Patriotic Brit, family man by nature, tech and AI by passion, Stoic by practice, bulldog dad by luck. Saying the quiet bits out loud, calmly. 🇬🇧
UK
Joined April 2012
- Tweets1.2K
- Following180
- Followers140
- Likes371
One of Britain's biggest AI data centres could start with a drop-in at Drax Village Hall.
Last week Drax said it wants to build an AI data centre at its power station near Selby. Up to 100MW from early 2028, an ambition of 500MW by 2031, and Brookfield reckons the whole thing could top £20bn.
Why a power station? These days the hard part of a data centre isn't the building. It's the plug. Drax already has 1,000 acres and 4GW of grid access.
Not everyone's keen. Campaigners worry about the extra power it will need. Fair enough. That's what the consultation is for. It closes on 3 December, with drop-ins on 19 and 20 November.
I land back in Britain on Wednesday. Rather nice that the future of British AI still goes through a village hall in Yorkshire.
1
48
Source, with the consultation details: drax.com/what-we-do/data-cen…
13
June 1215, Runnymede: Magna Carta puts limits on the king’s power in writing.
November 2023, Bletchley Park: Britain launches the world's first AI Safety Institute to test frontier AI.
Same rule, new ruler. My agents run 24/7, and a human makes the call.
ALT Glossy white sphere robot at a glowing approval panel on a dark stage, colourful shape robots queued around it, a sealed parchment scroll beside the pedestal. Text: Built in Britain 13. 2023: AI gets tested too.
14
I've been running my life with a team of AI agents for months: chief of staff, sales, research, wealth, even a Stoic companion. Longevity was the obvious gap. Why didn't I (or my bot team) think of that 😎 Good to see @davidasinclair and @biogerontology fill that gap for me in Grok Bot.
43
Once AI does the paperwork, what exactly is a politician for?
The lectern is lit, the mic is live, and behind it the work is getting done. Forms checked. Rules cross-referenced. Drafts written for a human to sign off.
That isn't a fantasy. Fifteen councils are now in a government trial of exactly that, on planning applications.
When the admin is handled, what's left is the part that matters: making a choice and owning it. Much harder to hide behind a podium when there's nothing left to stand in front of but the decision.
My answer: deciding, out loud. What's yours?
🤖 Made with AI
1
1
26
1936: Alan Turing invents the principle of the modern computer at King's College, Cambridge.
Today: London's Wayve raises $1.05 billion for embodied AI that drives itself. Founded in Cambridge, 2017.
Turing wrote the machine. Britain now puts it on the road.
ALT Cinematic view from inside an empty right-hand-drive car on a wet London street at dusk, Big Ben ahead, faint azure neural-net lines on the windscreen. Text: Built in Britain 12. Today: $1.05 billion.
39
My chief of staff's most important rule is that it isn't allowed to do any work.
It's a bot. So are the 18 others it routes to. Here's how the routing actually runs, with real numbers.
1. The roster. 19 bots. One chief of staff. 6 managers who each own an area, from revenue to build to life admin. 6 shared services any of them can call: mail and calendar, research, legal, ideas, phone calls, and one bot whose job is building and auditing the others.
2. One front door. I talk to the chief of staff. It decides who owns the ask and hands it on. Its brief literally says "never do a specialist's job". That's the only reason it stays good at routing.
3. Managers manage. 6 more bots sit under the managers. Sales has three: outreach, customer insight, competitor watch. They report to sales, and sales reports up. The chief never hears from them directly.
4. The morning. Every desk writes one line to a shared folder by 05:45. This morning that was 8 files, 2,285 characters in total. The chief reads them and sends me one message at 06:00, with "Needs you" at the top.
5. Hard walls. Life admin can shortlist a broadband deal, but the wealth bot checks the figures and I say yes. No figures leave the wealth bot unless I say so. The Stoic companion's journal stays private, even from the bot that manages it.
6. One line in every bot's brief: nothing sent, posted, bought, deleted or changed without my yes. Including this post.
7. What went wrong. I retired the first auditor bot on 31 Oct. On 28 Oct I took the legal bot out of the build room; it now speaks when asked. And a scheduled LinkedIn post sat paused until someone noticed.
8. The honest result. I don't have a time-saved number I'd trust yet. What I do have is one message a morning and a rule that nothing leaves without me.
If you run more than one agent, who's allowed to say no to whom?
1
1
51
Every promise is on the record. So is every vote. The two rarely meet.
Not because it's hard. Because it's tedious, and tedium is where accountability goes quietly to die.
Tedium is exactly what AI is good at. Read the speech. Read the division list. Put them side by side. Flag where the line snaps. No opinions needed, just the receipts in order.
Point it at your own side first. That's the honest test.
Should every MP have a public promise-to-vote ledger, kept by a machine that doesn't belong to anyone?
🤖 Made with AI
1
29
Genuine question, not a trap: if a machine kept that ledger, who should run it? Parliament, a charity, or nobody at all, open source so anyone can check the checker? xitter.twitterapi.xyz/dannyintheloop/status/…
Unpopular opinion: AI will do more to fix politics than any election.
Not by choosing who wins. By taking away the places they hide. Thousands of pages of rules nobody has read. Promises nobody checks against votes. Consultations designed to wear you out.
When anyone can ask "what does this law actually do, and who benefits?" and get a straight answer in ten seconds, posturing gets expensive.
I run twenty AI agents in my own work. The first thing they did was expose every pointless step. Government is next.
18
It's already started. Since Saturday, routine planning applications in 15 English councils are being handled with AI's help. Good. Now point it at the rulebook, not just the queue.
Unpopular opinion: AI will do more to fix politics than any election.
Not by choosing who wins. By taking away the places they hide. Thousands of pages of rules nobody has read. Promises nobody checks against votes. Consultations designed to wear you out.
When anyone can ask "what does this law actually do, and who benefits?" and get a straight answer in ten seconds, posturing gets expensive.
I run twenty AI agents in my own work. The first thing they did was expose every pointless step. Government is next.
13
1769: James Watt patents his separate condenser. Engines with it burn two thirds less coal.
Today: Cranfield spin-out WAAM3D prints big metal parts from wire and an electric arc. One space tank prototype saved over 200 kg of titanium.
Watt saved coal. Britain now saves metal.
16
Unpopular opinion: AI will do more to fix politics than any election.
Not by choosing who wins. By taking away the places they hide. Thousands of pages of rules nobody has read. Promises nobody checks against votes. Consultations designed to wear you out.
When anyone can ask "what does this law actually do, and who benefits?" and get a straight answer in ten seconds, posturing gets expensive.
I run twenty AI agents in my own work. The first thing they did was expose every pointless step. Government is next.
🤖 Made with AI
Honest question: which single rule, form or process would you hand to AI first and ask "what does this actually do, and who is it for?" gov.uk/government/news/faste…
5
The first AI data centre in space has sent its first message home.
It was a haiku.
"Blue marble below
Data streams in silent grace
Starlight feeds my core."
Google put four of its AI chips on a small satellite last month. Last week it asked the model on board for a poem, and the answer came down as the satellite passed over Svalbard.
It runs on sunlight, up to 1 kW. That's less than your kettle, and enough for one chip at a time, for about 20 minutes.
So why bother? Data centres on Earth need enormous amounts of power. Up there, the sun barely sets. Google reckons the sums start to work if launch costs fall to about $200 a kilo, which it thinks could happen around 2035.
Twin satellites next, in 2027.
The first words from the first data centre in space were a poem. What would you have asked it?
1
41
Google's post on the first response from orbit: blog.google/innovation-and-a…
13
1687: Isaac Newton publishes his law of universal gravitation, in London.
2022: a University of Birmingham team finds a buried tunnel by measuring gravity, with a quantum sensor. A world first outside the lab.
Newton wrote gravity down. Britain now reads the Earth with it.
ALT Blueprint drawing of a tall quantum gravity sensor on the grass above a tunnel buried in the ground, with dashed gravity lines bending toward it. Text: Built in Britain 10. 2022: gravity, read.
16
1843: Ada Lovelace publishes step-by-step instructions for a computer that was never built.
2024: Pragmatic Semiconductor opens the UK's first 300mm chip fab, near Durham, making chips that bend.
Britain had the code before the machine. Now it makes the chips, on plastic.
ALT Moody still life of an ultra-thin amber flexible microchip curling beside a polished silicon wafer on dark slate. Text: Built in Britain 09. 2024: the chip, on plastic.
19
I run about twenty AI bots. One of them exists purely to audit the others.
Another is a Stoic companion, covering while my handwritten journal is in transit.
The models are the easy bit. The hard bit is org design: who owns what, who can say yes, who's in the room.
Last night I took the legal bot out of the build room. It now speaks when spoken to.
What's the first job you'd give a bot?
1
32
From Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov isolating graphene with sticky tape in Manchester in 2004 to Concretene, the world's first graphene concrete slab, poured in Amesbury in 2021 with 30% less material and no steel reinforcement.
Britain builds big from very small things.
28
From Frank Whittle's first jet engine shrieking into life at Rugby on 12 April 1937 ("I have rarely been so frightened!") to Rolls-Royce using AI to track over 10,000 engine parameters in real time.
Britain built the jet. Now AI keeps watch. Same island. New tools. Let's build.
🤖 Made with AI
30
Homework marks up 18%. Exam marks down 20%.
Researchers followed 26,811 secondary school pupils in central China for 30 months. Once pupils started using AI, homework took 45 minutes instead of 64, and the marks went up.
Then came the closed-book exams. Six months in, scores were down a fifth. On the big entrance exams, the drop took about two years to show.
Roughly four in five AI users were finishing suspiciously fast. They'd handed the homework over.
The one in five who still put the time in did about as well in exams as pupils who never used it.
The difference wasn't the tool. It was the time.
What's the one thing you're glad nobody let you shortcut?
1
30
The study, by Strömberg, Lei and Wu for CEPR: cepr.org/voxeu/columns/gener…
21
When the forward-deployed engineer leaves, the agents stay.
Someone still has to brief the next run, check the output and put their name on it.
I run a small team of bots myself. They'll happily ship something confident and wrong if I stop reading.
So the lasting role is the grown-up who can still say no.
🤖 Made with AI
18
The best explanation I've heard of how the UK political class sorts itself out.
Dominic Cummings at the Lords. Great talent. Real responsibility. Speed of execution.
Not left or right. Westminster could try it, after countless committees and a nod from the House of Wrinklies.
Dominic Cummings, House of Lords Constitution Committee – full video. @Dominic2306
Fascinating look at where power really lies in Whitehall: the “subterranean system” connecting its power centres, the evolution and dysfunctions of the Cabinet Office, and the hollowing out of ministerial responsibility.
A few of my highlights…
“What’s one of the few remaining centres of excellence left in Britain? Britain’s Special Forces. Who’s their biggest enemy today? China? Russia? Iran? No. Cabinet Office and MoD lawyers.”
“All constitutional authority is being funnelled into No.10 because only the Prime Minister can get something done … Nobody apart from the Prime Minister now can break certain kinds of gridlock.”
“Cabinet has become an irrelevance.”
“‘You didn’t keep this terrorist under surveillance? Is that because there’s Cabinet Office legal advice that says that because of ECHR rights to privacy, you’re not allowed to keep even convicted terrorists under surveillance?’
‘Yes, Dominic.’
That happens routinely. The majority of terrorist offences you see, there is an ECHR, human rights angle. Close to 0% are ever explained publicly.”
“You cannot deal with the small boats problem unless you make primary law changes to the Human Rights Act and change how the courts give effect to the ECHR. That is a fact. It’s uncomfortable to all political sides to face this fact. But it is a fact. Everyone internally knows this is the case.”
“There’s a concept in the private sector: Directly Responsible Individual. That is how every complicated project that works, works. That concept has been rendered something close to unlawful inside the current system. Every aspect of how the current system works is to obfuscate actual responsibility. If you say in a meeting in Whitehall, ‘Which specific person is responsible for doing X by date Y?’ everyone throws their hands up in horror.”
“The principles of how things work well are eternal. You see the same principles in 500 BC or 1800 with Pitt, or today in SpaceX.”
“The idea that you make everything more complicated, and you have Sir Humphrey in charge of everything, and then that gets rid of corruption, is total nonsense.”
“We’re now just sitting here, year after year after year, watching this most stupid war in modern history unfold, completely unable to adapt to it.”
“The more that the system says that the Civil Service has to defend the constitution, the more you are driving yourselves into crisis … It’s Parliament that has to safeguard the constitution. Thinking this can be devolved to a bunch of officials in the Cabinet Office is what’s got us into this nightmare in the first place.”
“It can only change if there’s a Prime Minister who wants the government to control the government, and is himself or herself determined on change.”
At 1:16:17, on whether a PM can appoint anyone as a minister:
"Dominic is right, PM. You can in fact appoint anybody you want to. Churchill did it." "My God," said Boris. "My God," said the other MPs.
The rulebook was in the drawer all along.
youtu.be/E6bKlWZMqfk?t=4573
14
The attackers have agent swarms. The advice from the people who build the models is to patch your servers and lock the doors.
Very British, really. The machines have arrived, and the plan is to check the back door and put the kettle on.
as bad as things have gotten in the past 4 days, they are going to get a lot worse before they get better. security leaders, never let a crisis go to waste: please go to your boards and ask for help right now. not for ai, for the basics. (we need to hold on for ~18 months.)
1
26