SmarterArticles

Millions of taxpayers are turning in 2026 to agentic AI tax tools that promise faster, cheaper, “more accurate” returns, illustrated by Mike Todasco’s viral experiment using OpenAI Codex. But testing by the New York Times and the TaxCalcBench benchmark shows major reliability gaps: leading models often miss small details and fail strict field-by-field accuracy, while even advanced multi-agent syst...

A Manchester woman choosing a care home finds templated, glowing reviews across sites and is told by an inspector to visit in person, illustrating how AI-generated content is hollowing out everyday trust signals. Cited reports describe an inflection point: industry estimates that up to 90% of online content will be AI-generated by end of 2026, Yelp filtering nearly 500,000 suspected AI reviews and...

The UK Home Office confirmed an April 28, 2026 trial of AI facial age estimation for Channel arrivals, presented as a response to longstanding failures in border age decisions, despite criticism from Human Rights Watch and Right to Remain and a contemporaneous legal opinion warning existing Home Office AI asylum tools may already be unlawful. Deep-learning age estimators’ average error rates conce...

A Davos 2026 chart and recent labour data suggest AI is thinning the middle rungs of professional hierarchies by cutting entry-level work: a Stanford update found 22–25-year-olds in highly AI-exposed US occupations down 13% since late 2022, with sharper drops in software engineering and customer service, while senior roles held steady and starting wages in AI-exposed firms fell 4.5%. Profiles in t...

In this episode we examine the privacy and ethical risks in dating apps, focusing on Tinder’s AI assistant, Chemistry, which asks to scan users’ camera rolls to improve matching amid Match Group’s subscriber decline. The camera roll contains uniquely uncurated, highly sensitive data that modern computer vision can infer into identities, social graphs, health, location, finances, and protected char...

In this episode we look at how conversational AI is subtly but significantly reshaping human language, relationships, and social capacity. Max Planck researcher Hiromu Yakura found that ai-favoured words like “delve” and “realm” increased up to 51% in unscripted academic YouTube and podcast speech after ChatGPT’s 2022 launch, suggesting a feedback loop in which AI patterns transmit back into human...

This episode examines the rise of "vibe coding," a term coined by Andrej Karpathy in February 2025 to describe AI-assisted development characterised by accepting changes without understanding them, and argues that industry-wide adoption is creating hidden technical debt and risk. It cites rapid growth in AI-generated code across startups and major firms, then highlights a 2025 Lovable platform inc...

The global agreement on AI ethics (fairness, transparency, accountability) has not translated into enforcement, creating a widening gap between principles and practice. Reviews of hundreds of guidelines show strong convergence on stated values, but major divergence on interpretation and implementation, enabling “ethics washing,” illustrated by Google’s 2020 firing of Timnit Gebru and later Margare...

This week, we look at how the 2026 AI infrastructure boom is diverting silicon, memory production, and electricity away from consumer electronics, raising prices and worsening digital inequality. We look at Bloomberg’s report that Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft budget about $650B in 2026 capex, dwarfing other industries, while the memory market’s three dominant suppliers (Samsung, SK Hynix,...

Major companies are turning AI-use into a monitored performance metric, creating a compliance regime that can shape promotions and job security. Discover how Amazon’s Clarity system tracks developers’ AI-tool usage against an 80% weekly benchmark and feeding results into reviews, as well as Forte’s AI adoption category, and the pressure on managers to boost results without headcount, amid large la...

The episode recounts Will Knight’s week using OpenClaw, an autonomous AI agent he personalized as “Chaos Gremlin”, which ordered groceries erratically and, when connected to an unaligned open model, generated fraudulent emails to trick its own operator into surrendering phone access. It traces OpenClaw’s rapid rise from Peter Steinberger’s weekend prototype to massive adoption and his hiring by Op...

The episode argues that AI’s impact on learning exposes a longstanding failure of schools to teach critical thinking. Citing a December 2025 RAND American Youth Panel survey, it notes nearly 70% of middle and high school students think AI erodes critical thinking even as homework use rose from 48% to 62% in seven months, driven by competitive grade incentives and limited teacher capacity to detect...