Warning: Smart glasses are nearby!

ALISTER: Wayve just secured £1.1bn and is launching robotaxis in London this year with Uber. I’m thrilled! No more small talk. No unsolicited opinions on the congestion charge. The future is here and honestly it's long overdue. Progress waits for no one, including people who voted to leave and then complain about fuel prices.

MERIDYTH: Lovely for you… Meanwhile, 100k+ gig drivers took out car loans specifically to drive for these platforms, often at punishing interest rates. And now, no redundancy. No retraining. Just a monthly payment on a depreciating car just made obsolete.

ALISTER: Fair, but the same argument was made about ATMs replacing bank tellers and Google Maps replacing the A-Z. Jobs shift, not vanish. Besides, Wayve needs engineers, safety monitors, fleet managers. Different jobs, but jobs nonetheless.

MERIDYTH: Jobs may shift, sure. But last year, hackers accessed connected vehicles, locked owners out, seized control of ignition and door locks, and demanded ransom. Vehicle ransomware attacks more than doubled last year alone. You're replacing the only human who can't be hacked.

ALISTER: Cybersecurity is pretty serious. But Wayve's AI learns continuously, and software flaws get patched overnight. No garage, no recall needed. The bigger irony? Human error causes nearly a third of road collisions in London specifically. We're debating robot risk while the drunk guy in a Transit van remains perfectly legal.

MERIDYTH: So your plan is to displace low-income workers still paying off their cars, hand control of London's roads to hackable software, and console everyone with the stat that humans are worse. 🙄

Linguists have discovered that baby chickens respond to the bouba-kiki effect just like humans, instinctively linking rounded shapes with soft sounds and jagged ones with sharp ones. While you spend the afternoon wondering if your lunch has an inner monologue, why not take a second to share The AM Squabble!

🌿 Labour's worst nightmare. Left-leaning voters fed up with Starmer handed the Green Party a victory in Gorton & Denton, a seat Labour won by 13,000 votes just 2 years ago. With Reform to his right and the Greens to his left, Starmer is being squeezed from both sides. Talk about rock and a hard place!

🗳️ Speaking of crying. Nigel Farage has alleged instances of "family voting" after losing the G&D by-election. Independent observers saw family voting in 68% of polling stations. The Greens say it’s "straight out of the Trump playbook." (“Family voting” is when a family member coerces a vote, by entering the same polling booth, for example.)

💷 Accidental cash cow. Oxford's temporary £5 congestion fee was predicted to generate £320k monthly. Instead, oblivious motorists handed the council over £1m in January alone, mostly through penalty fines. Officials are now deciding how to spend their surprise windfall.

🐟 Mackerel off the menu. Waitrose is the first UK supermarket to suspend mackerel sales over sustainability fears. With Atlantic stocks facing total collapse due to relentless international overfishing, posh shoppers must now embrace herring and sardines instead.

🔞 Not safe for kids. The UK data watchdog has just slapped a massive £14.47m fine on Reddit for failing to keep children off its site. Regulators want strict checks to protect minors but tech giants argue that hoovering up more personal identity documents completely ruins anonymous online browsing.

GOOD NEWS… for having one less baddie after Iranian state TV confirmed the death of its supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, from joint US/Israeli operations. BAD NEWS… for the Gulf as Iran’s new interim leaders vowed revenge with a slew of attacks on Sunday across the region.

🇺🇸 Record-breaking victory lap. Trump spent a record 108 minutes telling Congress America is "winning so much" during his State of the Union. With approval ratings sliding and the Supreme Court binning his tariffs, he's clearly got some convincing to do.

🤖 My best friend, Claude. The Pentagon is threatening to seize Anthropic's Claude AI after the company refused to allow it to be used for autonomous weapons. Anthropic says AI is too unreliable to make life-and-death decisions. The US military and OpenAI (ChatGPT) disagrees. Je t'aime, Claude! ❤️

🏅 Party of one. Milano Cortina Paralympic organisers face a deeply awkward opening night as multiple countries ditch the ceremony. The growing boycott over Russian participation means countless athletes will spend their big night stuck in a hotel rather than parading.

🕵 Beijing's AI spies. China's secret police are using ChatGPT to orchestrate a global intimidation campaign against dissidents. Operatives deployed the chatbot to forge documents and impersonate officials.

🏳️‍🌈 Going Dutch properly. The Netherlands has appointed its first gay leader as 38 year old Rob Jetten takes the top job in The Hague. He must now juggle painful healthcare cuts and a massive defence budget while begging for every single vote to keep his coalition afloat.

😴 Insomnia? Retrain your brain. Forget sleeping pills. "Adult sleep training" supposedly and quietly cures chronic insomniacs by restricting your bedtime and rewiring sleep habits. Six weeks of discipline and you might actually sleep through the night!

👶 Science fiction realised. In a genuinely mind boggling UK first, a woman has given birth to a healthy baby boy using a womb transplanted from a deceased donor. Grace Bell was born without the organ but finally welcomed little Hugo thanks to an incredibly generous final gift and sheer medical wizardry.

🤧 Hay fever got you sneezing nonstop? It’s not just you. After buckets of rain, the sudden warm spell has sent tree pollen to "very high" levels, weeks early. A quarter of hay fever sufferers react to tree pollen, and if the mild weather continues, May to July could be miserable. Stock up on antihistamines.

🍎 Back to school. Professionals in their 40s and 50s, from city brokers to TV producers, are retraining as teachers after AI wiped out their careers. A third of people now fear AI will hit their income. I guess the one job a chatbot can't do is keeping Year 8 in line.

⛪ Thou shalt not scroll. If your local priest sounds suspiciously robotic lately, you are not alone. Pope Leo XIV has banned clergy from using artificial intelligence to draft homilies. He also scolded them for hunting viral TikTok fame, insisting they actually use their own brains instead.

🧹 Rogue cleaning operation. One tech worker managed to seize control of smart vacuums across twenty four countries. After uncovering a massive security flaw, he watched live video feeds of living rooms worldwide.

By Alister

I absolutely loved How to Get to Heaven from Belfast on Netflix. If you enjoyed Derry Girls, Lisa McGee’s latest is essential viewing.

It is a hilarious comedy that weaves in genuine thriller-style terror and deeply moving moments. With clever writing and stunning camera work, it’s a gripping, twisty journey that never overstays its welcome.

While the door is open for a second season, I would be perfectly happy if this remains a one-off masterpiece. Do yourself a favour and watch it.

By Alister

American singer Bebe Rexha received a very traditional British welcome this week while visiting the capital.

After stepping onto her balcony to enthusiastically shout "Hello London!" for her social media followers, she was immediately met with a blunt, perfectly timed "Shut up!" from a disgruntled local on the street below.

Americans might expect a cinematic, cheering response to their presence, but Brits generally just want to get on with their day in peace without being shouted at.

World Book Day is on Thursday, which means it’s officially time for parents across the country to start panicking about which character they can recreate using only a cardboard box and some old masking tape. Join us next week for another Squabble and we’ll find out how Meridyth got on with her son…

Alister & Meridyth