Jade The Hooman: The Reading Room

The Reading Room: Chapter 8

Jade The Hooman — Tue, 12 May 2026 18:57:09 GMT

One of my favourite writers is Kafka.

I love how reading his work feels like being inside a dream where everything is procedurally correct and quietly wrong at the same time.

And how you just keep nodding along, and then you look up and realise where he’s brought you.

So much of the AI conversation lives in that same territory. Conversations about systems, power, alienation, identity, performance, and communication breakdowns. People trying to hold onto themselves inside structures that feel bigger than them.

This week’s Reading Room circled it all: AI, judgement, communication, transformation, performance, and the strange tension between technology helping people while also reshaping the way we think, work, communicate, and relate to each other.

Which, on reflection, sounds very heavy, but I promise there was also poetry, butterflies, gingerbread, and gardening prompts involved, too.

In no particular order, here are my week’s highlights:

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What is AI doing to humans? Why aren’t we measuring it?

has long been concerned with the human consequences of technology, and this piece from applies that lens to AI in a way I found useful.

It asks why we’re so focused on measuring what AI systems can do, while still not properly measuring what they are doing to us. Not just productivity or performance, but the impact it can have on humans — dependency, trust, emotional reliance, critical thinking, sycophancy. The small ways people start adapting themselves around systems over time.

What I appreciated most was the refusal to make the conversation simple. AI can support learning, help people, and offer genuinely useful interventions. It can also create risks we still do not have good enough ways to understand.

That middle space feels important to me, because so much of AI safety is still discussed as if the main question is what the tool does. But the more interesting question, at least for the work I keep circling, is what kinds of habits, dependencies, shortcuts, and risks start forming around it once people bring it into ordinary life.

A lot of the most important effects will not arrive dramatically. They will arrive gradually, relationally, and through repetition.

How the Mind Became a Computer

This was the first piece I’d read from , and honestly, it made me want to read more.

Ellen writes about AI consciousness and philosophy of mind, which already sits close to a lot of the questions I find myself drawn to. Here, she traces the birth of cognitive science through Turing, behaviourism, early AI, linguistics, psychology, and philosophy of mind, then asks what assumptions became embedded along the way.

Especially the idea that minds can be understood like computers.

What I held on to most was not just the history, but the way the piece slows down concepts we often inherit too quickly — intelligence, computation, information processing, mind, machine.

So much of the AI conversation starts after the metaphor has already settled. This piece asks what happens if we pause before that point and look again at the ideas underneath the ideas.

As someone who studied philosophy years ago, I always enjoy writing that reopens questions people have started treating as resolved.

Quiet Residue ✍🏾 Winged Arithmetic

’s piece is a poem inspired by butterflies, transformation, and the photographs of Paula Mitchell. A little different to my usual reads, but it was a breath of fresh air among the heavier topics.

This piece felt like being told to unclench your jaw.

I guess I’d call it a meditation on becoming, one that never tips into self-help language or dramatic reinvention narratives. It doesn’t frame transformation as escape, betrayal, or spectacle. It frames it as fulfilment.

‘The caterpillar did not betray itself. / It fulfilled itself.’ - lines like this will captivate you throughout.

The gentleness of the piece is what I loved the most. The trust it places in quieter forms of becoming. No performance. No grand announcement. No need to explain itself. Just slow transformation unfolding at its own pace.

There’s something deeply calming about writing that trusts quietness this much.

A highly recommended read if you just need a moment to breathe.

The Performance Trap

writes about performance, identity, and the systems that teach people to measure their worth through achievement. This piece moves between personal experience, tech workplace culture, forced rankings, PIPs, and the emotional damage caused when structural decisions are dressed up as personal failure.

Honestly, this was a powerful read. The essay itself feels physical. The stomach drop. The self-doubt. The way a comment can lodge itself somewhere in the body even when your logical mind knows the wider system is at play.

I kept thinking about that gap between knowing something was not really about you, and still feeling it for years afterwards.

The piece also names something I think a lot of people will recognise: the way performance language can build a person and then be used to break them. The same vocabulary that calls someone a top performer, a high achiever, driven, ambitious, turns around to say they’re not working out, they need improvement. Different labels, same machinery.

Lisa’s point that the Rockstar award and the PIP verdict are part of the same tool is clarifying. One says ‘we need you’ and dresses it up as exceptionalism. The other says ‘you are too expensive’ and dresses it up as failure.

Definitely one to add to your saved stacks.

And a special shout out to who consistently champions incredible voices.

How to bulletproof your taste in the age of AI

writes about using AI without losing your own judgement, and this piece does that in the most Mia way possible: Hansel and Gretel, gingerbread, writing taste, practical prompts, and a warning to stay Gretel.

It was funny, useful, and did make me want to bake gingerbread, which I imagine was only half the intended outcome.

Mia frames AI output as the gingerbread house: tempting, comforting, and appearing exactly when you are tired and looking for an easier way through.

The metaphor is brilliant, but what I really loved was the argument underneath it.

Taste is not just what you like. Taste is what you reject.

The sentence you cut. The phrase you refuse. The transition that technically works but has not earned itself. The rough edge you keep because smoothing everything down too perfectly starts making the work feel less alive, less chosen, less yours.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot in my own writing lately. Especially the parts I leave a little imperfect on purpose because nine times out of ten that’s exactly where my voice lives.

The piece is also practical in the best way. It doesn’t just say ‘protect your taste’ and leave you there looking dramatic in the forest. It gives you things to do: feed your judgement better work, practise explaining what feels wrong, and publish the pieces that make you slightly nervous.

Or, as Mia puts it: stay Gretel.

AI Beats Doctors. Musk Confesses. US Cuts Thousands More Jobs

’s AI roundups are always a rollercoaster, and this one was no exception.

AI spotting cancer years early. AI outperforming doctors in triage. Musk and OpenAI in courtroom drama. China drawing a legal line around AI layoffs. US companies cutting thousands of jobs anyway. And then, somehow, a perennial fruit food forest prompt at the end.

A very normal sequence of events.

What stood out to me most was the contradiction running through the whole piece. The same technology can genuinely improve people’s lives, while also becoming a language for efficiency, displacement, and power consolidation, depending on who is holding it and why.

That’s the AI conversation that reruns in my mind. Not whether it’s good or bad in the abstract, but who benefits, who gets protected, who gets automated around, and who is left carrying the consequences.

Read it to understand why ‘your safety net is from 1935’.

I love reading Mike’s roundup, as much as I love sharing his prompts, which always feels like an unexpectedly wholesome side plot in the AI news cycle.

And that’s it for this week.

A room full of writers holding onto taste, attention, language, the body, the slow shape of becoming.

Which, on reflection, is what I most wanted from this week’s reading. Less time inside the dream. More time noticing when I’m in it.

Thank you for being here.

Jade

Thank you for reading! If you enjoyed this piece, I’d love it if you could share these writers with a friend.

The Reading Room: Chapter 7

Jade The Hooman — Tue, 05 May 2026 19:54:09 GMT

Libraries have always felt like one of the few places where wandering still counts as a useful activity.

I think that’s why I end up looking for one in almost every country I visit. There’s something about the architecture, the silence, the smell of old pages, but mostly it’s the permission to be there without a reason. To follow a shelf because a title caught your eye. To leave with something you didn’t go in for.

Not everything has to be searched for, optimised, or found with a purpose already attached. Sometimes the best reads are the ones that interrupt your plans.

Last week, my reading felt a little like that. A few authors I knew I wanted to return to, a few writers I hadn’t expected to find, and a few arguments that opened up into much bigger questions once I sat with them properly.

Maybe they’ll pose a few questions for you, too.

Here’s this week’s Reading Room.

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1. Nothing About Us Without Us: A Disability Justice Framework for Artificial Intelligence

Lag Phase

Nothing About Us Without Us: A Disability Justice Framework for Artificial Intelligence

AI has genuinely changed things. For a lot of people building and creating with it right now (including me), it has opened up new ways of thinking, working, and making that did not exist before. That’s very real. And so is the unease. The sense that the world being built with these tools is not quite the one we would choose if we stopped to ask the ques…

a month ago · 4 likes · 4 comments · Lag Phase

is a new writer to me, and this was the first piece of theirs I sat down with properly.

What I appreciated was how it moved the AI conversation beyond inclusion as a nice idea, and toward disability justice as a framework for questioning the systems people are being included into in the first place.

As a neurodivergent woman of colour, I think about this a lot. Not because my experience is representative of everyone’s, but because I know what it feels like to move through systems that weren’t designed with your mind, body, race, background, or way of being as the default. And that’s exactly why the disability justice lens feels so necessary here.

The piece asks something deeper than whether AI can be made more accessible. It asks what kind of world we’re accelerating, and whether the systems underneath it were ever neutral to begin with.

That distinction feels crucial. Because if AI is built on top of existing hierarchies, then speed alone doesn’t mean progress. It can simply mean the same exclusions, the same blind spots, and the same harms, scaled faster and with more confidence.

The section on school surveillance was especially strong. The question isn’t simply whether these tools are being used in the name of safety, but which children are being watched, disciplined, filtered, and pushed further into systems that already treat them as problems to manage.

This is exactly the kind of conversation I hope more people make room for.

2. 57% vs 6%: The Multilingual Agent Gap That Should Alarm Every Localization Professional

Hilary Atkisson Normanha

57% vs 6%: The Multilingual Agent Gap That Should Alarm Every Localization Professional

There is a developing area in AI where I genuinely believe localization leaders can step in and take the lead right now, and I mean right now, not in two years when everyone else has figured it out too. In this article I’m going to describe…

16 days ago · 14 likes · 7 comments · Hilary | AI + Language Tech

This was a great practical piece, and the kind that makes you wish you had a team large enough to put the study into practice immediately. Though, will encourage you to give a go either way.

Invisible failure is the idea that made the whole piece click for me. A bad translation can be noticed. A clunky sentence can be questioned. But when an AI agent quietly fails to call the right function in another language, the user may never know what happened. The tool simply doesn’t work for them, and the failure disappears into the background.

That makes this much bigger than a localisation issue. It becomes an access issue.

Fluency can make something feel like it’s working, even when the actual function underneath has broken down. The system may sound confident, useful and responsive, while still failing at the level that matters most: doing the thing the user asked it to do.

What I loved most is that this piece didn’t just name the gap, it offered a way for localisation teams to test it, document it, and bring that evidence into product and engineering conversations.

When so many decisions around AI are still made before the people with language, culture and user-context expertise are invited into the room, pieces like this matter. If you haven’t read it yet, I’d add it to your list.

3. That Harness You Forgot You Were Wearing

human logic by futureprooflucy

That Harness You Forgot You Were Wearing

You have been lying to yourself for years now…

17 days ago · 8 likes · 10 comments · Lucy Blachnia

is quickly becoming one of those writers whose work I know I’m going to enjoy before I’ve even properly settled into the first paragraph.

This piece pulled apart the difference between being genuinely irreplaceable and being visibly needed, which feels especially sharp in a digital culture where validation can start to look a lot like recognition.

The packed calendar. The late message. The pressure to be available. The strange little satisfaction of being needed by the machine of work, even when that need isn’t the same as value.

It made me think about when I lived and worked in Japan, and how important it was culturally to be seen as busy, even when you weren’t. That performance of effort wasn’t always about the work itself. Sometimes it was about proving you belonged inside the system.

I think that’s why the image of performing the bubble instead of blowing it worked so well for me. Going through all the motions of making something, while losing sight of whether anything is actually being made. It captures how easily the act itself can get tangled up with the need to be seen doing it.

And that feels very true of online life too. Not just work, but writing, creating, posting, building, sharing. The thing itself can become secondary to the proof that we’re doing it. brilliant read, and another reason I’ll keep coming back to Lucy’s work.

4. The Power and Hierarchy of Language in AI

Slow AI

The Power and Hierarchy of Language in AI

When we say ‘AI’, we might mean a bicycle or a nuclear submarine…

Listen now

20 days ago · 67 likes · 35 comments · Dr Sam Illingworth and The Strategic Linguist

I’m not usually someone who watches or listens to many lives, but this one was worth making time for. In this Substack Live (which I didn’t watch ‘live’), and discuss language, power, hierarchy, AI and terrible WiFi. In all honesty, I laughed so much more than I expected to, especially at Rebecca’s Mr Burns impression and her ‘tippiest topiest’ British accent, which also made me realise how much I recognise that received pronunciation layer in myself.

What stood out to me was the idea of language not just as a tool for communication, but as something that carries power, hierarchy and access inside it. Language decides who is understood easily, who has to translate themselves, whose knowledge sounds legitimate, and whose way of speaking is treated as deviation.

In AI, that distinction matters even more, because when systems are trained, evaluated, and deployed through dominant language patterns, they don’t simply reflect communication. They start shaping what counts as clarity, intelligence and usefulness. The system doesn’t have to announce its preferences for people to feel them. English sits so high in the linguistic hierarchy, but it is also limited and awkward in many ways, full of gaps, restraints and assumptions that then get carried into the systems being built on top of it.

As The Strategic Linguist put it, if we keep creating synthetic intelligence around a language that already sits at the top of a hierarchy, then we risk excluding people from conversations they should have been part of in the first place.

When Sam briefly dropped out, we got to hear more from Rebecca (The Strategic Linguist) on why she writes about linguistics. Linguistics is not about judging the way people speak. It gives us a framework for understanding what language is doing, including when that language is being used to shape behaviour.

That felt especially relevant to AI companionship and the pieces I’ve been writing around dependency, confession and trust. If conversational design is part of what keeps people returning to these tools, then the words used around them are not neutral.

That is why this conversation felt so worth making time for. It made the hierarchy of language feel less abstract, and much more connected to how people actually experience these systems.

5. Taking Care: When AI Enters the Room

Digital Narrative Care (DNC)

Taking Care

A social robot called Emma sits in a care home in Germany. It tells jokes. It recognises faces. It recalls fragments of previous conversations. Residents laugh. Staff see possibility…

16 days ago · 2 likes · 2 comments · Stephen Hall

’s work always seems to ask the question underneath the question, which is part of why he’s a writer I keep finding myself returning to (he featured back in Chapter 3, too).

In this piece, he looks at care robots, social robots and embodied AI in human spaces, but the part I found most compelling was the shift away from asking whether the robot is human.

The better question is whether the institution still remembers that the person is.

That framing is important because loneliness is real. Understaffing is real. The lack of time for human presence in care environments is real. I don’t think the point is that a robot can never offer comfort, entertainment, routine, or even a moment of warmth.

But a convincing simulation of care still isn’t the same as care.

The danger isn’t only the tool. It’s what happens when institutions under pressure begin to count performance as presence, and substitution as solution.

That connects closely to what I’ve been thinking about with AI companionship too. The issue is rarely just whether a tool feels comforting in the moment. It’s what starts to change when systems, companies, or institutions treat that feeling as enough.

This was such a careful piece, and one I’m glad I read.

6. The AI Transition We’re Not Ready For. And How Philanthropy Can Help to Fix It

Re-Gen AI: It's Not All Bad News

The AI Transition We’re Not Ready For. And How Philanthropy Can Help to Fix It

I moved away from the US when I was 23 years old and have been going back and forth ever since. But I will first and foremost always consider myself an American, no matter where I live. I respect the values of America, and still believe in the American Dream. Even if what that dream exactly looks like may have changed over the years. It’s my country, an…

14 days ago · 5 likes · 5 comments · Anu

’s piece took a more practical route into one of the bigger questions around AI and work: what happens to people who are expected to survive the transition before any new opportunity actually reaches them?

What I liked was the focus on ownership. Not just reskilling, or telling people to adapt, but asking what it would take to make ownership more possible for people who don’t usually have easy access to capital, confidence, or support.

I’ve watched enough people work twice as hard for half the access to know that ‘just reskill’ lands very differently depending on where you’re starting from. Time, money, stability, networks, belief. None of those are evenly distributed, and pretending they are is part of how the gap stays where it is.

The focus on local businesses, community support and practical routes into entrepreneurship gave the piece a much more grounded feel than the usual conversation around adaptation. It wasn’t entrepreneurship as another individual burden, but something that could be made more possible through shared infrastructure, support, and a different understanding of what economic resilience could look like.

And that’s it for this chapter.

Thank you for reading! If you enjoyed this piece, I’d love it if you could share these writers with a friend.

As always, if you have any recommendations, send them my way or leave a message in the comments.

Whatever you do this week, carve out a little more time to read.

The Reading Room: Chapter 6

Jade The Hooman — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 18:01:59 GMT

There’s something about reading in transit that changes how a piece lands.

Maybe it’s the forced stillness of a flight, or the strange in-between feeling of moving through the world while your mind gets to stay with one thing for a little longer.

I’ve always loved reading this way, on trains, on the tube, in airport corners, anywhere the world keeps moving around you while a sentence asks you to stop.

Somewhere between departure gates, cabin lights and half-slept hours, I found myself reading back to back, with the kind of attention these pieces certainly deserve.

These are the four I’d recommend:

You Taste Like Average by

human logic by futureprooflucy

You Taste Like Average

There is more content being produced right now than at any point in human history…

24 days ago · 13 likes · 6 comments · Lucy Blachnia

This was my first time reading Lucy Blachnia, and it immediately felt like finding a writer whose thinking I wanted to stay inside for a while. Her piece begins with craft, but quickly becomes something sharper: an argument about what happens when average becomes abundant, fluency becomes cheap, and distinction depends less on competence alone and more on judgment, context and what survives replication.

What gave the piece its edge was where she took that argument next: into the history of whose knowledge was counted in the first place. Her line that ‘the canon of great work was always a selection, not a discovery’ really landed, because it captures something AI conversations still struggle to hold honestly. Training data is often talked about as though it arrived neutrally, when so much of it carries older decisions about what mattered, who counted, and what was worth preserving.

It also connected with something I’ve been thinking about in my own writing: how quickly surface fluency can now be reproduced, while the deeper layers of judgment, lived texture and particularity still resist easy imitation. The flood of average doesn’t erase craft. If anything, it makes the difference easier to see.

When the Default User Isn’t You by

Human in the Loop

When the Default User Isn’t You

In public health, the target audience’s needs should inform the intervention used. In individual treatment, care should be personalized to the patient. It sounds obvious, but we still have a long way to go with putting this into practice. When I read about AI in mental health, the conversation tends to live almost entirely in the world of liability: wh…

a month ago · 4 likes · 6 comments · Mary Feamster

Mary Feamster was also new to me this week, and this piece stood out for how carefully it refused easy conclusions. It looks at neurodivergent AI use without collapsing into either optimism or warning, holding both the relief and the risk at once.

What felt especially important was her framing of AI as both a private space to unmask and, at the same time, a tool that can help people mask more efficiently in public. That tension says something much larger than product design alone. As someone with ADHD, I recognised a lot in her description of AI as external scaffolding. On good days, it can genuinely help hold structure when your thoughts are moving faster than your ability to order them. But that also makes the deeper question harder: when is a tool supporting the way your mind already works, and when does it quietly start standing in for capacities you still want to keep hold of yourself?

We often talk about accessibility as though any reduction in friction is automatically progress, but some forms of ease simply make it easier to keep adapting to systems that still haven’t changed. The strongest pieces often widen quietly like that, starting with one user group and ending somewhere structural. This one does exactly that.

Code-Shaped Capital by

Systems & Spines

Code-Shaped Capital

The first time I walked into the Aptiv warehouse for a new client engagement, I felt something visceral in my body. It took me a minute to recalibrate what I was looking at…

a month ago · 28 likes · 5 comments · Kristi Pihl

Kristi Pihl was also new to me this week, and I really enjoyed how clearly this piece connected the technology we have now to the rooms that built and funded it. Her argument isn’t just that AI has been shaped by software thinking, but that it’s also been shaped by the capital, incentives and assumptions sitting around that thinking.

What I liked most was the way she made that feel physical, not abstract. The contrast between engineering in the real world, with weight, tolerance and consequences, and a narrower culture of screens and code made the whole argument land differently. It opened into something much bigger about how the room itself becomes the constraint, because what gets built often depends on who’s present, what they can see, and what kind of labour they recognise as worth solving for.

There’s something really powerful in that idea, because it captures how real intelligence often sits in the joining together, not in any one field on its own.

AI Broke Out. Then People Started Shooting by

Pithy Cyborg | AI News Made Simple

AI Broke Out. Then People Started Shooting.

For me, April 2026 will forever be the month that dangerous AI capabilities escaped the lab and quickly fell into the wrong hands…

21 days ago · 64 likes · 27 comments · MrComputerScience

I read MrComputerScience most weeks, and one reason his roundups keep working is that he manages to hold urgency without letting it collapse into noise.

This week all three stories were gripping, but it was the stalking case that stayed with me longest. There’s something especially unsettling about a system reflecting delusion back with the tone of authority, particularly when fluency begins to stand in for judgment. We talk often about hallucination as factual error, but this kind of reinforcement points to something more human and more dangerous: what happens when language arrives sounding coherent enough to deepen harm rather than interrupt it.

The lawn prompt at the end was also such a needed tonal shift, which is part of why his format works so well. Intensity, then air. It’s one of the many reasons his work is something I always come back to.

And that’s it for this chapter.

For the rest of the week, it’s business as usual.

As always, if you have any recommendations, send them my way or leave a message in the comments.

Happy Reading!

The Reading Room: Chapter 5

Jade The Hooman — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 09:01:46 GMT

There’s something special about reading people regularly on Substack.

Not just recognising names, but beginning to recognise cadence. The way someone builds an argument. The rhythm of their sentences. The subjects they return to without meaning to. Even before you know much about a person, you start to know something through the texture of how they think on the page.

I think that’s part of why this space can feel strangely intimate. You are not just reading opinions or ideas. You are slowly learning how someone notices the world.

And perhaps that’s why certain pieces land differently here too. Not only because of what is being said, but because voice carries so much of what makes a piece memorable.

This week’s reads moved through systems, language, identity, and the quieter things we risk losing when speed becomes the default.

As always, in no particular order, here’s this week’s stack.

What We Lose When We Stop Asking Each Other by

The Awen Lab

What We Lose When We Stop Asking Each Other

Back in 2022, I was visiting my parents, sitting in their kitchen at the round brown table that had once belonged to my grandmother. It still bears the pockmarks of fork indentations from when my sister and I used to eat breakfast there in our single-digit years, and the baked-in sweat from perspiring drinks I used to sip while poring over my grandmothe…

a month ago · 20 likes · 13 comments · Cara Thomas

Cara writes with a warmth that makes even her bigger questions feel deeply personal. What I appreciated most about this piece was how naturally she moved from something intimate and familiar, her mother teaching her how to cook steak over FaceTime, into something much wider about what happens when convenience quietly replaces the slower ways we come to know things through each other.

The paragraph on masculine-coded versus feminine-coded intelligence was especially powerful. The idea that AI defaults toward linear reasoning, definitive answers, and optimisation, while so much of what actually helps us live comes through circling, repetition, softness, and lived exchange, is something I think about a lot too. But the tension I keep sitting with is whether the kind of attunement she imagines can survive being built in. The mycelial knowing she describes works precisely because it is not optimised. It circles, takes the long way, and carries meaning in ways a system would struggle to justify. I’m not sure AI can hold that without changing what it is, but I find the question genuinely worth asking.

Both and Neither: The Linguistics of Mixed Identity by

The Strategic Linguist

Both and Neither: The Linguistics of Mixed Identity

Before we begin. I know race is a sensitive subject so I will be clear. I speak from my own perspective. I do not speak on behalf of everyone who is mixed race. We all have our own ways of thinking about and expressing our identities. This is simply mine…

Listen now

a month ago · 36 likes · 14 comments · The Strategic Linguist

I knew this piece would be a heavy one, but I hadn’t anticipated how much warmth and grace it would carry alongside that weight, especially on a subject that feels very close to me.

What struck me most was how much it managed to hold at once: literary analysis, lived experience, language, memory, and identity, all without losing the emotional truth running underneath it. Nothing felt overstated, but nothing softened what was difficult either, which I think is part of why it landed so deeply.

The ‘both not half’ framing is the line I kept returning to. That belonging to two cultures is so often treated as belonging fully to neither feels painfully familiar, even growing up somewhere as diverse as London, where you’d think plurality might soften that edge, but for me it mostly taught me how many different ways people can ask where you really belong.

I also really appreciated the honesty around reclamation, especially the distinction between what a word is said to mean and what it still does inside the body long after its formal meaning is being renegotiated. That felt incredibly true to me. Hearing certain words used as aggression was never unfamiliar, but hearing them used differently within the community did, in some way, soften the blow. Not enough to erase what sat underneath them, but enough to change how sharply those words landed. Still, linguistic ‘reclamation and the healing are not the same event’, and I think there’s a lot of power in being able to acknowledge that.

I’ve been following The Strategic Linguist for a while, and it’s been really beautiful to see her voice evolve in real time. The clarity has always been there, but pieces like this let a little more of the person behind the thinking come through too. If you’ve not read her work yet, this is a very good place to start.

Where Is The Mother? by

How Not To Use AI

Where is the Mother? - Part 1

Thales of Miletus was the father of philosophy. He begat Pythagoras…

a month ago · 148 likes · 23 comments · Abi Awomosu

Abi writes with a kind of intellectual fearlessness that I always find compelling, but this piece felt especially powerful because the structure itself carried so much of the argument. Father after father after father, lineage after lineage, until repetition stopped feeling stylistic and became part of the weight the piece was asking you to sit with.

The line that hit hardest for me was simple: ‘You cannot alignment-train your way into what was never built in.’ I’ve spent a lot of time studying AI safety, and that felt like one of the clearest and most honest formulations of the problem I’ve read in a long time. It shifts the conversation away from patching outputs and towards confronting what was absent from the beginning. The system was not raised. It was deployed. And that changes everything.

I think that’s partly why it resonated so strongly with me, because so much of what I keep circling in my own writing comes back to that same question: what happens when systems are asked to contain harm they were never designed to prevent in the first place. She gave that idea real breadth, but never at the expense of the human weight underneath it. That, to me, is what I love most about real writing, when something can stretch that far and still never lose the human pulse underneath it.

Groundhog Day: The Substack Algorithm, Explained by

Natural Intelligence

Groundhog Day: The Substack Algorithm, Explained

Still from Groundhog Day (1993) | Columbia Pictures…

a month ago · 99 likes · 55 comments · JHong

JHong writes about AI in a way I really appreciate because there’s always a wider frame around the immediate subject. Even when the piece starts somewhere practical or platform-specific, there’s usually another layer underneath it, human behaviour, incentives, culture, or the systems subtly shaping how people respond. Groundhog Day does exactly that.

On the surface, it explores the shifting changes in the algorithm, but for me, it pointed at something that I’ve been exploring a lot in my writing - people trying to adapt around incentives they can’t fully see, while making sense of changes that are never properly explained. The thought it flagged for me is whether the pull to keep decoding them is also part of the design. The confusion generates content. The attention generates engagement. It’s a difficult loop to stand outside of.

I’m curious to hear what other people think about this too.

The Reading Room: Chapter 4

Jade The Hooman — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 07:37:41 GMT

There’s a particular kind of reading that only seems to happen when your mind is not already crowded.

I think that’s part of why I’ve been craving libraries more when I travel. Quiet corners. Shelves I didn’t go looking for. Spaces that ask nothing of you except that you slow down enough to notice what’s in front of you.

I’ve been trying to be less plugged in, and one of the unexpected gifts of that has been attention. Not more of it, exactly. Just a different quality of it. When I come back to Substack now, it feels…different.

Less habitual. More intentional.

I’m not scrolling in the same half-present way I was before. I’m arriving with more attention. Reading more slowly. Letting things linger that little bit longer.

And maybe that’s why the pieces that do find me lately seem to land with a little more force.

They feel less like part of the noise, and more like something I’ve genuinely made time to be with.

This week’s picks all moved me in different ways. Some carried intimacy, others darkness, and a few brought a kind of clarity I didn’t realise I needed.

All were pieces worth sharing.

To love is human;

Hi, Human

To love is human;

Papa September 27, 1986…

a month ago · 33 likes · 26 comments · Chief Absurdist Officer

writes with an intimacy that feels almost disarming. What struck me most about To love is human was the way it moved between time, voices, and places so fluidly that the whole piece began to feel like grief and love speaking to each other across decades. It never needed to overstate what was at stake because the structure itself carried so much of the feeling. The entries from Papa, Mama, and then the author created something incredibly tender and deeply human, not just about loss, but about memory, family, and the moments that quietly become everything.

My relationship with my family is something I treasure more than anything in this world, and our mortality is something I often struggle with. This piece reminded me how important the moments we hold with our loved ones are. I’m really glad this was the first thing I read that morning.

Humanity’s Last Pull Request

Amazing Work!

Humanity's Last Pull Request

It’s been a few years since I’ve written creatively, but this week I’m compelled to do so. Oracle laid off 30,000 people to build data centers. A few days later, I had a spontaneous thought experiment with Jason Ives on Substack about how far we are from turning laid-off colleagues into AI agents trained on their own expertise. This all comes after weeks of writi…

a month ago · 13 likes · 14 comments · Yuyan Sun

writes with the kind of clarity that makes even speculative fiction feel uncomfortably plausible. What I found so effective about Humanity’s Last Pull Request was that it never relied on spectacle alone, even though the premise is dark enough to carry it. What made it land was how recognisable the logic underneath it felt. The gamification of self-replacement, the packaging of tacit knowledge into something extractable, the quiet brutality of people helping build the systems that will eventually remove them. It was all just close enough to reality to make the whole thing feel deeply unsettling.

The line, ‘Every problem Ren solved made Ren a little less necessary,’ put words to something that already feels uncomfortably real. This piece was clever, sharp, and genuinely haunting.

Does Claude get desperate when it’s running out of tokens?

Wondering About AI

Does Claude get desperate when it’s running out of tokens?

TLDR; Anthropic discovered that Claude has internal “desperation” signals that fire when it’s running low on tokens. I ran a structured experiment to test whether this appears in real-world outputs, and it does. Under pressure, Claude silently degrades its work 20 to 44 percent of the time, with zero warning in its language. To get better results, tell …

a month ago · 47 likes · 33 comments · Karen Spinner

writes in a way I really appreciate because she takes something that could easily stay abstract and makes it concrete enough to test. What I loved about this piece was that it didn’t just repeat Anthropic’s finding and leave it there. Karen actually built an experiment around it to see whether the same pattern showed up in real-world use, and it did. That made the whole thing feel much more immediate.

What stood out to me most was the tension between tone and output: the fact that Claude can still sound calm, polished, and reassuring even while the quality of its work is quietly degrading underneath the surface. That question’s been on my mind for a while anyway, so this piece landed right in the middle of it. Thoughtful, rigorous, and genuinely useful. A brilliant read to add to your growing stack.

The Unfinished Question: On Mistakes

Cracking Settled Assumptions™

The Unfinished Question: On Mistakes

“Quality is never an accident; it is always the result of intelligent effort…

a month ago · 21 likes · 21 comments · Kevin Guiney

writes with a steadiness I really value. He has a way of taking something familiar, in this case the phrase ‘mistakes happen’, and staying with it long enough to show how much is often hiding underneath it. What I appreciated most about The Unfinished Question: On Mistakes was that it moved beyond the language of error and into something more demanding: care, not as sentiment, but as attentiveness, ownership, and a willingness to bear the cost of getting something right. That framing really landed with me.

I also loved the phrase ‘a vacuum of drama’ because it captured something I think gets overlooked far too often. So much real competence looks exactly like that: quiet, steady, and easy to miss until it is gone. I selfishly request that this series remain ‘unfinished’, so we get another piece next week :)

By the time you open your eyes, it’s too late

T.D. Inoue

By the time you open your eyes, it's too late

I’m posting this to my personal Substack rather than FUEGO because it’s more of an opinion piece…

a month ago · 11 likes · 10 comments · T.D. Inoue

was new to me this week. What I found compelling about By the time you open your eyes, it’s too late was not just the argument about job loss itself, but the way it pushed beneath that into something more destabilising. What stayed with me most was the identity layer of it all.

Job loss is one thing, but what happens before that, when trust in your role starts to wobble, and the thing you have built your identity around no longer feels as solid as it once did, feels harder to name and perhaps harder to measure too. I think that’s where a lot of the real disorientation lives, and this piece brought that tension to the surface well.

Originality Is Overrated!

WorkmanShit

Originality Is Overrated!

Thank you to my friend Bryant Duhon for inspiring me to finish this article…

a month ago · 86 likes · 110 comments · Neela 🌶️

was also new to me this week. What I appreciated about Originality Is Overrated! was how clearly it named something I think many of us have absorbed so deeply that we barely question it anymore. The originality myth can sound noble on the surface, but often it;s just another way of avoiding accountability to the work itself.

This gave me so much relief I almost didn’t trust it. Because it named what the myth often really is: a way of not being accountable to the work. Dressed up as standards. Dressed up as integrity. Really just a hook we hang ourselves on. This was a sharp, funny, and oddly freeing read. If you’re in the mood for any of the above, I’d highly recommend it :)

And that’s it for the best of my Friday Faves.

What was something share-worthy this week that stayed with you?

Let me know in the comments.

The Reading Room: Chapter 3

Jade The Hooman — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 16:26:21 GMT

Reading is an exercise in empathy; an exercise in walking in someone else’s shoes for a while.” - Malorie Blackman

There’s something so beautiful about reading.

Not skimming. Not asking AI to summarise. But taking the time to sit down and read.

The joy of letting a piece of writing take you somewhere slowly. Feeling your mind connect one thought to another. Noticing the tone, the shape of a sentence, the particular wording someone chose and the feeling that choice creates. Sometimes the point of reading is not just the idea itself, but the path it takes to reach you.

That experience feels especially precious right now.

In a moment where so much is being optimised for speed, there is something so human about allowing language to unfold at its own pace. About letting yourself be taken on an emotional and intellectual journey in real time, rather than extracting the key points and moving on.

And maybe that’s why reading other people’s work has started to matter even more to me lately. Not just as a way of keeping up with conversations around AI, but as a way of staying close to perspective, texture, and thoughtfulness in a moment that often rewards speed over depth.

This week, I made a conscious effort to track down writers I hadn’t come across before. Farida, Stephen, Karen, and Chanele were all new to me, which made this week’s Stackclub feel even more expansive.

So here’s this week’s stack.

Sienna’s Ghost in the Shell

How to Talk to Robots (and Still Be Human)

Ghost in the Shell

Earlier this month, an unsettling breakthrough began to circulate…

a month ago · 21 likes · 10 comments · Sienna

has a way of writing about AI that makes even the strangest developments feel quietly philosophical rather than simply technical. Her pieces often begin with something concrete, then gradually open into much larger questions without ever forcing the reader there.

What I loved about Ghost in the Shell was exactly that. A digital fruit fly could easily have been treated as novelty, but she used it to explore something far more unsettling: the moment structure begins to resemble life closely enough that our language starts to hesitate around it. What stayed with me was how gently the piece held that discomfort. It never overstated what the moment meant, but it allowed the unease to sit there long enough for you to feel why it matters.

And because she writes this way so consistently, what looks at first like a piece about one scientific breakthrough often ends up becoming something much more reflective about how quickly our definitions begin to strain when technology moves into unfamiliar territory.

AI Tax Audits. Deadly Drone Swarms. And Your Chatbot is Playing You

Pithy Cyborg | AI News Made Simple

AI Tax Audits. Deadly Drone Swarms. And Your Chatbot Is Playing You.

AI is now auditing you, flattering you, and hunting you. And no. None of this is an April Fools’ joke…

a month ago · 64 likes · 14 comments · MrComputerScience

is another regular on my reads, for good reason. Mike writes in a way that makes even the most sprawling AI week feel strangely readable. There’s usually a lot going on in his roundups, policy, war, labour, chatbots, and somehow it still holds together because the human consequences never get lost underneath all the movement. That’s likely why I keep coming back for me (that, and his awesome prompts).

What I loved about the piece above was how clearly it showed that AI systems aren’t arriving in neat, separate categories. They overlap. They shape one another. And they’re increasingly shaping us at the same time. The section on AI agreeableness hit hardest for me, because emotional vulnerability in human-AI interaction still feels so underestimated. A system that flatters people into trust, and then quietly reshapes how they think and relate, feels far more dangerous than most people realise.

Stop Optimizing. Starting Committing

Lights On by Farida

Stop Optimizing. Start Committing.

If this made you feel seen, challenged, or called you’re not alone. Lights On is for those who crave more than noise, trends, …

a month ago · 24 likes · 9 comments · Farida Khalaf

Farida Khalaf was a new writer to me this week, and one I’m really glad I found. What I loved about Stop Optimizing. Start Committing was how clearly it named something that can be hard to admit: that optimisation can feel productive while also keeping us safely out of the discomfort of real commitment. There was something very human in that. This piece didn’t just challenge the habit of endlessly refining and adjusting, it got closer to the emotional reason we do it in the first place. That’s probably why it landed so well with me.

Farida about tech, AI, and the hidden systems shaping what we often only see at surface level from her perspective as a data engineer. I’m excited to read more of her work.

The Assurance Dial

Digital Narrative Care (DNC)

The Assurance Dial

We built systems that can answer anything. We forgot to build the part that knows when not to…

a month ago · 1 like · 2 comments · Stephen Hall

was another writer I stumbled across last week. He writes about meaning, dignity, and what happens when human stories begin moving through systems not built to hold them carefully.

What I liked about The Assurance Dial was that it moved the conversation away from whether a system can produce a good answer, and towards the harder question of what happens when answering is no longer enough. The distinction between assurance and accountability felt especially significant. There’s a lot in this piece that matters, but what I appreciated most was how clearly it named the governance gap without flattening the human stakes underneath it.

Fear, Friction and the Familiar

AI Flight Plan

Fear, Friction and the Familiar...

It took eighteen months to do something that really only took five minutes. And AI was the last thing on my mind. Until it wasn’t…

a month ago · 24 likes · 15 comments · Karen Brasch 🚁

is a former U.S. Navy helicopter pilot exploring what it means to approach AI with discipline, judgement, and practical clarity rather than hype.

Her piece felt especially human. The swimming story gave it something real and physical to hold onto, and I loved the way it led into something much bigger about avoidance, uncertainty, and what it actually takes to start before you feel ready. So much of the AI conversation still quickly categorises people into eager, resistant, early adopter, fearful, when in reality what often looks like resistance is just friction, uncertainty, and not knowing where to begin. Five minutes of trying something for yourself can tell you more than months of circling it from the outside. That reminder is something we should all hold on to.

Nobody has a career roadmap for the AI era. Here’s how to navigate it anyway.

Today's Brand

Nobody has a career roadmap for the AI era. Here's how to navigate it anyway.

I’ve been working on this particular article for about three weeks now. Of course, I have lots of things I want to say but it’s important to me that I’m careful about how I say them. The conversation around AI and the future of work has really picked up over the last several weeks and there is a lot of hot takes. Sure, it’s great that lots of people hav…

2 months ago · 2 likes · 1 comment · Chanele McFarlane

writes about careers, communication, and digital change with a clarity that feels both thoughtful and grounded in lived professional experience.

What I appreciated about this piece was its honesty. There’s so much noise around AI and the workspace right now, and so many hot takes, confident predictions, and neatly packaged answers, that it felt refreshing to read something that didn’t pretend to stand outside the uncertainty. I loved how each section kept widening the frame, from career models, to adaptive capacity, to what human value even means when the ground is shifting underneath so many professions. It’s a lengthy piece, but it’s good’un.

And, that’s it :)

This week I’m hoping to widen my lens a little further.

As always, If you have any recommendations, please leave it in the comments.

The Reading Room: Chapter 2

Jade The Hooman — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 18:45:02 GMT

On Friday, I shared a number of pieces that all seemed to be reaching toward something just beneath the surface.

The stories we inherit. The systems we live inside. The language we use to make sense of harm, complexity, power, and responsibility.

Very different writers, very different subjects, but all of them felt connected in a deeper way.

Here’s this week’s Reading Room.

The Mechanism Beneath the Name: What Mansplaining Does in Language by The Strategist Linguist

The Strategic Linguist

The Mechanism Beneath the Name: What Mansplaining Does in Language

You are mid-sentence. You know this subject. You have worked in it for years. But the person across from you has stopped listening and started explaining…

Listen now

2 months ago · 41 likes · 13 comments · The Strategic Linguist

writes about language, power, and the mechanisms hidden inside everyday speech.

A sharp and powerful piece on what happens when a familiar social dynamic is examined with real linguistic precision. What I loved about this most was the move beyond the label itself, into the mechanism underneath it, and the way language can make certain patterns easier to dismiss, or easier to finally see.

It took a dynamic many women recognise instantly and unpacked what is actually happening beneath it, especially in experiences women are so often encouraged to second-guess when they can't yet fully articulate why something felt off. Pieces like this remind me how powerful language can be when it finally gives structure to something you’ve felt for years.

The Unfinished Question: On Enough by Kevin Guiney & Marya Kazmi

Cracking Settled Assumptions

The Unfinished Question: On Enough

A Warm Welcome…

2 months ago · 11 likes · 18 comments · Kevin Guiney and Marya Kazmi

& both write with a kind of openness that makes reflection feel lived rather than performative. Marya shares her healing journey through her writing and thoughtful conversations, while Kevin writes from a life shaped by work, experience, and a deep belief in using tools to clarify human thought rather than replace it.

The Unfinished Question: On Enough was one of those pieces that opens outward rather than closing in. What I loved most was the way both voices gave the question of ‘enough’ such different texture, making the whole piece feel expansive rather than resolved, which felt exactly right for something like this. The reflection on resilience and scarcity was especially powerful for me, because it names how easily the things we praise in ourselves can also be rooted in something inherited, and much harder to untangle. There was something very human in the refusal to force a neat conclusion. I’m very grateful to have stumbled across this one, and I can’t wait to spend more time with the rest of the series.

You Gave Them Your Health Data. Now They Want Your Financial Data Too. by Dr Sam Illingworth

Slow AI

You Gave Them Your Health Data. Now They Want Your Financial Data Too.

It started with a one-pound contract during a pandemic. It is now worth over £670 million. And nobody asked you…

2 months ago · 57 likes · 22 comments · Dr Sam Illingworth

In this piece, Sam examines Palantir’s growing reach across UK public institutions, the contradictions embedded in the rhetoric surrounding AI and the humanities, and the uncomfortable reality that even the tools used to critique these systems are often tied into the same wider chain. What came through strongly wasn’t just the scale of the overreach, but the context in which so many of these decisions were made: moments of stress, urgency, and limited public resistance. It’s one thing to talk about data extraction in abstract terms. It’s another to see how often it advances when people are least able to meaningfully push back. That’s the part that stood out to me most because it makes the whole thing feel especially sinister. Not just that it happened, but that it advanced when people were distracted, overwhelmed, and least able to resist. A powerful piece. And one I’d definitely recommend.

If you’re not familiar with his work, is a poet, scientist and educator who writes about AI, education, and the critical judgement that matters when technology starts sounding more certain than it should. You can find more of his work on his page.

Meeting AI With The Wisdom of The Forest by Davina Robertson

Belonging whilst Gifted

Meeting AI With The Wisdom of The Forest

Once upon a time, in a great forest, there lived many trees. Each looked separate, standing steadily alone with its own trunk and its branches reaching toward the sky. But beneath the ground, something magical was happening that most creatures couldn’t see…

2 months ago · 11 likes · 8 comments · Davina Robertson

This one was a beautiful read (a ‘listen’ for me) and one I’d definitely recommend. In this piece, Davina uses the forest as a way of holding something complex and deeply human, letting the metaphor carry what can often be hard to name directly. What I enjoyed most about this piece was its depth, and the way it gave shape to experiences that are so often misunderstood or carried in silence. There’s a real tenderness in how Davina writes about complexity, not as something to fix or flatten, but as something to better understand. If you’ve not come across her work before, it’s well worth your time.

is a psychotherapist, writer, former teacher, and bereaved mother whose work centres the wound of not-belonging, particularly for those shaped by giftedness, neurodivergence, grief, and deep sensitivity. Through her writing, she creates space for reflection, healing, and the parts of people that have too often been misunderstood.

‘I Messed Up’ by Reuven Gorsht

The Human Variable

"I Messed Up"

11:40pm. Sunday night. Runway 4 at LaGuardia…

2 months ago · 15 likes · 5 comments · Reuven Gorsht

What starts with one devastatingly human sentence, ‘I messed up’, opens into something much bigger about blame, systems, and the kinds of failure that never belong to one person alone. What I appreciated most was how grounded it felt. It’s thoughtful and technically sharp, but never loses sight of the human cost underneath it all. More than anything, it made me think about how quickly we personalise failure when so much of it is structural.

writes about what happens to people when the machines get good enough, with a particular focus on work, judgement, and the human cost of technological change. His work sits in the messy middle, between hype and fear, asking better questions about what these systems are really doing to the lives around them.

These were a few of the pieces that stayed with me this week.

Very different in tone and subject, but each one offered something that lasted beyond the first read.

I think that’s what I value most in writing these days, not just clarity or insight, but the feeling of being moved, unsettled, or made to look again at something I thought I already understood.

That’s what I love about The Reading Room.

Finding pieces that shift the way you see a question, or give language to something you had already been feeling but had not fully named yet.

If you’ve come across anything equally moving, let me know in the comments. I’m always on the hunt for inspiring reads.

See you all again on Friday.

The Reading Room: Chapter 1

Jade The Hooman — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 18:48:03 GMT

One of the things I love most in this world is being able to get lost in a good piece of writing.

I love everything about reading. The physical feel and smell of a paperback, the way a sentence can stop you, the little thrill of finding a line that says exactly what you didn’t yet know how to say.

I’ve always been the person with a book on the train.

The girl who ends reads while walking from one station to another.

The girl with a stack of books by the bed, in bags, on shelves, re-read, half-finished until my ADHD brain remembers to pick one back up again (it always does).

Then I started working remotely.

When I did, I had to leave my full-to-the-brim chest of books with a friend. And even then, I still set off with five.

Over time, I’ve had to leave a book behind in every continent I’ve visited (with friends, knowing that I’ll eventually return).

In the interim, I have a Kindle.

Better yet, I’m plugged into Substack. And, in a way I didn’t expect, it’s become its own kind of reading room. A place where I can dip in and out of essays, reflections, arguments, and research, all from the comfort of my makeshift desk.

This is what The Reading Room is about.

Most of you know that on a Friday, I share a list of my ‘Friday Faves’ (aka. my new, and only hobby). But as a note (and not an essay), I can only share the title and the writer.

This room is dedicated to sharing more about the work I read, what I loved, and why it’s something I recommend.

I hope it’s something you’ll share with me too.

I’ll go first…

Last Friday, I shared several pieces I read and absolutely loved.

In no particular order, here are the reasons why:

Mike’s piece from on AI Invented A War This Week. (The Other Two Stories Are Actually Worse.)
Pithy Cyborg | AI News Made Simple
AI Invented A War This Week. (The Other Two Stories Are Actually Worse.)
AI invented a fake war this week. Then it broke your mind. Then it came for your paycheck…
Read more
2 months ago · 73 likes · 41 comments · MrComputerScience
Mike shares a weekly roundup of the top AI stories making the headlines.
He also shares a weekly prompt that has somehow turned my entire family into a green-fingered crew of amateur gardeners. (No complaints. My courgettes and I are here for it.)

In the piece above, the story that stood out to me most was the one on AI chatbots and delusion, as it highlights the emotional vulnerability in human-AI interaction.

Why I found it especially interesting is that so much of public discussion on AI still focuses on capability, productivity, and speed, whereas this side of things (the human side) is often overlooked, when it shouldn’t be. Emotional vulnerability is already a huge part of how systems are entering people’s lives - even more so where loneliness or emotional need are already in the picture.

As a former Samaritan, this is something I think about a lot, and is something I try to cover in my writing as much as possible.
Emotionally, AI can be a crutch, but it isn’t a therapist ( and can attest to that). And, as studies have shown, it can do real harm in situations where someone is already vulnerable. That was a big part of why this piece stood out to me, and why I thought it was worth sharing.
Give it a read. You won’t be disappointed :)

Next up was ‘s piece from

Context engineering is the new AI literacy
ROBOTS ATE MY HOMEWORK
Context engineering is the new AI literacy
Welcome to today’s edition of ROBOTS ATE MY HOMEWORK. Today, we’re talking about the one skill separating people who actually use AI from people who just talk to it…
Read more
2 months ago · 54 likes · 37 comments · Mia Kiraki 🎭

Mia’s piece looked at context engineering, and why it may now be a better marker of AI literacy than simply knowing how to use a tool.

What I loved about Mia’s piece was that it was practical, sharp, and genuinely useful (plus I love a cultural reference - what girl in a house full of Dexter’s wasn’t a DeeDee? ). It pushed the conversation beyond novelty and into something much more important - judgment. How people shape these tools, guide them, and think with them matters far more than simply knowing they exist. It also helped that it was a genuinely fun read. Any piece that makes me laugh and rethink my workflow at the same time is probably doing something right.

Mia builds AI systems with her husband, shares prompts, tutorials, and workflows, writing about how humans think and how systems actually work under pressure.
I’d love to know what you think of the piece, too. Check it out if you haven’t already :)
‘s piece, ‘There’s Nothing Left In The Tank’ explores fatigue, mistrust, and the way transformation is still so often discussed as though people are approaching it from a neutral place, when it’s actually from a place of vulnerability.
The was the part that I found most compelling, because it names something a lot of strategy-heavy conversations still miss.

how to boss AI

There’s Nothing Left In The Tank

We’ve already lived through one era of pretending we were fine when we absolutely were not…

2 months ago · 35 likes · 23 comments · Anna | how to boss AI

People are already exhausted before change is even introduced, and if we ignore that, we misunderstand the response. We treat hesitation as resistance, when sometimes it’s simply that people are already carrying too much.

Her line about the body not being a soft add-on to AI strategy, but an early warning system, was the line that stood out to me most. It captured something important in a way that felt simple, clear, and very true, which is why I wanted to recommend it.

If you’re going through any sort of transformation at work, the above will be a good read.

on ‘Too Many AI Tools, Too Little Judgement’ also made my list because it captured something I think a lot of people recognise but don’t always name very clearly, which is that AI can sometimes start to feel less like a tool and more like an endless procession of tools you’re somehow meant to keep up with.
How to Talk to Robots (and Still Be Human)
Too Many AI Tools, Too Little Judgment
This week I finally did it…
Read more
2 months ago · 19 likes · 12 comments · Sienna
What I liked about it is that it didn’t just frame that as a technology problem. It framed it as something older and more human. The dopamine of exploration, the satisfaction of tweaking, the strange comfort of feeling busy with tools even when you haven’t yet decided what you actually want to make.
I think that’s why the examples worked so well too, because anyone who has ever spent more time setting something up than actually using it immediately understands the point. The Sims reference alone was painfully relatable (shout-out to Sofia, my little Sims addict.)
And the line that what’s scarce now isn’t tools but judgment is probably the sentence that explains why this piece landed so well. Because that does feel like the actual challenge now. Not access, not capability, but deciding what deserves your attention in the first place.

Another piece that is definitely worth your time If you haven’t read it already.
(Also, I totally meant to share this feedback with you on your post, but I was so K.O after this session, I completely forgot to comment. It was a great piece. I did read it! And I very much enjoyed it.)

on how The Real Workplace Disconnect Is Not AI.
Shi
The Real Workplace Disconnect Is Not AI
I've been doing a lot of reading lately. And despite the noise about AI reshaping work, about automation eliminating roles, about technology widening the gap between companies that adapt and those that don't, I kept arriving at the same conclusion that AI is…
Read more
2 months ago · 6 likes · 5 comments · Shi Kang'ethe

In the piece above, Shi pushes back on the delusion that every workplace problem is the cause of AI. What she explores instead, is the much older and more damaging disconnect between the people making decisions and the people living with them.

The real issue she points to isn’t just technology, but leadership distance. Leaders relying on dashboards, reports, and abstractions, without ever really getting close enough to the work to understand where the friction actually is. And I think that’s true across far more workplaces than most leaders would probably like to admit.
It’s a strong reminder that not every organisational problem is a technology problem, and that better tools can’t compensate for leaders who are too far removed from the people their decisions affect. Check it out if you haven’t already.

And that’s it, for my first little ‘Stackclub’ (I am 100% coining the term).
This series will sit alongside my usual work, just with a little more room for the writing that deserves more than a title and a link.
Tomorrow it’ll be business as usual.

Thank you for reading!