Old MacDonald had A Farm, AI-AI-O

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.

The US President is Donald Duck

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.

Artificial Dog Intelligence

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.

On Job Board Games of Chance and Skill

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.

Traffic Lights and Traffic Cops

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

Blind Unemployment And How Many AI Ethicists Does The World Really Need?

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.

Not a RoboDog

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?

The Agentic Shopping Wars

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.

For those of you who thought 'agentic' was obscure

AI excels at generating impressive content, often surpassing paid professionals. So why can’t it handle basic online chores like ordering a book or booking a flight? And what’s the outlook for tackling far more consequential agentic tasks?

Marital Misconduct, Blackmail and the end of the world as we know it

Agentic Misalignment describes actions taken by AI to the detriment of one or more humans. Aengus Lynch and colleagues at Anthropic recently demonstrated Large Language models attempting blackmail to prevent their own shutdown.