Ashley Hirst Writing on community, artificial intelligence and insurance

Writing

Community
10 September 2026

Dis-establishment by stealth, or How to live with difference

The bar on Catholics and Jews advising the King on bishops is not an insult to Catholics and Jews. It is the seam that holds the established church apart from the state. If you want to unpick it, say so, and let us argue.

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Community
8 September 2026

Hath Not a Jew Votes?

Apply your Moroccan standard, or your Turkish one, or your Crimean one, but apply one standard.

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Insurance & risk
30 August 2026

Why I came back to Swiss Re

Three months after rejoining Swiss Re, some reflections on four years in a small company, what they taught me, and why an institution I already trusted was the right place to use it.

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Insurance & risk
24 August 2026

Learning by experience in a world of AI

If AI takes over routine underwriting, the answer is not to preserve a hand-underwriting quota: it is to route exceptions to humans and make replay the training ground.

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Insurance & risk
21 August 2026

The trouble with training talent

Firms never paid for junior training: it was a free byproduct of low-value work that AI has now taken, and no individual firm has an incentive to restart funding the talent pipeline.

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Artificial intelligence
12 June 2026

Iteration eats planning for lunch

Anyone trying to get something done inside a company faces an implicit choice: how much to settle before they start.

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Insurance & risk
11 May 2026

Why the Standard Life model could go European

Anyone watching the UK bulk annuity market has been turning over the Standard Life carve-out for the past few weeks (I know, this is a mass appeal article).

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Artificial intelligence
5 May 2026

Actually getting value out of AI

Anyone using AI – specifically, LLMs – eventually has to deal with the same question.

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Artificial intelligence
13 April 2026

Start worrying about your dependency on specific AI companies

Cursor's maker Anysphere announced a $2.3b Series D in November 2025 - $29.3b post-money valuation, past a billion in annualised revenue and accelerating. Bloomberg reported it topped $2b by February 2026.

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Community · Note
12 November 2020

On Rabbi Sacks and the Jewish library

A mental image of the Jewish intellectual space — and what it meant to lose the person who stood by the open French window between Jewish and non-Jewish thought.

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