Chris Mairs

Smart glasses have real utility for vision impaired users. These glasses are however disconcerting in public places for others with privacy concerns. How can we resolve this dilemma?

Stripe and Open AI have announced an open source platform for agentic shopping and payments. This will spawn a myriad of agents that can buy anything you need and everything you don't. With a global financial system that is already a house of cards, what could possibly go wrong?

Last week’s OpenAI announcement of their Pulse Personal Assistant is significant and may usher in an era of ad supported agents. Meanwhile brands are considering Answer Engine Optimisation as the successor to Search Engine Optimisation.

Even without endless “still thinking” reminders, it’s easy to mistake AI for genuine intelligence. But LLMs can be tricked into revealing the dumb mechanics behind their illusion of thought. This post explains the trick and comments on Claude’s system prompt.

Many times people assume guide dogs have almost super human powers, and certainly extremely super canine powers. The reality is less amazing and once you understand what guide dogs can and cannot do, it becomes clear that already AI wins in some guiding scenarios.

Here’s a deeper dive on a traffic light framework for assessing AI’s impact on jobs. Spotting roles safe from AI over 10–15 years is hard, and over a lifetime even harder. But this framework makes it less of a lottery.

A RED/AMBER/GREEN framework for evaluating job exposure to AI displacement. The RED, AMBER and GREEN categories memorialise specific job characteristics.

Employment is a rare state for blind people. In contrast, jobs for the population at large are much more plentiful, but many of these jobs are at risk from AI replacement. What will the new jobs be, what jobs will stay and what jobs will go. Career choice matters.

The UK Guide Dogs Association raises an extraordinary amount every year. For many owners it’s hard to overstate the value of their dog. But the economics of guide dogs as navigation aids makes no sense, so what is the right form factor for a technological alternative?

Online shopping agents may not be AI’s deepest impact, but our drive to buy online has pushed Google and Amazon toward $5T. AI agents could transform shopping, with huge consequences for winners and losers.