Technology

Donald Trump wants to bring back mining and mineral processing to the US – and he needs to do this if he’s to continue fighting wars. “You cannot claim to have a military strategy without a clear idea of your supply chains,” says economic journalist Wolfgang Münchau. “The specific advantage that both Russia and China have over the West is not simply their wealth of metals and minerals – it’s the fact that they can also process them. China’s expertise in processing its raw material is unparalleled.” Trump has exhorted America’s traditional allies to take responsibility for their own mineral supplies as well as their own defense, and to ditch

This is the story of Paul, a 52-year-old psychiatrist who had a psycho-spiritual crisis triggered by overwork and overuse of AI. But this is not a usual AI cautionary tale, because Paul also says AI helped him navigate said crisis and make sense of it. Is he still in the grip of AI-induced mania? You decide. Paul has ADHD, and took a common form of stimulant to treat it until recently. He is interested in big ideas and spirituality. Early last year, he was working freelance and using AI to help him produce two or three 5,000-word reports a day. Because it was so useful at work, Paul started talking

American conspiracy culture is a tradition with a long lineage, though not a simple one. It runs through the John Birch Society and Mae Brussell, through Bill Cooper and Alex Jones, into QAnon and beyond. There are other tributaries – black nationalist suspicion of COINTELPRO, evangelical end-times theology, militia movements, UFO subcultures – but one dominant current exists in every conspiracy: it speaks from below. The conspirators operate as the hidden orchestrators of surface reality. The deep state, the intelligence agencies, the Fed, the media – at worst, Jews – all sit above normal people, controlling their world. The people telling these stories understand themselves as excluded from power. For

In the 1966 novel Colossus by British author D.F. Jones, a supercomputer (which goes by the name of Colossus) is given control and decision-making power over the US’s nuclear arsenal – a logical and unemotional computer being better placed, it is assumed, to make unemotional decisions than a human. Eventually, Colossus discovers the existence of a similar supercomputer in the USSR and begins communicating with its Russian counterpart in mathematical languages about technological advances beyond human comprehension. Frightened by the possibilities this presents, scientists sever the connection – only for Colossus to threaten to launch nuclear weapons if it isn’t reconnected. Colossus and its newfound Russian friend begin monitoring and controlling their

Cars ruined cities. Anyone can see that cities built before the invention of the automobile are incomparably more beautiful and serene than anything built after them. The contrast between Los Angeles and Prague is unmistakable. But people like things that move fast and make life easier, which means we’re stuck with the modern city hellscape whether we like it or not. And today, the same is true for AI. The contrast between the internet five years ago and today is unmistakable: content-slop, workslop, AI-generated comments, fake opinions and phony judgments, trite phrases, apocalyptic hysteria, the biggest intellectual-property heist in human history – all because of the invention of Large Language

Homo sapiens, as a species, is programmed to anticipate death, disaster and apocalypse. The monster in the mere, the ague that comes from the east, the flood that wipes out all living creatures outside the Ark. The reason children – and adults in horror movies – are scared of the dark is because darkness is where predators strike. We have a sensible evolutionary fear of things that go bump in the night. For thousands of years it was possible to argue this primal fear of apocalypse was overwrought. No matter what humans did, or did not do, we were incapable of destroying ourselves and anything that might destroy us in

Nancy Guthrie had been missing for less than 48 hours when the game began. Not the investigation, which was already under way, with FBI agents crawling the Catalina Foothills and more than 30,000 tips flooding in from the public, but the thing building around her disappearance, the thing that one could generously call “journalism” in both its legacy and citizen varieties.  By the time Ashleigh Banfield named a suspect in the case on her podcast, by the time Megyn Kelly had structured coverage around episode titles such as “Nest Camera Questions, Savannah Stalker Possibilities and Bitcoin Rumblings,” by the time dozens of true-crime influencers had weighed in, the kidnapping of

Even Elon Musk has to face a dose of reality every once in a while. Technology and politics have forced him to turn his gaze away from Mars, for the moment at least, to put Americans back on the surface of the Moon before China gets there. But it might already be too late. If America has any chance of beating China, it now seems inevitable that the next American human landing on the Moon will not be by Musk’s Starship but using a craft being developed by his rival Jeff Bezos. Announcing the pivot, Musk wrote on X: “For those unaware, SpaceX has already shifted focus to building a

Late last year, I published the first theoretical physics paper in which the main idea originated from artificial intelligence – from an AI. And my experience working with the most powerful AI models left me both impressed and wary. The most accurate analogy I can offer is that it’s like something familiar to anyone who has done research: a brilliant colleague who is also unreliable. This colleague can produce deep insights at surprising speed – and then, the next second, make an error that ranges from the trivial to the profound. That tension – capability versus reliability – has shaped how I now use these systems in mathematics and theoretical