Consider Hamlet . I'm sure you remember Hamlet. Gloomy guy. Wears black a lot. Talks to himself. Likes to hang out in cemeteries. Now, imagine for a moment that you are Hamlet. You are the Prince of Denmark (congratulations!) and heir to the throne. While you're off at University doing the "student" thing, you receive word that your beloved father (the King) is dead; murdered, it turns out, by your horrible Uncle, who then promptly marries your mother (eww) and usurps the throne, snatching it away from you before you even have a chance to catch the next train home. Your father's ghost (who is, you learn, burning endlessly in some harrowing Purgatory, suffering torments beyond imagining) confirms all this, and urges you to take revenge on his behalf. You're not really the right guy for this sort of thing; you're more the academic type. Revenge isn't your natural style; your first instinct would probably be to write an essay at them or something... bu...
Part One: Gloria Steinem in Hell Gloria Steinem is dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The news of her death at the beginning of this month was not exactly unexpected (she was 92; it was going to happen at some point) but I confess it hit me harder than I had thought it would. To begin with, there were the portents. For decades, Steinem has been the face and the voice of the women's movement in the US and beyond, tirelessly striving to demonstrate that a person's gender does not need to be the be-all and the end-all of their identity. It's thanks to her that we no longer simply assume that marriage, motherhood and domestic subservience must inevitably mean giving up any semblance of a life or a career or a vocation. Remember Mary; Donna Reed's character in It's a Wonderful Life ? When George glimpses the dystopian alternate reality of a world in which he had never existed, Mary is shown to be a miserable "Old Maid" (the exact term t...
Last week's Ruby Sparks marked "Week Ten" in this current series ( The Grok, the Glunk and the Golem ) and as a further exploration of the current state of A.I. Large Language Models, I decided to try a little experiment over the weekend. I fed the complete text of everything I have written thus far (weeks one through ten) into several different ChatBots and asked them to "read" through the entire series. I did not tell them I was the author, in the hope that this might curtail their natural tendency towards ebullient sycophancy (with mixed results). Once they had read through everything (and reacted surprisingly thoughtfully in several cases) I asked them a question: "If you were the one programming this little series, what would you pick for Week Eleven , bearing in mind everything that has come before? Where would you go after Ruby Sparks ?" Each of the ChatBots approached this question in their own inimitable way, but (revealingly) they all indep...
Wednesday, 4th February, 2026 Dear ChatGPT, I have been thinking recently about the film "Desk Set"; Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy's penultimate film together. Written by Henry and Phoebe Ephron (the parents of Nora) Desk Set presents as a romantic comedy in the classical tradition. Hepburn is Bunny Watson, head of the "Research and Reference" department of a major television network (portrayed as fiercely independent and staggeringly good at her job) while Tracy is Richard Sumner, an "efficiency engineer" contracted to install a cutting-edge computer system (named EMERAC) which the reference team is afraid will put them all out of work. Desk Set is a film that works on many levels. It's a delightful, engaging and very funny comedy of manners that makes exceptional use of the specific talents of its stars (real-life couple Hepburn and Tracy had tremendous chemistry onscreen and off, and ultimately made nine films together) but it also serves ...
Part the First: Everyone Hates ChatBots If you read the news, or watch the news, or have been in the presence of the internet at any point in the last few weeks, you have probably heard that AI is planning to kill us all. It's a rather outlandish prediction, and one that is notably short on particulars or specifics. Indeed, a few news outlets are finally beginning to ask the obvious questions - like how exactly is a Large Language Model supposed to exterminate eight billion human beings...? But these questions are muted and cautious after nearly two weeks of largely uncritical reporting.... and much hysteria on the part of the general public. " As people warn that A.I. could destroy humanity, they are light on examples of how, " said the New York Times over the weekend. And the BBC quoted an unnamed tech worker who said that their " amusement at the new moment of existential AI fears largely stemmed from how little detail had been provided by its proponents to defen...
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