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The newest article are first, so the artilces read in reverse chronological order.
For the owners of the Baltic Exchange, the IRA bombing of the Exchange might have seemed to be the end. In fact, it turned out to be the very platform from which the Exchange could reinvent itself and swap excess debt for cash in hand.
The Baltic Exchange is currently located on the 5th floor of 77 Leadenhall Street in the City of London. It takes a lease from WeWork, which lets out flexible workspace across several floors.
Before its move to Leadenhall Street The Baltic Exchange was located at 24–28 St Mary Axe. It operated there from 1903 until the IRA bombing on 10th April 1992, the day after John Major's Conservative Government was re-elected.
24-28 St Mary Axe was a multi-story, Grade II* listed Edwardian building with a large central exchange hall topped off with a glass dome. Thousands of shipbrokers, cargo owners, and charterers came together every day, and to the untrained eye they were standing, wearing suits and talking in pairs and small groups. To the initiated, this was open-outcry' floor trading. Behind them were administrative personnel and staff running the dining rooms and the services for members.
The Baltic Exchange now operates with a team of a few dozen people.
This downsizing was driven first and foremost by a truck loaded with Semtex and fertilisers that exploded and destroyed the building beyond economic repair. It was the biggest explosion on mainland Britain since the Second World War, and the IRA claimed responsibility.
The second driver was something that was happening on a world scale. It was the shift to electronic trading, and by the late 1990s and early 2000s, physical trading floors were basically obsolete. Shipping transactions that were the Baltic Exchange's staple were a prime candidate for the move to digital.
Suddenly, without a physical trading floor to maintain, the Baltic Exchange was free to evolve into an independent market-data and benchmarking agency. Today, it focuses on compiling global shipping indices such as the Baltic Dry Indexusing data provided by international panels of brokers. And that just needs a small team of analysts and administrators.
Setting aside the loss of life and injuries, the long-term overall gain and loss for the Baltic Exchange worked out better than the owners could have imagined in the immediate aftermath of the bombing.
From a corporate, economic, and operational perspective, the destruction of 24–28 St Mary Axe was an unintended catalyst that forced an acceleration of modernisation and likely saved the institution from a long, costly decline.
Had the St Mary Axe building not been bombed, the Baltic Exchange would have been trapped maintaining an expensive, high-maintenance, listed historic building whose central trading hall was becoming redundant. Selling the land and collecting the insurance freed up capital and relieved the organisation of its huge structural overhead.
Traditional exchanges worldwide spent years resisting electronic trading to protect their physical trading pits. Against that, the Baltic Exchange was forced to transition to digital operations overnight. I have to wonder how long after news of the bombing broke, the owners of the Exchange realised what an opportunity the bombing might be for their economic future.
Operating as a lean, low-overhead market-data provider transformed the Baltic Exchange into an attractive, agile business. In 2016, the Singapore Exchange (SGX) acquired the Baltic Exchange for £87 million. That was an exit for its shareholder-members that would have probably never had happened if it had still been in its Victorian white-elephant headquarters.
After the Baltic Exchange building was demolished, the land was sold. Now St Mary Axe houses the Gherkin, a 41-storey skyscraper built in 2004 and designed by Norman Foster, Its aerodynamic, spiralling design creates a chimney effect that passively regulates the interior climate. It was ground breaking when it was designed, with the building using roughly half the energy of standard office towers of a similar size.
The problem is that rectangles use space more economically, and every retrofitting upgrade to the Gherkin has to be expensively tailored to the spirals and circles of the building.
Now new rectangular buildings tower over everything and everyone, testaments to power.
Frank Skinner, the raconteur with a sharp eye for social humour, wrote how conversation has been ruined by facts. Instead of a heady, humour-filled conversation based on a lack of accurate knowledge, we have someone with a phone who can find any fact, and take the bottom out of the mood.
In a similar vein I am lamenting YouTube video reviews of places to visit. Not only do I see the attractions of the place, I get all the reasons why visting is not a good idea. The trash on the streets, the poor transport links, the number of tourists crowding the streets - it is all there.
What is a person to do? Looking 'just to check' is addictive. How can we not just check and potentially avoid a disastrous holiday?
We develop an extra sense that can read the quality of the place when viewed through the eye of the camera. Yet at the same time that we develop this extra sense, we doubt its accuracy, knowing that being on the street, in the gallery, in the town, on the lake, is different to how the camera sees it.
Different, but how different?
That knowledge drags on us and we abandon destinations. And for those that we think are fit to visit - when we arrive we have already seen them through the lens of that YouTube video.
There is no cure. We can't turn our back on it. That would be like travelling by horse when there are buses available.
13 May 2025: My wife was looking at places to visit that have interesting architecture, and Riga in Latvia came up. It is on the Daugava River, also called the Western Dvina. My grandfather's family came from Dvinsk, also known as Deneborg, that became Daguavpils. I wondered how that town was described and found that Mark Rothko was born in Daugavpils, at a time when Latvia was part of the Russian Empire.
He emigrated with his parents and siblings to the United States in 1913 and moved to New York City in 1923. He died in 1970, so it is quite realistic to imagine what would have happened to him had he stayed in Dvinsk, and the chances are very great that he would have been killed for beng Jewish.
Before the end of the First World War the Jewish population of Dvinsk was 50,000 but many emigrated when it becamse possible with the disintegration of the Russian Empire. Then came the nazis, and starting July 1941 they executed some and put the remaining 14,000 Jews in a Ghetto along with those from nearby towns. By the end of the year only about 1500 Jews remained, and they were murdered on 1 May 1942. When the town was liberated in 1944 only 100 had survived.
18 March 2025: The judgement of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, which agreed with the U.S. Copyright Office, is that an image created by Stephen Thaler’s AI system DABUS was not entitled to copyright protection, and that only works with human authors can be copyrighted.”
Superficially it seems a reasonable decision to deny copyright to a work generated by AI. But let’s think a bit.
What about those pieces of art that are generated by a paint can with a hole in the bottom being swung by the artist over a canvas? What about Jackson Pollock deciding where to splatter paint? After all, it is the law of physics that determines exactly where the paint will fall, and not Jackson Pollock.
I learned recently that Jackson Pollock used an arm motion that involved not just his forearm but aso his upper arm and that the combined effect of the double pendulum was to make the number of possibilities of the path of travel exponentially greater.
And that makes me more in doubt about the amount of input that Pollock had on the outcome. And that's because while Pollock could maneoevre that double pendulum, how certain could he be of the outcome? But I don't really know.
Still, while I am on a roll, keep going - for good or for bad.
So why not the text input by the artist whose work is generated by a program that obeys the laws of large language models?
How far do you have to go to separate the human input to the point that it is disconnected from what is produced?
Looking at the judgement, I see that the appellant Dr Thaler accepted that the piece of work under consideration was ‘autonomously generated by an AI’. I wonder why he conceded that when he could have argued that the AI was bound by the creative input from him? Instead Dr Thaler argued that he had copyright because the AI was his employee and that he had made the AI.
Very strange. Really the court could not have asked for a better appellant to argue against. He really did himself no favours.
It occurs to me that if one left an AI on its own without any prompts then it would sit there. It is not autonomous. Whereas, if you put Rembrandt or Leonardo da Vinci or Fred Smith in a locked room with paper and pencils, then all of them, including Fred (who has no pretensions are being gifted with the ability to make art), would start drawing. They would do it out of an urge to make art or to relieve boredom – or whatever motive – but they would start autonomously.
The materials would prompt them.
But the large language model inside AI would never prompt it to do anything because it is not capable of doing anything without being prompted by an autonomous being.
The future will arrive when AI surveys its environment and decides what it wants to do.