Two bits of news

[EU transport commissioner Apostolos Tzitzikostas: ‘Jet fuel prices are not extraordinary circumstances — they will have to reimburse the people’ © Olivier Matthys/EPA]

First up, the piece in today's FT at reference 1, about how the present steep rise in the cost of fuel for jets is not something which lets airlines off compensating passengers for cancelled flights.

I suppose he has a point that airlines should have included this possibility in the price they charge for tickets, taking out appropriate insurance themselves if they see fit. They should take the rough with the smooth. But it would be a bit harsh if passengers were allowed to claim fancy compensation, in the absence of any serious inconvenience. And one might think that the fact that the relevant EU Commissioner comes from tourist hotspot was not a coincidence. 

In any event, I dare say airlines, looking forward, will no doubt be looking hard at how to hedge against this eventuality. The customer has to pay in the end, whatever might happen this time around.

In the margins, I learn that it just so happens that Europeans could turn to the US where they manufacture and mostly use a slightly different version of the fuel that we use over here in Europe, known there as Jet 1. Another coincidence? See reference 2.

Then we have the (full page, including picture) piece in yesterday's Guardian at reference 3, with an 85 year old scientific eminence making rather large claims for his time with the Claude chatbot. I dare say he had rather better access to Claude than I get to Gemini, and that he did indeed find chatting with his chatbot very like chatting with a real person - I have had the same experience myself - but I still think that he is quite wrong. I thought Anil Seth summed up quite well when he said that the ability to both consume and produce fluent language has been a very good test of consciousness in normal human beings - but it is not a very good test of whether some other kind of entity is conscious at all.

Not forgetting that many people believe, and here I include myself, that plenty of animals without any kind of language at all (in our commonplace sense of the word) are conscious. Consciousness is a fascinating phenomenon, mixed up with but by no means identical to having language, let alone to having the language to talk about consciousness.

Perhaps yet another old person who needs to be pulling in his horns a bit. I associate to all those old people who fail to stop driving when they should - without having the good fortune to have nearest and dearest strong enough to stop them. We will see how I do myself in this department!

Also to my artistic uncle who, after a relatively mild stroke, packed up all his engraving tools and switched to the less demanding medium of water colours. Furthermore, I think he once told us of another artist, a famous artist whose name I have forgotten, packed up altogether when he found that he could no longer draw a decent circle without the aid of a compass or some other such aid.

A problem that professional sportsmen, with a much shorter working life, would no doubt understand.

PS: the article was on page 3 of the Guardian, very much the thinking person's version of the page 3 of old in the Sun. Perhaps also the Daily Mail for all I know.

References

Reference 1: EU tells airlines to pay passengers for fuel-linked cancellations: Rising cost of kerosene is ‘normal part of airline business’, says document - Barbara Moens, Ian Johnston, Financial Times - 2026.

Reference 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jet_fuel.

Reference 3: The AI delusion? Dawkins raises eyebrows as he declares the Claude chatbot is conscious - Robert Booth, the Guardian - 2026.