Recently added

From a policing point of view, 3-D printers were your classic new technology. Everybody knew they were going to be used by criminals for something, but nobody was sure what.

“That’s assuming that the Singularity hasn’t already happened,” said Victor. “And we’re not sentient virtual personalities inhabiting a simulation of reality.”

“How would we know?” I said.

The prisons are full of people with poor impulse control and a lack of foresight.

“An AGI?” I asked, because at the Serious Cybernetics Corporation it was important to make a distinction between Artificial General Intelligence and ordinary AI. AGI being the sort that was self-aware enough to pass the Turing test and ask difficult philosophical questions before going “Daisy-Daisy” and trying to wipe out humanity, while ordinary AI mainly tried to sell you books on Amazon.

“He was a Parisian,” he said. “You can never be sure what Parisians believe in—beyond Paris of course.”

The problem with troubleshooting is that trouble shoots back. —Anonymous

Still magic, like policing, has always been much more about the practice than the theory.

“The timing might not be significant,” I said. “Just because two things happen at the same time doesn’t mean they’re related.”

Abigail gave me a withering look. But everyone assumes causation when they should be thinking coincidence, and correlation when they should be asking whether Twitter is really a reliable source of information.

It was already one of the hazards of being police that you became suspicious of the everyday. You didn’t have to spend much time on the job before realising that professional criminals are comparatively rare and that crime is something committed by ordinary people.

I wondered, not for the first time, whether all farmers become obsessed or if only obsessive people become farmers.

The first rule of Big Brother is that Big Brother is never watching when you want him to.

The perennial problem for retailers the world over are the customers. Not only do they clutter up the shop, but they also demand to be reminded of the title of a book they read a review about in the Telegraph, given directions to The Lion King, helped to find a book their mum will like and, occasionally, purchase some actual merchandise. All of this customer-facing activity gets in the way of the shelving, merchandising, sticking, destickering, table pyramiding and stock returning that is necessary for the smooth operation of a modern bookshop.