February 2025 – Outsider Insight

Or is that BIBO: Bias In, Bias Out?

The rapid evolution of artificial intelligence raises profound ethical questions with far-reaching implications for our autonomy as human beings. However, today, I want to focus on a more immediate challenge: workplace displacement and its impact on the job market.

Some argue that AI assistants will usher in a new era of hyper-creativity, while others fear mass layoffs as intelligent automation outperforms well-paid professionals. Why pay a solicitor £250 an hour to resolve a business dispute when an AI-driven consultancy can handle the same task at a fraction of the cost? With the latest AI models, web services can parse mountains of Kafkaesque legislation in seconds and recommend a course of action just a few clicks away. Yet, when it comes to non-verbal human interaction, we are still a long way from reaching the singularity.

Over the last six months, I’ve tested various AI coding companions with mixed results. Many analysts suggest that programmers may soon follow in the footsteps of typesetters. While code-completion tools like TabNine, GitHub Copilot, and Codeium can significantly boost productivity, they cannot replace a solid understanding of data architecture and software design principles. Developers who rely too heavily on AI without mastering the fundamentals risk introducing performance bottlenecks, reliability issues, and unintended side effects. More importantly, they must remain aware of machine learning’s limitations—an AI-generated suggestion may be well-structured yet fail to align with the intended logic, merely predicting what a developer might type next rather than intelligently reusing custom helper functions.

Just as we transitioned from hand-coding assembly to higher-level languages like C, C++, Java, and C#, and later to more accessible scripting languages like Python and JavaScript, we may soon rely on large language models (LLMs) to translate technical requirements into robust, high-performance code. Instead of manually debugging thousands of lines of poorly documented code, we could focus on defining validation criteria, running unit and integration tests, benchmarking performance, and instructing AI assistants to refactor inefficient algorithms. As always, the devil is in the details.

Why, then, would anyone invest the extra time and effort to learn lower-level languages like C, with manual memory management, or grapple with Rust’s borrow checker when they could be far more productive using simpler, untyped interpreted languages like Lua? The short answer has traditionally been performance. Easier scripting languages, with their higher levels of abstraction, are generally more beginner-friendly, whereas strongly typed, compiled languages offer fine-grained control over data structures and memory management but come with a steep learning curve and greater attention to detail.

Historically, we have traded the faster development times of scripting languages for the raw performance of compiled ones, particularly when building minimum viable products (MVPs) for startups. Companies as diverse as Twitter and Facebook initially relied on frameworks like Ruby on Rails and the HipHop PHP compiler. Once they had viable businesses with millions of users and advertising revenue, they could invest in scalable solutions and hire top-tier systems programmers and infrastructure engineers. This allowed more creative frontend and mid-tier developers to focus on the rapidly evolving details of customer-facing UX and UI.

However, with AI coding assistants, hard languages like Rust become compelling choices outside their niche of systems programming for anything from rapid API development to Web apps, not because developers need to master their intricacies, but because they do not or, more accurately, only at a conceptual level. AI can handle the minutiae of lifetime management or the boilerplate of defining custom structs and enums with generics. A language like Rust could then act as an intermediary representation, precise and performant enough for machines, yet intelligible to skilled developers for oversight or debugging.

Unlike higher-abstraction languages, Rust’s fine-grained control, smoothed over by AI, ensures safety and efficiency without sacrificing flexibility. The result? APIs that are fast, reliable, and future-proof, with AI bridging the gap between human intent and Rust’s low-level power.

AI can also help with cross-compilation and migration. Let us suppose your lead mobile developer is most comfortable within the Apple eco-system with a strong preference for Swift and X-Code, but you need to support Android and desktop users too. Until recently, you may have weighed the pros and cons of hiring an experienced Android developer or choosing a cross-platform suboptimal framework like Flutter or React Native, often resulting in larger app download sizes and a greater drain on battery life. Coding assistants can not only port your code base, but they can also advise you on how to make the best use of inbuilt platform services.

In data science and language model training, where Python still reigns supreme, there has been much hype about Mojo and its potential to combine pythonic simplicity with C-level performance. I foresee that with coding assistants, developers may choose the flow-code representation they feel most comfortable with and then drill down to the native source code when necessary, boosting productivity and letting us focus on functionality, data integrity and efficiency.

What does this mean for the millions working in software development, whether in programming, design or data analysis? Essentially, the days of needing an army of narrowly focused coders churning out repetitive lines of code are coming to an end. Instead, the future belongs to adaptable, big-picture thinkers, sometimes called lazy programmers, who focus on the whole system rather than isolated fragments. Success in this new landscape will be less about grinding out code and more about mastering the key pillars of software development: thoughtful architecture, intelligent use of design patterns, robust data modelling and a sharp performance optimisation. Demand will remain high for those who can weave these elements together to build efficient, scalable systems. However, if your primary strengths lie in rote learning, fast typing and syntactical perfection, you may soon find your skillset redundant in an AI-assisted world.

Endless Moral Dilemmas in the age of Confusion?

Who stands to gain from never-ending destabilisation and dysfunctional societies?

In early December ‘24, the Western media welcomed the swift overthrow of Bashar Al Assad’s Baath government. Western leaders are suddenly wining and dining former terrorists, including the leader of newly rebranded HTS (Hayat Tahir Al-Sham or Organisation for the Liberation of Syria), Mohammed al-Julani, associated with Al Nusra, Al Qaeda and ISIS. After over 13 years of crippling sanctions against Syria, the West is promising billions in aid to help the construction of a new gas pipeline from Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the UAE to bypass Europe’s reliance on Russian gas or expensive LNG tankers. Within days, it became clear Israel welcomed the coup d’état too as it proceeded to expand its occupation of the Golan Height to Mount Hernon and bomb the remnants of the former Syrian regime’s air defences. Meanwhile Turkey continued to occupy the North-western Idlib region and the US still controls the country’s oil-rich east. The reality on the ground stands in stark contrast to the stage-managed scenes of jubilation. Many political analysts, including those critical of US and Israeli meddling in the region, marked the ousting of the Assad Dynasty as a strategic defeat both for Russia, engaged in the war over Eastern Ukraine, and its BRICS ally, Iran. Meanwhile the Israeli Defence Forces continue their onslaught on the peoples of Gaza and the West Bank without respite.

Back in Europe, five days before Yuletide, a psychiatrist from Saudi Arabia, reportedly belonging to the Shia minority, drove a rental SUV into a busy Christmas market in the Saxony-Anhalt city of Magdeburg. It had all the hallmarks of similar terrorist attacks attributed to Islamic fundamentalists. Yet the politically correct German media could not decide if the perpetrator, 50-year-old Taleb Al-Abdulmohsen, was a militant leftwing atheist, a far-right AFD sympathiser, a Hamas supporter or an Israel-Firster. Indeed, his social media pronouncements were all over the place, but he did appear in a BBC documentary showcasing his website intended to help asylum-seeking apostates from Saudi Arabia and the wider Gulf region. For a couple of days social media commentators on the tribal left and right blamed each other for at least 5 deaths and over 200 casualties, but does the guy’s political allegiance really matter? I can’t help but notice the lull in terror incidents across Western Europe in the covid-scam years. Nothing stacks up if we take mainstream media accounts at face value. Why would a supporter of a political party critical of mass immigration from Muslim countries target a Christmas market rather than a mosque?

The timing could not have been worse for Germany’s ruling traffic light coalition (Ampelkoalition) struggling to deal with rising energy prices, industrial decline and economic stagnation. It’s become increasingly obvious to most astute observers that rather than pay taxes to help deal with an ageing native population, newcomers to most European countries are now a net drain on public finances, not least in terms of additional infrastructure and, dare I say, policing. Therein lies the technocratic endgame. Out of engineered chaos our overlords hope to rebuild law and order.

On the eastern fringes of European Union, the Romanian constitutional court annulled the first round the country’s presidential elections for fear that independent candidate, Câlin Georgescu, might win the second round. The establishment rallied behind the other candidate, Elena Lasconi. Inevitably, they accused Russia of indirectly bankrolling Georgescu’s social media campaign. Over on the other side of the Black Sea, in Georgia, the Western Mafia has refused to recognise Irakli Kobakhidze’s new government, despite his Party, Georgian Dream, getting over 53% of the vote. To cap it all, EU Commissioner, Thierry Breton, has suggested that Elon Musk’s endorsement of Alice Weidel’s AFD Party threatens European liberal democracy. What he meant was growing sections of the electorate no longer align with the goals of the neoliberal elite behind superstate projects like the EU.

Back in the UK, six months after the government clamped down hard on protests against the consequences of rapid ethnocultural shifts, the suppressed truth emerged about the tragic case of Axel Rudakabana in the aftermath of his cold-blooded murder of 3 young girls and attempt to hack to death everyone else in the dance class. Although born in South Wales, his parents hailed from Rwanda and had fought alongside the Tutsi-led Rwandan Patriotic Front favoured by the US/UK Deep State. He was totally obsessed with genocide, which given Rwanda's recent history should surprise nobody, but with a sinister black-supremacist twist. His purported allegiance to Al Qaeda may well have been a red herring. Indeed in his isolation, he may well have been drawn to any organisation, whether genuine or contrived, that endorses his deep-seated urge for revenge. What's certain is that social and psychiatric services had long known about Axel's violent tendencies and emotional disturbance. Over his lifetime, the authorities had spent hundreds of thousands of £ on Axel's and his family's rehabilitation and inclusion in British society. Yet we are still supposed to believe the current levels of mass migration are both economically necessary and environmentally sustainable.

Meanwhile, the mainstream media has kept shtum about ongoing mass protests in Romania against the EU-backed cancellation of their elections. When the elites can no longer deliver the goods and can only offer managed decline with coordinated attacks against nostalgia for better times, we know the game is up. If the elites can no longer trust us to endorse their solutions or believe their narratives, then why on earth should we trust them? In the end, Western leaders rely on technology they ill-understand to control the masses. The subversion of that technology may well be their downfall.