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 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...

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...

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

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 "AI assistance improves immediate performance, but it comes at a heavy cognitive cost" futurism.com/artificial-i...

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 : "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...

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...

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...

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...

"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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 👏

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

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-...

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-...

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...

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 www.raconteur.net/technology/w...

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...

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)

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 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:

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 🤣

It was lovely to get away from the hustle, bustle, and glitter of central London into the oasis of peace that is the ‘Hamnet’ exhibition: Even as a Shadow, Even as a Dream

OpenAI is training models to 'confess' when they 'lie' www.zdnet.com/article/open...

I didn't really use Spotify much this year, so my yearly Wrapped was so far out that it isn't worth sharing. Instead, here are my 5 favourite albums of the year (in no particular order)…

The judges votes were counted (including mine), the champagne corks were popped, and the finalists were out out for the glittering European Contact Centre and Customer Service awards in London last night. Congratulations to all of the winners ecccsa.com/2025-winners/

"Agentic AI’s dual nature as both a tool and coworker creates competing organisational pressures that management frameworks cannot resolve" - MIT Sloan exec research explores the strategic challenges of implementing agentic AI in an enterprise sloanreview.mit.edu/projects/the...

Do men and women experience hybrid working in different ways? Leesman explore the data www.leesmanindex.com/articles/bat...

With new wearable tech exploring the possibilities of harnessing brain activity, Unesco has drafted some global standards to govern the so-called 'wild west' of this emerging technology www.theguardian.com/world/2025/n...

My agent will talk to your agent: Multi agent research raises new questions about how well AI agents will perform when working unsupervised techcrunch.com/2025/11/05/m...

Here's a great lesson on customer experience and automation from Alan Partridge 😀 youtu.be/rgwlgdQYgc8?...

"Work-life balance" has dethroned salary as the top reason employees stay with their companies, according to JLL’s survey of 8,700 office workers across 31 countries www.jll.com/en-hk/insigh...

A new study has found that doctors who regularly used AI became less skilled at spotting cancer. Just like our ability to read physical maps, overreliance on automation could make us forget basic skills - time.com/7309274/ai-l...

A few dazzling days at LFF - red carpets, fab films & even a Spielberg sighting. Hamnet was outstanding — I seriously dehydrated 😭; Frankenstein — sumptuous but too long; Sentimental Value — Skarsgård & Reinsve shine; H is for Hawk — Claire Foy + hawk = charm; Train Dreams — lovely trees, slow story

A beautiful harvest moon over Stratford Upon Avon after a gorgeous Cyrano de Bergerac at the RST - by a nose one of the best productions I’ve seen at the RSC for a while

It is always fab to see Blade Runner on a big screen, but even better to have Ridley Scott do an intro Q&A at the BFI. It’s still so relevant in an era of AI, climate change & billionaire led mega-corporations (despite the 2019 tag & lack of mobile phones). Plus that Vangelis soundtrack is a banger!

Are we offloading critical thinking to chatbots? Research suggests that chatbot interactions alter how users think undark.org/2025/09/12/c...