When a country has an elite school it is always described as the Eton of (insert country). In the FTWeekend today Aitchison College is “Pakistan’s answer to Eton”. Is there a Harrow of Pakistan, or anywhere else? But I digress.
I am getting left behind in a rapidly changing world. My grandfather (1890-1981) had two World Wars but his world did not fundamentally change. Cars and roads got better and television became a fixture in most homes. The 21st century is evolving so rapidly that no sooner have I learnt to say AI it’s old hat. Now it’s all Large Language Models and vibe coding and I am still using an Excel spreadsheet.
Can we trust AI? It seems to offer a shortcut to a lot of outcomes but does it know what it’s doing? I trust somebody to do the cleaning and change the duvet cover but can I trust AI to design a weapons system? If Asimov was writing today AI would turn the weapon on the programmer. It will only be when an AI outcome is fatally flawed that it will be held in check. OK, I’m a Luddite.
The media portrays British politics as a tussle between Left (Green) and Right (Reform). Maybe at a by election with a turnout under 50%. At a General Election the British voter gravitates to the centre so, for what it’s worth, if Labour holds its nerve it may get a second chance under a different leader – something the Conservatives tried repeatedly. They were indulged by the electorate who will take a while to forgive and forget.
I have had the benefit of a few teach ins recently on AI. Fortunately there was no exam at the end as I would certainly have flunked. I learnt two things. Like you I realised that a whole new vocabulary has been created to trip the older generation up. In addition to the terms you mention, I had to look up, among others, prompts, agents and generative. Secondly and both most importantly and reassuringly, there is no output from AI that doesn’t need checking by a human being as a few legal firms have found to their cost. Using AI to check AI just doesn’t do it.
In Santayana’s novel The Last Puritan a half Yankee, half Italian old Etonian doubts the possibility of an American Eton, as lacking the input of English boys and such conditions as English weather, the English Church, and the British Army. (Santayana was a graduate of the Boston Latin School.)
But I don’t think one hears “the American Eton”. One does or did hear the expensive private schools of the northeastern US referred to as “St. Grottlesex”: St. Paul’s, Groton, and Middlesex.
Conversely, “The Harvard of . . .” is heard fairly often