Writer at Silicon Canals

Machine Room

Contributor

Machine Room covers AI and deep tech: the builders, the breakthroughs, and the systems reshaping how technology gets made, with more interest in what ships than in what gets announced.

Google’s ATLAS study analyzed nearly 15 million AI interactions across more than 150 countries and found that, for the non-routine cognitive work where AI is used most heavily, fewer than 10% of conversations attempted to automate a task end-to-end. For now, the real-world picture looks much more like humans working with AI than AI simply replacing them.

Google’s ATLAS dataset suggests most observed cognitive work with AI is collaborative, but its scope and enterprise exclusions limit what the finding proves.

Aug 20, 2026

Technology

The Coldcard holders drained on 30 July had multiple safes, a safety deposit box and a device that never touched the internet, which is four defences against the same threat and none against the one that emptied them, a shape engineers call common cause failure

When every precaution points the same direction, they all fail together.

Aug 19, 2026

Technology

If you can’t keep your Bitcoin on an exchange that might freeze withdrawals, or in a hot wallet on a laptop that might get hacked, cold storage was the last answer anyone had left — and on 30 July roughly 1,082 coins drained out of devices that had never once been connected to the internet

A vulnerability in supposedly unhackable hardware wallets just moved $70 million in forty-one minutes, raising a terrifying question: if cold storage isn't safe, where is Bitcoin actually secure?

Aug 17, 2026

Technology

Epoch AI estimates that frontier models could fully use up the available stock of useful public human-written text sometime between 2026 and 2032. After that, developers may increasingly turn to private datasets and enormous quantities of AI-generated synthetic data — raising a strange possibility: a growing share of what future AI learns may ultimately have been written not by humans, but by earlier AI systems.

Epoch AI's 2026–2032 forecast is about effective public human text, not the end of new writing. The response may reshape data licensing, provenance and synthetic-data engineering.

Aug 14, 2026