The Joy of Six 1228

"AI skeptics - who are legion, and not necessarily part of the fringe tin foil hat crowd - are begging Silicon Valley to take a beat before unleashing AI to the world. But tech companies, faced with the most powerful computing innovation in a generation, are running around like kids who just found their dad’s gun." Allison Morrow reveals Silicon Valley's determination to produce an AI dystopia that no one has asked for.

Matthew Pennell reviews the Liberal Democrat performance in the London mayoral election: "A few activists have asked the Lib Dem leadership to be bolder in the context of Conservative implosion and Labour timidity. We saw exactly that in the London Lib Dem campaign - a manifesto focused on reforming the blue light services - the Met Police and London Fire Brigade. It was unprecedented to see a politician from a mainstream party run on a platform of police reform and it set us apart from the other parties."

Justin Garson looks to Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy to help him understand the nature of depression.

"When Germany began to reconstruct its modern history after 1945, angels were needed to replace the recent legions of devils. The Bauhaus, in its American imagining, became a place of heroism, even martyrdom. Nazism was, by definition, something done to the school, not by it." Charles Darwent finds the truth is less comforting.

"One of the most startling things about the enigmatic man who became the architect of the new Houses of Parliament was that he was born and brought up in Westminster itself and knew the area inside out even before the competition which changed his life." Caroline Shenton on Charles Barry.

Francesca Wade says George Eliot made her life, as well as her fiction and art, outside the conventions of the marriage plot.