I'm a Tamagotchi I've got a thing attached to my arm giving me moment-by-moment readings of my blood glucose. It's like having a Tamagotchi, except the Tamagotchi is me. If you missed this in the 90s, a Tamagotchi was a digital pet you had to keep alive for as many days as you could, tending to it day and night. I'm now the pet. On the one hand I'm loving being a little bit bionic and pretending I'm a biohacker. On the other, I'm sceptical. Is it going to tell me anything I don't already...
8 days ago • 2 min read
Hi Reader, Confession time: I’m one of those w*nkers who’s built an AI agent chief of staff. A whole digital workforce, actually. Seven of them. Named after fictional detectives. And eight weeks in, I’m in two minds about whether to turn the whole thing off. Is it giving me a productivity gain? Dunno. But there have been benefits, just not in the form I expected. Why I built it I’m a small business owner. I’d rather spend my time doing interesting work with fun people i.e. clients. But...
15 days ago • 4 min read
Hi Reader, In 2022, before any of this was fashionable, Andy Burnham said something that caught my eye. “Technology for technology’s sake doesn’t change lives.” He was right. And as the prime minister in waiting, he is about to get the chance to act on it from Number 10. Here my hot take (we are in a UK heatwave after all) for the incoming Prime Minister. The job is not to win the AI race. It is not to publish another strategy, stand up another institute, or be photographed next to a...
22 days ago • 6 min read
The only time I've run out of petrol is while driving through an oil refinery. Back in the day, there were Fiat Uno pool cars on the refinery for driving around the site. As contact engineer on a unit over a mile from the office, I had the keys to my own Fiat Uno. Nominally, it was still a pool car but the keys were in my pocket and we all know possession is 9/10th of the law. With a daily mileage of between 2 and 6 miles a day, you can survive many days with the orange fuel light on. I'd...
29 days ago • 2 min read
Dear Reader, Firstly, I've discovered a new word: botshit. It's a more visceral description of AI Slop that's been generated without sufficient oversight from common sense. And I just had to share. Also, it's cited in an actual academic paper - endorsed by academics, so feel free to use it with impunity. Secondly, I wanted to talk about using AI to subtract rather than add, because it might be the most important starting place to swerve botshit. The default instinct is to add AI to existing...
about 1 month ago • 2 min read
The future's here - it's just not evenly distributed. 1 in 4 people don't have access to clean water in their home according to the WHO. 26% of people don't have access to the internet. And 16 - 20% of the global population use Generative AI regularly. There's a hype cycle, but population-wise, AI is still emerging. And that matters because privately, business leaders tell me they've barely touched a tool like ChatGPT, let alone thought about what it means for their organisation. They're...
about 1 month ago • 1 min read
Hi Reader AI's an ingredient, not a meal. Most AI initiatives don't fail because the technology doesn't work. They fail because there's an element missing and no one noticed until it was too late. My big three are Possibility, Proof, and Politics. Get two right and you still fail in predictable, expensive ways. I'll show you the three failure modes in a minute. First, the big three themselves. POSSIBILITY - Thinking Big Enough The tension: Most organisations approach AI from below — “what can...
about 2 months ago • 5 min read
Confession, I was tempted to make this a nod to original Master of the Universe himself, He-man, as I watched the trailer for the film the other day. But you'll be pleased to know I've invoked a modicum of constraint. A VP from a SaaS company said the other day that software suppliers want to be the centre of the universe. And he's so right. They like to think that they can fulfil all your needs, even when their sales person knows that certain features are weak. And sure, if you're Microsoft...
about 2 months ago • 2 min read
One of my student jobs was script-checking GCSE papers. We sat in a large hall at desks like we were in an exam. And for each bundle of exam papers, we needed to check that the examiner had marked every page, added up the numbers correctly, transferred the numbers to the front properly and added them up right. If you found an error you could get up from your desk, go to the front and flag it to one of the quality control people. But otherwise, you sat in silence. One day I was literally bored...
2 months ago • 3 min read