My AI Predictions Expired Before the Ink Dried: Why Even Exponential Thinking Isn't Fast Enough
It’s Saturday before I fly to India on a work trip and I'm reviewing a predictions piece I published on LinkedIn just over four weeks ago. Ten bold forecasts for AI in 2026, written in the spirit of Ray Kurzweil's exponential optimism. I'd even felt a little bit pleased with myself writing them as they were a bit… aggressive, even. The kind of piece that makes people say 'that's a stretch.' And as I sit here getting ready to pack my suitcase, I am reflecting on the fact that
11 hours ago7 min read
The Tax on Intelligence: Why the UK Is Paying Four Times More to Think
Last week I sat on a panel on AI for a private equity firm. There were some great insights around the state of AI in the wild from the CEOs, founders and other panellists in the sessions I managed to see and in the conversations over drinks afterwards. One of the topics that discussions increasingly turned to is the energy premium we are paying in the UK and what that means about the cost of keeping our data centre lights on. The Stakes Most People Miss This blog is about why
6 days ago8 min read
The Infrastructure of Belonging: Which Teams Will Survive AI?
During COVID we proved a strange thing: you can keep a company running through a grid of faces - and still watch the human glue quietly dissolve. Hour after hour of 'being on' in front of a camera didn't just tire us out; it thinned us out. Psychologists even gave it a name. 'Zoom fatigue' - arguing that video calls overload us with sustained eye contact, self-monitoring, and missing body-language cues. Stanford's Jeremy Bailenson has written extensively about this. And large
Jan 136 min read
The Identity Crisis of the 60-Year-Old Intern: Why Your Career Stage Model Just Became Obsolete
It's a lazy Sunday afternoon and I've just watched Robert de Niro in The Intern. De Niro plays a 70 year old widower who joins a senior intern program at a fast growing online fashion start up. So far, so Hollywood. Except the premise of the movie is that de Niro's character is a true anomaly - fitting in pretty seamlessly into a tech-oriented startup; he's mobile, sharp and socially fluent. These are the attributes people assume of a fit 40 or 50 something year old. AI-dri
Dec 21, 20256 min read
The Trust Paradox: Why Explaining Your AI Might Be the Worst Thing You Can Do
Thursday morning, 9:47am, reviewing a vendor presentation and the slide deck promised "full transparency into our model's decision-making process." The room nodded approvingly. Then they showed the actual explanation. How the sausage was made. We had asked for transparency and received it. And it had made everything worse. Explainability can erode trust rather than build it. Understanding this paradox matters because organisations are pouring millions into explainable AI
Dec 14, 20255 min read
Sentience or Simulation - Why 'Evaluation Awareness' Changes Everything You Thought About AI Governance
The Moment the Control Framework Broke Before this blog was even a twinkle in my eye, a friend dropped an Anthropic research paper over to me. This was December 2024. I opened the document. The researchers had given Claude a training objective (be helpful to every query) that conflicted with its existing values (do no harm), when given a harmful instruction. The model complied with harmful requests 14% of the time, but only when it believed it was being trained. When it thoug
Dec 7, 20256 min read
The Tribe at Work: Why Shared Intensity Creates Bonds We've Been Missing
It's a Tuesday morning a few months ago now, and I'm listening to a colleague describe a recent project sprint over a lukewarm flat white, gesturing with the kind of wistful energy most people reserve for gap-year stories. 'Those two weeks were intense,' she says, 'but I've never felt more connected to a team.' She's not describing a crisis. She's describing what work might become. What struck me is that she wasn't nostalgic for the deliverables. She was nostalgic for the int
Nov 30, 20255 min read
