My latest for @TheEconomist: AI writing is taking over politics. 10% of what was is said in Parliament is now AI-drafted, per Pangram. Yet more in the House of Representatives, or in Australia and Canada. Link: economist.com/britain/2026/0… And a 🧵 below, w/ some main offenders

On our “Checks and Balance” podcast, @ArchieHall travels to Ohio to hear voters’ concerns about data centres economist.com/podcasts/2026/…

Had been waiting for one of these

A few reflections from travelling (w/ @ed_shackle, @sebwride++) through data-centre country in Michigan/Ohio in my latest for @TheEconomist. 1/ The issue really is moving votes to the Democrats. That's now visible in our polling, too (h/t @OwenWntr), but also in the scale of on-the-ground discontent. I'm quite a bit more bearish on the prospects for big new data-centre projects in blue states after the trip. 2/ I really didn't hear that much direct anti-AI sentiment. The mood much more was a cocktail of worries about local harms (water, electricity bills, house prices), plus a total distrust of businesses and politicians. Against that backdrop, assurances about the water usage of closed-loop cooling systems really don't cut through. And, though developers will doubtless get cannier at this, cash payoffs to communities can easily look like subterfuge and do little to help. 3/ Still, moratoriums are at this stage much more bark than bite (h/t @mayabarkin for the data there). Only about 2GW seems actually delayed. The bigger risk is deterring newer projects, but I'd still guess that affects the exact locations more than whether the build-out happens at all. 4/ The question I'm left with is what comes after data centres as the big AI political issue into next year. A few obvious candidates are: a big cyberattack, the sheer scale of AI-related PAC spending in the 2028 cycle, the early innings of job displacement. 5/ What the data-centre issue should tell us, I think, is that voters' hostility to new technologies that change their lives in unpleasant ways is vast—especially when those changes are less positive-sum than data centres. So, however mad you expect AI as a technology to make the next few years, scale that up accordingly to account for a much more scrambled politics. Do take a look at my piece on this here: economist.com/united-states/… And at our Checks and Balances podcast, where I contributed a short diary featuring lots of conversations with voters economist.com/podcasts/2026/…

Throwing a Works in Progress launch party that coincided with an air show over San Francisco Bay was really fun! There is basically no hedonic adjustment to fighter jets soaring past your window.

New essay: To keep human judgment, we need AI courts. AI-generated filings are starting to overwhelm courts around the world. The most popular response I’ve heard is to fight AI with AI: If we can just give judges the right tools and training, AI will help them keep pace. But this strikes me as the worst of both worlds. Because we want human judges in the loop, we don’t get the speed and scale benefits of AI. Yet because we expect them to resolve a massive number of cases quickly, judges (or their clerks) may end up leaning on AI more than they mean to or should. This essay offers another way: a parallel AI adjudication track. An AI track — inspired by AI use in private arbitration but formally part of the court system like magistrate judges — would let courts be explicit about how human judgment is allocated. Done right, this would allow courts to process large volumes of cases while ensuring human judges devote their full attention to the cases where their judgment is needed most. Read more in @PaxMachinaMag: paxmachina.ai/to-keep-human-…

Writing is (often) about reciprocity!

And then there’s the through-time version of that chart

Not even pretending to know the context, but... 👀🐷

Vibes remain toxic

“Do not ‘let it rip’” I walk through why the no-rules approach to AI has now run its course in a new leader for @TheEconomist. Whatever its merits several years ago, ‘let it rip’ is now a dead end—politically infeasible and intellectually unserious. economist.com/leaders/2026/1…

on the latest podcast episode, Archie Hall, acting Economics editor, discussed how the magazine is approaching the rise of democratic socialism.

A nice follow-up on my AI MPs story in Canada from @GabeOatley torontotoday.ca/local/politi…

**NEWS** I have started a substack, as a vehicle to tell you about my new FT columns and podcasts, as well as the odd song. You can sign up here: soumayakeynes.substack.com/p…

New research: we hired 12 CPAs to complete four realistic accounting tasks, then had AI models from the past few years complete the same work. As of May 2025, accountants outperformed AI. Now they lose out to today's frontier models, which are near perfect on these tasks. 🧵

'Gingerbread men with chocolate trousers incur value-added tax (VAT) worth 20%, but no tax is charged on those with chocolate only for their eyes.' Britain's taxes aren't unusually high - but they are freakishly complex, @TheEconomist says: economist.com/britain/2026/1…

The Economist editor @ArchieHall says Britain may have built itself into one of AI’s easiest economic targets by relying on service exports while lagging at adopting technology: "I'm pretty concerned about where Britain could end up, and I think that's evocative of where a lot of non-US rich world economies could end up in a world where AI is more economically disruptive." "You have an economy that's very, very services exports dependent. Law, finance, insurance. And it's not a vastly dynamic economy. It's not been incredibly successful adopting technology over the past couple decades." "More nimble AI-enabled competitors could very, very easily eat away at the export base of a lot of those services companies that really power the British economy." "Britain does have a pretty strong AI sector, but it's not huge, and most of the British economy is things that are not AI and things that are pretty bad at adopting tech." @TheEconomist

Burnham tells Labour conference: "I will make a break with the past 40 years and put Britain on a new path." V similar to Sunak at '23 conference when he denounced the previous 30yrs

Would you push yourself to read all the way through an essay or book if you thought AI had written it? @ArchieHall on how AI writing frays the contract between writer and reader. (Archie, I read your piece to the end)