Harold, I want to add my thanks for your inspiration over the years. Like many others, I have benefited repeatedly from your PKM workshop, blog posts and conversation. I hope, when the time comes, you'll enjoy your retirement, charitable work, travels and, of course, cycling.

As for your observations here and in other posts, AI could prove to be one of the biggest enablers of what you term 'the sociopaths', codifying and regurgitating their business speak and biases. My fear is that it also could squeeze out genuine innovation and creativity, making it more difficult for those who want to make a difference to gain a foothold. What we are witnessing in the creative industries (literature, music, film) is not encouraging, with AI recycling, hybridising and regurgitating rather than creating. The closest it gets to invention is its alarming and misleading hallucinations.

When AI acts as gatekeeper, things look bleak. Personal anecdote: I was commissioned to ghostwrite an article. I researched and wrote the piece in my own words, but reflecting the author's voice. A screening tool – operated by AI, checking for AI use – indicated that the article was more likely written by AI than a human. That in itself was infuriating, as my original material and writing style were being called into question. (More annoyingly, I suspect that my previously published material has been scraped and my style imitated by AI.) However, I kept tweaking the article until it had been approved by this gatekeeper and the client could formally submit their article. Counterintuitively, it didn't pass until it sounded like all the other boilerplate garbage generated by AI and nothing like my original. The tool was enforcing homogeneity, blandness, and superficiality. All nuance, all stylistic quirks, were lost. Just another droplet in the AI swamp.