That Was The Week is an editorialized and curated weekly look at developments in tech, startups, and venture investing with a video and podcast for paid subscribers. All free subscribers get a 6-month complementary paid subscription.
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1. Being smarter doesn’t give AI the right to decide for you. What matters is what it can access, what it can do and who can stop it. Those controls must be engineered and enforced. A more intelligent model is no substitute for accountable humans.
2. “Find me the best insurance” isn’t permission to buy it. That distinction is the foundation of useful delegation. Your agent needs enough freedom to save you time, with clear boundaries around spending your money, sharing your information and making commitments.
3. Your AI should work for you, not the website selling to you. A shopping agent should help you compare offers and walk away from a bad deal. Businesses can defend against abuse without shutting out your representative. You shouldn’t have to pay a toll to escape the advertising funnel.
4. You can say “thank you” to a machine without making it a person. Human-like conversation doesn’t establish human feelings or rights. Both worshipping AI and treating it as an enemy distract from the people building, deploying and using it. They remain responsible.
5. AI’s democratic promise is more power in your hands. More people could gain the ability to understand complex issues, challenge experts and hold institutions accountable. That won’t happen automatically. It depends on who gets access, whose interests the tools serve and whether the benefits are widely shared.
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6 Oct 2026
AI Is Becoming Permanent
1. Your next computer may be operated by your agent—not you. You describe the outcome you want. Your assistant uses the browser, software and tools to get there.
2. Your voice may become the interface. Instead of opening an app or sitting at a keyboard, you speak to your assistant wherever you are—and let it handle the task.
3. You don’t need more software. You need things done. Finding the right product, renewing insurance or arranging a return shouldn’t require your constant attention. The reward is time back.
4. You shouldn’t have to start from scratch every time. An assistant becomes more useful when it connects your email, calendar, travel and ongoing projects—bringing the relevant context to each new request.
5. A personal assistant shouldn’t be a luxury. The opportunity is to make practical, everyday help available to people who could never hire staff. Being offered an AI assistant is the beginning; making it affordable, reliable and worth trusting is the real test.
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25 Sept 2026
The Future Just Showed Itself
1. The agent becomes the interface; the device becomes secondary.
Facebook’s Muse points toward a different relationship with computing: delegate a task rather than navigate an application. A persistent agent operates a computer in the cloud, while glasses, earphones or a phone provide access. Hardware doesn’t disappear, but the device becomes less important than the agent available through it. Microsoft's announcement of autopilot is the same in a work context.
2. Free AI could change the economics of the industry.
Muse’s proposed transaction-funded model challenges the assumption that useful AI requires a subscription. If shopping commissions can support a free personal agent, Meta could bring delegated work to a mass audience. That puts pressure on both paid AI services and the device ecosystems through which people access them. The opportunity is substantial, though competitors can respond.
3. Responsibility for AI safety starts with its builders.
Jensen Huang’s challenge, central to the discussion, is that companies claiming their products cannot be controlled should not release them. Safety requires engineering, testing and enforceable limits. Regulation can establish obligations, but it cannot substitute for the technical controls needed to meet them.
4. The fight over regulation is also about competition and liability.
Global rules could protect the public, but they could also entrench established companies and encourage a compliance-based defence of harmful outcomes. Those possibilities deserve scrutiny. So do the commercial interests of regulation’s opponents: NVIDIA benefits from continued AI expansion. Neither side’s business interests automatically prove or disprove its arguments.
5. Technical control and social consequences are different questions.
The conversation’s sharpest disagreement concerns what can be known before deployment. Laboratory stress tests do not necessarily describe how released products behave. Equally, controlling a product’s operation does not establish every consequence of its widespread use. The challenge is to preserve experimentation while learning from actual outcomes and holding the responsible people and companies accountable.
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