Regulation moves, new research and industry data points — the material that keeps this argument current between the long pieces. Short, sourced, newest first.
Regulation
EU AI Act transparency duties start biting
Article 50 transparency obligations now apply to providers and deployers of generative and interactive AI systems across the EU, alongside the Article 14 human-oversight duties. Disclosure that you are dealing with a machine is now a legal requirement, not a courtesy. Non-compliance can reach €15 million or 3% of worldwide turnover.
This is Principle Two arriving by statute: publication is the instrument, not a softer version of it.
Colorado strips the impact assessments out of its AI Act
Colorado’s AI Act was due to take effect on 30 June 2026 with mandatory annual impact assessments and a duty of care. SB 26-189, signed this week, removes the impact-assessment mandate and the broad algorithmic-discrimination duty, and pushes the start date to 1 January 2027.
The pattern worth watching: disclosure survives, assessment gets negotiated away. Which is precisely the argument for making publication the principle rather than the reporting.
Workers spend 6.4 hours a week babysitting the machine
Glean’s Work AI Index 2026 surveyed 6,000 full-time digital workers across the US, UK and Australia and found they spend 6.4 hours a week “botsitting” — feeding context to AI and cleaning up wrong answers. That is more time than they spend using AI to produce anything. 69% admit shipping work they haven’t verified or can’t confidently stand behind.
This is the cognitive space ratio and the judgement rate, already measured, with a hard number attached. Nobody reports it.
The Secretary-General’s independent High-Level Expert Group published Counting What Counts: A Compass of Progress for People and Planet, proposing a dashboard of 31 indicators for countries to use alongside GDP. It answers a mandate set by member states under the 2024 Pact for the Future.
The direct descendant of Kennedy’s 1968 speech, sixty years on — and still entirely national-accounts territory. It never descends to the level of a company, let alone a campaign. That gap is the white space this project is aimed at.