Oh, brilliant. Gather round, comrades. It’s time for another installment of “Tech Executives Discover That Computers Need Electricity.” This time, they’ve dressed it up in a shiny frock and called it “2026 Data Trends.” Christ almighty, where do we even start?
By Martyn Rhisiart Jones For Energy Unplugged – a Cambriano partner
Walk through any tech conference today, and you can feel it: the hum of inevitability. AI will cure diseases. It will drive cars and write novels. AI will run governments. If you believe the BS booth graphics, it will probably solve loneliness, too.
The problem is, we’ve been here before.
Artificial intelligence has been promising to change everything since the 1950s. And every decade or so, we rediscover the same fundamental truth: machines don’t magically create wisdom. They just scale whatever understanding, or misunderstanding, we feed them.
I know this because I spent years building the early stuff. Neural networks, parallel distributed processing, and automatic feature extraction. The “deep learning” of 1987 with less RAM and worse haircuts. The technology was exciting, even miraculous. But back then, as now, it struggled to live up to the grand claims that surrounded it.
Violent conflict does not end through force alone. History teaches us that the only way out of war, brutality, and suffering is through negotiation. And negotiation, in the real world, always requires compromise.
Yet today, calls for dialogue are too often branded as weakness, or worse, as ‘siding with terrorists.’ This is a dangerous lie. Advocating for peace is not an endorsement of violence. It is an insistence on the value of life. It is a recognition of the dignity of communities and the survival of societies.
Darlings, it’s December 2025 and the party is now officially sweaty. The champagne has gone warm. Someone’s been sick in the ficus. The DJ is playing the same four AI remixes on loop. He is frantically checking the fire exits. Here is your updated field guide to the seven trends. These were going to “reshape humanity.” Now they are mostly reshaping venture capitalists’ therapy bills.
Imagine the stage is almost completely dark. One spotlight, maybe two. Our favourite standup philosopher stands perfectly still for eight full seconds. He just breathes through his nose. It’s like a man who’s just found a half-eaten kebab in his coat pocket from 2009. Then, very slowly, he begins.
Thank you… thank you for coming… to our Good Strat and LinkedIn dog and pony show.
Martyn Rhisiart Jones, Sir Afilonius Rex, Lile de Alba and our agentic intelligent actor, Selina Savant.
Spain, 6th December 2025.
The Logic Layer: Why Old-School Rules Are the New Guardrails for Generative AI
A hybrid renaissance is quietly rewriting the future of trustworthy artificial intelligence. The great folks here at Good Strat humbly champion this movement. In the fevered race to build ever-larger language models, a counterintuitive truth has begun to emerge from the labs. Surprisingly, sometimes the best way to make AI smarter is to shackle it with centuries-old logic. Modus ponens is that dusty Latin phrase from Aristotelian syllogism (“if P then Q; P, therefore Q”). It is enjoying an unexpected second act. It has become one of the most promising tools for keeping generative AI honest. It helps make AI coherent and, dare one say, responsible.
The Emergence of Goal-Directed Autonomous AI Systems: An Evidence-Based Enterprise Framework
Sir Horatio Pollox with the collaboration of Martyn Rhisiart Jones, Lila de Alba and Sir Afilonius Rex
London, Paris, New York and A Coruña, 5th December 2025
Autonomous AI agents are goal-directed systems. They show planning, tool-use, long-horizon reasoning, and continuous execution. This signifies a phase transition in the capabilities of artificial intelligence.
Recent benchmarking (e.g., GAGA-MAGA, GAIA&GAIA, WebSerena, and AgentBotch) shows state-of-the-art agents now outperform human baselines on multi-step, real-world tasks by margins exceeding 1040 %.
Perché il Data Warehousing è il futuro noioso, brutale e meraviglioso dei dati
Martyn Rhisiart Jones
A Coruña, 12/05/2025
Il moderno data stack si è trasformato in un sistema idraulico cyberpunk: tubi infiniti che alimentano altri tubi, strati sovrapposti come l’ampliamento di un loft costruito da qualcuno che ha imparato la falegnameria su TikTok. Da qualche parte un CTO insiste ancora sul fatto che il data lake “genererà valore aziendale da un trimestre all’altro”, con la stessa calma di qualcuno che sta negoziando con il proprio rapitore.
Pourquoi l’entreposage de données est l’avenir ennuyeux, brutal et fascinant des données
Martyn Rhisiart Jones – La Corogne, 12/05/2025
L’architecture de données moderne s’est transformée en un réseau de canalisations cyberpunk : des tuyaux à l’infini alimentant d’autres tuyaux, des couches empilées comme une extension de loft construite par un bricoleur du dimanche. Quelque part, un directeur technique persiste à affirmer que le lac de données « apportera de la valeur ajoutée à l’entreprise d’ici peu », avec le calme imperturbable d’un négociateur face à son ravisseur.