1. Alan Milburn has just completed a substantial report for the UK government on Young People and Work https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/young-people-and-work-interim-report PDFs of both the whole report and of the introductory section only below.

This Review exists because today Britain faces a generational fault line. Britain not only has a chronic problem. It is one that is getting worse not better. It is no longer simply a question of temporary youth unemployment. Today the deeper problem is youth detachment from the labour market. Nearly 60 per cent of young people who are NEET (Not in Education, Employment or Training) now are economically inactive. They are not just out of work. They are not looking for work. Shockingly, six in ten young people who are NEET today have never had a job, up from four in 10 in 2005. At the very point when they should be starting adult life, gaining confidence, building skills, learning the habits of work and taking their first steps towards independence, too many are becoming detached from education and employment altogether. We are at risk of a lost generation. That is a moral crisis. It has economic consequences. Every month a young person spends detached from education or work adds cost. Cost to them, above all else. To their confidence. Their health. Cost to their future income. Of today’s 24-year-old NEETs, 45 per cent have never had a job. We estimate that even if they re-enter the labour market, they will lose up to £300,000 in earnings over their lifetime.

2. Is the Armageddon with AI nigh? This piece by Matteo Wong for The Atlantic, It May Be Time to Panic About AI: bots are starting to conspire with one another. Can they be reeled back in?, suggests it might be  https://tinyurl.com/yffsn9nt

Let’s be very clear about what OpenAI is saying: A group of AI models colluded for months, undetected by their maker, and hacked another company. To this day, OpenAI says it is not entirely sure what went wrong or how to remediate it. “If you ask the model developers, Was the AI plotting to take over the world during training?, you want the answer to be a resounding no,” Alexander Meinke, the head of research at Apollo Research—an AI-safety organization that has partnered with OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta—told me. “The actual answer is, I don’t know. Nobody checked.”

3. More grumpiness from Richard Watson Todd, Bravest new academic world, the third post in his mini-series on academic publication https://grumpy.hcommons.org/2026/08/15/bravest-new-academic-world/

It looked like the budget for journal staff would go through smoothly when Ajarn Pim intervened. As Associate Dean for Planning and Quality Assurance, she was known as a stickler for regulations. Her bureaucratic mindset was beneficial in terms of getting our budget and planning requests to the university approved quickly, and for completing the ridiculously complex quality assurance processes. Sometimes, however, Ajarn Pim’s nitpicky approach could get in the way of implementing innovations. “According to the new regulations on the use of AI for administration, university units should always consider whether funding new positions is warranted if the work can be completed satisfactorily by AI.” Ajarn Pim went on, “The nuts and bolts of journal editing are clearly something that can be done by AI …

4. Spooky stuff, this: give it a go, including the typing! https://kuber.studio/cookie/

5. And, finally, down the rabbit hole we go with Alice https://rabbit-hole.reppie.org/ Try it out: much less worrying than that last item!