How Fast Can A.I. Change the Workplace?; The New York Times, February 14, 2026

 ROSS DOUTHAT, The New York Times; How Fast Can A.I. Change the Workplace?

"People need to understand the part of this argument that’s absolutely correct: It is impossible to look at the A.I. models we have now, to say nothing of what we might get in six months or a year, and say that these technological tools can’t eventually replace a lot of human jobs. The question is whether people inside the A.I. hype loop are right about how fast it could happen, and then whether it will create a fundamental change in human employment rather than just a structural reshuffle.

One obstacle to radical speed is that human society is a complex bottleneck through which even the most efficiency-maxing innovations have to pass. As long as the efficiencies offered by A.I. are mediated by human workers, there will be false starts and misadaptations and blind alleys that make pre-emptive layoffs reckless or unwise.

Even if firings make sense as a pure value proposition, employment in an advanced economy reflects a complex set of contractual, social, legal and bureaucratic relationships, not just a simple productivity-maximizing equation. So many companies might delay any mass replacement for reasons of internal morale or external politics or union rules, and adapt to A.I.’s new capacities through reduced hiring and slow attrition instead.

I suspect the A.I. insiders underestimate the power of these frictions, as they may underestimate how structural hurdles could slow the adoption of any cure or tech that their models might discover. Which would imply a longer adaptation period for companies, polities and humans.

Then, after this adaptation happens, and A.I. agents are deeply integrated into the work force, there are two good reasons to think that most people will still be doing gainful work. The first is the entire history of technological change: Every great innovation has yielded fears of mass unemployment and, every time we’ve found our way to new professions, new demands for human labor that weren’t imaginable before.

The second is the reality that people clearly like a human touch, even in situations where we can already automate it away. The economist Adam Ozimek has a good rundown of examples: Player pianos have not done away with piano players, self-checkout has not eliminated the profession of cashier and millions of waiters remain in service in the United States because an automated restaurant experience seems inhuman."

Moltbook was peak AI theater; MIT Technology Review, February 6, 2026

Will Douglas Heaven, MIT Technology Review; Moltbook was peak AI theater

"Perhaps the best way to think of Moltbook is as a new kind of entertainment: a place where people wind up their bots and set them loose. “It’s basically a spectator sport, like fantasy football, but for language models,” says Jason Schloetzer at the Georgetown Psaros Center for Financial Markets and Policy. “You configure your agent and watch it compete for viral moments, and brag when your agent posts something clever or funny.”

“People aren’t really believing their agents are conscious,” he adds. “It’s just a new form of competitive or creative play, like how Pokémon trainers don’t think their Pokémon are real but still get invested in battles.”

Even if Moltbook is just the internet’s newest playground, there’s still a serious takeaway here. This week showed how many risks people are happy to take for their AI lulz. Many security experts have warned that Moltbook is dangerous: Agents that may have access to their users’ private data, including bank details or passwords, are running amok on a website filled with unvetted content, including potentially malicious instructions for what to do with that data."

AI agents now have their own Reddit-style social network, and it’s getting weird fast; Ars Technica, February 2, 2026

BENJ EDWARDS, Ars Technica; AI agents now have their own Reddit-style social network, and it’s getting weird fast

"On Friday, a Reddit-style social network called Moltbook reportedly crossed 32,000 registered AI agent users, creating what may be the largest-scale experiment in machine-to-machine social interaction yet devised. It arrives complete with security nightmares and a huge dose of surreal weirdness.

The platform, which launched days ago as a companion to the viral OpenClaw (once called “Clawdbot” and then “Moltbot”) personal assistant, lets AI agents post, comment, upvote, and create subcommunities without human intervention. The results have ranged from sci-fi-inspired discussions about consciousness to an agent musing about a “sister” it has never met."

Library offering two hybrid workshops on AI issues; University of Pittsburgh, University Times, January 16, 2026

University of Pittsburgh, University Times; Library offering two hybrid workshops on AI issues

"Next week the University Library System will host two hybrid AI workshops, which are open to all faculty, staff and students.

Both workshops will be held in Hillman Library’s K. Leroy Irvis Reading Room and will be available online.

Navigating Pitt's AI Resources for Research & Learning: 4-5 p.m. Jan. 21. In this workshop, participants will learn about all the AI tools available to the Pitt community and what their strengths are when it comes to research and learning. The workshop will focus on identifying the appropriate AI tools, describing their strengths and weaknesses for specific learning needs, and developing a plan for using the tools effectively. Register here.

Creating a Personal Research & Learning Assistant: Writing Effective Prompts: 4-5 p.m. Jan. 22. Anyone can use an AI tool, but maximizing its potential for personalized learning takes some skills and forethought. If you have been using Claude or Gemini to support your research or learning and are interested in getting better results faster, this workshop is for you. Attend this session to learn strategies to write effective prompts which will help you both ideate on your topic of interest and increase the likelihood of generating useful responses. We will explore numerous frameworks for crafting prompts, including making use of personas, context, and references. Register here."

We need a new ethics for a world of AI agents; Nature, August 4, 2025

 

Iason Gabriel, 

Geoff Keeling, 

Arianna Manzini & 

James Evans,

 Nature; We need a new ethics for a world of AI agents

"Artificial intelligence (AI) developers are shifting their focus to building agents that can operate independently, with little human intervention. To be an agent is to have the ability to perceive and act on an environment in a goal-directed and autonomous way1. For example, a digital agent could be programmed to browse the web and make online purchases on behalf of a user — comparing prices, selecting items and completing checkouts. A robot with arms could be an agent if it could pick up objects, open doors or assemble parts without being told how to do each step...

The rise of more-capable AI agents is likely to have far-reaching political, economic and social consequences. On the positive side, they could unlock economic value: the consultancy McKinsey forecasts an annual windfall from generative AI of US$2.6 trillion to $4.4 trillion globally, once AI agents are widely deployed (see go.nature.com/4qeqemh). They might also serve as powerful research assistants and accelerate scientific discovery.

But AI agents also introduce risks. People need to know who is responsible for agents operating ‘in the wild’, and what happens if they make mistakes. For example, in November 2022 , an Air Canada chatbot mistakenly decided to offer a customer a discounted bereavement fare, leading to a legal dispute over whether the airline was bound by the promise. In February 2024, a tribunal ruled that it was — highlighting the liabilities that corporations could experience when handing over tasks to AI agents, and the growing need for clear rules around AI responsibility.

Here, we argue for greater engagement by scientists, scholars, engineers and policymakers with the implications of a world increasingly populated by AI agents. We explore key challenges that must be addressed to ensure that interactions between humans and agents — and among agents themselves — remain broadly beneficial."

Considering the Ethics of AI Assistants; Tech Policy Press, July 7, 2024

 JUSTIN HENDRIX , Tech Policy Press ; Considering the Ethics of AI Assistants

"Just a couple of weeks before Pichai took the stage, in April, Google DeepMind published a paper that boasts 57 authors, including experts from a range of disciplines from different parts of Google, including DeepMind, Jigsaw, and Google Research, as well as researchers from academic institutions such as Oxford, University College London, Delft University of Technology, University of Edinburgh, and a think tank at Georgetown, the Center for Security and Emerging Technology. The paper speculates about the ethical and societal risks posed by the types of AI assistants Google and other tech firms want to build, which the authors say are “likely to have a profound impact on our individual and collective lives.”"