Magnús Smári Smárason
Technology that serves life. Not the other way around.
Digital automation, human agency.
A place to get your bearings: I filter and share what matters in the world of language models and automation, news, writing, and learning for people who want to understand the technology, not just use it.
I shaped my own role at the University of Akureyri: research, development, and policy around digital automation and large language models. Sixteen years in emergency services before that, then law. Author of the master’s thesis Beyond Fragmentation (2026) and co-author of the book The Irreducible Human (forthcoming).
NowHome, working on the book, the educational material, Borg, and my golf swing.
Recent Articles
Technology serves those who understand it — not those who surrender their judgment.
Systems I've Built
Temjum tæknina
Conversations about AI and society. Exploring the human side of the technology revolution.
These songs are composed by AI (Suno) from a brief I write myself to capture the spirit of each Temjum tæknina episode. All of it is AI — the music is an output, not an author.
Taminn tækni (Tamed technology) — AI-read five-minute summaries of each Temjum tæknina episode. The English voice comes from a local model on my own machine; the Icelandic from ElevenLabs. Every summary opens by disclosing that both the voice and the summary are AI.
For 16 years I trained myself to diagnose complex systems under intense pressure. Now I apply that same thinking to AI governance.
Magnús Smári Smárason
I work at the boundary of technology and humanity: designing and building software driven by large language models and agentic systems — while researching how humanity relates to technological change. That is where the question comes from that drives all of it: how do we preserve human agency inside digital automation?
The whole story →- August 20, 2026NUAS Forum 2026 — talkBella Center, Copenhagen
In the last post, there was a montage. A par 3. A glowing arc that curved toward the trees with a kind of quiet certainty. The tracer did its job with precision. The ball did not. …
Get in touch.
I shaped my own role at the University of Akureyri. It is the research and development of digital automation and large language models, steering how they are adopted, and shaping the policy around them, with one goal: to amplify people, not replace them. From these tools I built a sovereign system for the institution, and I still run it. I advise other institutions and speak on request.
I work at the boundary between high technology and what we cannot hand over to it. If you are in the same place, solving this for real and not on a slide, I would be glad to hear from you.