January 2026

The AI conversation is shifting from novelty to consequences, as advances in coding agents, self-evolving systems, and agent-native architectures promise major productivity gains while raising hard questions about skills formation, software quality, and the economics of AI-driven development. Cultural and ethical unease is growing alongside technical progress, reflected in debates over what we mean by 'AI,' concerns about emotional manipulation by chatbots, the rise of AI-generated media and 'slop,' and warnings about disintermediation, the erosion of the free web, and distorted labour markets as automated vetting and vibe-coding scale. At the same time, security, governance, and accountability are becoming central, with polymorphic malware, Unicode smuggling, AI platform flaws, red-teamed agents, watermarking tools like SynthID, and new laws forcing transparency around AI risks. Industry responses range from ads entering ChatGPT and companies tightening incentives and rules, to governments intervening on health, image manipulation, and disclosure, all against a backdrop of uncertainty about AI's inner nature, its economic impact, and whether today's fast-moving systems are a stepping stone toward—or a distraction from—true AGI.