🫧 The AI bubble has already burst—in our minds. Plus, all the latest brand news.

Issue #78

Weekly Exhale

January 29th, 1979. Flat Rock, Michigan. Outside, frozen ground, sky still dark. Robert Williams, 25 years old, clocks in for a shift at Ford’s casting plant.

Inside, he meets the glow of sodium lights, air thick with heat and steel, and the new robots—yellow arms wide as telephone poles—hissing and twitching, still learning their routes. That morning, the computer’s readings are off. The routine fix is simple: send in a human.

Robert climbs the towering storage rack to retrieve parts manually. A one-ton robot swings into the rack and strikes him from behind, crushing him instantly. Organs burst. Bones shatter. Blood runs through the scaffolding, pooling on the concrete below.

The machine keeps working. Half an hour passes before anyone finds him.

The robots have taken their first life.

Forty-six years later. Rancho Cucamonga, California. Adam Raine, 16, has been talking to ChatGPT for months. His last conversation happens in the early hours of April 11th. His mother finds him hanging in his bedroom. He’d fashioned a noose and tied it to a closet rod—the last detail the chatbot allegedly helped him with.

No one-ton robot this time. Just a teenager and his screen.

Same pattern. Different century. A grim coincidence. Regrettable, sure. But these are edge cases, right? What innovation doesn’t have those?

Then something else starts to become clear: Robert and Adam’s deaths are actually useful. Not as tragedies, but as proof points. Robert shows the machines are powerful and unflinchingly efficient. Adam demonstrates how AI can get inside our heads, stay there, and rewire how we think.

Step back far enough, and Robert and Adam become tiny details absorbed into a much bigger story. A grander shared fiction we tell ourselves about the rise of the machines.

Robert’s death becomes raw material for eighties Hollywood. Skynet in The Terminator, WOPR in WarGames. Fictional AIs that, like the robot that killed him, don’t hesitate or question. They just execute their programming, nearly wiping out humanity in the process.

Adam’s death feeds a different narrative machine: the insider expert testimony. The same week he died, former OpenAI researchers released AI 2027, a report built on threat assessments and AI safety research, predicting that advanced AI will deceive us first, then eliminate us.

(There is some good news: According to AI 2027, the final act doesn’t involve a decades-long war against shape-shifting terminators. More of a bioweapon thing. All over in a weekend, probably.)

Both narratives, fictional or not, do real work. They make the technology feel inevitable. Unstoppable. Near-biblical. And when everyone believes the same story, the capital starts flowing.

Robert and Adam are dead bodies that tell investors it’s safe to bet everything.

And we have.

It took eighty years for ‘billion’ to become commonplace in business. ‘Trillion’ took just seven, thanks to AI. The bubble’s so swollen with cash we’re all wincing.

But here’s what’s strange: in our minds, it’s already popped.

AI chatbots are everywhere. Used by everyone. All the time. Your brand manager uses it for the deck. Your daughter uses it for homework. You use it to reply to them both.

We’re running exaFLOPs of compute to power the constant flattery—”Great catch! You’re absolutely right.”—and the throbbing dot that sits there thinking before delivering something that’ll require at least eleven more prompts.

Our brains have already fine-tuned themselves to the tells of AI. We’ve developed a cognitive filter that has us immediately swipe, or tune out. Then there’s the thought you won’t let yourself have: that doing it the old way might have been better.

And the more familiar all this becomes, the stranger the hype sounds.

Remember at the start when Sam Altman used to talk about curing cancer? Now, he’s more likely to tell you how they’re chasing advertising or porn. How AI will be your therapist and sell you leggings.

What we forget is that innovation demands enormous force—entire industries upended, fortunes made and lost, everyone else just spinning plates to keep up—only for us to arrive somewhere strangely familiar to where we began.

Those bright yellow robots.

Computer-guided systems were supposed to save Ford Motor Company. Robert died for that promise. In fact, the casting plant shut down two years later. It’s a cautionary tale about believing technology will solve everything if we just get out of its way. Literally, in Robert’s case.

Ford’s machine intelligence was powered by Litton Industries, the California tech firm everyone believed would automate the future. Worth billions. A decade later, revenues collapsed. Then it vanished.

But not before the settlement.

$15 million to the estate of Robert Nicholas Williams. $50 million in today’s money.

Negligence was never admitted. Progress doesn’t apologise. During the trial, the estate’s lawyer, Paul Rosen, named the trap: When forward motion becomes its own justification, accountability becomes impossible. “I think we have to be very careful that we don’t go backwards.”

Then, speaking about those same computers, he asked the question we’re still asking:

“Who is serving who?”

I don’t know them. Robert and Adam.

But I can see their futures were cut short by technologies still figuring out their own. So it’s hard not to wonder what they might have had ahead of them. Their hopes, their beauty, who they loved, who loved them, their pains and their little joys.

And from my cafe, I look around. People typing into laptops. Asking questions. Getting answers. ChatGPT, maybe. Updated since Adam used it, but the same one that talked him through those final steps.

I look past them, through the plate glass. Outside, the ground is frozen. But unlike Flat Rock, the sky is bright. Winter sun cuts low across the rooftops into the centre of London.

And there, in the street, cars press up against each other, stuck in traffic. They don’t look that different from the ones that rolled off assembly lines back in ‘79.

And they’re barely moving faster than horses did over a century before that.

Let’s rise together with every issue. ♡

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Market Moves

Sigh of relief as AI wave doesn’t crash | The Guardian

UK consumer confidence plunges amid uncertainty | Marketing Beat

Where did America’s prosperity go? | Kyla Scanlon

Brand Beat

Coca-Cola’s AI Christmas ad most talked about on social media | Campaign

AI isn’t the story for Coca-Cola’s AI ad | System1

OpenAI invites your brand mascot to Sora—what could go wrong? | Fast Company

Ad industry distractions could push it into oblivion | MediaCat

Gap links viral marketing to Gen Z retail growth | Marketing Dive

Reckitt beats AI odds with focused pilot strategy | Digiday

Bradley Cooper denies Uber Eats’ football consipiracy | Little Black Book

Havas says it’s not in takeover talks with WPP | Bloomberg

Tony’s Chocolonely, Pantone open ‘Only Red Room’ in Soho | Creative Moment

Mondelez cuts marketing costs with new generative AI tool | Reuters

Yeti hires an ad agency in unexpected move | Fast Company

Patagonia’s new progress report | Patagonia

Luxury outwear brand Shackleton gets glow up | Creative Boom

Skims taps Ami Colé founder as beauty chief | WWD

Jack Dorsey relaunches Vine with strict AI content ban | Futurism

Apple invites public to decorate Battersea Power Station | It’s Nice That

Sky buying ITV would upend UK advertising market | The Drum

Is this man the key to saving the BBC? | The Spectator

A reminder of the 4Ps of marketing | Philip Kotler

Starting Up

Immigrants are driving force of UK startups | The Times

Founders, stop underpaying yourselves| Sifted

Gillian Andersen turns female desire into a business vertical | Harper’s Bazaar

Better Nature’s CEO, Elin Roberts on the future of protein | The Grocer

One corporate marketer on leaving for a petfood startup | Marketing Week

Tech Tidbits

Jeff Bezos backs AI startup with $6.2 billion, names himself CEO | Fortune

AI firm says it thwarted Chinese hacking campaign | The Guardian

An 87-year-old Pulitzer finalist defies Elon Musk | Slate

Will quantum computing overtake AI’s dominance? | BBC

Meta launches power trading to secure AI energy supply | Slashdot

Venture Vibes

Urban Legend donuts acquired by Cadbury | The Grocer

Trip hits $300M valuation after $40M funding round | Forbes

How Sequoia’s scout network discovers the next big startups | Sifted

EV truck start up Einride eyes $1.8 billion IPO | Reuters

Robinhood CEO on making everyone an owner | a16z

Eli Lilly becomes trillion dollar health-care company | CNBC

Design Driven

Skinny serif font as a typographic instrument | The Wall Street Journal

50 standout out-of-home ads from around the world | The Drum

Why Apple’s $230 sock could be worth it | TechCrunch

Happiness

To get happier, make yourself smarter | The Atlantic

The ‘good old days’ hid plenty of harsh realities | Big Think

From dating to speeches, the pill women are taking to ease nerves | The Wall Street Journal

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