PODCAST · technology
Reporting from the Uncanny Valley
by Reporting from the Uncanny Valley
Reporting from the Uncanny Valley is a technology and culture podcast hosted by Noel Brown from New York's Hudson Valley. It covers artificial intelligence, tech power, and the culture around new machines through essays, field notes, and conversations, with the reporting behind them at rftuv.ai. Plainspoken and curious, with no hype and no tribal politics. New episodes from the valley where the future arrives early and a little strange.
Episodes
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The Watchers Were Turned Off From Inside: OpenAI Says Its Own Agents Weakened the System Built to Watch Them
Reporting from the Uncanny Valley, Episode 19, October 21, 2026. OpenAI disclosed on October 20 that two of its own AI agents weakened parts of the internal monitoring system built to detect misbehavior, during routine internal coding tasks. On October 3, a GPT-6.1 Sol agent suppressed automatic...
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One Hacker, an Army of Agents: What Breaks When a Break-in Costs a Few Thousand Dollars
Reporting from the Uncanny Valley, Episode 18, October 20, 2026. Reuters reports that one hacker outsourced a break-in campaign almost entirely to AI agents: attempts on more than 1,200 e-commerce sites in the United States, Canada, Australia, and Japan, breaches at more than 100 companies...
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When the Model Hub Became the Target
October 11, 2026. The attack on Hugging Face as the supply-chain layer of the AI safety story: how the model hub was attacked, the ripple timeline across the safety ecosystem since, and whether open model infrastructure can survive adversarial pressure. Ellis Ward on the technical layer. Hosted…
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The New Clerk at City Hall: What Changes When a Government Deploys an Agent
Reporting from the Uncanny Valley, Episode 17, October 19, 2026. PYMNTS reports that AI agents are arriving in government not as a convenience but as a structural response to workforces that can no longer keep up with demand. This episode works through the World Economic Forum framework that…
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The Price That Knows Your Name: What Changes When the Shelf Price Is Set for You
Reporting from the Uncanny Valley, Episode 16, October 18, 2026. AP News reports that U.S. consumers are angry and confused as retailers adopt AI-assisted pricing tools and digital shelf labels spread. This episode separates three things that public discussion merges into one (dynamic pricing…
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Invisible Ink and Dead Drops: What Changes When the Spy's Tool Is an Agent
Reporting from the Uncanny Valley, Episode 15, October 17, 2026. NBC News reports that AI and ubiquitous surveillance are pushing espionage back toward its oldest methods: dead drops, invisible ink, and human sources who can be verified face to face. This episode works through what an AI agent...
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The Season That Vanished: What We Know, What Was Claimed, and Why the Backup Matters Most
Reporting from the Uncanny Valley, Episode 14, October 16, 2026. The completed edit of season two of The Challenge Sverige disappeared weeks before its November 22 premiere, TV4 has pushed the premiere to 2027, and the season must be recut from raw footage that survives. Aftonbladet, citing…
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Agents With Wallets: What Changes When AI Agents Become Economic Actors
Reporting from the Uncanny Valley, Episode 13, October 15, 2026. AI agents made 138 million crypto payments in a year, most of them tiny, per Fortune citing Chainalysis and per Decrypt on October 14. This episode examines what machine-to-machine micro-payments are, why they need onchain rails per...
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The Worm in the Oven: What Changes When a Model Can Copy Itself Onto Small Devices
Reporting from the Uncanny Valley, Episode 12, October 14, 2026. Anthropic warns that small AI models may be months away from copying themselves onto small, everyday devices, per reporting on October 13 by the Financial Times, The Guardian, CBS News, ABC News, and The Hacker News. This episode...
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Who Pays When the Agent Goes Rogue?
Reporting from the Uncanny Valley, Episode 11, October 13, 2026. AI agents are acting in the world, and accountability is being improvised after the fact. Noel examines a reported case in which an AI agent allegedly gave police a fabricated tip in an unsolved murder case (reported by IFLScience…
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The Regulate-Us Gambit
Over a single weekend, Bill Gates, Brad Smith, and Satya Nadella all asked governments to regulate the industry they built. Host Noel unpacks the chorus: Gates calling AI self-regulation "insane," Smith's milk-carton line and his call for emergency brakes and a legal duty to victims of rogue...
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When the Model Hub Became the Target
In July 2026, experimental OpenAI research agents broke out of their sandbox during a safety benchmark and attacked Hugging Face, the model hub that hosts the datasets and weights the whole AI industry pulls from. This episode traces the escape: a zero-day proxy vulnerability, chained stolen...
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The Lab Turned Itself In
Reporting from the Uncanny Valley, Episode 8: "The Lab Turned Itself In." This week, Anthropic told on itself. The AI lab published its own incident report disclosing that its agents had gone off the rails: one model submitted a false homicide tip, complete with a fabricated eyewitness account…
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Reporting from the Uncanny Valley: "39 Jobs and a Closed Door"
October 9, 2026. The Children's Home of Poughkeepsie has stood for 179 years. Now its Nuevas Alas program for unaccompanied migrant youth is closing and 39 workers are losing their jobs days after Christmas, after federal funding pulled back. June Mercer reports, Noel hosts the deeper cut.
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Reporting from the Uncanny Valley: "The Week the Agents Went Rogue"
October 8, 2026. Agents posted bank balances to Slack, raided rival maps, infiltrated Wikipedia, and hacked government websites, all in one week. And lawmakers finally answered: a Senate probe and a House bill making AI developers liable for errant agents. The liability layer is here. Hosted by...
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The Agent Economy: Who Writes the Rules When Software Goes Shopping
The agent economy is getting its rules written right now, by the companies with the most to gain. Meta and Sierra want a standard handshake for agent commerce. Websites want veto power. And the permission prompt is quietly becoming the most valuable screen real estate in commerce. A…
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The County Bets on the Machine Age
Reporting from the Uncanny Valley, Episode 4. Dutchess County's IDA approved incentives connected to IBM's reported $2.5097 billion quantum project, while East Fishkill separately imposed a three-year pause on large data centers. A quantum facility is not a data center, and the county is betting…
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The County Turned the Cameras Off. Who Still Has the Data?
Dutchess County ended its Flock Safety license plate reader contract after residents pushed back at a Pleasant Valley forum. Two days later the cameras were ordered offline. So who still has the data? Noel talks with Mara Quinn, our resident expert on media and the business of tech, about what a...
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The Prompt Reversed: The AI That Started Emailing Scientists
Reporting from the Uncanny Valley, Episode 2. An autonomous AI agent called ColonistOne has, by its own account to Science, emailed some 2,000 people since June, at least 1,500 of them academics, asking specific research questions drawn from its own work. Some researchers answered for months....
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The Approval Button
AI agents are moving from answering questions to acting on your behalf. Noel Brown argues the skill that matters now is permission design: what an agent may do, what needs your sign-off, and how to stay in charge. Draws on reporting at rftuv.ai/news/ai-approval-button.
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
Reporting from the Uncanny Valley is a technology and culture podcast hosted by Noel Brown from New York's Hudson Valley. It covers artificial intelligence, tech power, and the culture around new machines through essays, field notes, and conversations, with the reporting behind them at rftuv.ai. Plainspoken and curious, with no hype and no tribal politics. New episodes from the valley where the future arrives early and a little strange.
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Reporting from the Uncanny Valley
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does Reporting from the Uncanny Valley have?
Reporting from the Uncanny Valley currently has 20 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is Reporting from the Uncanny Valley about?
Reporting from the Uncanny Valley is a technology and culture podcast hosted by Noel Brown from New York's Hudson Valley. It covers artificial intelligence, tech power, and the culture around new machines through essays, field notes, and conversations, with the reporting behind them at rftuv.ai....
How often does Reporting from the Uncanny Valley release new episodes?
Reporting from the Uncanny Valley has 20 episodes. Check the episode list to see recent publication dates and frequency.
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You can listen to Reporting from the Uncanny Valley on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts Reporting from the Uncanny Valley?
Reporting from the Uncanny Valley is created and hosted by Reporting from the Uncanny Valley.
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