Unintended Consequences of AI
3 Years, One AI Brain, and a Very Strange Future
In November 2022 I opened a browser, typed a slightly sceptical prompt into this new thing called ChatGPT, and thought:
“Alright then, clever clogs. Let’s see what you can actually do.”
At first it was just a content helper. A slightly over-eager intern with infinite energy and no sense of when to shut up. I used it to tidy up copy, brainstorm headlines, draft messaging – the kind of stuff I’d normally bang out myself with a beer and a deadline.
It wasn’t perfect. It hallucinated, waffled, got things wrong. But it was… useful. And, more importantly, it got better. Fast.
From curiosity to core workflow
I’m a 1965 model. I grew up in Thatcher’s Britain, coded in the 80s, moved to London at 19, built companies, raced cars, did the whole “slightly awkward entrepreneur” thing. I’ve seen a lot of tech hype cycles come and go.
This one is different – and I only really understood that by living with it, every day, for three years.
The journey roughly went like this:
“Let’s see if this can help me write a better email / blog / client proposal.”
“Okay, this speeds me up. I’ll use it for content, messaging, research, outlines, meeting prep.”
“This thing now sits across my whole workflow. Strategy docs, campaign architecture, customer journeys, board decks – it’s in the room for all of it.”
Custom GPTs arrive and suddenly it’s not just an AI, it’s my AI – tuned to how I think and what I care about.
Now, in late 2025, I’m basically running an AI-augmented life.
Today I have a small army of custom GPTs embedded into pretty much everything I do:
• In my role as CEO at Connected, I use them for deep business strategy, positioning, and planning. They help me pressure-test moves, simulate scenarios, and translate half-baked ideas into coherent plans.
• For clients, they’re part of how we build unique digital propositions, marketing systems, and growth engines. Not “templates” – truly tailored, data-informed thinking, faster than any team I’ve had before.
• For decision support, they sit on my shoulder when I’m thinking about multi-million pound investment decisions, risk, cashflow, or portfolio allocation. They don’t replace judgement – they make it sharper.
• At home, they help plan trips, structure long weekends, benchmark hotels, map routes.
• They’ve helped design a new kitchen, model different layouts, play with aesthetics, and sanity-check quotes.
• My smart home setup – from heating to security to AV – is stitched together with AI planning the logic, integrations, and automation.
• They assist in everything from fitness and diet planning to drafting complex emails I don’t want to screw up.
If my 25-year-old self could see this, he’d think I’d hired a small private staff – researchers, analysts, planners, designers, travel agents, and a slightly neurotic PA.
In reality, it’s one underlying technology, expressed through different custom interfaces, all wired into how I think and work.
Not because it’s smarter than me, but because it extends what my actual brain can manage on its own: more context, more optionality, more iteration, more breadth, more depth.
Living with the future before it’s evenly distributed
When you live like this every day, for years, your view of AI stops being abstract. It’s not “maybe this will change things one day.”
It’s “this has already changed how I think, work, decide, and design my life.”
You start to see where this is going with uncomfortable clarity:
• Every knowledge worker will have an AI brain – or be outcompeted by someone who does.
• Every business will either be AI-native or quietly slide into irrelevance.
• Every big decision – personal or professional – will be made with an invisible AI committee in the background, running scenarios and prompting alternatives.
And that’s just the warm-up.
I’m increasingly convinced this will be more transformative than the industrial revolution.
The industrial revolution mechanised muscle and factories. This revolution is mechanising thought work and decision-making.
We’re not just changing how we move goods around. We’re changing how we move ideas, power, and agency around.
Same way steam, electricity and railways rewired society, AI is going to rewrite who gets to participate, who gets left behind, and what “being capable” even means.
Why unintended consequences?
Most of the public conversation about AI swings between two equally boring poles:
• The hype merchants: “It’s all amazing, don’t worry, the market will sort it out.”
• The doom merchants: “It’s all terrible, we’re doomed, pull the plug.”
Neither camp is much use if you actually want to understand what’s happening – or make intelligent moves in the middle of it.
Living up close with this tech – in my business and in my life – you start to notice the second-order effects:
• Autocracy gets cheaper to run.
• Optimists get disproportionately rewarded.
• The cognitive middle class gets quietly gutted.
• Regulation, power, creativity, inequality – all start to shift in weird, non-obvious ways.
That’s what this series, “Unintended AI Consequences”, is about.
Not the obvious headlines.
Not the PR decks from the vendors.
Not the sci-fi apocalypse.
Instead, I want to poke at the nuanced outcomes:
• Where AI is bending politics, markets, and social mobility in directions nobody really planned.
• Where the side-effects – good and bad – are more interesting than the sales pitch.
• Where my own three-year, lived-in relationship with this technology gives me a slightly clearer view than the tourists who log in once a week and pontificate on LinkedIn.
Over the coming pieces I’ll be digging into themes like:
• The lower cost of autocracy – how AI makes soft authoritarianism cheaper and more scalable.
• Why the optimists win – and how AI widens the gap between those who lean in and those who sit this out.
• Gutting the cognitive class – what happens when the “safe” knowledge jobs aren’t safe anymore.
And plenty more after that.
If AI really is the biggest shift since the industrial revolution – and I genuinely believe it is – then the least we can do is stop treating it like a novelty app and start treating it like what it is:
A new layer of reality that’s already rewiring how we think, work, love, build, invest, travel and live.
I’ve spent three years building with it, arguing with it, and letting it into parts of my life I never expected.
This series is my attempt to map out what that actually means – not just for me, but for anyone who plans on living through the next decade with their eyes open.
Enjoy, comment, and please do share
