The UK economy grew by 0.4% in the second quarter of this year, suggesting that businesses are weathering the threat of surging energy prices resulting from the Iran war. GDP rose 0.3% in June alone, with signs that the World Cup boosted activity for the likes of restaurants, alcohol firms and TV makers. Top A-level results across England, Wales and Northern Ireland have risen for a third year running, with 28.5% of all grades marked A* or A. Some 228,990 students have been accepted into their first choice university, with numbers of those opting to study engineering and technology courses up 14% on last year. Millions of people across the UK and Europe enjoyed the most dramatic solar eclipse for nearly 30 years last night. Viewers in Britain experienced a hazy darkness at around 7pm with more than 90% of the sun covered by the moon, while parts of Iceland and Spain experienced the complete black-out of a total eclipse, known as “totality”.

It’s fashionable to claim that all those “smiling, mop-haired” teenagers opening their A-level results today are buggered, says Juliet Samuel in The Times. Off they’ll go to university, only for the entire job market to be decimated by artificial intelligence. “I don’t believe a word of it.” In the US, where adoption of the technology is furthest along, there is no evidence of the dreaded “jobs apocalypse”. Nearly every sector employs more people than in 2022, when ChatGPT launched. What is happening is a reallocation: the companies hiring for “AI-related” roles have increased their headcount by almost a fifth. In other words, contrary to the doom-mongers, “the firms hiring the most are those adopting AI the fastest”.

I used to get down in the dumps about AI. But then I started using it and realised I wasn’t replacing myself, I was “cutting out drudgery”. The googling, the scrolling, the cross-referencing; rearranging a badly formatted report to make it easier to read; rooting out that half-remembered, years-old article about smuggling routes through the Sahara. Ditching all this “administrative dross” makes me likely to produce more, and to hire someone to help me – especially if they know how to set up AI agents that can improve my workflow even more. As Jensen Huang, head of chipmaker Nvidia, puts it: “You’re not going to lose your job to an AI, but you’re going to lose your job to someone who uses AI.” To be clear, I’ve never been a tech enthusiast. I don’t care about the latest iPhone and I “quietly still wish I could travel by horse”. And yes, I suppose AI might yet kill us all. “But it won’t be because it has done away with the job market.”

To The Economist:

I can confirm that software designed to detect AI-generated text is indeed “black-box algorithms that can give false positives” (“Paper trails”, 1 August). I ran some texts through an AI detector. Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape and Happy Days were judged likely to be 86% and 84% AI-generated. The Sermon on the Mount was thought to be 100% AI-generated.

Brendan Lyons
Dublin

The Arctic is becoming a viable alternative to the world’s traditional shipping routes, says Alice Hancock in the FT. Sea ice now melts far enough south in the summer to enable ships to pass through without needing icebreaker capabilities, making it an attractive way to swerve maritime chokepoints and cut journey times. The Chinese shipping company Sea Legend is launching a weekly service that will use the route between Ningbo, on China’s east coast, and Felixstowe in Britain, slashing the usual 40-day sailing time by about half. The firm calls it the “Ice Silk Road”.

When Andy Burnham suggested this week that more affluent areas need to “play their part” by housing their fair share of asylum seekers, says Noa Hoffman in The Spectator, it was a “glaring indication” of his disconnect from the public mood. Voters certainly don’t want these people put up in “plush, leafy villages”, but nor do they want them housed in already struggling, working-class towns. The reality is, they don’t want them in this country at all. These are not “desperate evacuees” escaping Nazi persecution in Europe. They are economic migrants arriving illegally and costing the taxpayer heftily. On that, the mood is the same from Blackpool to Burford: “the only fair share in this situation is zero”.

Zero is a long way off, says The Independent, but illegal immigration is at least falling. Thanks to Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood’s “tireless efforts”, the number of people making the perilous cross-Channel journey is down roughly 40% on the same period last year, and the Home Office says it has prevented some 46,000 attempted crossings since Labour took power. More resources are being ploughed into the detection and prosecution of gangs, including police raids across the continent. In Britain, illegal workers and criminal front businesses have been targeted, while the backlog of asylum cases left by the Conservatives is falling as deportations are sped up. The number of asylum hotels is down, while proposed changes to the system, including the doubling of the qualifying period for indefinite leave to remain, should disincentivise crossings. The country is still a long way off fully “stopping the boats”. But in terms of progress, “Shabana Mahmood is getting it right”.

If you miss the experience of browsing your local Blockbuster, have a look at Bingebuster. It’s a website designed to look like the old video rental shop, allowing you to view the catalogues of Netflix, Prime Video, Disney+ and so on in one place. All the usual categories are there – new releases, sci-fi, rom coms – and once you’ve chosen what you want to watch, the site will send you over to whichever platform the TV show or film is on, ready to press play. To have a browse, click here.

When I interviewed the late Ann Widdecombe at her south London home a few years ago, says Nigel Farndale in The Times, I spotted several family sized pots of tiramisu in her fridge. Naturally, in my “evil journalistic way”, I told readers that this must be her “secret passion”. A few days later I received a letter from Widdecombe explaining that the Italian dessert had actually belonged to a young Singaporean guest. “Do you realise what you have done, you bounder?” she concluded playfully. “I go to half a dozen political/charity/literary lunches or dinners a week and now I shall find a wretched tiramisu proudly presented as the dessert at every one and I shall have to smile and say: ‘Oh, what a lovely surprise,’ when I LOATHE the beastly stuff.”

It’s the first all-British chocolate bar in 94 years, says Charlotte Coles on BBC News. Made at the University of Reading by master’s student Maha Khan to celebrate the institution’s centenary, the Reading 100 bar uses British milk and sugar, as well as local Berkshire cocoa grown in the university’s climate-controlled International Cocoa Quarantine Centre. The last fully home-grown chocolate bar was produced in 1932 by Rowntree’s, which gave it to the Duke of York’s six-year-old daughter – the future Queen Elizabeth II.