What does AI think you mean by ‘exciting’?
My version of exciting could be spending an afternoon examining disputed evidence from a criminal trial. Somebody else might find that tedious and reserve the word for jumping out of an aeroplane, which would require considerably more persuasion on my part.
Even when we’re describing the same event, the feeling we attach to it may be very different.
AI Saved You Time. What Did You Do With It?
We tend to assume that time saved becomes value created, but there’s nothing automatic about that. If somebody saves six hours a week using AI and those six hours are simply filled with more emails, more meetings or a higher expectation of output, the business has certainly increased its capacity. Whether it has become more innovative is another matter.
It may simply have become faster.
There’s a human behaviour problem sitting underneath this. If I find a way of completing my workload much more efficiently and my reward is even more work, I’m likely to learn something fairly quickly about announcing my next ‘efficiency’.
You can’t ignore evidence just because it ruins your argument!
We can now generate summaries of documents we might once have read ourselves, which is useful until the summary becomes a substitute for understanding. If something important has been omitted, we’d be blithely unaware.
It could well be that this lost clause or definition is never needed or referred to, but if it is, it will be when something has gone horribly wrong.
When Accurate Information Leads to the Wrong Decision
A company can know more about its activity than ever before while still misunderstanding what’s happening within it.
The most useful question is not be whether it has enough information to act, but whether it has tested the story that the information appears to tell.
Why Changing Your Mind Is a Skill Worth Practising
Participants can surprise themselves as much as they surprise everyone else. Before long, they’re not merely taking part but shaping the argument.
The version of themselves who ‘doesn’t do this sort of thing’ has apparently taken a brief leave of absence.
AI, and the end of ‘I Don’t Know’
People are able to form fixed opinions about strangers from a short recording or somebody else’s description of an event. They become angry with anyone who interprets the same fragments differently. AI now gives those opinions structure and an appearance of authority. It can make an untested belief sound like a considered judgement.
My concern isn’t simply that this will produce more keyboard warriors. I’m more troubled by what it might do to curiosity
Some minds follow a map. Others draw one.
The world our young people are entering is changing faster than any curriculum can realistically keep pace with.
Some of the jobs they'll eventually do don't exist yet. Many of the problems they'll solve haven't yet appeared.
Things We May No Longer Feel: Could AI Change Our Capacity for Empathy?
Recently, I've found myself wondering what role artificial intelligence might play in this area. Not because I believe AI is creating psychopaths. What interests me is whether some of the ways we interact with AI could gradually influence how we process empathy, guilt, and accountability.
The Smartest Tool in History Is Making Our Kids Less Intelligent
We need to teach children to interrogate everything. Not with anxiety, but with curiosity. To hold up a piece of information and turn it slowly in the light. To understand that a deepfake isn’t just a technical trick: it’s a weapon, and someone made it for a reason.
To ask not just ‘what does this say?’ but ‘what does this want from me?’
And we need to model this for them.
An AI algorithm will not sit in a witness box. A person will.
This matters most when decisions are later challenged. If an outcome is questioned, the explanation cannot rest solely on what the system produced. The algorithm will not sit in a witness box. A person will.
That person may point to validated models, risk thresholds, and compliance processes, yet beneath all of that lies a human judgement: the judgement to rely on the system, to accept its output, to refrain from overriding it.