FROM BELL TO BYTE

25 June 2025

Dear 50 International,

During the deep, silent winters of ‘the little ice age’ of the early 1800’s the midnight bell of St. Paul’s Cathedral would echo along the frozen Thames, to very faintly reach Windsor Castle. With no engines, railways, nor mechanical clamour, sound was of horses, wind, water, and the resonance of bronze. Within decades, a soundscape that would be replaced by steam, factories, and shift work.

What once echoed freely over fields and water, the world of bells, birdsong, and ambulation, was gradually drowned out by coal, carriage wheels, and steam's hiss. The soundtrack of civilisation was no longer seasonal or sacred; it became mechanical, relentless, and measured in shifts and sirens.

For two centuries, the industrial engine defined our economy and our understanding of value. Factories, ports, and offices being a noisy, visible evidence of progress. Labour was tangible, and taxation followed the trail of income, output, and consumption.

Today, we move differently. Artificial intelligence flows silently through networks, coordinating electric fleets, diagnosing illnesses, managing inventories, and optimising power grids. The AI that guides medical scans or balances wind farms is tireless and fast. It learns not year-on-year but hour-on-hour. The rhythm of innovation is no longer industrial; it is exponential.

Already, silent revolutions are underway: neural networks sift through genomic sequences while we sleep; supply chains reroute themselves in milliseconds; predictive systems shut down turbines before failure occurs. No raised voices. No alarms. Just orchestration.

This new intelligence doesn’t mimic human action; it amplifies and exceeds it, reshaping logistics, finance, medicine, and energy in ways that reduce input and increase output. With each gain in efficiency, the need for physical infrastructure shrinks. The quiet hum of data centres replaces the clatter of assembly lines.

However, here lies the conundrum: the more silent and decentralised value creation becomes, the harder it is to see and to tax. What happens when wealth is generated by non-human agencies and resides nowhere in particular? When code and capital flow frictionlessly across borders, bypassing traditional fiscal governance?

We must rethink taxation not just to fund the state, but to support the human within it. If AI reduces drudgery and extends life, the prize must be reinvested in education, the arts, the civic realm. The industrial age taxed muscle. The age of intelligence must learn to share the dividends of thought.

Without recalibration, we risk replicating old inequalities at an exponential scale. A  future where efficiency accrues to the few while others subsist in algorithmic obscurity. The question is not just who owns the machines, but who benefits from their quiet labour.

This is the new quietude not of absence, but orchestration. A silence filled with insight and in it, a question. Can we hear what’s coming next, and will we be ready to respond not with noise, but with purpose? Perhaps silence will not be a retreat, but an invitation to imagine new forms of worth, contribution, and meaning. In the hush between inputs and outcomes, we may rediscover something wholly human.

All the best

Alistdair