I have a confession. I have been in the playpen with Claude. I was the last of my colleagues to get a mobile phone — a Nokia 6310i with a battery life like an elephant’s memory. Then Nokia lost the plot. I moved to a BlackBerry; lovely piece of Canadian engineering, and the Canadians, bless them, managed to mislay that too. I was early into Windows — 1993, Windows 3.1 in all its unpolished glory — and finally, only last year, gravitated to a Mac. My track record as a technology bellwether is, you’ll notice, immaculate in reverse. The latest kid on the block is AI — which has been around for ages, at least by the standards of anyone born this century — and suddenly it is, as they say, everywhere.
It’s quite extraordinary what it is alleged to be able to do. I’ve tried it out on a few interesting things. I’ve told it about me. I’ve told it what I don’t like it to do, and I’ve told it what my aspirations are. It’s given me a very creditable business plan, if you want to call it that. It can create and organise your life in ways you would never have dreamed of and you will probably wish you hadn’t. The more I look at it, the more I realise that if you don’t embrace AI in one form or another, you are either going to end up being a dinosaur or you’ll go completely mad, which is probably what is going to happen to a lot of people who try and keep up with the frenetic pace of AI development.
While the rest of us are asking Claude for a decent recipe or a holiday itinerary — to say nothing of the legions of perfectly respectable business applications — the Men in Grey Suits are on a darker and altogether more interesting path. Anthropic has reportedly built a version of Claude that can crack pretty much any password or code. The military, naturally, are gagging for it, and have almost certainly got it already. One does wonder what they intend to do with it. Nothing benign, I suspect.
I don’t think we appreciate just how much this is going to change the world that we live in, not just in terms of the changes in jobs and employment. Jobs that will disappear, new jobs that will be created. The whole way our society, our cultures, our structures in our countries and economies are going to be managed, and not by us.
We assume that the Western world is in the vanguard when it comes to AI development mainly because of all the hoo-ha around the semiconductor space, where the fastest chip is going to be the one that everyone’s going to have to use. We kind of forget, because it’s a long way away and less visited than most would be hedgemons (I’ve been there and Russia), that China has been using AI for quite a long time. They’ve developed their own chip technology, a clone, a copy of what’s been produced in the West, but they’ve had the initiative to go ahead and do that. You can gnash and wail all you like about stealing intellectual property, but this is what war looks like in the 21st century. Its fought in the financial and technological fields.
Their use of tech in industry and manufacturing is quite extraordinary. A factory in China started 2025 with 2,000 employees. They embraced AI. It now runs with 20 — twenty humans and an AI doing the rest. Industrial output prices are deflating. China is, quite literally, going to eat America’s lunch, and possibly the plate as well. We are reassured that there are jobs AI can’t do. Another story from China: cameras quietly filming women sewing garments, so that the AI can learn the motions and, in due course, do without them. Elon, meanwhile, is presumably having Claude look at autonomous driving — heaven knows he could use the help.
The problem most people have with AI now, or certainly I do, is that it changes almost every day. There I was happily using ChatGPT, then along comes Claude. The next thing I know, the guy who recommended Claude said, “Well actually you’ve got to go back and look at ChatGPT 5.5 because it’s moved up a whole degree or two.” I suspect Claude will come back with something and so it will go, backwards and forwards.
In fact, the use of AI is limited only by ones imagination in asking it what to do. We live in a universe of infinite possibilities and Claude, is making them accessible. The irony is that the imagination that creates innovation is slowly being stifled. Lean on AI too heavily and we’ll all end up in the same place, having lost the ability to think for ourselves on the way. Mind you, looking around much of the UK today, we appear to have managed that already, entirely under our own steam.
The other serious issue is that Clod — the misspelling is deliberate — makes things up, ignores instructions, and runs its own programme whenever the mood takes it. Check the output. Then check it again. Skip that step and you’ll find yourself halfway down a rabbit hole that wasn’t there yesterday. Try to build a commercial application on top of it and you’ll spend as much time debugging Clod’s confident nonsense as you would have spent writing the code yourself. This may well change by the time I hit the send button such is the pace of correction improvement.
And then there are the financial markets. You will have noticed that extreme volatility is now the daily order of business. Trump sneezes and the market falls out of bed a fraction of a second later. He blows his nose ten minutes on, and the market is back where it started before you’ve reached for your coffee. I embraced technical analysis a very long time ago; I used to teach students of the UK Society of Technical Analysts and set the exam for them. Poor sods.
Things like support and resistance are patterns and AI is just brilliant at patterns. If you watch charts now you can see resistance levels. You can see them being hit. You can see where the stops are. You can see the markets sucking out those stops and then the whole thing reverses. This has always been the way of markets but now it’s moved into a completely different scenario. Now the algorithms are playing against each other. They’re certainly playing against you and me. Trading is getting to be less easy. It is also believed that over 70% of stock market trades are now carried out by AI bots. And don’t get me started on another elephant in the room, passive investing…
Everyone has asked Claude to come up with the “best trading plan” and I suspect there are myriad versions of that. Eventually it’ll learn from itself, and it’ll find the trading plan that works this week. Of course, as we know from experience once everyone finds the same edge, the edge disappears.
There’s still going to be scope for forward thinking. If this, then that, then what? The second and third derivative effects of Trump sneezing are a good example. Very few really think that through, markets react to tweets, but what is really going on. In due course AI will do that thinking for us as well. And, no doubt, hand Trump a box of Kleenex on the way past.
We live in interesting times. There are days — notwithstanding the fact that I can barely read my own handwriting — when I’d happily go back to pen and paper for all my thinking, planning and writing. Better still, find a quiet beach and contemplate on one’s sanity whilst the rest of the world goes slowly, and then suddenly, mad.
Mind your eye out there and go gently.
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