Today’s essay will read like a collection of science fiction x horror stories, except that these things are really happening. The weekly recap covers the conclusion of the GO-FAR 2026 journey, choosing a university degree, and the launch of my new consulting offering to help companies organise their knowledge.
Weekly recap
I’m very proud of my 14 NTU storytellers for completing the 2026 edition of Going Overseas for Advanced Reporting with their book launch event.
Which university degree should you go for these days? My response is always the same.
I’m offering a new consulting service to help companies organise their knowledge, information, and data, so that AI can be effectively used to transform their business operations. This is the biggest challenge for companies trying to embrace AI. Please message me directly if you want to find out more. FYI, I don’t do hard selling like some AI vendors.
Sunday essay
This quarter, I have been teaching AI to hundreds of colleagues and alumni from Nanyang Technological University as part of a massive upskilling initiative. The in-person workshops range from three hours to two days, and I couldn’t be more grateful for the opportunity to share what I know about AI.
At the start of each workshop, I often share the latest news about AI that will either surprise (or maybe scare) the audience into paying attention for the entire session. I found this teaching method to be useful in 2026, when some people are thinking: “I have been using ChatGPT for free since 2023, why do I still need training?”
However, in the last few sessions, I’ve started to get uneasy myself as I shared the news articles in class. The advancement and impact of AI have suddenly accelerated with the latest frontier models. Let me give a TLDR of the past TWO WEEKS of news:
🔴 70% of global websites became vulnerable to cyberattacks after researchers found two obscure bugs with the help of AI.
Billions of people carried on with their lives this week while teams of stressed coders worked furiously to patch major websites like Wikipedia and Amazon. When hackers found out about the bugs, they launched millions of attacks to see which websites they could take down. This sounds like science fiction but it was only Thursday.
🔴 The first reported case of an employee in Singapore messing up thanks to vibe coding and a lack of governance.
Famous bak kwa seller Bee Cheng Hiang declared to the SG data privacy body that one of its employees had used AI to write a Python script to automate mass mailing to over 95,000 customers, but ended up exposing their email addresses to each other. You should read the official PDPA announcement to understand the many things that went wrong. It was a human problem, not an AI model problem.
🔴 Increasing FOMO as AI companies launch more AI personal assistant agents.
People keep asking me if they are missing out if they don’t use AI agents that run continuously in the background to do errands and research. OpenAI just launched the expensive Dots feature, and Claude now has Duet agents. I tell them, “Well, only if you are so busy you already have a human personal assistant to manage your schedule. If so, you can afford a $100/month AI agent too. It’s more important to learn how to write AI skills first.”
🔴 Rapid reverse engineering of proprietary apps and games.
You can use Gen AI to reverse engineer apps like Adobe Photoshop, Microsoft Word, and turn console games into PC games. The results aren’t perfect, but will continue to improve. This is destroying the moat of software companies.
🔴 Mathematicians are having an existential crisis as AI purportedly solved many of the math puzzles that have kept them busy for decades.
As an ex-photojournalist, I always tell people how the photography industry was wiped out by smartphone cameras and social media, but few ever shed tears for jobless photographers. It’s hard to, because the average Joe does not realise how much effort, skill, and intellect goes into their work. Will people shed tears for your job when it disappears?
🔴 Motion graphics designers are also hit hard – Anyone can make decent motion graphics now with AI.
🔴 There are the cute Microducks promoted by Jensen Huang. Then there are the Unitree robots who can now somersault towards you and land a fast karate chop.
It’s too much to take in at once, but I see these incidents as inevitable disruptions as our current fabric of society (and reality) is ripped apart by AI and we have to sew it back together into a new design.
IMO, the only way forward is to understand how to use AI well and learn where we can take the reins. I don’t bother to debate with anti-AI people because I need the bandwidth to keep pace with AI developments, learn the new AI techniques, and share them with other people.
As Jim Rohn said, “Don’t wish it were easier, wish you were better. Don’t wish for less problems, wish for more skills. Don’t wish for less challenge, wish for more wisdom.”