays happen, then we may see AI momentum slow over the coming decade. Electricity, after all, is the blood of the digital world, and if there isn’t enough blood then things are bound to go awry…