James Taylor James Taylor

Top 10 Things Everyone Believed About AI in 2025 — That Aged Badly

Top 10 Things Everyone Believed About AI in 2025 — That Aged Badly

As of December 24, 2025, the public story about artificial intelligence (AI) looks different from the one that dominated the start of the year.

Over the past few days, three key themes have emerged: the physical impact of AI on the power grid, the security implications of "agentic" tools capable of browsing and acting, and the increasing expenses associated with unresolved data, copyright, and accountability regulations.

This piece breaks down ten widely held beliefs about AI in 2025 that did not survive contact with real-world deployment. It also explains what replaced them: new bottlenecks, new risks, and a more sober view of what “progress” actually means in 2026.

The story turns on whether AI can scale into daily life without breaking trust.

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James Taylor James Taylor

The AI Oligarchs: How Five Tech Giants Are Quietly Taking Control of the Future

The AI Oligarchs: How Five Tech Giants Are Quietly Taking Control of the Future

A handful of companies are pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into artificial intelligence, building data centers, chips, and models at a scale that rivals national infrastructure programs. Their share prices have driven much of the stock market’s recent gains, and global regulators now warn that an AI-fueled bubble and rising market concentration could threaten financial stability.

These “AI oligarchs” are not science-fiction villains. They are familiar names: Microsoft, Alphabet (Google), Amazon, Meta, and Nvidia. Between them, they dominate the cloud platforms that run the largest models, the chips that power them, and the consumer and enterprise services built on top. In some segments, one company controls as much as 80–90% of the market.

This article explores how these five firms built their position, how their alliances and rivalries shape the next phase of AI, and how policymakers are trying—often awkwardly—to keep up. It also looks at what this concentration means for countries, companies, and ordinary users who increasingly rely on systems they do not control.

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James Taylor James Taylor

World War Wired: How AI Makes a Global Conflict Possible by 2030

World War Wired: How AI Makes a Global Conflict Possible by 2030

Modern war is already online. In Ukraine and Gaza, algorithms help drones find targets, sift surveillance feeds and guide strikes even when human operators lose contact. At the United Nations, diplomats now debate not just missiles and treaties, but code, data and “human control” over digital weapons.

This is the world that sets the stage for “World War Wired” – a future in which artificial intelligence, cyber tools and autonomous systems do not just support conflict, but shape whether a regional clash spirals into a global one by 2030. Great powers are racing to embed AI into everything from drones and submarines to early-warning radars and nuclear command systems, betting that speed and smarter data will deliver an edge.

The risk is not that machines suddenly “decide” to start a world war. The danger lies in how AI changes human decisions: compressing timelines, amplifying mistrust, and creating new ways for accidents, misread signals or cyber attacks to cascade across borders.

This article explores how AI-driven warfare is emerging today, how it could make a global conflict more likely by 2030, and what might still be done to keep a wired world from stumbling into a wider war.

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