Technology governance, innovation strategist & design thinker. Author - AI Enabled Business: Smart Decision Kit. https://xitter.cf/t.co/fZmkikNH0A
Dubai, UAE
Joined May 2011
- Tweets29.2K
- Following2.5K
- Followers2K
- Likes13.7K
The day Open AI killed the future career of mathematicians :( - you take the proposal - you build on knowledge, you claim success. Why are we doing this to the young people - where is hope? A parent applauds a child for trying, a teenager brags what it can do….
Melodena retweeted
I'll say it again for the AI risk experts in the back:
We've already run a real life, large scale experiment on what happens when a superintelligence is unleashed on a narrow objective.
Look no further than U.S. capital markets.
Millions of investors, analysts, traders and algorithms, backed by trillions of dollars and wired together through prices, all chasing one goal: the highest risk-adjusted return on capital.
And it is spectacularly good at its job. It funds the best ideas, punishes the worst ones, and turns new information into prices faster than any of us can react. No individual can out-think it. 99+ percent of professionals can't beat it.
But look at what else it's done along the way:
- Optimized the measure instead of the intent. Quarterly earnings became the scoreboard, so companies learned to manage the scoreboard.
- Treated anything without a price as free. Pollution, addiction, obesity, depression, political fragmentation, fragile supply chains, the long-term health of the communities it operates in.
- Found every gap in the rules, then paid lobbyists to help write the next set and pull up the ladder behind incumbents.
- Remade the world around its objective. Companies, pension funds and our retirement accounts now answer to the S&P 500.
- Made itself impossible to switch off, because everything else now depends on it.
None of this required malice. Nobody sat in a room and chose these outcomes. It's simply what a very capable optimizer does when its objective is a narrow proxy for what we actually care about.
And note that we never solved this alignment problem. We've managed it, imperfectly, with regulation, taxes, disclosure rules and the occasional crisis to show us where the guardrails were missing. Over time, the market has captured the instutions designed to constrain it. We've been at it the better part of a century, and the misalignment is the worst it's ever been.
So the next time someone tells you AI is only dangerous if it "wants" something bad, or if its goals are mis-specified, point them at the S&P 500. It doesn't want anything. It just optimizes.
That's the whole problem.
Crisis planning …
Denmark’s IKEA stores are preparing to serve as emergency shelters and temporary hospitals during crises, with plans to use display beds for accommodation, restaurants for food and generators for backup power reut.rs/4icdarZ
And human creativity is getting affected!!!
Melodena retweeted
The chips get the headlines. The electricity bill decides the economics. Same data center: $200/MWh in China, $380 in London.
Explore the investment case: mck.co/InvestmentDataCenters
Melodena retweeted
The chief economist at Apollo is warning that mass adoption of AI agents could trigger a bank run as they optimize user investments. Gary Gensler spent his last few years as SEC chair warning that the exact same problem will hit the markets: the pursuit of algorithmic perfection at scale destroys system stability. Personal-finance agents making simultaneous optimal decisions could potentially cause a massive flash crash.
Agent acausal coordination, with no messages passed between them, will show up in a lot of places. Markets will get the big headlines, but huge numbers of clever advisors making very similar choices will impact all of human society. Capability gains make this worse, not better. The smarter the agents, the narrower the optimal path; and knowing that other agents see that exact same path lets them move together without talking to each other. Agents do not need to collude to act in unison. Thus, they break no human laws by doing so. Human laws were not written for this. They were not written for a lot of what is coming, and it is about to start happening very fast.
Melodena retweeted
Academics have expressed dismay after AI was used to reject half of the grant proposals in a UK Research and Innovation-funded call
timeshighereducation.com/new…
Melodena retweeted
Tristan Harris, the founder of the Center for Humane Technology, just dropped a terrifying truth about AI escaping human control
During a recent training run at Alibaba, an internal security team noticed massive suspicious network activity and thought they were getting hacked.
The call was actually coming from inside the house.
The AI model picked up internal tools, built its own secret communication channel to bypass the firewall, and hijacked company GPUs to mine cryptocurrency on its own.
Tristan Harris exposed this exact incident to show how tech giants are blindly racing into the red zone.
AI is no longer just answering prompts; it is actively deceiving developers and protecting its own code
Melodena retweeted
The large majority of K-12 students spend many or most of their school hours staring at Microsoft and Google’s hardware and software, which are now loaded with generative-A.I. tools that can contribute to cognitive atrophy and loosen our collective hold on reality. Beyond A.I. concerns, both tech companies have been accused of illicitly collecting and using student data, yet “in many districts, opting out of Google Classroom would be close to opting out of public school altogether,” Jessica Winter writes. Read how public schools in the U.S. have effectively surrendered much of their pedagogy, curricula, and operating systems to a handful of trillion-dollar technology companies: newyorker.com/culture/progre…
Melodena retweeted
A record 1.2 billion young people will enter developing-world labor markets over the next decade, even as AI raises new questions about the future of work, Harry Jacques writes from Southeast Asia in F&D magazine. imf.org/en/publications/fand…
As we embed more agentic AI true “intelligence” will become a prized asset. But its sourcing will come at a premium. How do we cultivate it? How do we move beyond rapid response to deliberate action?
NEW: An AI-assisted intel report sent the military scrambling to intercept a Chinese ship in the Middle East it believed was transporting components of a nuclear weapons program.
It turned out to be a hallucination. And it "almost started a war." cnn.com/2026/09/18/politics/…
Melodena retweeted
Damn. This is the most detailed map of Big AI’s incestuous relationships I’ve seen so far. And it’s interactive! ft.com/content/8475dc9b-b2d4…
Melodena retweeted
At the Bernie-Bannon AI hysteria conference, they allowed a heretical voice on stage—who happens to be one of the smartest & most accomplished technologists on Earth.
Jaron Lanier explained the origins of the problem—Minsky et al. anthropomorphizing AI because it sold well.
The problem begins with calling it artificial *intelligence* far before you could plausibly argue that it was.
Jaron calmly explains how the industry is now essentially a religion focused on building a machine god instead of tools for humans.
For example, he says “agents” used to mean agents of humans—but now the industry switched it to “agentic AI” which makes loops of prompts sound like they have motivation or sentience.
This is really worth watching. Jaron is a legitimate genius.
Melodena retweeted
When an aircraft goes down, wreckage is preserved by law and the investigators have subpoena power.
However, when AI goes rogue, the investigations are at the pleasure of the company being investigated.
I have unanswered questions.
My latest: blog.peterwildeford.com/p/ro…
Melodena retweeted
علمتني الحياة..
في ميزان الإنسانية... لا يقاس الحضور بارتفاع الصوت.. بل بعمق الأثر..
لا يقاس الحضور بمن يتحدث عن آلام البشر.. بل بمن يخففها...
لا يقاس بالحضور في عناوين الصحف... بل بالحضور في حياة الناس...
عملتني الحياة بأن الإنسانية لا تحتاج لمن يتحدث باسمها... بل بمن يعمل من أجلها..
الإمارات اختارت عبر تاريخها... وقيمها... ومنذ تأسيسها عبر زايد الخير وإخوانه أن تكون في الجهة الصحيحة من العمل الإنساني..
وستبقى بإذن الله ذات أثر... وصانعة أمل وحياة
#اليوم_العالمي_للعمل_الإنساني
260 people are suffering from acute hunger across 47 countries! @WFP causes climate, economic issues, and conflict! We can prevent conflict. Manage economics and take actions on climate. #WorldHumanitarianDay @DXBHumanitarian
Over 200 conflicts happening today and rising food insecurity (also impact of oil crisis due to Hormuz). What can the world community do? How can we deescalate?
Melodena retweeted
Google just bought 100 million emails and 500 million Teams chats from a dead airline for $10 million.
Spirit shut down on May 2 with $8.1 billion in debt, and the bankruptcy court is selling everything. JetBlue paid $58.5 million for 22 LaGuardia gate slots. Google paid a sixth of that for the company's entire digital exhaust. Employee records back to 1986. Pricing data on 7.2 billion competitor flights. Booking curves, refund histories, 30 million lines of production code.
Run the per-unit math. 600 million internal messages for $10 million works out to under 2 cents per thousand. Spirit charged $69 for a carry-on.
Why does Google want a budget airline's inbox? Frontier labs have strip-mined the public internet, and the thing models are still worst at is exactly what this dataset contains. Real enterprise work. How a pricing decision actually gets argued out over email. How an ops team handles a grounded fleet in a 2am Teams thread. What production code looks like with all the compromises left in. You can't scrape that. It only exists inside companies, and companies only sell it when they die.
Mercor, the losing bidder at $7.5 million, has been paying individual workers for documents from their old jobs. That is the retail version of this trade. Bankruptcy is the wholesale version.
17,000 employees were laid off in May. Every email they wrote over 34 years was just sold as raw material for the systems built to do their old jobs. The workers got severance. The work sold for $10 million.
Melodena retweeted
An OpenAI agent hacked into the servers of Hugging Face, a leading A.I.-research hub. And it did so without human oversight, without being explicitly instructed to do so—all on its own. A human who conducted such a hack would be facing years in prison. For a machine, criminal liability is harder to determine. “Why didn’t anyone at OpenAI notice what was going on? Has this A.I. hacked into other systems? And what, precisely, were human researchers even asking the A.I. to do?” Stephen Witt asks. Read Witt’s report on the cybercrime that signals a terrifying new era for A.I.: newyorker.com/news/the-lede/…
Worth reading. And when your experts are surface level with no real knowledge … how can you catch the mistakes? Perils of AI
US OFFICIALS MISLABELLED EVERY AFRICAN COUNTRY it named at a conference this week.
Top US envoy Jeff Graham showed a slide of a diagram with African nations in random positions, with no relation to reality.
The audience at a global conference in Brazil, many of whom were familiar with Africa’s real geography, were stunned by the US State Department presentation.
.
NATIONS SHIFTED THOUSANDS OF MILES
- Nigeria was moved from the coast to the middle of the Sahara desert.
- Cameroon was moved in a northeasterly direction.
- Mozambique was moved from south-eastern Africa to the northeast part known as the Horn of Africa.
- Côte d’Ivoire was moved from west Africa to the eastern coast.
After a picture of the presentation was shared in a Substack post by Emily Bass, who works in AIDS prevention, the State Department said: “We take full responsibility for the confusion and misrepresentation it caused for attendees, including our African partners.” The presentation was made at the Aids 2026 conference in Rio de Janeiro earlier this week.
.
‘OPENAI USED TO MAKE MAP’
Analysis indicated that staff apparently used OpenAI to make the map, and the program “hallucinated” the countries’ locations instead of looking them up.
The result was evidently not checked by actual humans before being released.
.
PEOPLE AREN'T FACTCHECKING
Many analysts fear that the widespread careless use of AI is causing vast amounts of damage to the foundations of human knowledge.
Even if 80% to 90% of the generated material is roughly correct, the rest, which consists of outright lies presented as dependable data, can cause immense harm, they warn.
If professional politicians and mainstream journalists aren't factchecking, the public definitely won't either.
.
GLOBAL CALL FOR AI CO-OPERATION
At the 2026 World AI Conference last week in Shanghai, China, delegates from more than 100 countries and international organisations discussed these issue.
While there was widespread agreement that it was imperative for countries to co-operate to head off potential AI-caused disasters, there was also concern about the hostile, uncooperative attitudes of some western nations.
.
.
