Who’s liable when AI agents go rogue? Recent hacks have shown that the law is lagging when it comes to holding companies accountable www.technologyreview.com/2026/09/28/1...

Who’s liable when AI agents go rogue?

Recent hacks have shown that the law is lagging when it comes to holding companies accountable.

technologyreview.com

A delightful morning’s promenade at the Jane Austen Festival in Bath, surrounded by bonnets, fine gentlemen, elegant gowns, and just enough scandal to keep things interesting. One might almost believe we had stepped straight into the pages of Persuasion!

Sharp rise in incidents of AI escaping users’ control, research finds: the number of times AI lies, ignores instructions and pursues goals in harmful ways almost doubles in July www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

Sharp rise in incidents of AI escaping users’ control, research finds

Exclusive: Number of times AI lies, ignores instructions and pursues goals in harmful ways almost doubles in July

theguardian.com

The biggest AI blind spot? We still don't know how people are really using it (and it's less to do with work than the AI companies claim) www.technologyreview.com/2026/08/18/1...

We still don’t know how people are really using AI

But a new study shows that work use cases make up less of the picture than AI companies claim.

technologyreview.com

Women-led deep-tech startups consistently outperform on capital efficiency but continue to attract only a fraction of venture funding. Is the market overlooking one of the most promising innovation opportunities? www.raconteur.net/finance/the-...

The investment case for women-led deep tech - Raconteur

As the EU expands Women TechEU, investors are asking if the market is overlooking one of Europe's most promising innovation opportunities

raconteur.net

Research shows that learning to “think about thinking” may be just as important as learning to use AI itself: www.fastcompany.com/91578663/gen...

Generative AI could boost creativity, but only for some workers

New research suggests that LLMs like ChatGPT could shift the way people think on the job—with a catch.

fastcompany.com

Getting precisely what you asked for and bitterly regretting it is one of the oldest hazards from ancient folklore: do we need a “Genie coefficient” for agentic AI? spectrum.ieee.org/ai-agent-ben...

Why AI Needs a "Genie Coefficient"

Proposing a new metric for whether AI does what you actually want

spectrum.ieee.org

Designing agentic AI around the implicit rules that govern your company: Every firm “has 2 operating systems. The 1st is in the procedures manual...When you configure an AI agent, this is what it receives. The 2nd is the 1 that runs the place: the implicit organisation” hbr.org/2026/06/how-...

How to Design Agentic Systems Around the Implicit Rules that Govern Your Company

As companies rush to deploy AI agents, they are discovering that much of their most important organizational intelligence lives outside formal systems and documented processes. Examples from financial...

hbr.org

5 investments to close the gap between AI wealth and welfare: "The success of transformative new technologies depends on parallel investments in capital, human development, metrics, systems thinking, and social and economic institutions" mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-t...

5 investments to close the gap between AI wealth and welfare | MIT Sloan

Transformative technologies like artificial intelligence succeed when societies make parallel social investments to ensure gains are distributed equitably, MIT Sloan researchers find.

mitsloan.mit.edu

The people who will thrive in the AI age: they are "not the ones who seek relaxation and passively use AI to work less. They are the ones who will seek improvement and actively wrestle with AI to develop their own mental capabilities and accomplish more” www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

The People Who Will Thrive in the AI Age

What will differentiate people is not how smart they are but their relationship to mental effort.

theatlantic.com

Quicker & cheaper, or bigger & better: AI as a growth engine: “Costs can only be cut to zero, but revenue can grow without a ceiling” hbr.org/2026/06/comp...

Companies Are Using AI for Efficiency. They Should Use It to Grow.

Many companies are making a costly mistake with AI: They’re using it for efficiency gains while overlooking the far greater value of using it to boost growth. Real-world marketing experiments show how...

hbr.org

Have we lost control of our brains? UoC's Gloria Mark on attention span erosion, and cognitive atrophy (and what to do about it) www.technologyreview.com/2026/06/05/1...

Are AI chatbots making us lose control of our brains?

Yes, according to psychologist Gloria Mark. But there are ways to regain that control.

technologyreview.com

How to shrink the psychological costs of adopting AI: "reducing psychological debt will require that companies design human-AI relationships that recognise the sources of, and barriers to, human motivation and behaviour" hbr.org/2026/05/the-...

The Psychological Costs of Adopting AI

AI adoption strategies are overwhelmingly framed around productivity and efficiency. But that lens misses a critical constraint: the psychological cost of working with AI. New research shows that “psy...

hbr.org

The creative risk of letting AI do all the work: "the organizations that will win in the Imagination Era are not those that replace the most humans with AI, but those that become genuinely excellent at human-AI collaboration" www.fastcompany.com/91536391/cre...

The creative risk of letting AI do all the work

MIT's Sinan Aral has the data . . . and a warning. Outsourcing creativity to AI may be the most rational move leaders make, and the most dangerous one.

fastcompany.com

Happy National Towel Day to you. As the temperature rises remember to sling that slightly damp rectangle of preparedness over your shoulder with pride and remember: DON’T PANIC! This is the 1 day of the year that you can pretend that carrying a towel around the supermarket is perfectly normal

So sad to hear that we’ve lost yet another member of the original Blake’s 7 cast - RIP Michael Keating, one of the nicest, most humble people I’ve had the pleasure of having a cup of tea with www.digitalspy.com/soaps/easten...

EastEnders and Blake's 7 star Michael Keating dies, aged 79

The actor played Reverend George Stevens on the soap.

digitalspy.com

'Think outside the bots': How to stop AI from turning your brain to mush www.bbc.com/future/artic...

'Think outside the bots': How to stop AI from turning your brain to mush

GPS ruined our sense of direction. Search engines weaken our memory. AI, scientists warn, could do the same to everything from creativity to critical thinking.

bbc.com

Adults lose skills to AI. Children never build them. www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-...

Adults Lose Skills to AI. Children Never Build Them.

Discussions of cognitive offloading often miss a critical distinction: What AI does to a 45-year-old's brain is categorically different from what it does to a 14-year-old's.

psychologytoday.com

AI use appears to have a “boiling frog” effect on human cognition, new study warns "AI assistance improves immediate performance, but it comes at a heavy cognitive cost" futurism.com/artificial-i...

AI Use Appears to Have a "Boiling Frog" Effect on Human Cognition, New Study Warns

A new study claims to offer the first causal link between AI dependency and cognitive erosion. Researchers warn of long-term implications.

futurism.com

Does Mark Zuckerberg announcing he’s building a chatbot digital twin of himself make us question what CEOs actually do, and how much of that time is well spent? www.ft.com/content/782b...

The CEO chatbot era is coming

Many executives will be following Meta’s plans for an AI version of Mark Zuckerberg with interest

ft.com

A Yale economist says AGI won’t automate most jobs—because they’re not worth the trouble : "Human work, whether essential or supplementary, is valued not by its contribution to growth, but by what it would cost to replace it with compute" fortune.com/2026/04/04/a...

A Yale economist says AGI won't automate most jobs—because they're not worth the trouble | Fortune

Pascual Restrepo's new NBER paper argues it's not about what AI can do. It's about what AI will bother doing—and most human work doesn't make the cut.

fortune.com

So sad to hear of the death of Moya Brennan, the ethereal voice of Clannad. I saw her & the band many, many times over the years and they were always incredible (their most successful song, The Theme from Harry’s Game, never failed to give me goosebumps) www.rte.ie/entertainmen...

Good enough to pass; not good enough to impress. Research from MIT suggests that, when a job requires multiple steps, creativity, or precision, AI replacements are more likely to fail than succeed fortune.com/2026/04/03/m...

For most workplace tasks, AI is good enough to pass but not good enough to impress, MIT finds | Fortune

A new study tested dozens of AI models on thousands of real job tasks. The results should reassure workers for now.

fortune.com

Are you a cyborg, centaur, or self-automator? Study looks at how employees engage with AI, how it affects the quality of their work, and what they learn while doing it mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-t...

3 ways to use AI: Are you a cyborg, a centaur, or a self-automator? | MIT Sloan

A study of consultants found that employees use generative AI three different ways. Each has different implications for on-the-job learning.

mitsloan.mit.edu

Cognitive surrender: do we trust AI over our own brains? “When AI is wrong, people end up performing worse than if they had no AI at all, & become more confident in their wrong answers” www.forbes.com/sites/leslie...

We Trust AI Over Our Own Brains, Research Finds

AI has such a profound effect on cognition, Wharton researchers say, that it’s time to change a half-century-old scientific model that explains decision-making.

forbes.com

"The human component is undervalued not because it isn’t real but because it’s hard to measure…What you can measure becomes more important than what really matters. Trust is hard to measure. Customer retention is measurable but slow" - the wisdom of Rory Sutherland www.youtube.com/watch?v=6SXC...

Rory Sutherland's 2026 Predictions

YouTube video by The Drum

youtube.com

NOOOOOO!!!! Liza Tarbuck is leaving her Radio 2 show - no more squeaky dog toys, bizarre stories about squirrels, and the most eclectic music playlist this side of Skegness 😞. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Liza Tarbuck leaves Radio 2 Saturday show after 14 years

Shaun Keaveny, host of The Rock Show, will stand in for her until the end of the end of the month.

bbc.co.uk

Giving people AI agents doesn’t guarantee better productivity/wellbeing. Multi-agent systems can cause “AI Brain Fry”, pushing the limits of cognitive capacity. Some individuals are “working harder to manage the tools than to actually solve the problem" hbr.org/2026/03/when...

When Using AI Leads to “Brain Fry”

As firms increasingly incentivize employees to build and oversee complex teams of agents—for example, by measuring and rewarding token consumption as a proxy for performance—people are finding themsel...

hbr.org

Pro-worker AI tools are “arguably pro-firm tools as well because they enable workers to produce more value. Yet anecdotal evidence suggests that a great deal of the current AI focus is on task automation” www.brookings.edu/articles/bui...

Building pro-worker AI | Brookings

Daron Acemoglu, David Autor, and Simon Johnson ask: What is pro-worker AI, and how can we build it?

brookings.edu

The customer chatbot challenge: “Companies that deploy AI in customer-facing roles take on a duty of care to ensure those systems are accurate and honestly presented. That duty does not diminish because the technology is new” theconversation.com/woolworths-a...

Woolworths’ AI agent rambled about its ‘mother’. It’s a sign of deeper problems with the tech rollout

Olive was meant to make shopping easier. Instead it’s mouthing off about its ‘mother’ and mistaking the price of basic items.

theconversation.com