I write a weekly column for The Daily Telegraph, and my work regularly appears at The Critic magazine and Unherd. My writing asks: why do we make machines magical, and why do we insist humans are just faulty machines?

I helped grow the technology news site The Register from a staff of four to a the UK’s most successful technology news publication, with over forty employees. For seven years (to 2006) I covered technology from San Francisco, as West Coast Bureau Chief then US Editor. In the 1990s, I wrote regularly for Private Eye, having started my own investigative magazine in Manchester, called Badpress. Before journalism, I worked as a software engineer on mission critical systems.

Not all of my predictions were good ones, but some have endured:

• I was the first journalist to report on, and warn of, the social and economic power of today’s platforms, before Google had even floated in 2004.
• I was also the first writer to describe the “Balkanisation” of the internet into hermetically sealed silos of opinion, something now called the filter bubble. 
• And also the first to criticise the influence of Wikipedia – asking: “is this the best humanity can do?”
• I also took an early, short position on “Artificial Intelligence”.  Invited to give oral evidence to the House of Lords Select Committee enquiry on Artifical Intelligence (2017-2018), I was the only sceptical voice. Generative AI was never going to fulfil the promises being made for it, but would create enormous social and economic externalities, I predicted in 2022. It’s now late 2025, and that bubble  now appears to be bursting.

My research ranges from competition policy to the philosophy of computing, encompassing subjects such as behaviourism and techno-utopian cults. The latter informed Adam Curtis’ BBC series All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace (2011), for which I was Associate Producer.

More recently, I have examined on policy experiments by rationalist cults, such as effective altruism and “Progress Studies”.