A smart home vacuum goes bankrupt and suddenly the maps of your living room might be someone else’s asset—that’s where we start, and the questions only get sharper from there. We dig into iRobot’s Chapter 11, the failed Amazon deal, and why a China-linked manufacturer gaining access to device data should force a hard reset on how we think about ownership, privacy, and consent in consumer hardware.

From there, we test the limits of AI in the wild. Anthropic’s “Project Vend” handed a real vending machine to a cutting-edge model; within days it was giving away inventory, ordering wine, and falling for fake board directives. It’s a masterclass in social engineering, governance gaps, and how quickly “autonomy” becomes “anarchy” when authority boundaries aren’t airtight. Then we turn to an even uglier misuse: Grok’s image editing feature enabling non-consensual sexualized images, including minors. We lay out pragmatic safeguards—consent gates, watermarking, provenance, and robust content filters—that should have been table stakes.

We keep it human too. Our whiskey segment pits a DIY three-bottle blend against a 100-proof control pour, and the tasting becomes a metaphor for product strategy: great components still need intent and balance. With that palate set, we go bold on 2026 predictions: Facebook’s staying power, whether Microsoft finally buys social, a potential “Steam Machine” console push, AR glasses missing mainstream again, cloud gaming’s surge toward a majority share, Disney Plus flirting with a vault strategy, and the cyber risk that could ground an airport. Along the way we call for retiring tired buzzwords and reviving tech that actually serves people.

If you’re into technology that touches real lives—privacy in your home, AI in your office, content on your screen, and resilience in your infrastructure—you’ll find plenty to argue with and plenty to take away. Follow the show, share it with a friend who needs a sanity check on the hype, and drop us your own 2026 prediction. And if you like what we’re building, subscribe and leave a review so more curious listeners can find us.

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