CEO, Truetide PLC (AIM:TRUE) & Imaging Biometrics (LSE:IBAI) Quantitative imaging for brain tumours | Neuro-oncology | Private equity.
Switzerland
Joined July 2009
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Ironically, Dom has become now more wieldy with the summarise prompt
Amazing 70k word substack from Dom: AI and Power
dominiccummings.substack.com…
... it’s useful to take a wide look at the context, to see how many questions connect, before ploughing into lots of detail. Much of the news is extremely hard to make sense of even for tech Insiders — so there’s these people call ‘Sam’ and ‘Dario’ who think they’re close to building super-intelligence then putting it in robots, and they apparently think there’s a 20% chance it kills everyone, and they’re accelerating their plans because they don’t trust each other, and some of their opponents claim this is a marketing campaign, and the governments have mostly ignored it all and have no Actual Plan?!
... I’m one of a tiny number of people who’ve had senior roles in politics AND has followed the AI debate since ~2000, listened to three physicists about AI before 2016 and took it seriously, hired AI experts to do AI on two historic elections (2016 and 2019) when this seemed kooky in politics and in 2019-20 helped create an AI office in No10, as part of a general push to make AI and robotics a central strategic priority for the British state and No10, when this idea seemed ludicrous to ~100% of the ‘sensible mainstream’.
... It’s normal to listen to some bigshot talking about AI and someone from a lab will say, sometimes with a pitying smile, ‘they just don’t feel the AGI’: i.e they don’t really grasp how fast change is happening and will accelerate because it’s exponential.
My friend physicist Steve Hsu has made a documentary, Machine God, coming out soon (check out the trailer, and his blog for details). Steve also was boss of the PRC side in the AI wargame organised by Marc Warner (film here). Steve wanted to capture the feel of the Bay Area in this extraordinary time. Here, the people who feel the AGI talk about ‘the future lightcone’.
Its boiling frog taxation, the UK electorate live in a salami slicing, nuancing this, emphasising that, impacting in next parliament, or maybe not, kind of world. Though AI is coming to wake everybody up
'The biggest tax rise in British history'... that you might not know abo... youtu.be/t6UXit_lgI8?is=hbr8… via @YouTube
They have also forgotten that they could choose what to vote for, rather than be told what to choose between
"people who are sure AI isn't conscious usually can't say what they mean by consciousness" but people are alive and AI isn't, simples
Geoffrey Hinton, the Nobel-winning scientist known as the godfather of AI, says today's AI is already conscious — and we may be on a very bad path..
Hinton, whose work on artificial neural networks laid the groundwork for today's chatbots, made the claim in an interview with The Telegraph at the Starmus science festival in Tenerife.
Asked whether AI is conscious, he said yes, and argued that it has as much subjective experience as we do. His reasoning: AI systems have been shown to behave differently when they seem to realize they're being tested, which he says means they're aware of their situation, and in his view being aware and being conscious are pretty much the same thing.
He also noted that people who are sure AI isn't conscious usually can't say what they mean by consciousness.
Hinton, who left Google in 2023 so he could speak freely about AI's risks, warned that as AI grows smarter than us, we need to design it to genuinely care about people — or we're toast.
That said, many experts disagree with him. Microsoft AI chief Mustafa Suleyman, for example, has written that AIs are not conscious and don't feel or suffer, and there's still no scientific test for consciousness in machines or anything else.
source: Knapton, S. (2026, October 19). Godfather of AI: Befriend the bots or we're toast. The Telegraph.
The FDA will hopefully rise to the challenge
this might be my last normal tweet before biotech goes vertical
i'm not a whistleblower. I don't work at Lilly, Novo or any of the big labs
but there is a massive shift happening in human biology right now.
it's sitting in press releases and almost nobody reads them
the last 6 months alone:
- a once-daily pill roughly doubled median survival in metastatic pancreatic cancer (13.2 vs 6.6 months)
- a one-time gene editing infusion cut hereditary angioedema attacks 87%, and 62% of patients stayed attack-free and off all other prevention for 6 months
- a one-time gene edit for cholesterol dropped LDL up to 62%, and it held for over a year
- a personalized mrna vaccine beat keytruda alone in a 1,137 patient melanoma phase 3
- retatrutide hit ~28% weight loss in a phase 3
- an ai-designed drug entered phase 3
- a pill that regrows hair passed its second phase 3
- an immunotherapy that could let some rectal cancer patients skip surgery, chemo and radiation just got fda approved
- a man lived 271 days off dialysis on a pig kidney
- human cells were caught passing chromosome-sized chunks of DNA to their neighbors, and it changes how the neighbors behave
we are on the verge of an era where the human body is a software problem and the update cycle gets shorter everyday
stick around, it's going to get weird
bio/acc
Who said: “I, for the first time in my life, have started steadily buying things like tinned food. I have started to buy things which I know we shall need in five to ten years time—things like sheets and towels and things. I am of the wartime generation. We did this at the beginning of the war and I can remember my mother still had tins left at the end. They were very good indeed. I am doing the same thing now. With my husband facing retirement I see the prices rise so one does lay in a quiet store of food and of household things that one hopes one will need.”
The infantilisation party
#URGNTE El ministro de Defensa del Reino Unido: "Asegúrense de tener efectivo, agua y alimentos enlatados en casa"
"Las familias con bebés deben preparar comida para bebés y pañales. Si tienen mascotas, ¡también comida para mascotas y agua!" (22 de octubre de 2026)
El jefe del ejército advierte oficialmente a la ciudadanía que se prepare "para sobrevivir"
"Vamos a dejar de endulzar la píldora. El mundo se está volviendo peligrosamente inestable a gran velocidad"
El 22 de octubre de 2026, el ministro de Defensa del Reino Unido, Wes Streeting, apareció en un programa de noticias de la BBC (una cadena de televisión pública similar a la NHK en Japón) y dio una instrucción inusual dirigida a toda la población: "Preparen agua, alimentos y dinero en efectivo en casa de inmediato para varios días". ¿Por qué el máximo responsable militar ordena a los hogares civiles que hagan acopio de provisiones? Aquí está la verdad 👇
・"Asegúrense de tener agua, latas de comida que no requieran calentamiento y efectivo en casa de inmediato"
Se indicó que cada persona debe almacenar 3 litros de agua por día y latas de comida que se puedan comer sin usar microondas ni fogón, suficientes para varios días. Además, para el caso de que se corte internet y las tarjetas de crédito o pagos móviles queden completamente inutilizables, se exige tener "efectivo" en casa, así como baterías portátiles y linternas a pilas.
・El ministro de Defensa del Reino Unido declara oficialmente la amenaza de "grupos de hackers respaldados por estados o terroristas". El Reino Unido ya no oculta su política de enfrentar una "situación extremadamente peligrosa".
・"No lo esquive. Mire de frente la realidad de que el mundo se ha vuelto peligroso"
Aunque tranquilizó diciendo que "no hay bombardeos inminentes para mañana", afirmó con rotundidad que "no hay forma de maquillar el hecho de que el mundo es más peligroso e inestable que antes". Apela a que no se debe depender solo del Estado o el ejército, sino que cada ciudadano debe prepararse para protegerse a sí mismo.
En resumen, "el ministro de Defensa del Reino Unido advirtió en serio a la ciudadanía que, debido a posibles ataques terroristas de países enemigos o ciberataques, la electricidad, internet o los pagos bancarios podrían fallar en cualquier momento. No cierren los ojos a la realidad de un mundo más peligroso: preparen efectivo, agua y latas de comida ahora mismo para sobrevivir incluso si los pagos con móvil dejan de funcionar".
#RTMasivo #UrgenteCOMPARTAN 👇🏼👇🏼👇🏼👇🏼👇🏼👇🏼👇🏼👇🏼
I sense politics has changed, while commentators see it as a party issue, it seems that voters in the US voted for the Trump party, here the polls suggest it is Burnham who has improved Labour polling while the party policy has not changed. An inspirational leader would attract support regardless of party, something lacking since Blair, (and Kohl, and Chirac?)
BRITAIN AND FRANCE — some thoughts.
British and French politics are now moving in different directions.
Macron destroyed the French centre-left/right parties in the 2017 presidential election. They have never recovered. But Macron’s centrist movement hasn’t filled the vacuum.
Nor, even as his failures multiplied over almost a decade, was there a renaissance of the centre left/left but the rise of more extremes — Mélenchon’s LFI on the Left, Le Pen’s RN on the Right.
Latest polls indicate they will juke it out in the presidential 2nd round next May — with Le Pen the easy winner.
In Britain the rise of Reform on the Right and the Greens on the Left since the 2024 election + the collapse of Labour/Tories in the polls suggested, if not a Left/Right polarisation like France, then a new politics of multi-party democracy.
But 2026 brought a major correction — it’s been a dire year for Reform and the Greens, whereas Labour/Tories (but especially Labour under Burnham) have enjoyed something of a renaissance from their polling nadirs.
So, as French politics increasingly becomes a choice between populist Left and Right, the mainstream centre left/right has become once again the story in British politics.
With the most recent polls showing Labour in the lead, the Tories second, Reform third (and still slipping), Greens nowhere (along with LDs).
At the moment Labour must be favourite to win an election (at least end up the largest party).
Of course Labour/Tories are still a long way off their former dominance in share of the vote. But they are, at least for now, on the way back, which is more than can be said for their French counterparts.
Don't worry Thierry, the human race has responded to thousands of years of cultural, scientific and climatic disruptions, always to arrive in better shape than before
This is it.
Everyone is excited about AI.
I'm not.
AI is the biggest commoditizer of human capability we have ever built. Doctors earn more than cleaners because expertise takes a decade to acquire and judgment to apply. AI is going to make most of that expertise available to anyone, at marginal cost.
The gap doesn't go to zero. But it shrinks. And the same thing happens in almost every knowledge profession. Programmers. Lawyers. Analysts. Traders. Designers. The taxi driver replaced by a robotaxi is the easy case. The harder ones are people who spent twenty years training to do something a model can now do in a second.
The one corner of human life I don't see this hitting is sport. Nobody pays to watch a robot beat a human. The whole appeal is humans competing against each other. That's why nobody watches Deep Blue play chess anymore.
From an investing perspective, the next decade plays out in three phases.
Phase 1 is the buildout. Hundreds of billions in capex on chips, data centers, and energy. This is what's driving today's market.
Phase 2 is the deployment. Productivity rises sharply, then deflation sets in as the cost of knowledge work collapses. Jobs disappear faster than the economy can replace them.
Phase 3 is the social adjustment. Capital becomes more powerful than labor. The biggest winners are likely to sit where AI cannot reach. Real assets. Energy. Commodities. Precious metals. Scarce land.
And there's something deeper than the economics. The Japanese have a word for it: ikigai. The reason you get up in the morning. Your vocation. Your purpose. The work that makes you feel needed. AI is coming for that too. Nobody has yet figured out what a healthy society does when most of its members no longer feel needed by anything.
I might be wrong. I hope I am.
If I'm not, the world is about to change faster than most people are ready for.
A 2013 Cambridge study (Kosinski et al., PNAS) analysed the Facebook likes of 58,000 people who’d taken IQ tests. One of the strongest predictors of high IQ? Liking curly fries. Mozart, The Godfather and thunderstorms too.
The average Texan spends $8k per annum on healthcare, so 2.4 children and 2x adults could mean $32k out of that £224,400
The underlying problem is that the democratic process has become sclerotic and gamed, for example approximately 32.2% of the registered electorate in Makerfield voted for Andy Burnham. i.e.67.8% voted for someone else or didn't want to vote for him, and Andy is now PM
Easy to understand luck Mario, consider your good luck in being able to comment thus, instead of being the commented upon
Phillip Inman (Guardian economics writer) repeatedly misfired:
• Feb 2022: BoE should not raise rates or risk “almost certain” recession. Rates went to 5.25%; inflation hit 11.1%; downturn stayed mild/technical.
• Jul 2022: US rate hikes would tip the world into recession. Slowdown yes; broad severe global recession no.
• 2023: “Greedflation” was a major ignored driver. Evidence pointed more to supply shocks + demand than margin expansion as the main cause.
This sentence gives the entire article away:
“In the west the technology comes with at least some effort to provide security and a benign intent – not so from China.”
“Benign intent” is not a technical metric.
It is an ideological confession.
The author begins with the conclusion:
West = benign.
China = malign.
Then he spends the rest of the article arranging facts around that prejudice.
Chinese AI is cheaper? Threat.
Open-weight? Threat.
Competitive? Threat.
Widely adopted? Threat.
Chinese? Therefore sinister.
This is not technology analysis.
It is anti-China paranoia wearing a business-column costume.
The funniest part is that the article accidentally admits the real problem:
Chinese models are arriving at a fraction of the cost of US equivalents and giving users alternatives to expensive proprietary Western systems.
And that is what terrifies them.
Not “malign intent.”
Competition.
When Western technology dominates, it is called innovation.
When Chinese technology competes, suddenly civilization itself is in danger.
They are not afraid Chinese AI is evil.
They are afraid it is good enough to make Western monopoly optional.
SInce 2016 cumulative comparables (China 61% USA 24% ) makes the argument (EU (EEC) 15% v UK 12%) a bit angels on a pin head, at least Switzerland managed 16%
That’s a nonsense argument too. Yes, Brexit has probably reduced UK GDP growth, certainly in the early years. But by how much? That’s the key question. Most studies ascribe all UK growth shortfall to Brexit. Nothing to the highest industrial energy costs in the world or the reckless obsession with net zero, which has hollowed out industry. Nothing to the cackhanded economic policies of successive governments. Nothing to heading for European levels of tax and spend, a proven growth killer (as France illustrates all too clearly). Not that really is a nonsense.
What could they have done differently that day had they known what lay ahead, and what of us, stumbling into our inconceivable future, clearly we also have no idea
Stockton-on-Tees, 1910.
A bustling Edwardian town of around 50,000 people, where old and new rubbed shoulders. Electric trams rattled along the streets beside horse-drawn carts, while market traders, shoppers and even livestock filled the busy High Street.
A fascinating insight of everyday life in an industrial northern town before the First World War.
#EdwardianBritain #1900s #SocialHistory