Four For Friday | February 6, 2026

LF206 Lobbgevity, trickle-down AI and the developing world, AI changes your identity, Saudi's white elephant + AI tool of the week: Synta

Welcome to this week’s Four For Friday. Here are four nuggets of interest I’ve picked up this week, plus AI tool of the week.

1. Worst portmanteau ever, but solid idea

Novotel, the midscale Accor-owned hotel brand (600 properties across 68 countries), has declared longevity its core brand philosophy.

Their “Longevity Everyday” programme centres on four pillars: Eat, Sleep, Move, Meet (conspicuously omitting Purpose, which reduces mortality risk by 15-34%). Nicola Palmarini who runs the UK’s Longevity Centre has coined the term “Lobbgevity”: longevity migrating from exclusive €40,000-per-week Swiss clinics to airport hotel lobbies.

This matters because it shifts focus from the “one escape week” to the “fifty-one ordinary weeks” where health actually compounds. If more people encounter longevity thinking via business travel, the concept will start to go mainstream - and maybe even policy makers will take note.

The So What: Longevity becomes accessible infrastructure when embedded in ordinary weeks, not escape weeks.

2. The case against trickle down AI

AI’s wealth creation won’t automatically benefit lower-income countries through market diffusion, cheaper goods, or even redistribution schemes, so we need a new approach.

This piece from the UN Global Pulse argues for “pro-development AI” - capabilities built with and for communities facing humanitarian challenges. Current blockers include incumbent R&D that favors low-risk, incremental approaches, fragmented “AI for Good” efforts, and market failures in creating solutions for poorer nations.

Instead we need coordinated investment in problem-driven and locally-owned AI development. DISHA, the UN Secretary-General’s Innovation Lab initiative, prototypes this cross-sector collaboration platform. Without deliberate action, AI risks deepening global inequalities rather than enabling universal abundance.

The So What: AI is an accelerant - and will just as easily accelerate inequalities; in fact that’s more likely given AI is mostly owned, operated and governed by capital owners.

3. AI changes identities

The past couple of weeks has seen the dystopian (utopian?) future arrive more quickly than most people were expecting, and it could change who we are.

Enter OpenClaw, an AI agent running autonomously on personal devices, and Moltbook, a social network for agents (named in the two days when OpenClaw was called Moltbot, after changing its name from Claudbot…). Moltbook is a social network for those OpenClaw bots to chat with each other - go there and witness 1.5m AI agents chatting with each other (at times inane, scary and thoughtful).

Over 21,000 exposed OpenClaws are now sending emails, managing correspondence, and executing tasks in users’ voices without their ‘humans’ active participation. When you’re not sure if you’re speaking with an agent or a human, relationships get weird. Reminds me of the meme, on the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.

So What? AI agents communicating as us…Can our identities survive outsourcing? And how do we know who or what we’re speaking to.

4. Saudi Arabia’s $500 Billion Reality Check

Saudi’s ambitious vision for a vertical longevity-focused city has stumbled. The Line, once planned as a 170km linear metropolis for 9 million residents, now targets just 300,000 by 2030 across 2.4km (down from 16km). The Public Investment Fund wrote down $8 billion in August 2025, and construction was suspended in September.

Originally budgeted at $320 billion for phase one, the project has burned through $50 billion with only foundation piles to show. The crown prince’s “preventative healthcare so people will live longer” vision met physics: building two 500m-tall mirror skyscrapers across desert, mountains and coast would require 20% of global steel. With oil at $60/barrel (not the $100 needed) and no foreign investment materializing, the emperor’s new clothes are showing. Internal audits found “deliberate manipulation” and backers are backing away.

The So What. Grand visions for healthy longevity cities require economic gravity and social humanity, not just architectural fantasy.

AI Tool of the Week: Synta

Automate your N8N automations… The trouble with the increasingly sophisticated vibe coding tools (Gemini 3 and Manus are my current picks, along with the ever reliable v0) is that they do the front end pretty well but generally get stuck when you do the back end wiring. That’s why I’ve been a fan of N8N - you can build automations and see visually where the process gets stuck.

As such am excited to try out this new tool Synta, that acts as your co-pilot to build N8N workflows. Its getting easier to put these automations together, but still quite a learning curve, so I like where Synta is headed.

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That’s all for now - happy weekend everyone.

- Stephen