Pat Kane

Glasgow, London

Columnist at The National (Scotland)

Eco-soc #indy. Writer @scotnational. Editor @alterglobal21. Singer @hueandcry. Ideas https://t.co/WsFU1Jogoo Semi-bio: https://t.co/7HY8WYGWrG #AdAstra

Articles

The Constitute #2: AI meditations

2 weeks ago | patkane.substack.com | Pat Kane

Hi all, here’s episode two of The Constitute! my definition of this new noun is here, but essentially this is a 15-18 minute video-musing over the themes and trends that have come through my info-week. This week, I’m taking the first of many bites at AI (and AGI, and ASI). I have a very long historical, evolutionary take on it… all the sources/references in the piece are below. If you’d like to engage with me further on these overviews, as organisation or individual, please contact me here.
Pat Kane: Why your friendly neighbourhood Spider-Man gives you the ‘ick’ factor

3 weeks ago | thenational.scot | Pat Kane

That shimmering street grid, and those sandstone bases of unbuilt skyscrapers, will host the most everyday superhero of the current Marvel Universe. Everyday, in every way. It’s not just Peter Parker’s tentative romance with Mary Jane Watson (and her variants), or his wracked grief on the deaths of his adoptive parents, or his humdrum job as a freelance photographer. But it’s also his powers; they too partake of the everyday.
In this remote northern community, Oilers-mania runs deep

3 weeks ago | theglobeandmail.com | Pat Kane
Welcome to The Constitute!

3 weeks ago | patkane.substack.com | Pat Kane

Welcome to The Constitute! My name is Pat Kane, and this is a vlog that helps me - and hopefully you - make some sense of the torrent of stories about tech, culture and ideas storming down on us all. Interviews to come too. [You won't have heard of "constitute" as a noun - here's my stab at a definition.]This opening episode tries to use the PDFs I’ve downloaded to Apple Books from social media in any one week, as an indicator of some of my interests.
Pat Kane: Humanoid robots pose an ethical dilemma we’ve long prepared for

4 weeks ago | thenational.scot | Pat Kane

Earlier this week, an Edinburgh University lab exemplified the second option. Looking like a toad made from rubbery stickle bricks, it’s a “soft robot” – one that can (with a whiff of air pressure) walk out of its own 3D-manufacturing unit. They’ll be useful for nuclear decommissioning, biomedicine and space exploration, says the lab. Great! Robots as curiously shaped facilitators of a cleaner, healthier, more ambitious world. Safely in the background.
Pat Kane: STV's new radio station could be the jolt Scottish music culture needs

1 month ago | thenational.scot | Pat Kane

STV wants to start a radio station! Aimed at Scottish audiences! Hiring presenters! Let me find my Tiger Tim promotional baseball cap! In my relationship with radio, this almost comes full circle. Forty-odd years ago, my musical yearnings began to be answered by Radio Clyde’s Billy Sloan show (Billy’s still plying his trade weekly on BBC Radio Scotland). I heard The Blue Nile’s I Love This Life on Billy’s show, lost under my nylon bedsheets, and haven’t been the same since.
Has Robert De Niro found his most important role ever: taking on Donald Trump?

1 month ago | thenational.scot | Pat Kane

With a soft kiss and a tender hug for Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert De Niro accepted his lifetime achievement Palme D’Or award earlier this week. What does an authentic patriarch (or for that matter, matriarch) do? Identify the threat to the tribe, gather forces for self-defence and self-belief. Small and bowed, craggy and thinning-greying, De Niro stepped up. Without missing a beat, the actor launched into his Trump attacks.
Is there any escape from Donald Trump? For Scotland, it's complicated

1 month ago | thenational.scot | Pat Kane

Donald Trump pictured in 2008 at the house his mother grew up in in Lewis TO my eyes, it’s the most striking image unearthed by The National team’s tour d’horizon of Trump and Scotland this week. The date is June 2008. The Orange One, tie at full length and combover at full strength, is raising his arm at the gate of his mother’s pebbledash house on the Isle of Lewis. In the background, one of his cousins keeks out the front door.
TRNSMT: Please hold your nerve and keep Kneecap

1 month ago | thenational.scot | Pat Kane

Members of Kneecap attending the Irish Film and Television Academy (IFTA) Awards Ceremony THE Belfast agit-rappers Kneecap might be shaping up to be this era’s Sex Pistols. “I wanna destroy passers-by” and the Queen’s “fascist regime” parallel easily with stage shouts of “Up Hamas, Up Hezbollah” and “the only good Tory is a dead Tory”.
If Scotland has an 'independence cohort', they have a lot of work to do

2 months ago | thenational.scot | Pat Kane

Young Scots must look to community ownership of energy to help build a new nation, Pat Kane writes A “COHORT” – if the term comes to your mind at all – sounds military. Indeed, it was the name for one-tenth of a Roman legion. But that itself came from the Latin “cohors”, meaning enclosure, farmyard or retinue.

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Pat Kane @thoughtland

8 Jun 25

What brave and admirable young people. And how weapons of mass distraction can be turned to advantage https://t.co/kGQ5tYTXZi

Pat Kane @thoughtland

8 Jun 25

Interstitial Intelligence. Now, what might that be? Computation guided by metaphors and isomorphisms from ecology, mycelia, networks? That seeks relationality, not instrumentality? Your ideas pls https://t.co/izfpuMbS4r

Pat Kane @thoughtland

7 Jun 25

RT @ScotNational: Spider-Man is properly odd if you scrutinise him closely enough and line him up with all his bionic pals, writes Pat Kane…