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.

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

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.

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...

The CEO chatbot era is coming Many executives will be following Meta’s plans for an AI version of Mark Zuckerberg with interest

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...

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.

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...

Clannad on stage

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...

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.

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...

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.

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...

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.

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...

Rory Sutherland's 2026 Predictions YouTube video by The Drum

"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...

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.

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...

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...

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...

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

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...

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.

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...

Pro-worker AI doesn’t just happen. Companies need to act | MIT Sloan As AI capabilities advance, the window for shaping whether the technology augments or replaces workers is narrowing. Decision makers need to step up, MIT researchers say.

Why pro-worker AI matters and what companies must do: the value of labour underpins the labour market — and society itself. A future where it fails should worry us: mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-t...

Inspiring leadership insight from Chloé Zhao after a screening of the brilliant Hamnet, directing through openness & co-dependence, with rituals and even dance takes to align cast & crew. Unconventional — but it works: $80M+ gross, 11 BAFTA noms, 8 Oscar noms, 2 Golden Globes 👏

AI Doesn’t Reduce Work—It Intensifies It One of the promises of AI is that it can reduce workloads so employees can focus more on higher-value and more engaging tasks. But according to new research, AI tools don’t reduce work, they consisten...

As with many technologies before it, AI can intensify work, rather than take it all away hbr.org/2026/02/ai-d...

How Do Workers Develop Good Judgment in the AI Era? AI is creating a major organizational challenge: People with deep experience get huge productivity gains, while junior employees often can’t tell whether AI‑generated work is any good or how to improv...

The AI Paradox: Judgment Without Experience. “To use AI effectively, people need judgment about the task at hand, but as AI takes over more of the work, the very experiences that once produced judgment start to disappear” hbr.org/2026/02/how-...

How AI assistance impacts the formation of coding skills Anthropic is an AI safety and research company that's working to build reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems.

Interesting study from Anthropic on AI in software development shows that “incorporating AI into the workplace comes with trade-offs. The way we interact with AI while trying to be efficient affects how much we learn” www.anthropic.com/research/AI-...

Deloitte sees enterprises adopting AI without revenue lift : Business transformation, but not much remuneration

Latest research from Deloitte shows that AI is delivering business transformation in some areas, but not much remuneration: "success with AI isn't just about boosting efficiency or even growing revenue” www.theregister.com/2026/01/21/d...

Make films shorter if you want them shown in cinemas, says Picturehouse director Clare Binns says three-hour runtimes deter audiences as she is named Bafta recipient for outstanding British contribution to cinema

Picturehouse’s Clare Binns hits the nail on the head re: increasingly bloated film run times : “Directors need to ensure a comfortable viewing experience for audiences….Tell the director you’re making the film for an audience, not the directors” www.theguardian.com/film/2026/ja...

What firms can learn from Travelopia’s big AI experiment - Raconteur The company's tech director gave two developers one job: experiment with AI. What they learned has transformed how the business operates

What firms can learn from Travelopia’s big AI experiment www.raconteur.net/technology/w...

AI Coding Assistants Are Getting Worse Newer models are more prone to silent but deadly failure modes

Is AI getting worse, not better? "Models will continue to produce garbage, be trained on that garbage, and thereby produce even more garbage, eating their own tail" spectrum-ieee-org.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/spectrum...

The Russo Brothers talk to the Empire podcast on stage

Ben Wheatley talks Bulk on stage

The Empire podcast colleagues of such lethal cunning take to the stage

Bangly bang! A fun evening at the taping of the 700th episode of the Empire podcast at King’s Place in London last night. Lots of film chat and many, many guests (including the Russo Brothers not talking about Avengers: Doomsday, and Ben Wheatley on his latest mindbender, Bulk)

AI automation paradox: More work, not less : Workers face new mental health pressures as they shift from doing tasks to babysitting agentic AI

Although the promise of AI is to reduce workplace drudgery, there is also the prospect that it shifts some roles from doing tasks to supervising them. This might introduce new mental health pressures into the workplace www.theregister.com/2026/01/06/a...

AI Is Changing How We Learn at Work As artificial intelligence rapidly transforms the workplace, it is also reshaping how people learn, develop expertise, and form their professional identities. Although gen AI promises to accelerate le...

AI Is Changing How We Learn at Work - as generative AI changes the ways that we learn and can potentially increase work intensity, it risks eroding the experiences that build human mastery, empathy, and identity. hbr.org/2025/12/ai-i...

Why do English-speaking countries average 1.3-1.9 work-from-home days per week, while some East Asian countries—despite world-class digital infrastructure—report less than one? www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

2025 was a bumper year for movies. Thematically it was a year of political paranoia, superhero fatigue, and problem parents. I saw a record 120 films (all but 5 at the cinema - support your local cinema, folks!)

Here are my picks for the best of the year:

BT Adastral Park: The Suffolk science park that changed the world - BBC News The park is behind several significant telecommunication world firsts.

Adastral Park: the Suffolk science park that changed the world www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

I had big plans for Christmas cards this year. Envelopes! Stamps! Organisation! It (mostly) did not happen. So here's a glittery picture I took of St Paul's instead, delivered instantly and without paper cuts. Merry Christmas and a very jolly New Year 🎄

This is basically my 2025 entirely summed up 🤣