Subscribe:
RSS feed
Following a comment I made and subsequent discussion on a recent FT.com article (Could AI revive the socialist dream?), I felt the need to extrapolate, if only as a release valve to my own cognitive expression on the theme. My view being that for decades, the strongest argument against central economic planning was not ideological […]
August 29, 2026
A recurring problem in client discussions about AI is that organisations are still comparing models using headline specifications that sound important but often tell them very little about whether the model is actually right for the job. More parameters. Bigger context windows. More tokens. More compute. All great ‘headology’ if your selling your latest Frontier […]
August 23, 2026
Enterprises (and individuals for that matter) are understandably becoming interested in a new generation of AI brokerage services; platforms that allow users to move between models while maintaining a common memory of previous conversations, preferences and context. It sounds compelling, one memory, any AI. It should also set security architects’ alarm bells ringing. The problem […]
August 21, 2026
Further to my earlier piece on AI transparency The Great AI Labelling Illusion; When Compliance Becomes More Important Than Trust, AI watermarking sounds like the answer to a defining problem of generative AI, how do we know whether something was created by a machine? These new transparency regulations come as part of the European Unions […]
August 16, 2026
AI doom scenarios often assume that sufficiently advanced intelligence will eventually understand, predict and manipulate the world better than humans can. The kicker here is that civilisation is not a bounded game. It is a complex adaptive system in which participants respond to one another, interventions change behaviour and genuinely novel events continually alter the […]
August 14, 2026
My earlier argument on the accountability gap at the heart of AI postulated that delegating authority to AI should never allow humans or corporations to delegate responsibility with it. A recent US court ruling in Amazon.com Services v Perplexity AI shows just how quickly that principle is going to be tested. The Ninth Circuit considered […]
August 13, 2026
What a rollercoaster ride AI is proving to be. Its machine-speed DNA has already turned the assimilation of raw data and accumulated human knowledge into information available almost instantly to everyone, commoditising knowledge, if not necessarily judgement. In doing so, AI is collapsing innovation time horizons, rewriting productivity assumptions and disrupting almost every sector. Not […]
August 10, 2026
Mark Zuckerberg’s latest essay on Meta’s AI strategy deserves more attention than a typical technology announcement. His argument is not simply that AI should become cheaper, more capable and more widely available. It is that powerful AI should be distributed to billions of individuals as a deliberate counterweight to the power of governments, corporations and […]
August 8, 2026
Universities have traditionally prepared people for a world in which knowledge was scarce, expertise took years to accumulate and the ability to recall, analyse and apply that knowledge differentiated the graduate from everyone else. AI fundamentally challenges that model. Knowledge today is becoming abundant. Analysis that once required days can increasingly be completed in minutes. […]
August 2, 2026
There is an old saying that bureaucracy expands to consume the time available for its administration. Increasingly that feels less like satire and more like a business model. No sensible executive disputes the need for Know Your Customer (KYC) or Anti-Money Laundering (AML) checks and or controls. They are essential safeguards against fraud, organised crime […]
August 1, 2026
News is abound that from 2 August, organisations across Europe will proudly inform us that we’re chatting to AI. Websites will politely disclose that the smiling customer service agent is, in fact, a large language model, and marketing images will carry reassuring labels declaring they were generated by artificial intelligence. Progress? Certainly. Protection? That’s another […]
August 30, 2026
0