Shaken Not Burned

Generative AI promised to transform how we work, while Agentic AI is beginning to transform how businesses themselves are built. In this week’s episode of Shaken Not Burned, Felicia Jackson talks to Ethan Ouyang, who is AI ATOMS Spokesperson and responsible for North America Market & Partnerships. ATOMS is the venture building platform developed by DeepWisdom, one of China’s leading artificial intelligence companies. It has been designed as an agentic AI system, helping busine...

AI is becoming one of those topics where the scale of the claims can make it surprisingly difficult to work out what is actually happening. We are told it will transform business, unlock extraordinary productivity gains, reshape jobs, and even help solve major global challenges like climate change. At the same time, there are growing concerns about energy demand, governance failures, bias, job losses, and the sheer speed at which these systems are developing. The dominant narrative tends to...

This is the final episode in our mining arc. Rather than revisiting what we’ve already covered, we step back to ask a different question: what does mining actually teach us about how change happens in complex systems? Across the series, one tension kept coming up. The transition to a cleaner economy depends on scaling one of the most environmentally intensive industries on earth. We need more minerals, but we are deeply uncomfortable with how they are extracted. In practice, that tension show...

Welcome to the latest episode in our mining arc! In the previous two episodes, we covered the geopolitics of critical minerals and whether deep sea mining is the innovation we need to meet growing demand for critical clean tech raw materials. This week, we turn to one of the most important lessons emerging from the mining sector: modern projects succeed when trust is built before the digging begins. How mines affect and benefit people, especially those isolated communities that live on resour...

Welcome to the second instalment of our mining arc. After covering the geopolitics of critical minerals (check out the episode here), this week we ask a harder question: is deep sea mining a necessary innovation, or a risk we don’t yet understand well enough to take? Deep sea mining means extracting minerals from the bottom of the ocean, at depths of 200 metres and beyond, no easy feat. It’s often framed as the next frontier for securing the metals needed for the energy transition – batteries...