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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 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 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 […]
July 26, 2026
For decades, software assurance has been built on a relatively stable premise. If engineers correctly implement a well defined specification and that implementation can be tested, reviewed and verified, confidence follows. The question stakeholders and particularly regulators have traditionally sought to answer is straightforward ‘Did the engineers implement the specification correctly?’ That model served us […]
July 25, 2026
Listening to the narratives from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman following the recent headlining incident (or canny marketing ploy!) I get a sense that like Pygmalion, the mythical sculptor who fell in love with the statue he had carved, today’s AI pioneers risk becoming captivated by their own creation. It begs the question why do we […]
July 22, 2026
Before a nation deploys a new weapon, Article 36 of Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions requires it to determine whether that weapon would be lawful under international law. Should AI face its own Article 36 moment? It is a simple but powerful principle, before delegating the ability to cause significant harm, independent scrutiny […]
July 20, 2026
Following an article on Cyber Insurance in the Financial Times today ‘Growing threats prompt rethink over cyber insurance’ I felt a moment of déjà vu, as I reflected on a piece I wrote just over 10 years ago to the day Cyber Insurance – Let the dance begin. In which I predicted the disruption to […]
July 18, 2026
A rather novel line in a recent policy review leapt out at me. It mandated that users of corporate mobile devices DID NOT customise their voicemail welcome message but leave the default carrier welcome. Why? The creative nature of threat actors are harvesting these custom voice clips to use in AI deepfake autodial human engineering […]
July 12, 2026
Further to my earlier piece, The Adaptation Gap, several readers argued that leaders have always had to navigate technological change and questioned whether AI is truly different. My view is that AI is truly different. For decades, executive leadership was rewarded for consistency. Stable assumptions, proven operating models and incremental change produced predictable outcomes. Experience […]
August 30, 2026
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