Sean Thomas

I am sitting in a little bar overlooking the jaunty marina of Trinité-sur-Mer, on the opulent south-east coast of Brittany. My Kir Breton is cold, fizzy, sweet and rubescent. Everyone around me is swigging Sancerre and cidre as the sun slowly nods below the green, southerly Celtic hills. The water glitters, the pretty people parade, the douceur de vivre is palpable. If you look at what has happened to Paris and Marseille, you can see how this can easily go wrong, how France’s good fortune can be squandered I've been here in Brittany five days, having got the ferry over from Portsmouth. And, quite frankly, the difference in life quality has been stark.

Everyone knows that Italy is a boot. Many people know that the boot has a heel – the rocky, sunburnt region of Puglia. Perhaps a few know that the heel has a spur – the Gargano Peninsula. Yet virtually no one knows that the Gargano hides a magical woodland – the Foresta Umbra – a national park and treasure. And one of a dozen or more Italian parklands that are practically unvisited by foreign tourists.

I am Cornish. Indeed I am so Cornish my sister lives about three miles from where my echt Cornish ancestors lived in the 13th century (near Falmouth), and my mum makes working-class Cornish recipes so obscurely Cornish most of the Cornish have barely heard of them (‘date and lemon pie’). As such, I am pretty fond of the place, and I like to go back as much as I can. Except in summer, when it’s crowded. And increasingly May. Or September. Or October. Or the rest of autumn. And Christmas, And Easter. And New Year. And any weekend at any time, ever.

It’s a famous theme in science fiction: the idea that, one day, humanity and the thinking machines will somehow go to war. It’s the narrative spine of The Terminator films. It’s implied in 2001, A Space Odyssey. You can find it in Neuromancer, The Hyperian Cantos, Ex Machina, The Creator and I, Robot (the Asimov stories and subsequent film). In one of the fundamental texts of sci-fi, Frank Herbert’s Dune, this apocalyptic conflict is given a name: the ‘Butlerian Jihad’. Personally, I’ve always dismissed the concept of Butlerian Jihad as fanciful, even as I accept that Artificial General Intelligence – machines as smart as the best of us – is coming at us fast. And yet in recent weeks I’ve started to wonder.

I’m sitting on a stone terrace in the winsome south Breton port of Sainte Marine, which oversees France’s prettiest river (the Odet), and I’m excitedly tucking into a dozen gleaming Morbihan oysters. I am doing this partly because I am writing about travel in Brittany and oysters are very much part of the package here – you come to Brittany, you must consume oysters (also cake, cider, biscuits, tinned sardines and chunky buckwheat crepes). But I’m also eating oysters because I really love oysters. The idea is bad, the texture is worse – slimy, crunchy feathers and bones At this point I imagine a reasonable percentage of Spectator readers will be wincing. Because oysters are a divisive issue.

As locations go, they don’t get more humdrum than the address ‘Carrera 79B, #45D/94’. It is so anonymous it sounds encrypted. Nor, in reality, does it look like anything special: a flat roof, next to a shuttered language school, above a wall of graffiti, in a lower middle-class suburb of another Spanish speaking city. But then you notice the razorwire surrounding the nearby boutique. The armed guard outside the local bank. And you remember why this address, in the inner suburbs of Medellin Colombia, is notorious: this is where fugitive cocaine warlord Pablo Escobar was finally shot by cops in 1993 as he tried to flee across that roof.  Native American empires were bizarrely cruel – even before the Europeans arrived Knowing that, everything looks different.

Whenever I write about AI on The Spectator (which is a lot) I always get comments like ‘Yawn. Wake me up when AI actually does something’. And, to a point, these are fair comments. For all its remarkable feats, its photos of Shakespeare with weird fingers, its videos of dogs typing in spacesuits, the new wave of AI hasn’t really done something simultaneously concrete and astonishing, something where you can draw breath and say ‘Wow, that is definitely replacing this particular job’. In my experience, these AI chatbots respond better if you are polite, an uncanny fact Well, now I can address that.

It’s not easy being a Leaver, right now. For a start, the government that actually delivered Brexit – the present Tory government – is facing a one-sided electoral hammering which will make the Anglo-Zanzibar war of 1896 (duration: 38 minutes) look like a tense, nail-biting score draw. In the same vein, polls consistently show high levels of Bregret and Bremorse, with a hefty majority actively wishing to Rejoin.  If you are reading this and you are in the EU, you might find it trickier In that depressing light – for Brexiteers – let me introduce the ray of sunshine that is ‘Claude’.