Lev, I think this shift to an algorithmic policy basis is really important and good. The problem is that humans are too stupid and ignorant and emotional to have sensible opinions. For example, if we ask artificial intelligence to design an optimal climate policy, we will find that the biggest const...

Summary Chapter 7: Conference The University community gathers for a conference. After an encouraging speech by Beadley and a few words on organisation, Dr Vorless, a professor of sociology, explains that the community will have to adapt new rules to survive. Later, Bill and Josella discuss the new ...

A searchlight leads Bill and Josella to the University, where they encounter a heated debate at the gate, with those outside arguing intensely that the sighted must care for the blind majority. The insiders can see, and they respond with gunfire. The callous reality is that the sighted could only ca...

Josella explains her privileged background, they mourn the loss of civilization, and it turns out she was the author of a notorious book, Sex is my Adventure. They plan their strategy, noting that London is starting to stink and they have to escape before epidemics take hold. They plan to fill a tru...

Finishing the reference to HG Wells, Bill observes that ‘the country of the blind’ is one where people have adapted to a life without sight, but he can’t imagine that happening in the triffid dominated situation they are in. Bill and Josella are developing a romance. They find an opulent apartment t...

Escaping to their car, Bill and Josella watch a nearby triffid. It seems to be listening to them. It appears these walking plants can also talk and hear. Driving away, they encounter a mob of blind people being driven along by three triffids. They head to a factory that used to make triffid guns and...

Josella Playton is quite the rich aristocrat, from a wealthy family with servants. Wyndham presents an irony in having Josella escape blindness by telling her servants not to wake her after taking a sleeping pill, regardless of “comets, earthquakes or the day of judgement itself”. Now that everyone ...

In Chapter Four, Shadows Before, hunger is driving blind people out of their homes, bumping into each other, standing aimlessly in front of broken shop windows. But what to do when the food runs out? Vignettes of this grim process without chivalry include “an elderly man who darted into the roadway ...

I just found this Guide Site to The Day of the Triffids - https://triffids.guidesite.co.uk/summary Here is its summary for chapters 4, 5 and 6. Chapter 4: Shadows Before Bill is wandering the streets when he hears a scream and finds a sighted young woman being beaten by a blind man. He rescues her a...

“I think it was while I was sitting there comfortably with a brandy in front of me and a cigarette in my hand that I at last began to admit that what I had seen was all real - and decisive. There would be no going back - ever. It was finish to all I had known . . . .” Here Bill reflects on the psyc...