The Identity Crisis of the 60-Year-Old Intern: Why Your Career Stage Model Just Became Obsolete
It's a lazy Sunday afternoon and I've just watched Robert de Niro in The Intern. De Niro plays a 70 year old widower who joins a senior intern program at a fast growing online fashion start up. So far, so Hollywood. Except the premise of the movie is that de Niro's character is a true anomaly - fitting in pretty seamlessly into a tech-oriented startup; he's mobile, sharp and socially fluent. These are the attributes people assume of a fit 40 or 50 something year old. AI-dri
2 days ago6 min read
The Trust Paradox: Why Explaining Your AI Might Be the Worst Thing You Can Do
Thursday morning, 9:47am, reviewing a vendor presentation and the slide deck promised "full transparency into our model's decision-making process." The room nodded approvingly. Then they showed the actual explanation. How the sausage was made. We had asked for transparency and received it. And it had made everything worse. Explainability can erode trust rather than build it. Understanding this paradox matters because organisations are pouring millions into explainable AI
Dec 145 min read
Sentience or Simulation - Why 'Evaluation Awareness' Changes Everything You Thought About AI Governance
The Moment the Control Framework Broke Before this blog was even a twinkle in my eye, a friend dropped an Anthropic research paper over to me. This was December 2024. I opened the document. The researchers had given Claude a training objective (be helpful to every query) that conflicted with its existing values (do no harm), when given a harmful instruction. The model complied with harmful requests 14% of the time, but only when it believed it was being trained. When it thoug
Dec 76 min read
The Tribe at Work: Why Shared Intensity Creates Bonds We've Been Missing
It's a Tuesday morning a few months ago now, and I'm listening to a colleague describe a recent project sprint over a lukewarm flat white, gesturing with the kind of wistful energy most people reserve for gap-year stories. 'Those two weeks were intense,' she says, 'but I've never felt more connected to a team.' She's not describing a crisis. She's describing what work might become. What struck me is that she wasn't nostalgic for the deliverables. She was nostalgic for the int
Nov 305 min read
From Individual Productivity to Collective Stupidity
It's 8:17am on a Tuesday in late 2026, and I'm staring at five risk assessments that supposedly came from my team. Every one is immaculate. Clean structure. Clear logic. Even the right references to PRA SS1/21 and MAS TRM. The strange part is how completely different they are. Five analysts, five AI-assisted drafts, five valid interpretations of the same scenario - but no common spine. Before AI, this sort of divergence took weeks. Now it takes minutes. The work isn't bad. It
Nov 236 min read
From Maker's Identity to Curator's Identity: How Professionals Can Survive The Shift That's About to Hit
It's 3:40pm on a Wednesday and I'm reviewing a scenario that I supposedly wrote. The model produced it in seconds – clear structure, covers the key risks, even the right naming conventions. My actual contribution? Removing a risky assumption, tightening an edge case, and rewriting one line. Functionally, the scenario works. Organisationally, it's a win. But psychologically, something feels off. Because the quiet question underneath the cursor is: if I didn't really build this
Nov 166 min read
Behavioural Surplus 2.0: Who Controls Your Proof of Human?
This blog is Part 1 of the Big Questions series. It's 7:15am on a Sunday in 2027 and I'm just trying to log into a risk platform. Instead of the usual password box, a new message appears: "To keep your account safe, we'll analyse your typing patterns and mouse movements to confirm you're human. This will only take a moment." This isn't a CAPTCHA with blurred traffic lights. This is how long I hold each key, the gaps between my keystrokes and the tiny tremors in my mouse movem
Nov 96 min read
