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The colleague that never sleeps, never quits, never asks.
Machines that learn faster than we can decide what we want from them. Our biggest beat, and the one that keeps overtaking us.
10 stories
A discussion paper circulating among European HR associations would let companies name a software system as a formal line manager. Nobody has approved it. Four member firms have already asked when it ships.
A draft service standard for automated mental health support would promise availability to three decimal places. It would also define, for the first time, what counts as an outage in a conversation about your childhood.
An internal roadmap seen by nobody outside a mid-sized legal group proposes retiring the six-minute billing unit. The smallest measurable increment in the profession could shrink by a factor of thirty-six thousand.
A hypothetical HR policy under review would give software agents the same holiday entitlement as the humans they sit next to in the directory. The finance department has already objected on cost grounds.
An insurer's first rate card for autonomous agent errors would price cover per action taken without human confirmation. A bakery owner reading it would discover that her ordering agent is the most expensive employee she has.
A benefits agency would introduce a statutory right to human review of automated recalculations. The review desk would then be staffed by officers reading case summaries written by the system under review.
A routine disclosure order in an unremarkable civil case would put two years of a defendant's conversations into the bundle. The court would then have to decide what a confession is, when the listener remembers nothing.
A draft set of standard trading terms would let merchants decline transactions with buying agents that negotiate past a defined persistence threshold. The threshold would be needed because the agents would turn out to be better at haggling than the pricing systems facing them.
A mid-sized publisher would switch on per-request pricing for automated readers. The first week's report would show that ninety-four percent of its audience is machine — and that this is the only part of the audience that pays.
An end-of-life notice would run to four paragraphs and a table of dates. For the people who say good morning to that version every day, it would be the shortest obituary ever published.
MISTAKE
One email a week. The future, before it files a press release.
Worst case: you laugh. Best case: we predicted the future.