There’s a concept doing the rounds at the moment called cognitive debt, and it’s been sitting in the back of my head for a few days now.

The idea is straightforward. Tech debt is what happens when you cut corners on code quality to ship faster, and then spend the next year paying for it in maintenance hell. Cognitive debt is what happens when you outsource the thinking itself. You ship the thing, it works, but you don’t actually understand why it works. The understanding got deferred along with the effort.

Ronny Chieng gave the commencement address at Harvard last week and told the graduates their mission was to destroy AI. The crowd cheered. Which is either deeply ironic or completely logical, depending on how much sleep you’ve had.

I’ve been turning the speech over in my head for a few days now. Not the “destroy AI” bit, which is a comedian doing what comedians do. The other line: “AI is just going to end up making mediocre people dumber.”

There’s a post doing the rounds that stopped me mid-scroll this week. Someone shared how a ten-minute conversation with an AI chatbot gave them more closure on their divorce than four years of therapy. And the responses ranged from genuinely moving to deeply cynical, with a lot of interesting territory in between.

My first instinct was the sceptical one — it just told you what you wanted to hear. That’s a fair criticism. Large language models are, by their nature, somewhat sycophantic. They’re trained to be helpful and agreeable, and that can absolutely create a hall-of-mirrors effect where your existing narrative gets reflected back at you with a shiny coat of authoritative-sounding language on top. That’s a real risk, and anyone using these tools for emotional processing should keep it front of mind.

There’s a comment that’s been rattling around in my head since I stumbled across a discussion thread about tech companies and their slow-motion moral collapse. Someone wrote: “We wanted the Gene Roddenberry and we got the Ridley Scott.” It’s such a perfect summary that it almost physically hurt to read.

I’ve been in the IT industry long enough to remember when working in tech felt genuinely optimistic. The early internet had this wild, anarchic energy — the sense that we were building something that would flatten hierarchies, democratise information, and give ordinary people a real voice. And for a brief, shining moment, maybe it did. Then somewhere along the way, the people running these companies looked at all that power and decided the best thing to do with it was… extract as much money as possible and capture every government within arm’s reach.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about truth. Not in some philosophical, navel-gazing way, but in a very practical sense: how do we know what’s real anymore?

There’s been quite a bit of discussion online about an AI safety researcher resigning from Anthropic, warning that the world is “in peril.” And while my first instinct was to roll my eyes at yet another doom-and-gloom headline, the more I read about it, the more the knot in my stomach tightened.

Been scrolling through the latest updates on Figure’s humanoid robot development, and honestly, the progression from their earlier models to this latest iteration is pretty remarkable. What struck me most wasn’t the technical specs or the marketing hype, but how this thing actually looks like it belongs in our world rather than some dystopian factory floor.

The design evolution here is fascinating from a user experience perspective. Early industrial robots always looked like what they were - utilitarian machines built for specific tasks in controlled environments. But Figure’s latest model? It’s got this sleek, almost consumer-friendly aesthetic that makes you think “yeah, I could see this thing folding laundry in someone’s living room.”

Well, here’s something I never thought I’d write: I find myself nodding along with the Pope. Pope Leo’s recent declaration that AI technology is “an empty, cold shell that will do great damage to what humanity is about” has been doing the rounds online, and frankly, it’s got me thinking about the uncomfortable parallels between tech evangelism and religious fervor.

The irony isn’t lost on me. Here I am, someone who’s spent decades in IT and DevOps, someone who generally leans towards science over religion, finding common ground with the Vatican. But when you strip away the religious context, what Pope Leo is essentially saying is that we’re creating false idols – and in the tech world, that hits uncomfortably close to home.

Scrolling through Reddit this morning, I stumbled across a discussion about Seedream 4 that’s left me genuinely unsettled. Not in a doom-and-gloom way, but in that peculiar manner when you realize we’ve just crossed a technological threshold that we can’t uncross.

The images being shared looked like ordinary photographs - a determined-looking puppy, candid portraits, autumn scenes. Nothing particularly remarkable until you realize they’re all AI-generated. And here’s the kicker: even people actively looking for tells couldn’t reliably spot them as fakes.

David Suzuki’s recent comments about the climate fight being “lost” have been doing the rounds online, and frankly, they’ve got me thinking about something that’s been nagging at me for a while now. The 89-year-old environmental icon’s frustration is completely understandable – watching decades of advocacy seemingly fall on deaf ears while the world continues to hurtle toward disaster would break anyone’s spirit. But here’s the thing that really gets under my skin: giving up now is exactly what the fossil fuel industry wants us to do.

The warnings about AI’s impact on employment have been constant lately, but something particularly caught my attention in recent discussions. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei raised a crucial point that goes beyond the usual job loss concerns - he’s worried about the fundamental breakdown of democratic power structures.

Looking at my own industry, I’ve already witnessed how AI tools are reshaping the software development landscape. What started as simple code completion has evolved into systems that can write entire functions and debug complex applications. While I’m still employed, I’m using these tools daily, and they’re getting dramatically better every few months.

Remember those old spy movies where someone would discover a hidden camera and immediately change their behavior? Today, that’s not just a movie plot - it’s our daily reality. The other day, while setting up my new smart doorbell (yes, I know the irony), I found myself wondering about how these devices are fundamentally changing our behavior.

Living in the digital age means accepting a certain level of surveillance. My smart TV probably knows more about my viewing habits than my wife does. The apps on my iPhone track my location, my fitness data, and probably know when I’m having a cheeky scroll through social media during work hours. Even my daily coffee run to that little place on Degraves Street is logged somewhere in the digital ether through my payment app.

The tech world is buzzing with news of a massive $500 billion joint venture called Stargate, aimed at developing superintelligent AI. This isn’t just another tech startup announcement - it’s potentially one of the most significant technological investments in human history.

Sitting in my home office, watching the rain trickle down my window while reading through the discussions online, I find myself torn between excitement and deep concern. The sheer scale of this investment is mind-boggling. Three major companies each committing $100 billion to build what essentially amounts to a massive AI brain farm in Texas? This makes previous tech investments look like pocket change.

Looking through various online discussions about the most interesting or impactful years in human history got me thinking about how we perceive historical significance while living through potentially transformative times. The ongoing AI revolution has sparked quite a debate about whether 2022-2024 will be remembered as a pivotal moment in human history.

The rapid advancement of AI technology over the past couple of years has been nothing short of extraordinary. Sitting here in my home office, watching the progression from GPT-3 to ChatGPT, then GPT-4, and now the promises of even more capable systems, reminds me of those grainy documentaries about the early days of aviation. Someone in an online forum made a fascinating comparison between our current AI developments and the evolution of aircraft after the Wright brothers. We remember the Wright brothers’ first flight, but not necessarily the crucial improvements that followed.

Reading through online discussions about the future of entertainment in an AI-dominated world has got me thinking about what we truly value in our experiences. Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian recently suggested that live theatre and sports might become more popular as AI technology advances, and there’s something genuinely fascinating about this prediction.

The logic makes perfect sense when you think about it. In a world where AI can generate endless streams of content with a few keystrokes, genuine human performance becomes increasingly precious. Standing in the crowd at the MCG during a nail-biting final quarter, or watching performers pour their hearts out on stage at the Arts Centre - these experiences simply can’t be replicated by algorithms.

The tech world had a moment of rare candor recently when OpenAI’s CFO openly acknowledged what many have long suspected: AI is fundamentally about replacing human workers. While the admission isn’t particularly shocking, the bluntness of the statement certainly raised eyebrows across the industry.

Working in tech myself, I’ve witnessed firsthand how automation has gradually transformed various roles over the years. What’s different now is the pace and scope of the change. We’re not just talking about streamlining repetitive tasks anymore – we’re looking at AI systems that can handle complex, creative work that previously seemed safely in the human domain.

The ongoing debate about AI capabilities has reached a fascinating boiling point. While sitting in my home office, sipping coffee and watching the rain pelt against my window in Brunswick, I’ve been following the heated discussions about the current state of AI technology, particularly Large Language Models (LLMs).

The tech industry’s rhetoric about AI advancement reminds me of the early days of self-driving cars. Remember when we were told autonomous vehicles would dominate our roads by 2020? Here we are in 2024, and I’m still very much in control of my Mazda on the Monash Freeway.

Looking through various online discussions lately, there’s been a disturbing yet understandable trend emerging: people actively hoping for an uncontrolled artificial superintelligence (ASI) to save us from ourselves. The sentiment reminds me of sitting in my favourite Carlton café, overhearing conversations about the latest political developments while doomscrolling through increasingly concerning headlines.

The logic seems straightforward enough - we’ve made a proper mess of things, so why not roll the dice on a superintelligent entity taking the reins? Recent political developments, particularly in the US, have only amplified these feelings of desperation. Walking past the State Library yesterday, I noticed a group of young protesters with signs about climate change, and it struck me how their generation might view ASI as their last hope for a liveable future.