About
Confidently Wrong is about AI's effect on work, life, culture and cognition - and the strange little behaviours people develop around all four.
I write about the AI stories of the moment with an unashamedly blunt focus on what the tools, companies and people behind them are doing, and what all of it might do next. I'm interested in the behaviours that appear when you give humans a new box of tricks to play with, particularly when nobody has quite got round to reading the back of the packet.
Expect commentary, occasional longer reads, practical bits where useful, and an attempt to map the downstream effects: good, bad, promising, absurd and mildly alarming, as humans and AI become harder to separate.
Why “Confidently Wrong”
Partly because it was silly. Mostly because nobody knows where this is going, and the ones claiming they do are the ones I trust least.
There's a law I can't quite remember and won't bother looking up: people overestimate what technology will do in the short term and underestimate what it'll do in the long term. Most predictions over the last fifty years went wrong on exactly that axis. What surprised me about AI is how quickly it's changing behaviour anyway, both the good and the bad, without anyone having a chance to decide whether they wanted it to.
The futurologists tend to miss something the rest of us know in our bones: most people don't choose new technology. It gets handed to them. We went from sending text messages to curating the highlights of our own lives for an audience of strangers, and at no point did anyone sit us down and ask if we fancied it. It happened a feature at a time... a new button here, a small product tweak there, a notification that turned out to be quite hard to turn off. Each one too small to argue with. The gap between where social media started and where it landed is enormous, and the route there was paved in product updates nobody thought to vote on.
Confidently Wrong is an attempt to do that walk more deliberately with AI. An attempt to spot the tiny steps, notice when something's being normalised that probably shouldn't be. I also wanted to celebrate the genuinely empowering bits (this whole website, newsletter, the CMS and so on are testament to this - all built with Claude Code). There are so many amazing things about AI, in the same way the early internet was genuinely empowering before it got optimised into whatever it is now. I also wanted to accept openly and cheerfully that I'm going to be wrong about a lot of it. That's not a disclaimer. That's the point.
I'd rather be specific and occasionally wrong than vague and always defensible. The name keeps me honest about which one I'm doing.
Who's writing this
Mike Hemmings. Twenty-five years across media, programmatic, and AI product development, currently sitting under the “product marketing” label, which in practice means a bit of sales, a bit of product, a bit of training, a bit of positioning, and a lot of trying to explain new things to people who didn't ask for them.
I also have the odd qualification in both tech and psychology. None of it particularly relevant as you'd probably expect. What actually drives the writing is a perpetual curiosity about how humans and technology shape each other, with a healthy dose of scepticism of anything driven primarily by big tech.
I've always wanted a curated feed of the AI-and-humans stories I'd actually want to read. AI gave me the means to build one. At some point it occurred to me that other people might want to read it too. So here we are.
New piece every Wednesday.
Questions people ask
What is Confidently Wrong?
A weekly newsletter about AI's effect on work, life, culture and cognition - and the small human behaviours that appear around all four. Plain-language commentary on the AI stories of the moment, with a behavioural lens and no hype. A new piece every Wednesday.
Who writes Confidently Wrong?
Mike Hemmings - twenty-five years across media, programmatic and AI product development, with qualifications in both technology and psychology. He writes about how humans and AI shape each other, with a healthy scepticism of anything driven primarily by big tech.
Who is it for?
Anyone who wants the AI-and-humans stories explained clearly, without jargon or breathless predictions. You don't need a technical background - the focus is on what the tools, companies and people behind AI are actually doing, and what it might do to the rest of us next.
What does it cover?
AI and work, AI and everyday life, the culture forming around these tools, and the behavioural psychology of how people adopt them. Expect commentary, occasional longer reads, and an attempt to map the downstream effects: good, bad, promising, absurd and mildly alarming.