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“Moving through unnecessary complications with clear, direct and flexible thinking. Seeing with new eyes, looking beyond the obvious, evolving established ways of thinking, reappraising old assumptions, finding new answers, harnessing potential."
AI Won’t Kill the OS, It Will Make You Forget It Exists.
At the weekend I reached a milestone in a project that has taken me through at least two cognitive event horizons in how I now see the familiar compute landscape which I flet might be interesting to share. It has also left me convinced of something else; AI is now here for the masses. So […]
Digital Sovereignty is Being Designed for Borders, ‘The Fabric’ Has None
September 6, 2026
Hard on the heels of my piece on the Fabric, I found myself thinking about discussions last week with clients on the impact of the EU’s regulatory focus on pinning down what is meant by Digital Sovereignty. If you had not noticed the regulatory world has been and remains somewhat infatuated with defining digital sovereignty […]
The Cloud Won, Now It’s Just Infrastructure … Welcome to ‘The Fabric’.
September 5, 2026
For the better part of two decades, the technology industry has performed an impressive trick, convincing boards that moving computing from one building to somebody else’s building constituted a strategic revolution. yes, for those of you who know me I have been part of that bandwaggon. To be fair though cloud genuinely changed everything. Infrastructure […]
Give Socialism Enough FLOPS and See What Happens; AI & the Fantasy of the Perfect Economy.
August 30, 2026
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 […]
Stop Buying Bigger AI, Start Building Smarter AI Architecture
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 […]
The Next IT Lock-In Won’t Be the AI Model, Their after Your Memory
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 […]
The Great AI Laundry, Why AI Watermarks Will not Solve the Authorship 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 […]
AI Won’t Take Over the World, It May Just Destabilise It.
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 […]
Is AI Gaining Agency Faster Than the Law Can Assign Responsibility?
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 […]
AI Could Win. The Financiers Could Still Lose.
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 […]
Does Zuckerberg’s AI Vision Have a Blind Spot?
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 […]
Posted in: ai, Cloud Computing, Computers and Internet, Cyber Security, Privacy, Risk, Security, Skills
Are Universities Educating Students for a World That Is Disappearing?
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. […]
When Compliance Forgets Its Purpose
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 […]
The Great AI Labelling Illusion; When Compliance Becomes More Important Than Trust
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 […]
Posted in: ai, Cloud Computing, Computers and Internet, Cyber Security, Legal, Privacy, Risk, Security
Beyond Code Assurance – Why AI Regulation Must Assure Decisions as Well as Software
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 […]
Posted in: ai, Cloud Computing, Computers and Internet, Cyber Security, Privacy, Risk, Security, Skills, Sovereignty
September 8, 2026
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