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the characters in the core three modern shows—Discovery, Picard, and Strange New Worlds—are less concerned with professionalism and duty and more concerned with personal morality, authenticity, and teamwork.

Dylan Roth, writing for Fanbyte, suggested that as Star Trek has aged, it has “changed from a series about benign authority to one about stalwart heroes protecting an institution from moral decay.” This is true enough, but I also think there’s something else going on with the modern Trek shows. Namely, the atmosphere and philosophy of the shows is much less comfortable with the maxims of professionalism and duty that were foundational to pre-2017 Star Trek media.

Modern Star Trek, much like older Star Trek, often presents its main characters as moral paragons, but whereas older Trek would usually depict them embodying Starfleet’s ideals in the presence of challenging aliens, modern Trek is more likely to establish their uprightness by contrast with the faceless and untrustworthy institution of Starfleet itself. Both eras do both things, at least occasionally, but the ratio has notably shifted.

WHY THE CHANGE? Part of it probably has to do with the other material that Star Trek writers are drawing from. The ’60s and ’90s-era Trek writers either served in the military themselves or were drawing from science fiction written by people who had. (Gene Roddenberry, the creator of Star Trek, and many of the great science-fiction authors of the mid-twentieth century, including Robert Heinlein, Arthur Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Frank Herbert, and Walter M. Miller Jr., each served in some capacity in the World War II-era U.S. or British armed forces.

difference in leadership style is everywhere between the two eras. The Strange New Worlds version of Capt. Christopher Pike has been repeatedly praised for being more collaborative than commanding (I struggle to remember a time he has ever raised his voice), whereas Capt. Sisko shouts at everyone, as only the great Avery Brooks can shout. Picard’s version of its title character trades all his twentieth-century grouchy gravitas for a more grandfatherly role; his inspirational speeches now seek to buoy his friends’ confidence rather than inspire subordinates to high achievement.

Old-school Sisko reminds his crew of the expectations he has for them and unsubtly critiques their behavior as unbecoming of Starfleet officers. He acknowledges their difficulties (“I know it’s hot. . .”), but leaves no doubt that he expects them to perform their duties as professionals anyway. New-school Tilly motivates her command by making it clear that she sees and hears their concerns, and encourages them to work together by seeing the value in their unique life experiences.

modern Trek writers are far less likely to have served—but are far more likely to have worked in twenty-first-century corporate America, which has a rather different set of norms and concepts of professionalism.

more fundamentally, popular science fiction today—as written by authors like N.K. Jemisin, Martha Wells, and Tamsyn Muir—is more likely to be concerned with questions of identity and combating imperialism. It is also more likely to be written from marginalized perspectives, which have valid reasons to distrust institutions and authority. For many of these writers, concepts like “professionalism” have questionable implications

Besides, nobody likes any of America’s institutions anymore (and for all that Star Trek is ostensibly international, it is a fundamentally American franchise). Gallup’s polling about Americans’ faith in U.S. institutions shows it hovering at or near record-breaking lows, spawning a great deal of hand-wringing from people across the political spectrum. These apparently untrustworthy institutions range from purely political ones (the presidency, the Supreme Court, etc.) to “the church or organized religion” (whatever that means), “banks,” and “newspapers.”

What are professionalism and duty if not the suppression of individual quirks in service of some larger goal or institution? Duty overrides individual desires or assessments of right and wrong.

But older Trek nevertheless believed in duty, because it believed that Starfleet was a fundamentally good institution, even if it may be failed by individual bad or misguided actors. It elevated Starfleet’s regulations and codes of conduct almost to the status of holy wri

it is difficult to be seriously inspired by the notion of duties if one has a deep distrust of the institutions that assign such duties.

Of course the characters written by twenty-first-century authors, who are animated by the same deep distrust of American institutions as the rest of us, are less likely to justify themselves with the language of duty than they are by reference to personal morality and authenticity. And of course they’re going to be skeptical of rank and hierarchy because they don’t believe these things are necessarily signs of actual merit or accomplishment any more than the rest of us do.

Yet I worry. If Star Trek is supposed to start from the assumption that Starfleet and the Federation are quasi-utopian, I worry about what it says about our collective imaginations if we can’t even let the institutions of that fictional utopia be utopian. If we can’t even trust Starfleet, who can we trust?

On the left, what gets termed “wokeness” is indissociable from self-help. How should we understand superficial, performative expressions of “anti-racism” or preening social-media politics if not as a way for self-described good-hearted liberals to make grand public displays of pruning their moral shrubbery?

We might call this turbocharged version of authenticity culture “therapeutic libertarianism”: the belief that self-improvement is the ultimate goal of life, and that no formal or informal constraints—whether imposed by states, faith systems, or other people—should impede each of us from achieving personal growth

This attitude is therapeutic because it is invariably couched in self-help babble. And it is libertarian not only because it makes a cult out of personal freedom, but because it applies market logic to human beings. We are all our own start-ups. We must all adopt a pro-growth mindset for our personhood and deregulate our desires.

We must all assess and reassess our own “fulfillment,” a kind of psychological Gross Domestic Product, on a near-constant basis. And like the GDP, our fulfillment must always increase.

Among the right, a new kind of reactionary self-help is ascendant. Its mainstream version is legible in the manosphere misogyny of Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan, and Andrew Tate, while more eldritch currents lurk just beneath the surface. The Nietzscheanism of internet personalities like Bronze Age Pervert—who combines ethnonationalist chauvinism in politics and personal life with a Greco-Roman obsession with physical fitness—is only one of many examples of the trend the social critic Maya Vinokour has called “lifestyle fascism.”

Stewart’s response to the UTIs is not concern for his wife but irritation: “This guy is breaking all my toys,” he grumbles. When she gets upset that her husband keeps calling her a “cunt” and a “whore” during sex—something he professes not being able to help—Stewart does not change this habit. Instead they strike a preposterous bargain: “He will try his best not to scream cunt during sex, and I will do my best to ignore him if he does.”

What the author is trying to find in her open relationship is not sex, but self-understanding—what it means, how we get it, whether sex can provide it. And although the answers Molly arrives at are not cheaply won, they are cheap all the same.

his concept doesn’t quite capture the extent to which this relentless quest for self-optimizing authenticity has infused our social and even political sensibilities.

though Molly may tell herself and her readers that she is on a journey of learning and growth, the ugly truth is that More feels like a 290-page cry for help. Molly does not come off as a woman boldly finding herself, but rather as someone who is vulnerable to psychological manipulation and does not enjoy her open marriage.

if it seems like Molly Roden Winter does not want to be in an open marriage, it is because she often lets us know that she doesn’t want to be in an open marriage.

When a couples therapist asks the pair why they’re in counseling halfway through the book—prompted by a breakdown Molly experiences that stems from their marital arrangement—she explains: “We’re here because I don’t want to be in an open marriage anymore, but Stewart does.”

There are precious few sex scenes where Molly seems to be enjoying herself. When Molly is in the middle of a squirmy threesome she’s been dreading, she literally dissociates from her body, pretending that she is a director staging a scene in which her physical person is merely an actor. Molly describes how she performs her role with “a clinician’s detachment” and leaves the apartment rapidly so as not “to be pulled back into this scene.” After one of her dates repeatedly removes his condom without her consent—an act known as “stealthing,” which is considered a sex crime in a number of countries and the state of California—she contracts a series of urinary tract infections

Near the end of the memoir, the author’s mother provides the empty epiphany toward which the text careens. “Everything that happens in life,” her mom offers, “is an opportunity to learn about yourself. Marriage. Motherhood. Relationships. Even anger and illness. Nothing that happens is good or bad in and of itself. It’s all just an opportunity to learn and grow.” With this maternal revelation, Molly’s “skin starts to tingle.” She relates that the advice “feels almost holy.”

Winter is trapped in her therapeutic worldview, one imposed on her by an American culture that has made narcissism into not simply a virtue, but a quasi-religion that turns external obstacles into opportunities for internal self-improvement.

These obstacles include, in her case, profound gender inequality relating to Molly’s life as a parent to two sons, and a troubling family history. Molly’s mother joined a cult—and indoctrinated the author into it as a child—at the urging of a male partner in her own open marriage. The book makes tacit comparisons between Molly’s mother’s initiation into a cult at the behest of an extramarital partner, and Molly’s own initiation into an open marriage at the behest of her husband.

throughout More, the dominant emotion Molly reports is not lust but rage—primarily at the deeply unequal child-care burdens that are placed upon her. “I think about all the years I’ve spent my night alone with the kids—the dinners, the bedtimes, the dishes, the loneliness of doing it all by myself—because Stew had to work,” she laments at one point. That Stewart is now spending late nights not working (if he ever was) but rather schtupping his endless reserve of mistresses pushes Molly further to the brink: “I feel my jealousy mingle with the resentment I’ve kept at bay for years,”

Molly doubles down on her quest for self-actualization through the relentless pursuit of bitter novelty: new sexual experiences that she rarely seems to enjoy, new partners who rarely treat her kindly.

The only solution Molly can imagine is to persist in an open marriage, rather than push for an equal one. Inward sexual revolution plainly feels more possible than a revolution in who does the dishes.

Two sources said that during the early weeks of the war they were permitted to kill 15 or 20 civilians during airstrikes on low-ranking militants. Attacks on such targets were typically carried out using unguided munitions known as “dumb bombs”, the sources said, destroying entire homes and killing all their occupants.

“You don’t want to waste expensive bombs on unimportant people – it’s very expensive for the country and there’s a shortage [of those bombs],” one intelligence officer said. Another said the principal question they were faced with was whether the “collateral damage” to civilians allowed for an attack.

“Because we usually carried out the attacks with dumb bombs, and that meant literally dropping the whole house on its occupants. But even if an attack is averted, you don’t care – you immediately move on to the next target. Because of the system, the targets never end. You have another 36,000 waiting.”

ccording to conflict experts, if Israel has been using dumb bombs to flatten the homes of thousands of Palestinians who were linked, with the assistance of AI, to militant groups in Gaza, that could help explain the shockingly high death toll in the war.

Details about the specific kinds of data used to train Lavender’s algorithm, or how the programme reached its conclusions, are not included in the accounts published by +972 or Local Call. However, the sources said that during the first few weeks of the war, Unit 8200 refined Lavender’s algorithm and tweaked its search parameters.

Responding to the publication of the testimonies in +972 and Local Call, the IDF said in a statement that its operations were carried out in accordance with the rules of proportionality under international law. It said dumb bombs are “standard weaponry” that are used by IDF pilots in a manner that ensures “a high level of precision”.

“The IDF does not use an artificial intelligence system that identifies terrorist operatives or tries to predict whether a person is a terrorist,” it added. “Information systems are merely tools for analysts in the target identification process.”

In earlier military operations conducted by the IDF, producing human targets was often a more labour-intensive process. Multiple sources who described target development in previous wars to the Guardian, said the decision to “incriminate” an individual, or identify them as a legitimate target, would be discussed and then signed off by a legal adviser.

n the weeks and months after 7 October, this model for approving strikes on human targets was dramatically accelerated, according to the sources. As the IDF’s bombardment of Gaza intensified, they said, commanders demanded a continuous pipeline of targets.

“We were constantly being pressured: ‘Bring us more targets.’ They really shouted at us,” said one intelligence officer. “We were told: now we have to fuck up Hamas, no matter what the cost. Whatever you can, you bomb.”

Lavender was developed by the Israel Defense Forces’ elite intelligence division, Unit 8200, which is comparable to the US’s National Security Agency or GCHQ in the UK.

After randomly sampling and cross-checking its predictions, the unit concluded Lavender had achieved a 90% accuracy rate, the sources said, leading the IDF to approve its sweeping use as a target recommendation tool.

Lavender created a database of tens of thousands of individuals who were marked as predominantly low-ranking members of Hamas’s military wing, they added. This was used alongside another AI-based decision support system, called the Gospel, which recommended buildings and structures as targets rather than individuals.

The accounts include first-hand testimony of how intelligence officers worked with Lavender and how the reach of its dragnet could be adjusted. “At its peak, the system managed to generate 37,000 people as potential human targets,” one of the sources said. “But the numbers changed all the time, because it depends on where you set the bar of what a Hamas operative is.”

broadly, and then the machine started bringing us all kinds of civil defence personnel, police officers, on whom it would be a shame to waste bombs. They help the Hamas government, but they don’t really endanger soldiers.”

Before the war, US and Israeli estimated membership of Hamas’s military wing at approximately 25-30,000 people.

there was a decision to treat Palestinian men linked to Hamas’s military wing as potential targets, regardless of their rank or importance.

According to +972 and Local Call, the IDF judged it permissible to kill more than 100 civilians in attacks on a top-ranking Hamas officials. “We had a calculation for how many [civilians could be killed] for the brigade commander, how many [civilians] for a battalion commander, and so on,” one source said.

Another source, who justified the use of Lavender to help identify low-ranking targets, said that “when it comes to a junior militant, you don’t want to invest manpower and time in it”. They said that in wartime there was insufficient time to carefully “incriminate every target”

So you’re willing to take the margin of error of using artificial intelligence, risking collateral damage and civilians dying, and risking attacking by mistake, and to live with it,” they added.

When it came to targeting low-ranking Hamas and PIJ suspects, they said, the preference was to attack when they were believed to be at home. “We were not interested in killing [Hamas] operatives only when they were in a military building or engaged in a military activity,” one said. “It’s much easier to bomb a family’s home. The system is built to look for them in these situations.”

Such a strategy risked higher numbers of civilian casualties, and the sources said the IDF imposed pre-authorised limits on the number of civilians it deemed acceptable to kill in a strike aimed at a single Hamas militant. The ratio was said to have changed over time, and varied according to the seniority of the target.

The IDF’s targeting processes in the most intensive phase of the bombardment were also relaxed, they said. “There was a completely permissive policy regarding the casualties of [bombing] operations,” one source said. “A policy so permissive that in my opinion it had an element of revenge.”

“There were regulations, but they were just very lenient,” another added. “We’ve killed people with collateral damage in the high double digits, if not low triple digits. These are things that haven’t happened before.” There appears to have been significant fluctuations in the figure that military commanders would tolerate at different stages of the war

One source said that the limit on permitted civilian casualties “went up and down” over time, and at one point was as low as five. During the first week of the conflict, the source said, permission was given to kill 15 non-combatants to take out junior militants in Gaza

at one stage earlier in the war they were authorised to kill up to “20 uninvolved civilians” for a single operative, regardless of their rank, military importance, or age.

“It’s not just that you can kill any person who is a Hamas soldier, which is clearly permitted and legitimate in terms of international law,” they said. “But they directly tell you: ‘You are allowed to kill them along with many civilians.’ … In practice, the proportionality criterion did not exist.”

Experts in international humanitarian law who spoke to the Guardian expressed alarm at accounts of the IDF accepting and pre-authorising collateral damage ratios as high as 20 civilians, particularly for lower-ranking militants. They said militaries must assess proportionality for each individual strike.

An international law expert at the US state department said they had “never remotely heard of a one to 15 ratio being deemed acceptable, especially for lower-level combatants. There’s a lot of leeway, but that strikes me as extreme”.

Sarah Harrison, a former lawyer at the US Department of Defense, now an analyst at Crisis Group, said: “While there may be certain occasions where 15 collateral civilian deaths could be proportionate, there are other times where it definitely wouldn’t be. You can’t just set a tolerable number for a category of targets and say that it’ll be lawfully proportionate in each case.”

Whatever the legal or moral justification for Israel’s bombing strategy, some of its intelligence officers appear now to be questioning the approach set by their commanders. “No one thought about what to do afterward, when the war is over, or how it will be possible to live in Gaza,” one said.

Another said that after the 7 October attacks by Hamas, the atmosphere in the IDF was “painful and vindictive”. “There was a dissonance: on the one hand, people here were frustrated that we were not attacking enough. On the other hand, you see at the end of the day that another thousand Gazans have died, most of them civilians.”

“So far we’re seeing basic agreement with our best model of the universe, but we’re also seeing some potentially interesting differences that could indicate that dark energy is evolving with time,”

When the scientists combined their map with other cosmological data, they were surprised to find that it did not quite agree with the otherwise reliable standard model of the universe, which assumes that dark energy is constant and unchanging. A varying dark energy fit the data points better.

“It’s certainly more than a curiosity,” Dr. Palanque-Delabrouille said. “I would call it a hint. Yeah, it’s not yet evidence, but it’s interesting.”

But this version of dark energy is merely the simplest one. “With DESI we now have achieved a precision that allows us to go beyond that simple model,” Dr. Palanque-Delabrouille said, “to see if the density of dark energy is constant over time, or if it has some fluctuations and evolution with time.”

“While combining data sets is tricky, and these are early results from DESI, the possible evidence that dark energy is not constant is the best news I have heard since cosmic acceleration was firmly established 20-plus years ago.”

praised the new survey as “superb data.” The results, she said, “open the potential for a new window into understanding dark energy, the dominant component of the universe, which remains the biggest mystery in cosmology. Pretty exciting.”

what if dark energy were not constant as the cosmological model assumed?

At issue is a parameter called w, which is a measure of the density, or vehemence, of the dark energy. In Einstein’s version of dark energy, this number remains constant, with a value of –1, throughout the life of the universe. Cosmologists have been using this value in their models for the past 25 years.

Dark energy took its place in the standard model of the universe known as L.C.D.M., composed of 70 percent dark energy (Lambda), 25 percent cold dark matter (an assortment of slow-moving exotic particles) and 5 percent atomic matter. So far that model has been bruised but not broken by the new James Webb Space Telescope

As a measure of distance, the researchers used bumps in the cosmic distribution of galaxies, known as baryon acoustic oscillations. These bumps were imprinted on the cosmos by sound waves in the hot plasma that filled the universe when it was just 380,000 years old. Back then, the bumps were a half-million light-years across. Now, 13.5 billion years later, the universe has expanded a thousandfold, and the bumps — which are now 500 million light-years across — serve as convenient cosmic measuring sticks.

The DESI scientists divided the past 11 billion years of cosmic history into seven spans of time. (The universe is 13.8 billion years old.) For each, they measured the size of these bumps and how fast the galaxies in them were speeding away from us and from each other.

When the researchers put it all together, they found that the usual assumption — a constant dark energy — didn’t work to describe the expansion of the universe. Galaxies in the three most recent epochs appeared closer than they should have been, suggesting that dark energy could be evolving with time.

Dr. Riess of Johns Hopkins, who had an early look at the DESI results, noted that the “hint,” if validated, could pull the rug out from other cosmological measurements, such as the age or size of the universe. “This result is very interesting and we should take it seriously,” he wrote in his email. “Otherwise why else do we do these experiments?”

I’ve spoken to in-house editors and publicists who are more inundated than ever, unable to give each of their titles the attention they deserve. Their submissions and workloads have increased even as marketing and editorial resources for individual titles have tapered off.

In the corporate world, output seems to be becoming more and more of a percentage game. You throw a bunch of products against the wall, see what sticks, and write off the ones (a vast majority) that don’t.

What a remarkable change it would be if corporations would allow their employees to do the best job they can with each book that the company has chosen to buy, rather than allowing them to flail

I had always thought that “discoverability” was a unique problem for books because so much browsing happens online rather than in carefully curated physical stores, but the world of streaming TV and movies has begun to catch up

What do corporate publishing and streaming have in common? They’re very often run by people who don’t engage with the products they put out.

Linker’s description of Bushnell’s options and actions is measured and not without some respect:

Damon hops off the bus at the same point I do: Bushnell displayed a tremendous amount of courage, yes. But this was mated to an absolute moral certainty.

Every society needs both, because that is how we conserve our achievements while still working toward a more perfect order.

[Bushnell’s] choice of that word to describe Israel means he followed the “anti-colonial left” in viewing the interminable conflict in and around the Jewish state through the lens of Western imperialism across the “global south.” Viewed in this way, Israelis are rapacious oppressors, exploiters, unjustly stealing from the Palestinians, occupying their land, not just in the territories of the West Bank that are occupied under international law but likely in its entirety. That’s certainly how Hamas views the situation, with an added overlay of Islamist theofascism.

What would it be like, I wonder, to live in a world so morally simple, so neat and tidy, so devoid of tragic clashes, so orderly, with its heroes and villains, its Children of Light and its Children of Darkness? I really wouldn’t know. Because the world I inhabit is one permeated by ambiguity and people with mixed motives who are often (usually?) torn between competing moral considerations and imperatives, not a world divided between the absolutely good and the absolutely evil. The line between good and evil doesn’t run between East and West, or North and South, or white and black, or Israel and Palestine. It runs right through every human heart. Or at least most hearts.

This is where liberalism and conservatism meet, in the most elemental sense. The conservative impulse is to be suspicious of change because you are aware that things can always get worse, that systems are often too complex to be understood, that tail risk rules the world. The liberal impulse is to believe that agency is precious, that the world can be improved, that progress is both possible and desirable.

Linker notes that Bushnell referred to Israelis as “colonizers”:

Every governing system needs both, because that is how we channel passions out of the street and into political institutions.

And every person needs both, because that is how we avoid the epistemic certainty that can drive us to extremes of exuberance or despair.

The war in Gaza is a textbook example of the dangers of epistemic certainty, because it is too complicated, freighted with too much history, and too full of horrors to fit neatly on one side of the ledger or the other.

The 10/7 attack was an act of unconstrained barbarism that made it impossible for Israel to coexist with Hamas. Or at least: I am not aware of any proposed remedy that would have made coexistence possible without Israel becoming a fully militarized, illiberal state.

The Israeli response has at times violated the rules of war—sometimes of its own volition and sometimes because Hamas’s strategy has been to position assets in such a manner as to result in the deaths of as many Palestinian civilians as possible.

The suffering of the Palestinian people is real and of a magnitude that is almost impossible to comprehend.

And yet, the war continues because Hamas has no interest in a ceasefire. “We are not interested in engaging with what’s been floated, because it does not fulfill our demands,” one Hamas official told the media yesterday.

The world is messy. Life is messy. Often in ways which break the human heart. The project of liberal society, which requires equal measures of liberalism and conservatism, is to manage this messiness as well as possible.

a major extinction panic happened 100 years ago, and the similarities are unnerving.

The 1920s were also a period when the public — traumatized by a recent pandemic, a devastating world war and startling technological developments — was gripped by the conviction that humanity might soon shuffle off this mortal coil.

It also helps us see how apocalyptic fears feed off the idea that people are inherently violent, self-interested and hierarchical and that survival is a zero-sum war over resources.

Either way, it’s a cynical view that encourages us to take our demise as a foregone conclusion.

What makes an extinction panic a panic is the conviction that humanity is flawed and beyond redemption, destined to die at its own hand, the tragic hero of a terrestrial pageant for whom only one final act is possible

What the history of prior extinction panics has to teach us is that this pessimism is both politically questionable and questionably productive. Our survival will depend on our ability to recognize and reject the nihilistic appraisals of humanity that inflect our fears for the future, both left and right.

As a scholar who researches the history of Western fears about human extinction, I’m often asked how I avoid sinking into despair. My answer is always that learning about the history of extinction panics is actually liberating, even a cause for optimism

Nearly every generation has thought its generation was to be the last, and yet the human species has persisted

As a character in Jeanette Winterson’s novel “The Stone Gods” says, “History is not a suicide note — it is a record of our survival.”

Contrary to the folk wisdom that insists the years immediately after World War I were a period of good times and exuberance, dark clouds often hung over the 1920s. The dread of impending disaster — from another world war, the supposed corruption of racial purity and the prospect of automated labor — saturated the period

The previous year saw the publication of the first of several installments of what many would come to consider his finest literary achievement, “The World Crisis,” a grim retrospective of World War I that laid out, as Churchill put it, the “milestones to Armageddon.

Bluntly titled “Shall We All Commit Suicide?,” the essay offered a dismal appraisal of humanity’s prospects. “Certain somber facts emerge solid, inexorable, like the shapes of mountains from drifting mist,” Churchill wrote. “Mankind has never been in this position before. Without having improved appreciably in virtue or enjoying wiser guidance, it has got into its hands for the first time the tools by which it can unfailingly accomplish its own extermination.”

The essay — with its declaration that “the story of the human race is war” and its dismay at “the march of science unfolding ever more appalling possibilities” — is filled with right-wing pathos and holds out little hope that mankind might possess the wisdom to outrun the reaper. This fatalistic assessment was shared by many, including those well to Churchill’s left.

“Are not we and they and all the race still just as much adrift in the current of circumstances as we were before 1914?” he wondered. Wells predicted that our inability to learn from the mistakes of the Great War would “carry our race on surely and inexorably to fresh wars, to shortages, hunger, miseries and social debacles, at last either to complete extinction or to a degradation beyond our present understanding.” Humanity, the don of sci-fi correctly surmised, was rushing headlong into a “scientific war” that would “make the biggest bombs of 1918 seem like little crackers.”

The pathbreaking biologist J.B.S. Haldane, another socialist, concurred with Wells’s view of warfare’s ultimate destination. In 1925, two decades before the Trinity test birthed an atomic sun over the New Mexico desert, Haldane, who experienced bombing firsthand during World War I, mused, “If we could utilize the forces which we now know to exist inside the atom, we should have such capacities for destruction that I do not know of any agency other than divine intervention which would save humanity from complete and peremptory annihilation.”

F.C.S. Schiller, a British philosopher and eugenicist, summarized the general intellectual atmosphere of the 1920s aptly: “Our best prophets are growing very anxious about our future. They are afraid we are getting to know too much and are likely to use our knowledge to commit suicide.”

Many of the same fears that keep A.I. engineers up at night — calibrating thinking machines to human values, concern that our growing reliance on technology might sap human ingenuity and even trepidation about a robot takeover — made their debut in the early 20th century.

The popular detective novelist R. Austin Freeman’s 1921 political treatise, “Social Decay and Regeneration,” warned that our reliance on new technologies was driving our species toward degradation and even annihilation

Extinction panics are, in both the literal and the vernacular senses, reactionary, animated by the elite’s anxiety about maintaining its privilege in the midst of societal change

There is a perverse comfort to dystopian thinking. The conviction that catastrophe is baked in relieves us of the moral obligation to act. But as the extinction panic of the 1920s shows us, action is possible, and these panics can recede

To whatever extent, then, that the diagnosis proved prophetic, it’s worth asking if it might have been at least partly self-fulfilling.

today’s problems are fundamentally new. So, too, must be our solutions

It is a tired observation that those who don’t know history are destined to repeat it. We live in a peculiar moment in which this wisdom is precisely inverted. Making it to the next century may well depend on learning from and repeating the tightrope walk — between technological progress and self-annihilation — that we have been doing for the past 100 years

We have gotten into the dangerous habit of outsourcing big issues — space exploration, clean energy, A.I. and the like — to private businesses and billionaires

That ideologically varied constellation of prominent figures shared a basic diagnosis of humanity and its prospects: that our species is fundamentally vicious and selfish and our destiny therefore bends inexorably toward self-destruction.

Less than a year after Churchill’s warning about the future of modern combat — “As for poison gas and chemical warfare,” he wrote, “only the first chapter has been written of a terrible book” — the 1925 Geneva Protocol was signed, an international agreement banning the use of chemical or biological weapons in combat. Despite the many horrors of World War II, chemical weapons were not deployed on European battlefields.

As for machine-age angst, there’s a lesson to learn there, too: Our panics are often puffed up, our predictions simply wrong

In 1928, H.G. Wells published a book titled “The Way the World Is Going,” with the modest subtitle “Guesses and Forecasts of the Years Ahead.” In the opening pages, he offered a summary of his age that could just as easily have been written about our turbulent 2020s. “Human life,” he wrote, “is different from what it has ever been before, and it is rapidly becoming more different.” He continued, “Perhaps never in the whole history of life before the present time, has there been a living species subjected to so fiercely urgent, many-sided and comprehensive a process of change as ours today. None at least that has survived. Transformation or extinction have been nature’s invariable alternatives. Ours is a species in an intense phase of transition.”

In other words, the Marshall Plan and the tech boom during the 1990s were products of their time and place. They wouldn’t necessarily have the desired effects in a modern context.

“A shifting global economy left many working Americans and their communities behind. A financial crisis shook the middle class. A pandemic exposed the fragility of our supply chains. A changing climate threatened lives and livelihoods. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine underscored the risks of overdependence.”

What was the solution? Instead of rampant globalization, Sullivan’s pitch was that a reenergized American economy made the country stronger. It was time to remake the Rust Belt into a Cobalt Corridor, to establish industries that led not only to blue-collar work but to azure-collared careers. If that was done right, a strengthened America could act more capably around the globe.

“This moment demands that we forge a new consensus. That’s why the United States, under President Biden, is pursuing a modern industrial and innovation strategy — both at home and with partners around the world,

Implicitly, Sullivan said the main assumptions undergirding America’s foreign and economic policy had been wrong for decades. China, and the Washington belief that liberalized markets would eventually lead to democracy within the halls of power in Beijing, was the most glaring example.

“By the time President Biden came into office, we had to contend with the reality that a large non-market economy had been integrated into the international economic order in a way that posed considerable challenges,” he said, citing China’s large-scale subsidization of multiple sectors that crushed America’s competitiveness across industries. Making matters worse, Sullivan continued, “economic integration didn’t stop China from expanding its military ambitions.” It also didn’t stop countries like Russia from invading their neighbors.

Standing in front of the esteemed audience, Sullivan was telling them he didn’t want to be caught flat-footed as the global economy reshaped around them. The U.S. government would be proactive, prepared and proud in search of an industrial strategy to undergird American power. Without saying the words, he was offering a plan to make America great again.

A self-proclaimed “A-Team” came together to move beyond the Trump era, but in some ways they embraced elements of it. Not the nativist demagoguery, but the need to return to fundamentals: a healthy middle class powered by a humming industrial base, a humility about what the U.S. military alone can accomplish, a solid cadre of allies, attention to the most existential threats and a refresh of the tenets that sustain American democracy.

“This strategy will take resolve — it will take a dedicated commitment to overcoming the barriers that have kept this country and our partners from building rapidly, efficiently, and fairly as we were able to do in the past,”

Rising inflation has led to surging prices for groceries, cars and many essentials. The cost of a college education has skyrocketed in two decades, with the average student debt for federal loans at $37,000, according to the Education Department. Overall debts for Americans in their 30s jumped 27% from late 2019 to early 2023—steeper than for any other age group.

home prices have risen considerably, while wages haven’t kept pace.

“What Dave Ramsey really misses is any kind of social context,” says Morgan Sanner, a

She began paying off $48,000 in student loans (a Ramsey do) and also took out a loan to buy a 2016 Honda (a Ramsey don’t). Her rationale was that it was safer to pay extra for a more reliable car than a junker she could buy with cash. S

he feels these sorts of real-life decisions don’t factor into his advice.

When she saw a comment from Ramsey online about how people receiving pandemic stimulus payments were “pretty much screwed already,” Israel felt it came across as shaming people. The pandemic shutdowns ended a decadelong economic expansion for Black Americans, a disproportionate number of whom lost their jobs and relied on those checks.

“Moralizing financial decisions is very damaging to marginalized groups,” says Israel, who is Black.

Many young adults scratch their heads over his advice that people should let their credit scores dwindle and die.

People need a good credit score, says Mandy Phillips, a 39-year-old residential mortgage loan originator in Redding, Calif. She uses TikTok and other social media to educate millennials and Gen Z about home buying. Scores are vital when applying for mortgages and rentals.

She also takes issue with Ramsey’s advice to only obtain a home loan if you can take out a 15-year fixed-rate mortgage with a down payment of at least 10%. Few younger buyers can pay the large monthly bills of shorter-term mortgages.

“That may have worked years ago in the ’80s and ’90s, but that’s not something that is achievable for the average American,” Phillips says.

Housing is a particularly hot-button topic. He advises people to only buy a house with their lawfully wedded spouse. Yet many young adults are pooling their finances with partners, friends or roommates to buy their first homes. 

Ramsey is perhaps best known for advocating a “debt snowball method”: People with multiple loans pay off the smallest balances first, regardless of interest rate. As you knock out each loan, he says, the money you have to put toward larger debt snowballs. Seeing small wins motivates people to keep going, he says.Conventional economic theory would be to pay off the highest-interest loans first, says James Choi, a finance professor at the Yale School of Management, who has studied the advice of popular finance gurus.

Ramsey’s save-not-spend message sounds logical, young adults say. It’s his all-or-nothing approach that doesn’t work for them.

Kate Hindman, a 31-year-old administrative assistant in Pasadena, Calif., who has taken an anti-Ramsey stance on TikTok, ended up with $30,000 in credit-card debt after she and her husband faced income-reducing job changes. They’ve since turned it into a consolidation loan with an 8% interest rate and pay about $1,200 a month.

She wonders if the debt aversion is generational. Perhaps younger people are less willing to make huge sacrifices to be debt-free. Maybe carrying some amount of debt forever is a new normal.

In his 2007 history of the movement, Radicals for Capitalism, Brian Doherty identifies five key figures who most shaped the nascent ideology and its organized advocacy: author Ayn Rand, and economists Ludwig von Mises, F. A. Hayek, Milton Friedman, and Murray Rothbard

With one exception, all paired radical free-market and smaller government views with liberal tolerance and cosmopolitanism on social issues. None were religious, and Rand and Mises were both avowedly irreligious. Friedman and Hayek both trended more moderate and pragmatic, and also achieved the highest degree of mainstream intellectual recognitio

It was in Rothbard that the divergence began which today has culminated in the Libertarian Party’s convention transforming into a literal Trump rally

He was in many ways the most radical—an avowed anarchist—and the most marginal

he was also the most involved in creating a self-consciously libertarian movement and many of its institutions. In this he was aided by his skills as a prolific polemicist.

From the start, Trump’s brand of illiberal populism had more than a passing resemblance to Rothbard’s paleo strategy—minus, as many classical liberal critics had long predicted, any meaningful moves to actually shrink government

By accommodating and embracing conservative culture warriors, even including avowed white supremacists, Rothbard believed he was forming the basis of a political coalition to demolish modern big government

it included an open embrace of police brutality, fuming about the need to “dispense instant punishment” to “bums,” while railing against efforts to undo America’s white supremacist past. Later, opposition to immigration became one of the paleo posture’s signature issues.

Across the loose constellation of libertarian think tanks, advocacy organizations, and electoral efforts in both the L.P. and the GOP, the embrace or rejection of Rothbard’s “paleo” idea was a source of perennial tension. Rothbard himself was involved for a time in both the Libertarian Party and the Cato Institute, co-founding the latter before being acrimoniously ejected after a few years.

the other end of the movement came to embrace the view of libertarianism as fundamentally an extension of the larger liberal tradition, continuous with a classical liberal political philosophy rather than a socially conservative one.

Free markets and limited government were still a big part of the picture, but in service to a vision of a dynamic and pluralistic free society.

As much as each held a dim view of the other, both continued to work under the “libertarian” label.

As he outlined in a 1992 essay, “Right Wing Populism: A Strategy for the Paleo Movement,” paleolibertarianism was an explicit alliance between small-government radicalism and the extremist far-right.

it still embodied the burn-it-all-down reactionary ethos that saw tearing down established institutions as a necessary first step, even if that required an unrestrained autocrat

After the deadly 2017 neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, the then party leadership denounced the “blood and soil” rhetoric. But to the Rothbardians, this smacked of unacceptable wokeness. Within a few days, the Mises Caucus—named more for the ideas exhibited by the think-tank than the actual economist—was founded. Over the next few years, this group began launching hostile takeovers of state parties and then the national party. As they did so, the party increasingly adopted rhetoric that sounded more like the tiki-torch brigade than one committed to individual liberty.

The two camps within the movement—the cosmopolitan and the paleo—already strained to nearly the breaking point, went through the inevitable rupture. A number of differences and disagreements fueled the split, but most central was the divide into MAGA-friendly and anti-Trump sympathies.

It is no longer possible to ignore the conflict of visions about what kind of society freedom was supposed to yield. One in which private bigotry and established hierarchies were allowed free rein? Or an open and all-embracing one where different people and lifestyles disapproved by the traditional order could flourish?

The only way the libertarian movement’s demise could bring down libertarianism as a political-philosophical framework is if one expected the ideas themselves to disappear. Happily, a robust conviction of the centrality of individual liberty—or of the need to fight a tyrannical state—is in no danger of fully fading away.

After the Civil War, a series of amnesties were passed, eventually encompassing almost all Confederate soldiers.

The complicit were so great in number that identifying and trying every one of them would come at significant cost, but more important, no law could sufficiently condemn what they had done, and no criminal procedure could adequately consecrate the memory of their wrongs.

the “act of oblivion,” an ancient, imperfect legal and moral mechanism for bringing an end to episodes of political violence. These acts were invoked when forgiveness was impossible, yet when pragmatism demanded a certain strain of forgetting — a forgetting that instead of erasing unforgivable transgressions, paradoxically memorialized them in the minds of all who had survived their assault

Rather than relying upon the courts to deliver impossible and unattainable forms of reckoning, oblivion provided opportunities for the extralegal recognition of political and moral wrongs, and reminded its subjects of the desire for, and necessity of, coexistence.

For centuries, legislative “acts of oblivion” were declared in times when betrayal, war and tyranny had usurped and undermined the very foundations of law; when a household or nation had been torn apart, its citizens pitted against one another; when identifying, investigating, trying and sentencing every single guilty party threatened to redouble the harm

Under the oblivions of old, the ringleaders of riots, insurrections and tyrannical reigns were prosecuted for their crimes and in many cases were forced out of the cities and states they had once claimed to rule. Treasonous leaders were prohibited from holding public office

I wondered what it would mean to revive the old idea of oblivion in our age of seemingly unending memory.

Oblivion demanded accountability for those who bore primary responsibility for political rupture and often required material compensation and restitution for the harms don

consecrating the facts of what had occurred while refusing to allow the misfortunes of the past to dictate the future.

over the course of the 20th century, as the cultural tide gradually turned toward an embrace of remembrance and recrimination, oblivion fell out of favor, and out of collective memory.

The oldest act of oblivion is usually dated to 403 B.C., when the Athenians, having survived the bloody reign of the Thirty Tyrants, swore to never remember the wrongs of a war within the family, a civil war that had divided Athens.

The 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, the supposed origin point of our world of sovereign states, promised that all the violence, hostility, damage and expenses that had been incurred “on the one side, and the other … shall be bury’d in eternal Oblivion.”

In 1660, the Indemnity and Oblivion Act restored the British monarchy after the English Civil War

To remember the power of oblivion is not to naïvely wish away the wrongs of the recent past, but rather quite the opposite: By marking certain transgressions as unforgivable and unforgettable, it recognizes the depth of the loss while also opening a path toward political pragmatism

the Continental Congress passed a resolution recommending that states treat loyalists with leniency, “to receive such returning penitents with compassion and mercy, and to forgive and bury in oblivion their past failings and transgressions.” Punishments for loyalists were, according to the scholar Mugambi Jouet, “particularly mild” for the era.

Over the past several decades, our society has become oversaturated with memory. In our legal system, a single, low-level crime can ruin an individual’s life forever, people are forced to serve sentences for acts that are no longer illegal, and even a sealed conviction or an arrest with no charge can jeopardize job, housing and volunteer opportunities.

This virtual culture of incessant, uncompromising remembrance and recrimination has seeped from our screens, affecting the kinds of conversations we are willing to have in public, and with whom.

Every day, we depend on our devices to store every photograph, every video, every file. We store all these things because we have learned a bit too well that it is important to remember, to archive, to keep receipts and screenshots. To create a faithful, digitized log not only of our own lives but also of those around us

we have been very good students of memory. So good that we have, I think, forgotten what all our memory is for — that it can guide us to choose justice over vengeance

Revisiting the forgotten idea of oblivion would give us permission to reconsider our unthinking overdependence on memory and perhaps to begin to let go of all the data, digital and otherwise, that we do not need

our personal and political memories, which, left to fester for too long, can corrode and transform, causing us to lose sight of their original force and feeling.

Gripped too tightly, memory can become a vengeful and violent force.

The unique power of oblivion is that it does not forgive the crimes committed on one side or the other, but rather consecrates and memorializes the profound gravity of the wrongs. It demands accountability and refuses absolution, yet it rejects the project of perpetual punishment.

Historically, appeals to oblivion offered political communities the prospect of rethinking the present, presenting a rare opportunity to re-evaluate and confront societal divisions.

One man, speaking about one of his favorite young influencers in a Telegram exchange captured by a child-safety activist, said that her mother knew “damn well” that many of her daughter’s followers were “pervy adult men.”

Meta looms over everything young influencers do on Instagram. It connects their accounts with strangers, and it can upend their star turns when it chooses. The company periodically shuts down accounts if it determines they have violated policies against child sexual exploitation or abuse. Some parents say their accounts have been shut down without such violations. 

Over the course of reporting this story, during which time the Journal inquired about the account the mom managed for her daughter, Meta shut down the account twice. The mom said she believed she hadn’t violated Meta’s policies. 

Meta’s guidance for content creators stresses the importance of engaging with followers to keep them and attract new ones. The hundreds of comments on any given post included some from other young fashion influencers, but also a large number of men leaving comments like “Gorgeous!” The mom generally liked or thanked them all, save for any that were expressly inappropriate. 

Meta spokesman Andy Stone said the company enables parents who run accounts for their children to control who is able to message them on Instagram or comment on their accounts. Meta’s guidance for creators also offers tips for building a safe online community, and the company has publicized a range of tools to help teens and parents achieve this.

Like many young girls, the daughter envied fashion influencers who made a living posting glamour content. When the mother agreed to help her daughter build her following and become an influencer, she set some rules. Her daughter wouldn’t be allowed to access the account or interact with anyone who sent messages. And they couldn’t post anything indicating exactly where they live. 

The mom stopped blocking so many users. Within a year of launching, the account had more than 100,000 followers. The daughter’s popularity earned her invitations to modeling events in big coastal cities where she met other young influencers. 

Social-media platforms have helped level the playing field for parents seeking an audience for their children’s talents. Instagram, in particular, is visually driven and easily navigable, which also makes it appealing for child-focused brands.

While Meta bans children under the age of 13 from independently opening social-media accounts, the company allows what it calls adult-run minor accounts, managed by parents. Often those accounts are pursuing influencer status, part of a burgeoning global influencer industry expected to be worth $480 billion by 2027, according to a recent Goldman Sachs report. 

Young influencers, reachable through direct messages, routinely solicit their followers for patronage, posting links to payment accounts and Amazon gift registries in their bios.

The Midwestern mom debated whether to charge for access to extra photos and videos via Instagram’s subscription feature. She said she has always rejected private offers to buy photos of her daughter, but she decided that offering subscriptions was different because it didn’t involve a one-on-one transaction.

The Journal asked Meta why it had at some points removed photos from the account. Weeks later, Meta disabled the account’s subscription feature, and then shut down the account without saying why. 

“There’s no personal connection,” she said. “You’re just finding a way to monetize from this fame that’s impersonal.”

The mom allowed the men to purchase subscriptions so long as they kept their distance and weren’t overtly inappropriate in messages and comments. “In hindsight, they’re probably the scariest ones of all,” she said. 

Stone, the Meta spokesman, said that the company will no longer allow accounts that primarily post child-focused content to offer subscriptions or receive gifts, and that the company is developing tools to enforce that.

he mom saw her daughter, though young, as capable of choosing to make money as an influencer and deciding when she felt uncomfortable. The mom saw her own role as providing the support needed for her daughter to do that.

The mom also discussed safety concerns with her now ex-husband, who has generally supported the influencer pursuit. In an interview, he characterized the untoward interest in his daughter as “the seedy underbelly” of the industry, and said he felt comfortable with her online presence so long as her mom posted appropriate content and remained vigilant about protecting her physical safety.

an anonymous person professing to be a child-safety activist sent her an email that contained screenshots and videos showing her daughter’s photos being traded on Telegram. Some of the users were painfully explicit about their sexual interest. Many of the photos were bikini or leotard photos from when the account first started.

Still, the mom realized she couldn’t stop men from trading the photos, which will likely continue to circulate even after her daughter becomes an adult. “Every little influencer with a thousand or more followers is on Telegram,” she said. “They just don’t know it.”

Early last year, Meta safety staffers began investigating the risks associated with adult-run accounts for children offering subscriptions, according to internal documents. The staffers reviewed a sample of subscribers to such accounts and determined that nearly all the subscribers demonstrated malicious behavior toward children.

The staffers found that the subscribers mostly liked or saved photos of children, child-sexualizing material and, in some cases, illicit underage-sex content. The users searched the platform using hashtags such as #sexualizegirls and #tweenmodel. 

The staffers found that some accounts with large numbers of followers sold additional content to subscribers who offered extra money on Instagram or other platforms, and that some engaged with subscribers in sexual discussions about their children. In every case, they concluded that the parents running those accounts knew that their subscribers were motivated by sexual gratification.

In the following months, the Journal began its own review of parent-run modeling accounts and found numerous instances where Meta wasn’t enforcing its own child-safety policies and community guidelines. 

The Journal asked Meta about several accounts that appeared to have violated platform rules in how they promoted photos of their children. The company deleted some of those accounts, as well as others, as it worked to address safety issues.

In 2022, Instagram started letting certain content creators offer paid-subscription services. At the time, the company allowed accounts featuring children to offer subscriptions if they were run or co-managed by parents.

The removal of the account made for a despondent week for the mom and daughter. The mother was incensed at Meta’s lack of explanation and the prospect that users had falsely reported inappropriate activity on the account. She was torn about what to do. When it was shut down, the account had roughly 80% male followers.

The account soon had more than 100,000 followers, about 92% of whom were male, according to the dashboard. Within months, Meta shut down that account as well. The company said the account had violated its policies related to child exploitation, but it didn’t specify how. 

Meta’s Stone said it doesn’t allow accounts it has previously shut down to resume the same activity on backup accounts. 

The roots of this phenomenon have been well studied. They include the cultural aggression of elite institutions and the predictable reaction to it, the nationalization of issues abetted by the collapse of local media and the pernicious effects of the antisocial media.

The gerrymandering that once exaggerated a dominant party’s political margin is no longer much of a factor; social clustering and these other factors have often done a more effective job than the political bosses ever did. In many jurisdictions today, one would have to reverse gerrymander, mixing geographies and crossing all kinds of legal boundary lines, to produce a truly competitive electorate.

Our campaign messages, as they had to, mostly centered on specific, new ideas: ethics reforms, access to health insurance, property tax caps, automatic tax refunds and many more, all couched in rhetoric stressing Indianans’ commonality as people, and the need for every part of the state to participate fully in its better future. Boy, is that passé.

Ideas fashioned not to stroke the erogenous zones of a riled-up minority of left or right, but to speak to the broader public in pursuit of a general election victory, evoke our common interest instead of our differences and antagonisms. But such campaigns rarely make sense these days.

Political campaigns need not necessarily be dispiriting, narrowcasting mudfests. They can be vehicles, in fact the best possible vehicles, for floating constructive ideas to an attentive public. Ideas proposed by a successful campaign have a higher likelihood of enactment after the election

Once in office, to make effective change, we had to engage with our Democratic counterparts, even in the years when we achieved full but narrow legislative control.

In 2024, 30 states feature not only trifecta government but 2-to-1 majorities in at least one house. In that setting, both campaigns and governance look totally different than they do in genuine two-party polities.

This year, our next governor ran a smart race and won his victory fair and square. The problem is that neither he, nor any of his competitors, had an incentive to offer their soon-to-be employers a sense of how Indiana could move forward.

What voters saw instead, besides attacks on each other, were political advertisements centered on “standing up to China,” taking on foreign drug cartels and closing the Mexican border. It became difficult to tell whether these folks were running for secretary of state or secretary of homeland security.

Wise policy and good government can and do emerge in lopsided states. But competition, always and everywhere, fosters innovation. In politics, it also compels a sensitivity and an outreach to the widest possible audiences.

The contours of the current system don’t conduce to those outcomes; until that changes, we have to hope for candidates who, elected by 5 percent of the state, somehow come to consider their duty of service to all the rest.

Arthur: Part of it is because we have a rigid system of power, and so we’re ridiculously institutionalized in the way that people can rise and prosper

Americans speak a good line about meritocracy, but we don’t have a meritocracy. When it comes to our politics, we have a gerontocracy that is based on seniority, loyalty, and tenure. We have leaders with tons of wisdom, but they don’t have the vigor and the focus and the energy to be putting in the grinding work of national and international governance.

Matt: Happiness is your principal subject, and your work usually frames it in terms of advice to the individual: How can you be happy? How can I be happy? But in this political moment, there’s also a dimension of this that’s about collective happiness, the public good—a general happiness that is at stake in Biden’s decision. How do you balance that?

Arthur: You know the famous Zen Buddhist koan: What is the sound of one hand clapping? One interpretation of that koan is that the sound of one hand clapping is an illusion. And one version of that illusion is that your personal happiness is somehow meaningful. In fact, the clapping becomes a reality only when there’s a second hand.

In other words, your happiness is real only when somebody else is happy as well. So if you’re a public figure, then the good of the public is required to get the second hand clapping. Otherwise you’ll be living in illusion.

a philosopher at the University of Cambridge named Stephen Cave who wrote a really important book called Immortality. In it, he talks about how one of the ways to become immortal is to build a legacy, and the way to think about that is the internal struggle of Achilles. Obviously, the Greek hero is a mythological character, but his story presents an emblematic dilemma: The best way to achieve immortality is to secure your legacy through a heroic end; the worst way to get immortality—and the most efficacious way to destroy your legacy—is to just hang around. Do you see the irony? People who hang around because of their legacy are diminishing their legacy.

Arthur: So there’s personal advice and there’s political advice. The personal advice is that for all successful people, there comes a time to decide between being special and being happy. Being special—staying on top—is hard, tiring work. But it is an addiction, which is why people keep at it way beyond what seems reasonable, at great harm to themselves and others. Get sober; choose happiness.

The political advice is based on a lesson from history, that the mark of great leadership is what happens after leaders leave the scene. Did they teach the next generation and set up those who came after for success? And then did they step aside with grace and humility? Be able to answer yes to both of those questions.

In fact, the news from Wall Street lately has mostly been about retreat from climate goals, rather than recommitment. Banks and asset managers are withdrawing from international climate alliances and chafing at their rules. Regional banks are stepping up lending to fossil fuel producers. Sustainable investment funds have sustained crippling outflows, and many have collapsed.

In some cases, it’s a classic prisoner’s dilemma: If firms collectively shift to cleaner energy, a cooler climate benefits everyone more in the future

in the short term, each firm has an individual incentive to cash in on fossil fuels, making the transition much harder to achieve.

when it comes to avoiding climate damage to their own operations, the financial industry is genuinely struggling to comprehend what a warming future will mean.

A global compact of financial institutions made commitments worth $130 trillion to try to bring down emissions, confident that governments would create a regulatory and financial infrastructure to make those investments profitable. And in 2022, the Inflation Reduction Act passed.

What about the risk that climate change poses to the financial industry’s own investments, through more powerful hurricanes, heat waves that knock out power grids, wildfires that wipe out towns?

“If we think about what is going to be the best way to tilt your portfolios in the direction to benefit, it’s really difficult to do,”

“These will probably be great investments over 20 years, but when we’re judged over one to three years, it’s a little more challenging for us.”

Some firms cater to institutional clients, like public employee pension funds, that want combating climate change to be part of their investment strategy and are willing to take a short-term hit. But they aren’t a majority

And over the past couple of years, many banks and asset managers have shrunk from anything with a climate label for fear of losing business from states that frown on such concerns.

On top of that, the war in Ukraine scrambled the financial case for backing a rapid energy transition. Artificial intelligence and the movement toward greater electrification are adding demand for power, and renewables haven’t kept up

All of that is about the relative appeal of investments that would slow climate change

If you bought some of the largest solar-energy exchange-traded funds in early 2023, you would have lost about 20 percent of your money, while the rest of the stock market soared.

There is evidence that banks and investors price in some physical risk, but also that much of it still lurks, unheeded.

“I’m very, very worried about this, because insurance markets are this opaque weak link,” Dr. Sastry said. “There are parallels to some of the complex linkages that happened in 2008, where there is a weak and unregulated market that spills over to the banking system.”

Regulators worry that failing to understand those ripple effects could not just put a single bank in trouble but even become a contagion that would undermine the financial system.

But while the European Central Bank has made climate risk a consideration in its policy and oversight, the Federal Reserve has resisted taking a more active role, despite indications that extreme weather is feeding inflation and that high interest rates are slowing the transition to clean energy.

“The argument has been, ‘Unless we can convincingly show it’s part of our mandate, Congress should deal with it, it’s none of our business,’”

a much nearer-term uncertainty looms: the outcome of the U.S. election, which could determine whether further action is taken to address climate concerns or existing efforts are rolled back. An aggressive climate strategy might not fare as well during a second Trump administration, so it may seem wise to wait and see how it shakes out.

big companies are hesitating on climate-sensitive investments as November approaches, but says that “two things are misguided and quite dangerous about that hypothesis.”

One: States like California are establishing stricter rules for carbon-related financial disclosures and may step it up further if Republicans win

And two: Europe is phasing in a “carbon border adjustment mechanism,” which will punish polluting companies that want to do business there.

at the moment, even European financial institutions feel pressure from the United States, which — while providing some of the most generous subsidies so far for renewable-energy investment — has not imposed a price on carbon.

The global insurance company Allianz has set out a plan to align its investments in a way that would prevent warming above 1.5 degrees Celsius by the end of the century, if everyone else did the same. But it’s difficult to steer a portfolio to climate-friendly assets while other funds take on polluting companies and reap short-term profits for impatient clients.

“This is the main challenge for an asset manager, to really bring the customer along,” said Markus Zimmer, an Allianz economist. Asset managers don’t have sufficient tools on their own to move money out of polluting investments and into clean ones, if they want to stay in business,

“Of course it helps if the financial industry is somehow ambitious, but you cannot really substitute the lack of actions by policymakers,”

According to new research, the benefit is greater when decarbonization occurs faster, because the risks of extreme damage mount as time goes on. But without a uniform set of rules, someone is bound to scoop up the immediate profits, disadvantaging those that don’t — and the longer-term outcome is adverse for all.

The Israeli military relies on reservist soldiers, some of whom have described growing exhaustion as Israel manages conflicts for months on end on multiple fronts, including the border with Lebanon and in the West Bank. An end to fighting in Gaza would give Israeli forces a respite that analysts say is needed, especially if fighting with Hezbollah escalates further.

Israel Ziv, a retired Israeli general and veteran of multiple wars, said tensions between the Israeli military and security establishment and Netanyahu are at a record high.“The IDF feels and the security echelon feels that we exhausted the purpose of the war. We reached the maximum tactical peak that we can achieve,” he said. “As long as Rafah was there, they could say finish the job. OK it’s finished now.”

Netanyahu has rejected a series of proposals for possible alternatives to Hamas, including an American plan to bring in the Palestinian Authority and Arab calls for a Palestinian unity government that would include Hamas. Some military analysts and former Israeli officials have questioned whether installing a new government in Gaza was ever possible, given that Hamas has managed to survive the Israeli military assault.

“We need to make a decision,” said Ziv. “Even a bad decision, that’s OK. Let’s say [we] occupy Gaza in the next few years because we need to clear up the last few terrorists. OK, it’s a bad decision, but it’s a decision. The military needs to know.”

The dispute between Netanyahu and the military centers in part on how officials define a defeat of Hamas. An Israeli military official said the army considers a battalion “dismantled” not when all its fighters are killed, but when its command structure and ability to carry out organized attacks are eliminated. 

Military analysts say that Hamas’s militia forces are likely to survive the Israeli military operation even in Rafah, in part because the Israeli army’s approach leaves many lower-ranking Hamas fighters in place. Hamas’s top leadership in the enclave, including its leader, Yahya Sinwar, have also eluded Israeli forces throughout the war.

“Hamas is preserving its forces in Rafah rather than engaging the Israel Defense Forces, likely because Hamas does not believe Israel’s Rafah operation will be decisive,” said an assessment this week from the Institute for the Study of War and the American Enterprise Institute’s Critical Threats Project.

Why write this book? The Singularity Is Near talked about the future, but 20 years ago, when people didn’t know what AI was. It was clear to me what would happen, but it wasn’t clear to everybody. Now AI is dominating the conversation. It is time to take a look again both at the progress we’ve made – large language models (LLMs) are quite delightful to use – and the coming breakthroughs.

It is hard to imagine what this would be like, but it doesn’t sound very appealing… Think of it like having your phone, but in your brain. If you ask a question your brain will be able to go out to the cloud for an answer similar to the way you do on your phone now – only it will be instant, there won’t be any input or output issues, and you won’t realise it has been done (the answer will just appear). People do say “I don’t want that”: they thought they didn’t want phones either!

The most important driver is the exponential growth in the amount of computing power for the price in constant dollars. We are doubling price-performance every 15 months. LLMs just began to work two years ago because of the increase in computation.

What’s missing currently to bring AI to where you are predicting it will be in 2029? One is more computing power – and that’s coming. That will enable improvements in contextual memory, common sense reasoning and social interaction, which are all areas where deficiencies remain

LLM hallucinations [where they create nonsensical or inaccurate outputs] will become much less of a problem, certainly by 2029 – they already happen much less than they did two years ago. The issue occurs because they don’t have the answer, and they don’t know that. They look for the best thing, which might be wrong or not appropriate. As AI gets smarter, it will be able to understand its own knowledge more precisely and accurately report to humans when it doesn’t know.

What exactly is the Singularity? Today, we have one brain size which we can’t go beyond to get smarter. But the cloud is getting smarter and it is growing really without bounds. The Singularity, which is a metaphor borrowed from physics, will occur when we merge our brain with the cloud. We’re going to be a combination of our natural intelligence and our cybernetic intelligence and it’s all going to be rolled into one. Making it possible will be brain-computer interfaces which ultimately will be nanobots – robots the size of molecules – that will go noninvasively into our brains through the capillaries. We are going to expand intelligence a millionfold by 2045 and it is going to deepen our awareness and consciousness.

Why should we believe your dates? I’m really the only person that predicted the tremendous AI interest that we’re seeing today. In 1999 people thought that would take a century or more. I said 30 years and look what we have.

I have a chapter on perils. I’ve been involved with trying to find the best way to move forward and I helped to develop the Asilomar AI Principles [a 2017 non-legally binding set of guidelines for responsible AI development]

All the major companies are putting more effort into making sure their systems are safe and align with human values than they are into creating new advances, which is positive.

Not everyone is likely to be able to afford the technology of the future you envisage. Does technological inequality worry you? Being wealthy allows you to afford these technologies at an early point, but also one where they don’t work very well. When [mobile] phones were new they were very expensive and also did a terrible job. They had access to very little information and didn’t talk to the cloud. Now they are very affordable and extremely useful. About three quarters of people in the world have one. So it’s going to be the same thing here: this issue goes away over time.

The book looks in detail at AI’s job-killing potential. Should we be worried? Yes, and no. Certain types of jobs will be automated and people will be affected. But new capabilities also create new jobs. A job like “social media influencer” didn’t make sense, even 10 years ago. Today we have more jobs than we’ve ever had and US average personal income per hours worked is 10 times what it was 100 years ago adjusted to today’s dollars. Universal basic income will start in the 2030s, which will help cushion the harms of job disruptions. It won’t be adequate at that point but over time it will become so.

Everything is progressing exponentially: not only computing power but our understanding of biology and our ability to engineer at far smaller scales. In the early 2030s we can expect to reach longevity escape velocity where every year of life we lose through ageing we get back from scientific progress. And as we move past that we’ll actually get back more years.

What is your own plan for immortality? My first plan is to stay alive, therefore reaching longevity escape velocity. I take about 80 pills a day to help keep me healthy. Cryogenic freezing is the fallback. I’m also intending to create a replicant of myself [an afterlife AI avatar], which is an option I think we’ll all have in the late 2020s

I did something like that with my father, collecting everything that he had written in his life, and it was a little bit like talking to him. [My replicant] will be able to draw on more material and so represent my personality more faithfully.

What should we be doing now to best prepare for the future? It is not going to be us versus AI: AI is going inside ourselves. It will allow us to create new things that weren’t feasible before. It’ll be a pretty fantastic future.

AlphaGo’s victory demonstrated the unbridled potential of A.I. to achieve superhuman mastery of skills once considered too complicated for machines.

Mr. Lee, now 41, retired three years later, convinced that humans could no longer compete with computers at Go. Artificial intelligence, he said, had changed the very nature of a game that originated in China more than 2,500 years ago.

As society wrestles with what A.I. holds for humanity’s future, Mr. Lee is now urging others to avoid being caught unprepared, as he was, and to become familiar with the technology now. He delivers lectures about A.I., trying to give others the advance notice he wishes he had received before his match.

“I faced the issues of A.I. early, but it will happen for others,” Mr. Lee said recently at a community education fair in Seoul to a crowd of students and parents. “It may not be a happy ending.”

Mr. Lee is not a doomsayer. In his view, A.I. may replace some jobs, but it may create some, too. When considering A.I.’s grasp of Go, he said it was important to remember that humans both created the game and designed the A.I. system that mastered it.

What he worries about is that A.I. may change what humans value.

His immense talent was apparent from the start. He quickly became the best player of his age not only locally but across all of South Korea, Japan and China. He turned pro at 12.

“People used to be in awe of creativity, originality and innovation,” he said. “But since A.I. came, a lot of that has disappeared.”

By the time he was 20, Mr. Lee had reached 9-dan, the highest level of mastery in Go. Soon, he was among the best players in the world, described by some as the Roger Federer of the game.

Go posed a tantalizing challenge for A.I. researchers. The game is exponentially more complicated than chess, with it often being said that there are more possible positions on a Go board (10 with more than 100 zeros after it, by many mathematical estimates) than there are atoms in the universe.

The breakthrough came from DeepMind, which built AlphaGo using so-called neural networks: mathematical systems that can learn skills by analyzing enormous amounts of data. It started by feeding the network 30 million moves from high-level players. Then the program played game after game against itself until it learned which moves were successful and developed new strategies.

Mr. Lee said not having a true human opponent was disconcerting. AlphaGo played a style he had never seen, and it felt odd to not try to decipher what his opponent was thinking and feeling. The world watched in awe as AlphaGo pushed Mr. Lee into corners and made moves unthinkable to a human player.“I couldn’t get used to it,” he said. “I thought that A.I. would beat humans someday. I just didn’t think it was here yet.”

AlphaGo’s victory “was a watershed moment in the history of A.I.” said Demis Hassabis, DeepMind’s chief executive, in a written statement. It showed what computers that learn on their own from data “were really capable of,” he said.

Mr. Lee had a hard time accepting the defeat. What he regarded as an art form, an extension of a player’s own personality and style, was now cast aside for an algorithm’s ruthless efficiency.

His 17-year-old daughter is in her final year of high school. When they discuss what she should study at university, they often consider a future shaped by A.I.“We often talk about choosing a job that won’t be easily replaceable by A.I. or less impacted by A.I.,” he said. “It’s only a matter of time before A.I. is present everywhere.”

Out of the 7,000 rooms in the Village, 2,500 have been supplied mobile air conditioning units at the teams’ requests, a Paris 2024 spokesman said

Keeping cool at all times is that much more important given the erratic schedules that some of the athletes here are facing, said Carroll, the Australian Olympic committee executive. Since many athletes’ events are at night, they’ll need to sleep during the hottest part of the day. So the decision to pay for air conditioners was a no-brainer.

But not everyone is all-in on A/C. Germany’s Olympic sports federation will have one of the larger contingents in the village with around 350 athletes. That includes 6-foot-7½-inch decathlon medal favorite Leo Neugebauer, who recently won the NCAA title competing for the Texas Longhorns in Austin, where air conditioning isn’t merely a suggestion—it’s a way of life.

When Germany asked its individual sport federations if they wanted to order air conditioning units for the athletes’ village, demand for frigid air was lukewarm, according to Olympic committee spokesman Michael Schirp.

“A total of 11 AC have been ordered. Eleven,” he wrote, adding an emoji of a face wearing sunglasses.