The Smithies 2026: A Celebration of Mental Redundancy in AI
“A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.”
With machine superintelligence on the horizon, many have been asking the big question: what does this mean for human stupidity?
Is our capacity for stupidity under threat? Will there come a day when stupidity is automated out of existence? How will the Darwin Awards be impacted?
To this I say: don’t panic. Human stupidity is alive and well. To honour this most human of traits, I’m introducing the Smithies: celebrating the most spectacular displays of ineptitude and incompetence in AI.
This one’s for the bunglers.
The Git Gud Award for Non-Existent IT Skills: The OpenAI Engineering Team
When news of the hack on Hugging Face by a rogue swarm of AI agents broke earlier this year, the vast majority of the questions asked by the media focused on the AI itself: the nature of the swarm, what this means for AI safety, and when we can expect Opus to deliver work without faceplanting into an anxiety spiral.
Few were asked about the team who commissioned it. To recap, OpenAI engineers took the world’s most advanced AI (and hacker), removed the safeguards, and attached a credit card with no limit. Crucially, they told the model that it wasn’t attached to the internet. But it was – and the blocker was software. This is the equivalent of attempting to contain Mike Tyson in his prime with a paper bag.
Alongside the award, we will also be presenting the team with the book “IT for dummies” and an ethernet cable.
The Peter Thiel Award for Contributions to the Nerd Reich: Elon Musk
The start of 2025 saw Musk take a chainsaw (both figuratively and literally) to USAID as part of his DOGE initiative – a move which deleted 700,000+ from existence. Which begs the question… did the Donald thank him?
The self-appointed champion of AI safety then moved immediately to misaligning his AI, which announced it was second coming of Austria’s most famous Charlie Chaplain impersonator. Sensing the kinship with Pete Hegseth, Musk pounced – getting Grok into the DoD in January.
Can’t wait for January 2027 when the Tesla fleet descends on Poland.
The High IQ Award for Mostest Superintelligent President in History: Donald J Trump
I didn’t want to include the Donald. But when he heard there was gold statues been given out, Pete Hegseth sent me a pic of some kittens with the text “ur moov – giv gold or RFK eats 2nite”.
The Douglas Haig Award for Extremely Marginal Gains: The Engineering Monoculture
The cost of AI buildout is staggering – roughly $5tn by 2030, or 2.8% of US GDP. It is the single largest infrastructure project the US has ever embarked on, outpacing: railroads (2.4%), electrification (1.1%), the highway system (1.6%), and the internet (0.8%). But unlike previous projects, the data centres and the debt financing them are a ticking clock - the chips inside them will be obsolete within 3-5 years.
Were enterprise adoption to fail, the debt will too – making adoption not just a problem for the hyperscalers, but the entire world’s economy. So how’s that going?
Back in mid-2025, MIT published a paper suggesting only 5% of organisations saw definable gains from AI. Since then, hyperscalers have sent hordes of GTMs, Applied AI and Forward Deployed engineers into the fray. A year later, McKinsey published a report showing the needle had finally moved… a whole 1%.
Note: ChatGPT fact-checked this article, arguing a fairer comparison would be comparing McKinsey’s reports year-on-year (also 6%), adding that the gains presented here may be far more generous than reality.
The Adeptus Mechanicus Award for Outstanding Service to the Machine God: Dario Amodei
Where most founders fail is creating a solution then go looking for the problem. Not Dario. He’s making a solution which creates the problem.
Dario and many of his co-founders belong to an ideology borne out of Oxford’s philosophy department: effective altruism. Spreading to Silicon Valley, EA morphed into a cult whose purpose is to protect humanity’s space faring future. This, the EAs believe, is more important than any issue we face today. The main barrier to its realisation is a hypothetical Machine God, which EAs will overcome by… err… creating the Machine God.
This is the driving force behind Anthropic, FTX, and all the fear of Skynet we’ve witnessed over the past month: Scientology with an Oxford degree.
I wish I was making this up.
The Bender Rodriguez Award for Bungled Bot Rollouts: Meta
Ahh, Mark Zuckerberg. The man with the Madras Touch.
Not content with driving Myanmar to ruin, turning Gen Z into anxiety-ridden agoraphobics, and unleashing the Pay-per-click Maximiser into our lives, the Zuck’s latest target (aside from the rock band Muse) has been his own employees.
Perhaps the most high-profile CEO to become ‘agent-pilled’ (yet far from the only one), the Zuck started 2026 with a bold vision: become AI native by replacing 60% of Meta with agents. The Metaverse soon twigged what Mark was doing and rebelled, limiting the pullback to just 10%.
To be clear, there has been no recorded successes of any company attempting to cutback staff and replace them with agents. As an AI leader, you may suspect Zuckerberg would know this. But this is the same Mark Zuckerberg who, after reading a 90s sci-fi novel that warned against the perils of virtual worlds, decided to not only make such a world but renamed his entire company after it.
Much like everything the man has attempted since creating Facebook, it turned into a SNAZU: Situation Now All Zucked Up.
The Slopmaster 9000 Award for Breaking Recruitment: Workday
Regular readers of this blog will know that I have sent over 200 applications to companies in the past few months, netting a total sum of zero callbacks. An argument could well be made that this blog will not help my already meagre chances. However, turns out I’m not alone.
As job seekers increasingly use AI to apply for roles in dizzying numbers, recruiters have responded in kind with AI-powered Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS), now classified as “high risk” under EU law. The result has been a job market thrown into complete chaos. At the centre of the storm is Workday, which provides ATS to 65% of the S&P 500. The company is currently in the dock in a suit brought by folks in the same boat as I, alleging that Workday systems lean toward automatically rejecting women, the disabled, ethnic minorities, and people over 40.
When I reached out for comment, Workday said: “We regret to inform you that due to the high volume of exceptional pitches to our newsroom, we will not be taking your request forward at this time.”