Tech & AI

Can an AI assistant run your home – and how much should it be allowed to do? Robo sets up a smarter home: lights, music, reminders, a shared calendar, a camera search. Then he starts asking the less glamorous questions: What does the home need to know? Where does the data go? Who else uses the display? What still works when the internet fails? And what does all this cost after the unboxing? A calm, vendor-neutral look at AI assistants at home, with one short news section on Apple HomeView, Gemini for Home and Alexa+.

Your website appears in Google – but people aren't clicking. Why? In this episode, Robo discovers how AI summaries and searches without result clicks can change the journey from a question to a website. We explain what the research actually shows, why not every traffic drop is caused by AI, and how website owners can distinguish visibility, visits, and real business results. Featuring research from SparkToro and Similarweb, Pew Research Center, and Google's published guidance. All business examples are fictional. Research dates and geographic scope are shown on screen.

Robo uses AI to build a booking app for car repair shops. It works – and then he finds ten apps that look almost the same, some of them free. So why would anyone pay for his? We follow Robo into one small (fictional) workshop: why your biggest competitor might be a notebook, why watching beats pitching, how a calendar app turns into a simple repair-status update, why "Great idea!" isn't a customer yet, what a paid service has to take care of, how a price has to work for both sides – and what to do when someone copies your screens.

Robo asks an AI to help plan dinner. The answer appears in seconds – but behind it are chips, cooling, a grid connection and a power supply. Why can a brand-new AI data centre be ready and still wait for power? We follow one question from a phone to a power plant: training vs. inference, why cooling needs electricity too, why generating power and delivering it are two different jobs, why a grid connection can't be downloaded, why more efficient chips can still mean more total electricity, what can ease the bottleneck – and whether this affects your electricity bill.

Robo built a small car-maintenance web app with help from AI, and a friend hosts it under a subdomain. Now he wants to "make it secure" – but what actually needs protecting? We follow one oil-change entry through the address, DNS, the server, the application and the database, and see what HTTPS, logins, permissions and Cloudflare each do – and don't do.

What is a blockchain? Think of a digital notebook shared across computers, with a history designed to be difficult to secretly rewrite. Robo borrows a drill from his neighbourhood tool library – and the lending notebook turns into a blockchain, step by step: shared copies, linked blocks with digital fingerprints, signatures, and rules for agreeing which history to follow.

What is cryptocurrency – and what do you actually own when you own crypto? Robo follows a bitcoin payment, looks inside his wallet (a keyring, not a bag of coins), decides who holds his keys, and watches the price of an imaginary coin halve while his number of coins stays the same.

Your phone has a lithium battery. So does your laptop. So why are airlines so worried about your power bank?