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The current market turmoil tells me a new era is breaking, so question everything. Will cable, energy, mobile and social media ever come back? And if not, what’s next?

Will energy stay cheap forever after this week’s devastation? I doubt it, but the economy can finally benefit from fracking’s cheap natural gas. I’d bet so-called clean and renewable energy was set back a decade by having to compete with lower prices. Cheap fossil fuels may also push back any new adoption of carbon-free nuclear energy.

The end of China’s dominance is certainly coming. No one will ever again concentrate manufacturing in China alone. Vietnam and other countries with low-cost labor will benefit

There has been a rising bipartisan clamor, meanwhile, for new regulation of a tech industry that, amid a historic surge in wealth and power over the past decade, has largely had its way in Washington despite concerns raised by critics about its behavior.

In particular, momentum is building in Congress and elsewhere in the federal government for a law requiring tech companies — like newspapers, television stations and other traditional carriers of campaign messages — to disclose who buys political ads and how much they spend on them.

“There is no question that the idea that Silicon Valley is the darling of our markets and of our society — that sentiment is definitely turning,” said Tim O’Reilly, an adviser to tech executives and chief executive of the influential Silicon Valley-based publisher O’Reilly Media.

Top Israeli cyberoperators penetrated a small cell of extremist bombmakers in Syria months ago, the officials said. That was how the United States learned that the terrorist group was working to make explosives that fooled airport X-ray machines and other screening by looking exactly like batteries for laptop computers.

“There were folks working hard on this stuff, and there were some accomplishments that had an impact, but there was no steady stream of jaw-dropping stuff coming forward as some expected,” said Mr. Geltzer, who now teaches law at Georgetown University Law Center. “There was no sort of shining cybertool.”

that paper was a conceptual exercise. The new one uses real-world data — and suggests a more pessimistic future. The researchers said they were surprised to see very little employment increase in other occupations to offset the job losses in manufacturing. That increase could still happen, they said, but for now there are large numbers of people out of work, with no clear path forward — especially blue-collar men without college degrees.

“The conclusion is that even if overall employment and wages recover, there will be losers in the process, and it’s going to take a very long time for these communities to recover,” Mr. Acemoglu said.

“If you’ve worked in Detroit for 10 years, you don’t have the skills to go into health care,” he said. “The market economy is not going to create the jobs by itself for these workers who are bearing the brunt of the change.”

Amid the slithering mess of problems that emerged in 2017, the one that bothers me most is that people don’t seem to know what’s true anymore. “Facts” this year got put in quotation marks.

If we aren’t sure what’s true, how can we act to make things better? If we don’t know where we are on the map, how do we know which way to move? Democracy assumes a well-informed citizenry that argues about solutions — not about facts.

If there are gaps in provenance — an unexplained missing link in the chain of evidence, or signs of misattribution — then those anomalies should be flagged automatically.

Military-grade autonomous drones can fly themselves to a specific location, pick their own targets and kill without the assistance of a remote human operator. Such weapons are known to be in development, but until recently there were no reported cases of autonomous drones killing fighters on the battlefield.

Now, a United Nations report about a March 2020 skirmish in the military conflict in Libya says such a drone, known as a lethal autonomous weapons system — or LAWS — has made its wartime debut. But the report does not say explicitly that the LAWS killed anyone.

The Kargu-2 is an attack drone made by the Turkish company STM that can be operated both autonomously and manually and that purports to use "machine learning" and "real-time image processing" against its targets.

Knowledge is power, as the saying goes, and the invention of the mechanical movable type printing press helped disseminate knowledge wider and faster than ever before.

German goldsmith Johannes Gutenberg is credited with inventing the printing press around 1436

His greatest accomplishment was the first print run of the Bible in Latin, which took three years to print around 200 copies,

ordinary people worn out by the dramas and lies of the past four years have a right to refuse to take Trump’s most enthusiastic supporters seriously. To reject further debate with people whose views are completely incoherent is not only understandable, but sensible.

I am not talking about all 74 million people who voted for Trump. Some voters may well have supported Trump in both 2016 and 2020 with a sense of hesitancy, perhaps focused on a single issue, such as abortion, or because they were making a raw and self-interested calculation about taxes.

Instead, I am talking about the people who are giving Trump their full-throated support to the very end, even as he mulls a military coup; the people who buy weird paintings of Trump crossing the Delaware, or who believe that Trump is an agent of Jesus Christ, or who think that Trump is fighting a blood-drinking ring of pedophiles. These supporters have gone far beyond political loyalty and have succumbed to a kind of mass delusion.

“The government agencies we thought were keeping us safe and secure—the CDC, the FDA, the Police—have either failed or, worse, have been revealed to be active creators of danger and insecurity,” Alex Tabarrok, an economics professor at George Mason University, wrote on Twitter.

Why have America’s instruments of hard and soft power failed so spectacularly in 2020?

We are prepared for wars against states and militant groups, but not against stateless forces such as pandemics and climate change.

Julia Lyons portrayed herself as a busy visiting nurse in Chicago during the great flu pandemic of 1918. But “Slick Julia,” as she came to be known, was no Florence Nightingale.

The 23-year-old Julia, “a woman of diamonds and furs, silken ankles, gem-studded fingers and aliases by the dozens,” was posing as a “flu nurse,” ripping off home-bound patients for cash and jewelry as they suffered and even died, the Chicago Tribune reported in late 1918.

A century before the coronavirus crisis, the 1918 flu was a killing machine, taking the lives of more than 675,000 people in the United States and 50 million around the world.

Rosenstein’s complicity in this machine was ugly, but it was by no means unique. Top officials at the Departments of Justice, Homeland Security, and Health and Human Services all played a role. They were all sowing chaos, inflicting cruelty and causing unfathomable trauma at the behest of a small, vicious cadre up top

his argument was this: The jail time for these misdemeanors was usually a matter of days. So why were these parents not being reunited with their children afterward? “What became clear,” he told me, “is that they never had any intention of reuniting them until the parent gave up and was deported, if ever.”

The federal judge in San Diego agreed, saying the government’s behavior “shocks the conscience,” that the separation policy violated due process and that all separated families had to be reunited within 30 days.

Over the past eight years, the Russian government has promoted the idea that the motherland is surrounded by enemies, filtering the concept through national institutions like schools, the military, the news media and the Orthodox Church. It has even raised the possibility that the country might again have to defend itself as it did against the Nazis in World War II.

And all are united by the near-sacred memory of Soviet victory in World War II — one that the state has seized upon to shape an identity of a triumphal Russia that must be ready to take up arms once more.

This year, the share of Russians saying they feared a world war hit the highest level recorded in surveys dating to 1994 — 62 percent.

Edwards thought young people would be worried about immediate threats, like AI-powered surveillance, misinformation or autonomous weapons that target and kill without human intervention — problems he calls “ultraserious.” But he soon discovered that some students were more focused on a purely hypothetical risk: That AI could become as smart as humans and destroy mankind.

In these scenarios, AI isn’t necessarily sentient. Instead, it becomes fixated on a goal — even a mundane one, like making paper clips — and triggers human extinction to optimize its task.

To prevent this theoretical but cataclysmic outcome, mission-driven labs like DeepMind, OpenAI and Anthropic are racing to build a good kind of AI programmed not to lie, deceive or kill us.

We thus have the privilege of seeing a great civilization at its peak

How much greater would China’s peak have been if Deng Xiaoping had sided with the Tiananmen Square protesters, and liberalized China’s society in addition to its economy? How many great Chinese books, essays, video games, cartoons, TV shows, movies, and songs would we now enjoy if it weren’t for the pervasive censorship regime now in place? How much more would the people of the world have learned from Chinese culture if they could travel there freely and interact with Chinese people freely over the internet? Without a draconian autocrat like Xi Jinping at the helm, would so many Chinese people be looking to flee the country? Would the U.S. and China still be friends instead of at each other’s throats?

The key fact is that China’s meteoric rise seems like it’s drawing to a close

Creating a Chinese version of the World Bank, Mr. Xi inaugurated the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.

Instead of the American dream, he speaks of the “Chinese dream,” which describes the collective pride that people feel when they overcome a century of disorder and colonial humiliation to reclaim their status as a great power.

I asked half a dozen scholars who study China what lessons Americans should draw from Mr. Xi’s tenure so far. Here’s a summary of what they told me.

“I’ve been running my research lab for almost 30 years,” says Jennifer Doudna, a biochemist at the University of California, Berkeley. “And I can say that throughout that period of time, I’ve just never experienced what we’re seeing over just the last five years.”

“You cannot imagine what you’re going to see over the next 30 years. The pace of advancement is in an exponential phase right now.”

surveying the recent landscape of scientific breakthroughs, she says the last half-decade has been more remarkable still: “I think we’re at an extraordinary time of accelerating discoveries.”

The more I covered Biden, the more I came to feel affection and respect for him. Then, as now, he could be a tough boss, occasionally angry and hard on his staff. But throughout his life, Biden has usually been on the side of the underdog. I’ve rarely met a politician so rooted in the unpretentious middle-class ethos of the neighborhood he grew up in. He has a seemingly instinctive ability to bond with those who are hurting.

He has his faults — the tendency to talk too much, the chip on his shoulder about those who think they are smarter than he is, the gaffes, that episode of plagiarism and the moments of confusion — but I’ve always thought: Give me a leader who identifies with those who feel looked down upon. Give me a leader whose moral compass generally sends him in the right direction.

But I’ve also come to fear and loathe Donald Trump. I cannot fathom what damage that increasingly deranged man might do to this country if given a second term. And the fact is that as the polls and the mood of the electorate stand today, Trump has a decent chance of beating Biden in November of next year and regaining power in 2025.

“I consider Mark and Elon to be role models to children in their embrace of fighting,” Andreessen writes.

Modern American society, at least in the big cities, is turning on law enforcement and tolerating crime, so you need combat skills to protect your loved ones. We are also fat and depressed, and learning to fight might help on both counts. In conclusion, “if it was good enough for Heracles and Theseus, it’s good enough for us.”

what caught my eye was the veneration of the virile aggression of the Greeks, the call to rediscover the ways of the ancients. A list of things that were good enough for the Greeks but not good enough for us would run long: Slavery, pederasty and bloodletting come to mind

Powerful artificial intelligence systems threaten social stability and AI companies must be made liable for harms caused by their products, a group of senior experts including two “godfathers” of the technology has warned.

A co-author of the policy proposals from 23 experts said it was “utterly reckless” to pursue ever more powerful AI systems before understanding how to make them safe.

“It’s time to get serious about advanced AI systems,” said Stuart Russell, professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley. “These are not toys. Increasing their capabilities before we understand how to make them safe is utterly reckless.”