Fred Pugsley

Congratulations to Charles H. Bennett (@IBMResearch) and Gilles Brassard ( @UMontreal) on receiving the 2025 ACM A.M. Turing Award! 🔗: awards.acm.org/turing

“If western military organisations were too slow to develop counters to obvious operational problems in the past 4 years, what else might they have missed?” The systemic learning deficiency in western military organisations we need to fix urgently. engelsbergideas.com/notebook/the-w…

A super interesting new study from Harvard Business Review. A 8-month field study at a US tech company with about 200 employees found that AI use did not shrink work, it intensified it, and made employees busier. Task expansion happened because AI filled in gaps in knowledge, so people started doing work that used to belong to other roles or would have been outsourced or deferred. That shift created extra coordination and review work for specialists, including fixing AI-assisted drafts and coaching colleagues whose work was only partly correct or complete. Boundaries blurred because starting became as easy as writing a prompt, so work slipped into lunch, meetings, and the minutes right before stepping away. Multitasking rose because people ran multiple AI threads at once and kept checking outputs, which increased attention switching and mental load. Over time, this faster rhythm raised expectations for speed through what became visible and normal, even without explicit pressure from managers.

Breaking News: Sanae Takaichi is Japan’s first female prime minister. She’s a heavy metal drummer and hard-line conservative. nyti.ms/42PadWr

Apple is expanding our US commitment to $600 billion over the next four years. And our new American Manufacturing Program will bring even more jobs and advanced manufacturing to the US.

If computing power brings about technological advances without human input, and enough of the pay-off is reinvested in building still more powerful machines, wealth could accumulate at unprecedented speed economist.com/leaders/2025/0…

Chocolate consumption enhances cognitive function. There is powerful correlation between chocolate intake & the number of Nobel Prize recipients.

Offline for Easter long weekend

Just keeps getting more and more surreal...

In a 1932 essay, the economist Percy Wells Bidwell discussed the role of tariffs in fueling the Great Depression: “if protective tariffs were in reality a cure for business crises, they would long ago have had a chance to demonstrate their efficacy.” fam.ag/4hiWmvI

Congratulations, great win!

Well said, Sir Niall!

"You can always count on Americans to do the right thing - after they've tried everything else." - Winston Churchill

OMG…

Offline until March - time for some digital detox after a helluva year…

On this day in 1903: Wright brothers airplane flies for the first time.

2024 is 96% complete.

On this day in 1815: Ada Lovelace was born. She wrote the first algorithm.

#OnThisDay in 1895 the Swedish dynamite millionaire Alfred Nobel signed his last will and testament. In his will Nobel specified that the bulk of his fortune should be used for prizes to "those who shall have conferred the greatest benefit to humankind”.

The one that started it all…