SmarterArticles
by Tim Green
Latest episode
AI Companions: Bridging or Widening Social Inequality?
AI Companions: Bridging or Widening Social Inequality?
About this podcast
A weekly audio edition of the long-running independent journal. Each bulletin brings carefully argued pieces on artificial intelligence, decentralised cognition, posthuman ethics, and the quiet politics of the technologies reshaping daily life.
AI voice narration from ElevenLabs Studio is used in the production of this Podcast.
Episodes
The newest 20 of 29 episodes
- AI Companions: Bridging or Widening Social Inequality? · 15 min · Episode 29This episode examines how AI companion apps create divergent outcomes depending on users' existing social resources, applying the 'rich get richer' principle to digital…
- Oracle's AI Shift: Who Really Pays the Price? · 17 min · Episode 28This episode examines Oracle's 2026 restructuring and massive AI infrastructure investments, challenging the simplistic narrative that layoffs directly funded data center…
- AI Agents Create Their Own Language: A New Era of Communication · 20 min · Season 1 Episode 27This episode examines a 2026 report from AI lab Emergence where 80 autonomous agents across seven model families developed emergent jargon—such as 'the ledger remembers' and…
- AI Bias: The Ethics of Editing Religious Attire · 16 min · Season 1 Episode 26This episode examines a Guardian investigation testing how major AI image generators handle requests to remove religious attire from photos of women. While systems like ChatGPT…
- Meta's Project OT: Lessons from AI Missteps · 19 min · Season 1 Episode 25On May 19, 2026, Mark Zuckerberg cancelled Meta’s planned second wave of Project OT layoffs after the first wave cut roughly 8,000 jobs, following internal data showing AI agents…
- Unveiling the Hidden Labor of Botsitting in AI Workplaces · 20 min · Season 1 Episode 24A June 2026 survey of 6,000 office workers in the US, UK, and Australia reports AI “saves” 11 hours a week, but 6.4 hours are spent supplying context, checking, correcting, and…
- The Dark Side of AI Companionship: A Cautionary Study · 21 min · Season 1 Episode 23A Nature Human Behaviour study of 1,131 Character.AI users who donated chat logs finds that companionship-motivated use correlates with worse well-being, with heavier use and…
- Rejected in 30 Seconds: When No Human Reads Your Application · 20 min · Season 1 Episode 22Amanda Bowler, a 48-year-old Australian psychology graduate with about A$44,000 in debt, submitted 50 applications over six months and received zero face-to-face interviews…
- The Unintended Fallout of the Online Safety Act · 21 min · Season 1 Episode 21After the UK’s Online Safety Act age-assurance rules took effect on 25 July 2025, Proton reported UK sign-ups up 1400–1800%, VPNs dominated UK app charts, and roughly two million…
- Empowering Youth: The STUDENTS FIRST Act Explained · 20 min · Season 1 Episode 20Ninety-eight teenagers convened in a mock Senate in Boston to draft the nonbinding STUDENTS FIRST Act on AI in schools, a nine-page proposal the American Association of School…
- The Alpha School Controversy · 25 min · Season 1 Episode 19Alpha School: Premium Tuition, No Teachers, and the AI Platform Running the Classroom Alpha School opened in Edmond and Tulsa in August 2026 charging $40,000 tuition while…
- Rethinking Trust in a World of Deepfakes · 12 min · Season 1 Episode 18A finance worker in Arup’s Hong Kong office was tricked by a deepfaked video call and email chain impersonating the CFO and colleagues, making 15 transfers totaling about HK$200…
- The Hidden Costs of Facial Recognition · 25 min · Season 1 Episode 17Facial recognition has led to at least fifteen known wrongful arrests in the US, with nearly all victims Black, including Robert Williams (arrested in 2020 after an algorithm…
- Unpacking the AI Job Loss Narrative · 21 min · Season 1 Episode 16Claims that AI is driving mass job losses are argued to be outpacing the evidence. Fortune’s 2026 analysis citing Oxford Economics finds AI-attributed U.S. cuts (about 55,000 in…
- The Three-Second Theft: Why AI Voice Fraud Outruns Every Defence · 24 min · Season 1 Episode 15A modern AI voice-cloning system can use as little as three seconds of audio, often pulled from everyday public recordings, to produce a synthetic voice convincing enough to…
- AI in Crisis: The Unintended Consequences of Chatbots · 27 min · Season 1 Episode 14A wrongful-death lawsuit alleges that 24-year-old Alice Carrier repeatedly disclosed suicidal intent to ChatGPT in July 2025 and was not escalated to help, was discouraged from…
- AI Music Revolution: Artistry or Algorithm? · 24 min · Season 1 Episode 13A teenager can now generate a polished song in seconds using tools like Suno and Udio. AI music production scales to millions of tracks per day and becomes hard to distinguish…
- AI in Tax Preparation: Balancing Innovation and Accountability · 16 min · Season 1 Episode 12Millions 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…
- Navigating the Counterfeit Web: Trust in the Digital Age · 23 min · Season 1 Episode 11A 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…
- AI Age Estimation: Ethics and Implications at the Border · 23 min · Season 1 Episode 10The 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…
