Although I find the AI consciousness debate to be more of a seductive red herring, I do think it offers a crucial opportunity for us to approach its continued development with the best of human values in mind. Consciousness researchers are currently designing for a future where the development of AI models progresses to the…

One of the NHS apps I work on at the moment supports people to cut down the amount of alcohol they consume. The primary mechanism for achieving this encourages users to commit to at least three drink free days per week. The data shows us that 48% of our user base find their pledged number…

Now that we’re at the point many of us rely on AI for daily human-like interaction, life coaching and advice, it occurred to me that an unintended positive consequence of this may be that AI could eventually make us nicer. When we interact with each other online, we seem not to be able to resist…

There’s a lot of alarmism going on at the moment about the potential for AI to change the internet forever, but what if that’s a good thing? What if our utopian vision for this incredible service was corrupted long ago and AI was used to rebuild it in a way more aligned with the original…

Listening to Hardfork recently, the team were discussing the rise and implications for AI generated music that we now see on platforms like Spotify. The argument was that this is not only another avenue of lost jobs to automation, but also signals a decline in music quality, artistry and integrity. Popular ambient playlists like those…

A couple of weekends ago I was with a group of friends and one mentioned they were currently reading ‘Bullshit Jobs’ by David Graeber. I said it sounded great and his reply was: “Careful Becca, you’re a middle manager, you’ll probably realise you, like me, have a bullshit job.” I was willing to take the…

I’ve been off with a stomach bug this week and after five days I still can’t eat anything. Now in a 9000 calorie deficit and having dropped 3kgs, I keep thinking what I really need is someone to hand me things when it’s too hard to get up. That made me wonder, isn’t there an…

I’m now almost three weeks into a new role with the app team and today took part in my first app hackathon. At first I was slightly alarmed that we were all going to be taking a day out of delivery with an important deadline on the horizon, but I thoroughly enjoyed the day and…

Core Web Vitals have become increasingly important in recent years as they play a significant role in determining a website’s search engine ranking. Core Web Vitals measure the user experience by looking at how quickly a page loads, how quickly it becomes interactive, and how visually stable it is while loading. By optimising Core Web…