From the computer of Peter Clark

As a Tottenham fan who lives almost a mile up Hornsey Road from Seven Sisters Road, I mostly stayed home. You could hear the noise and the media helicopters.

But I did pop out and, before it all happened, purposely went to the shops nearer the route. I saw the crowd then, and again just after 3pm, when they started streaming past on the way home in a more concentrated way.

It was really striking. Never seen a crowd like it - mutli everything, multi-generation, multi-religious, every shade, the whole breadth of an inner London borough, plus what seemed to be very many from the wealthier outer suburbs and counties - like clusters of clearly middle-class Indian and east Asian families. Everyone decked out in new authentic kit (big splurge by dad on the whole family).

The locals people - Islington has the highest rented sector in England including highest social renting - often made do with a replica shirt for the child or two, plus a scarf for mum. Saw Sunni women with their full face covers and a scarf (tied in the correct way!), one wearing an Arsenal hat. Plenty with hats on top of their hijabs. I very much doubt if any of them had ever been to a football match never mind the prices Arsenal want, but they were out there today.

I doubt there is a corner of the world that wasn’t out there to day in large numbers.

Maybe my reference points are limited; Glastonbury at one end, the Gaza ceasefire marches at the other, with maybe the Queen's laying in State and funeral in the middle. Today blew all of that away.

If AI is going to 10x our productivity across the board, that means that I should be able to produce the same amount of output by midday on Monday that, in the before times, would have taken all week.

So can I just take Friday off? From here on out, I’ll work Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and then take Friday off. We can even declare Friday to be something like an “AI workers’ day;” on Thursday I promise I’ll work my ass off writing great prompts and then the agents can churn on them all day on Friday. In that case, you’d hardly even lose Friday, right?

We need more of the world—religious communities, civil society, scholars, governments, and indeed all people of good will—to do what His Holiness has done here: to take this seriously, to look closely, and to push events in a better direction. We need informed critics who will tell the labs when we are failing. We need moral voices that the incentives cannot bend.

Spending my childhood summers in Portugal, I spent a lot of time in cafés where people would argue about anything and everything. Finding the minor disagreement that would spark the argument was the goal of being at that café. Someone unfamiliar with that kind of environment would walk in and assume a fight was gonna break out. But this was just people communicating. This was people enjoying their evening by having spirited conversations with their friends. Which, counter-intuitively, ends up bringing people together. Because if I enjoy a lively discussion—and I do—the person willing to go toe-to-toe with me is going to be someone I end up treasuring as a friend. As long as everyone understands the rules of discussion. We are arguing about minor things. We’re making argumentative mountains out of molehills. This isn’t conflict, it’s sport.