We will make AI ‘work for the workers’, says UK technology secretary Liz Kendall, promising to support people whose jobs are swept away by automation. Can she really have so little idea what is coming? www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

6/9 An AI tax could be levied on token usage. Token production is heavily concentrated in data centres in the USA. They cost $bns and take years to build, and “rogue” tax jurisdictions would struggle to replicate them. calumchace.com/podcast-feed/

5/9 Unlike polluting factories, AI deployment can be rapidly shifted, so firms can simply flee to jurisdictions with no Pigouvian tax. The solutions are tax co-ordination, or border controls with tariffs. Both present immense challenges. calumchace.com/podcast-feed/

I'm looking forward to my keynote at the Lisbon AI Summit on Monday. See you there.

4/9 One proposed solution is to tax automation, using what economists call a Pigouvian tax, which taxes externalities to force firms to pay attention to them. calumchace.com/podcast-feed/

A week from today The AI Guy meets The UBI Guy. Join us!

3/9 Counter-intuitively, the fiercer the competition, the worse the automation trap. To avoid “The AI Layoff Trap”, we might be better off in a monopoly-ridden economy. calumchace.com/podcast-feed/

Geoff Hinton reiterates his claim that we already have conscious AIs. eu.36kr.com/en/p/3834555...

"AI as agents for the rich, and erotica and distracting simulations for the poor." A bleak view of an AI future from Ezra Klein's latest podcast. A lot like Brave New World. We can avoid this.

2/9 "The AI Layoff Trap" points out that in the extreme case, if all firms automate fully, the result is zero employment and therefore zero demand, and every firm goes bust. calumchace.com/podcast-feed/

1/9 "The AI Layoff Trap" is a new paper by our guests, Gerry Tsoukalas and Brett Hemenway Falk. It depicts automation as a classic prisoner’s dilemma. Every firm feels obliged to automate as much and as fast as possible, with terrible consequences. calumchace.com/podcast-feed/

One week until the Lisbon AI Summit. See you there!

Great phrase for AI from Anthropic's Jack Clark, interviewed on The Rest is Politics podcast> Teaching Sand to Think.

Waymo has 600 self-driving cars operating in Texas. Tesla has 42. Nuro has 47. How long before Musk invents an excuse to fold Tesla into the SpaceX-AI-Twitter money furnace? techcrunch.com/2026/05/28/w...

Ironic that Putin, one of the most vile humans ever, has a much clearer understanding of the significance of AI than almost any Western politician. www.youtube.com/watch?v=chJ1...

Responding to "AI jobpocalypse now" claims, BCG´s CEO says revenue rose 7% to $14bn last year, and its headcount is expanding to help companies roll out AI. Jobpocalypse later. www.wsj.com/tech/ai/ai-i...

The conversation has moved on from "whether to adopt AI" to "how to deploy it safely". Most of the people asking that question are not getting a satisfactory answer. The gap between deploying agents and deploying trusted agents is huge. The answer is coming...

Sam Altman has often warned about full automation, and funded UBI experiments to explore solutions. Now he has changed his mind. Couldn't possibly be related to OpenAI's IPO, could it? time.com/article/2026...

On June 11th, the AI Guy meets the UBI Guy.

Only 12 days until the AI Summit in Lisbon. See you there?

8/8 What should an LLM say if asked whether it's conscious: yes, no, or I don't know? Megan Peters would like them to say I don't know, and see how that affects our relationships with them, and our intuitions about them. www.prism-global.com/podcast/mega...

The newsletter by Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark is often fascinating. This issue has a moving story about a family touched by death, which is subsequently undone by technology. mail.google.com/mail/u/0/?ui...

The Pope just issued his first Encyclical - a warning against “power [being] concentrated in the hands of a few, [because] it tends to become opaque and evade public oversight" Who better to know about that than a senior Catholic. techcrunch.com/2026/05/25/t...

Is there a contract between writers and readers which means it is actually rude to inflict LLM writing on your readers? Or is the problem simply that LLM copy is samey, and worse, often badly thought through? jola.dev/posts/the-so...

7/8 Megan Peters says science fiction often conflates superintelligence with sentience. The really frightening prospect isn't a conscious AI that hates us. It's a super-capable system, with no experience of its own, and no care for ours. www.prism-global.com/podcast/mega...

Google CEO Sundar Pichai is preparing to give the commencement speech at Stanford. He doesn't seem to have a plan to avoid the boos that Eric Schmidt and others have received. www.nytimes.com/2026/05/22/p...

Google CEO Sundar Pichai: "I absolutely am sure that the technology is making foundational progress toward AGI. I am less able to predict whether it’s in the 3-to-5 year time frame or the 5-10 year time frame." www.nytimes.com/2026/05/22/p...

6/8 The debate between biological naturalism and computational functionalism is artificially binary, says Megan Peters. Are there functions that only biology can perform? Let's identify them, and see if any other substrates can realise them. www.prism-global.com/podcast/mega...

5/8 Megan Peters wants us to drop the traditional view of metacognition. Your brain monitors its own uncertainty constantly, just to function. Rats pass metacognitive tests. The effortful classroom version is only one slice of a much larger cake. www.prism-global.com/podcast/mega...

I´m delighted to be discussing AI, UBI & the Economic Singularity with @AndrewYang on June 11 at The AI Epidemic: Building for Life Summit. Come say hello at the Economic Singularity / Surviving AI booth. Free: bloomstack.com/lifesummit

In the latest episode of the "Eye on AI" podcast, EY's head of consulting Errol Gardner confirms that we are in the phoney war phase of the agentic AI revolution. We have a window of opportunity to learn how to make AI agents safe by verifying them. conscium.com/verifyax

With speakers being boo'ed at prestigious US universities when they talk about AI, will the SpaceX IPO convert the Magnificent Seven into the Hateful Eight?

4/8 Being wrong about machine consciousness will cause real harms. False positives will mean badly allocated resources, and blame will be mis-assigned. False negatives will mean conscious entities will suffer. Both will be bad, in different ways. www.prism-global.com/podcast/mega...

3/8 Applying a language-based test for consciousness to an octopus tells you nothing useful, says Megan Peters. Likewise a biology-based test applied to an AI. We need more and better tests. www.prism-global.com/podcast/mega...

If you live in San Francisco and dislike cleaning your home, you can hire a humanoid robot from Gastby to do it for $150. It takes 3 hours and no humans are present. gatsby.bot

Move over Artificial General Intelligence. Jeff Bezos says his new venture Prometheus is developing “Artificial General Engineers” - next-generation tools for designing physical objects. www.geekwire.com/2026/jeff-be...

"Agentic AI has arrived. AI can now do productive and valuable work. ... The world is rebuilding computing for agentic AI.” Jensen Huang in Nvidia's latest quarterly report. We don't have long to make sure that agentic AI is safe. yourstory.com/2026/05/nvid...

2/8 Megan Peters is confident that LLMs aren't conscious because every prompt hits a different server farm, and the model just gets the conversation context. There is no continuity, no coherent self. There is no candidate for consciousness there. www.prism-global.com/podcast/mega...

A pleasure to discuss the future of AI with Dan Blumberg on "Future Around and Find Out". We cover Verify AX, the verification platform for AI agents, and the Economic Singularity. www.futurearound.com/p/what-if-ai...

At the end of his keynote at a big Google event, DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis said “When we look back later, now may seem like the time we were standing at the start of the singularity.” www.digitaltoday.co.kr/en/view/5702...

This year's Google I/O had a strong focus on AI Agents. We're in a kind of phoney war with regard to agents, which means there is time for people to work out how to deploy them safely. Which means verification. www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-ne...

1/8 Ask an LLM if it’s confident about something, and it replies 'yeah, definitely'. Then you explain that it’s wrong, and it glibly replies 'my bad.' This is not metacognition, says Megan Peters, but mimicry. www.prism-global.com/podcast/mega...

5/5 The pilots of the ill-fated Air France flight 447 in June 2009 weren't incompetent. They were unprepared for a system that had changed around them. That's the lesson for AI agents. A license to operate must be earned — and earned again. startupsmagazine.co.uk/why-ai-agent...

6.6. Musk, the world's richest man, lost his fight with Trump. Today, Presidents beat Plutocrats. But what happens when an individual´s wealth exceeds their nation´s GDP? When compute sits in orbit, outside sovereign control? calumchace.com/podcast-feed/

Dark web? www.authoritarian-stack.info

4/5 An agent doesn't have to change for it to fall out of compliance. Legislation moves. Frameworks shift. An agent can find itself operating outside the rules it was designed for — not because it changed, but because the world did. startupsmagazine.co.uk/why-ai-agent...

5/6. China may treat AI as national infrastructure rather than private property. That framing might actually be the more coherent response to a world in which AI dominates the means of production. calumchace.com/podcast-feed/

Fun drought. Half of Americans think it´s harder to have fun today than it was 10 years ago. Bet they thought the same ten years ago. And all the way back. talkerresearch.com/are-us-adult...

3/5 Agents drift in deployment without anyone changing a line of code. A well-tuned system on day one can slowly develop blind spots nobody built in. Especially in regulated industries, that's not a quirk. It's a liability. startupsmagazine.co.uk/why-ai-agent...

4/6. In one weekend during COVID, governments went from hands-off to paying half the workforce directly. That speed of economic reinvention suggests that – just maybe - we could restructure around AI displacement, even without a pre-agreed plan. calumchace.com/podcast-feed/