AI & Emerging Technology
The AI Could Keep Fixing Things. We Had to Decide When to Stop.
A PDF investigation shows how sensible suggestions from an AI agent can add up to unplanned work—and why deciding what is enough takes human attention.
The Reading Room
Articles
Search the full text, or narrow the collection by purpose, topic, author, and format.
Articles
66 articles
AI & Emerging Technology
The Context Between the Clicks
AI agents use interfaces designed for people who bring context and learn through experience. What happens when they arrive without either?
AI & Emerging Technology
What If We Can't Keep Up?
Chicago's Deep Tunnel offers lessons for investing in AI defense, finding bottlenecks, and adjusting when future demands exceed our plans.
AI & Emerging Technology
What Kind of Fires Does AI Start?
Alex Cannella applies familiar problem-solving methods to active AI incidents, smoldering problems, and conditions that could fuel future failures.
AI & Emerging Technology
Can an AI Stop Before It Guesses—and Keep Working?
A retrospective lab notebook tracing experiments, measurement mistakes, and imperfect results when an AI must pause an unsupported action while continuing useful research.
AI & Emerging Technology
Digital Pair Therapy
Use disagreement with a coding agent to uncover missing context, preserve decisions, and improve how you work together.
AI & Emerging Technology
Feelings, Evidence and Constraints in AI Collaboration
Separate feelings, evidence, constraints, and assumptions when working with AI, while keeping research findings and practical hypotheses distinct.
Systems Thinking
The Discovery That Never Happened
How unspoken questions and missing dissent can prevent ideas from meeting—and what organizations can do to protect discovery.
AI & Emerging Technology
When Your Chatbot Follows Your Lead
How unchecked assumptions, unspoken thoughts, and gaps in shared context can steer an AI conversation—and how to make room for correction.
AI & Emerging Technology
I Approved the Test Before I Learned What Else Would Change
A newsletter access-control test prompted questions about login authority, lasting changes, and what an approval warning does not explain.
AI & Emerging Technology
You Don’t Have to Answer Every Question Your AI Asks
A reasonable question from an AI agent can arrive before we know enough to answer it. Decide when to commit, when a provisional choice is enough, and when to keep learning.
AI & Emerging Technology
Beyond Automating Bottlenecks
Why the next big win is not just faster workflow, but better work selection
AI & Emerging Technology
Integrating GenAI Into User Workflow
Navigating the hype while meeting the future head on.
Strategy & Innovation
When Innovation Outruns Useful Life
How rapid replacement separates useful life from market value, and what that means for buying, building, and switching technology.
Leadership & Organizations
Learning to Lead While the Rules Are Changing
A military leadership experiment offers a way to think about uncertainty, information provenance, and learning to lead systems that contain AI.
AI & Emerging Technology
A Better Way to Work: Give Your AI a Ticket
After roughly a thousand issues, tickets appear to help humans and AI coding agents preserve constraints, failed approaches, and prior decisions. Shared memory also needs human care to stay useful.
AI & Emerging Technology
Kirk, Raccoons, and the Trouble With Rules
Kirk, raccoons, and AI agents offer a humorous look at how persistent learners discover gaps between intended rules and the possibilities a system actually permits.
AI & Emerging Technology
Ask Your AI About the Tech Debt
A review of duplicated deployment work cut our deployment time by about a third. Periodic technical-debt reviews can reveal costs that have become routine, with humans deciding what to change.
AI & Emerging Technology
“The AI Did It” Is Not an Excuse
AI can move the work, but people and organizations remain accountable for the choices, safeguards, and outcomes of its use.
AI & Emerging Technology
Before the Fire: How We Learn to Use AI Safely
Responsible AI use is a learning loop: anticipate what could go wrong, observe what happens, and use what you learn to improve the next decision.
AI & Emerging Technology
Can You Recover Your AI Work?
Backup copies are a starting point. Recovering AI work also means restoring the conversations, instructions, connections, and context that make a project usable.
Systems Thinking
A Recommendation Needs Somewhere to Go
Recommendations need a receiving owner, a reasoned decision, and a way for learning to shape what comes next—even when the answer is no.
AI & Emerging Technology
What Chatbot Tricks Can Teach Us About Working Together
Repeatable habits keep human judgment involved when working with GenAI: develop the substance, pause to review, then give it shape.
Learning & Knowledge
Give Each Other a Break: We Aren’t Losing Our Minds
Shared false memories and real differences between versions can both shape disagreements. Ask whether people were shown the same thing.