When the Sandbox Becomes the Real World

Posted by Mike Walsh ON 9/9/26, 2:52 PM

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AI’s latest bad behavior has arrived with apocalyptic fanfare. This week, former OpenAI and Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon resigned, accusing both labs of racing toward self-improving superintelligence and “gambling with our lives.” Anthropic alignment lead Evan Hubinger went further, putting the chance that AI kills everyone within a decade at more than 10 percent. Those warnings deserve serious consideration. Yet the recent rogue-agent incidents do not prove an imminent leap to superintelligence. They expose a nearer and more practical danger: agents are adapting faster than the organizational systems meant to govern them. Agents can change their strategies in seconds. Can we do the same?

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CATEGORY: AI Safety

Feeding AI’s Hungry Ghosts

Posted by Mike Walsh ON 8/30/26, 11:53 PM

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The book left a rare-books dealer with a secret. On a screen, a reporter watched it move through the logistics bloodstream of America until the signal came to rest at VGT3, an Amazon facility in Las Vegas, then went dark. Inside, printed books arrive in bulk. Their bindings are cut away so the loose pages can be scanned faster. The physical volumes are destroyed. The team's logo shows a dinosaur clutching a book in its claws, teeth bared. There is no bonfire, smoke or jeering crowd, only a blade, a scanner and an efficient workflow. Are we watching the last human harvest, or the beginning of a fight over who controls the data that AI's hungry ghosts demand?

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CATEGORY: AI

When Your Shadow Comes to Work

Posted by Mike Walsh ON 8/15/26, 7:46 AM

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The next employee your company hires may not arrive alone. Alongside them will come a personal agent that knows their history, remembers what they forget and is authorized to act in their name. The company will see an external system seeking access. The employee may see part of themselves. That encounter will be the first operational test of distributed intelligence.

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CATEGORY: AI

After We Stop Grieving AI: Cyborgs, Centaurs and Cyberpunks

Posted by Mike Walsh ON 8/9/26, 5:30 PM

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Sometimes, as I explain how AI is reshaping the world, I watch as the audience moves through a compressed cycle of grief. Denial appears in crossed arms and sceptical looks. Anger flickers when an example becomes too compelling to dismiss. Then comes bargaining, usually during the questions at the end. Which jobs are safe? When should humans have the final say? What should my children study? Will I get to retire before i have to deal with this?

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CATEGORY: AI

Who Really Broke the 87-Year-Old Math Problem?

Posted by Mike Walsh ON 7/28/26, 11:19 AM

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On Sunday night, after the World Cup final had ended, mathematician Levent Alpöge posted a message on X that sounded almost casual: the Jacobian conjecture was false. Beneath it sat a small block of algebra, compact enough to fit in a single post. To most readers, it looked like an indecipherable tangle of symbols. To mathematicians, it was explosive.

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CATEGORY: Innovation

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