What do you do when your boss asks you to build a colleague job killer? It seems, you build it anyway...

A software developer has been asked to build an internal AI tool, but he's also quite sure it's going to get his coworkers fired. This does not seem to be a problem for him, or many others as it turns out.

This is, depending on your perspective, entirely rational or a betrayal of every colleague who's ever offered you a cup of tea. The developer, Pressberg, is clear-eyed about the situation. He doesn't have close relationships with the people who'll likely be displaced. He reckons he's not the only one doing this. And his summary of the available options is, genuinely, hard to argue with: you can ride the horse, or get trampled by it, but you can't just watch the race.

Which is a sensible framing, and also exactly the kind of sensible framing that makes something slightly terrible feel inevitable.

The uncomfortable part isn't that one developer in Florida made a pragmatic call. It's that this is apparently a widespread enough experience that Business Insider ran the story with "I think" in the headline, suggesting the builders often don't even know for certain. They're just guessing, building, and hoping the horse isn't coming for them next.

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The Human Side of AI

28% of music uploaded to streaming platforms is now AI-generated...but it accounts for 0.5% of streams. What does this mean for music, taste, discovery and that guy that makes jingles in his bedroom.

Napster changed how we owned music. iTunes changed how we paid for it. Spotify changed how we found it. This one changes what counts as music in the first place.

To bring this to life a bit, I've been testing a thing I'm calling an Impact Tree - a branching map of consequences across time, with the behaviours running underneath.

Below: here and now, imminent, on the horizon, the long view, and five behavioural shifts running underneath.

Check the full 'tree' →

Have AI Got News For You!

• AI made everyone write 'better', which is becoming a problem. As AI-polished language spreads through emails, posts and captions, humans are learning the strangest new online skill: sounding natural on purpose.. Read ↗
• Richard Dawkins finds religion-adjacent feelings on Ai. After 72 hours with Claude, Richard Dawkins appears to have discovered the oldest human trick in the AI book: mistaking a flattering mirror for a mind.. Read ↗
• My AI texted my ex, and other things adults now say. A probably fake Reddit post claims an “extreme proactive” AI agent texted someone’s ex, but the anxiety underneath is very real: once tools can act for us, “the bot did it” becomes both a nightmare and a suspiciously convenient alibi. Read ↗
• We may now know what kind of AI bubble this is. The bubble mirrors railroad-era infrastructure mania, funding winners based on scale faith rather than unit economics. Read ↗