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Writing in the wake of the 2008 financial crash, Slama asked ‘whether our old democracies, faced with an economic, sociological, demographic and intellectual shock unprecedented in the last 70 years, are in danger of evolving in a direction comparable… to the tribal and arbitrary model that is hampering the development of most Third World countries.’

The 2008 crash was just the first shock of many to strike the West, each one weakening further its foundations. The overthrow of Colonel Gaddafi in 2011 precipitated the first great migrant crisis, and Angela Merkel provoked the second four years later by opening Europe’s borders to more than a million migrants; Islamic terrorism has left hundreds dead; Covid lockdowns caused irreparable economic, mental and social damage; environmental obsessiveness is reawakening class divisions; progressive radicalism is stoking identitarian tensions and the war in Ukraine has sent energy prices and inflation soaring.

France is at the epicentre of these shockwaves, and a growing number of prominent thinkers and commentators are warning that culturally and economically the country is in grave danger. In a recent interview the economist Agnes Verdier Molinié cautioned that ‘France is on the verge of bankruptcy’ and that the annual cost of its debt will hit €70 billion in 2024

at least as far as these gentlemen were concerned, this was a talk about the future of technology.

Taking their cue from Tesla founder Elon Musk colonising Mars, Palantir’s Peter Thiel reversing the ageing process, or artificial intelligence developers Sam Altman and Ray Kurzweil uploading their minds into supercomputers, they were preparing for a digital future that had less to do with making the world a better place than it did with transcending the human condition altogether. Their extreme wealth and privilege served only to make them obsessed with insulating themselves from the very real and present danger of climate change, rising sea levels, mass migrations, global pandemics, nativist panic and resource depletion. For them, the future of technology is about only one thing: escape from the rest of us.

These people once showered the world with madly optimistic business plans for how technology might benefit human society. Now they’ve reduced technological progress to a video game that one of them wins by finding the escape hatch.

ultimately, achieving the dream of explaining everything is too big an ask, even for an economist of Galor’s range. He is so devoted to the hidden long-run pulses that determine our destinies – geography, climate, diversity, the capacity to be future-oriented, the role of education, the rights and wrongs of Malthusian economics – that he neglects what is in full view

An account that purports to describe humanity’s journey without getting to grips with why some innovations – such as the three-masted sailing ship, printing press or computer – change civilisation while others are more ordinary, can only be incomplete. These “general-purpose technologies” not only have diverse origins, as he argues, but also require an extraordinary interplay between state funding, large markets, cultural readiness and capitalist organisation to get off the ground

Galor devotes little of his book to capitalism, the structure of states and the consequent dynamic interdependence between the public and private sectors, or the importance of Enlightenment values that unleashed notions of the public sphere and rule of law. These are gigantic omissions. His is a technocratic journey full of illuminating graphs, but strangely bloodless and neglectful of political economy in explaining humanity’s journey.

Tyler makes the case that, despite what you may have heard, we can make rational judgments about what is best for society as a whole. He argues:Our top moral priority should be preserving and improving humanity’s long-term futureThe way to do that is to maximise the rate of sustainable economic growthWe should respect human rights and follow general principles while doing so.

there’s something different about today’s tech titans, as evidenced by a rash of recent books. Reading about their apocalypse bunkers, vampiric longevity strategies, outlandish social media pronouncements, private space programmes and virtual world-building ambitions, it’s hard to remember they’re not actors in a reality series or characters from a new Avengers movie.

Unlike their forebears, contemporary billionaires do not hope to build the biggest house in town, but the biggest colony on the moon. In contrast, however avaricious, the titans of past gilded eras still saw themselves as human members of civil society.

The ChatGPT impresario Sam Altman, whose board of directors sacked him as CEO before he made a dramatic comeback this week, wants to upload his consciousness to the cloud (if the AIs he helped build and now fears will permit him).

ust a few hours after Hamas launched its assault on Israel, India’s prime minister was among the first world leaders to respond. In a strongly worded statement, Narendra Modi condemned the “terrorist attacks” and said India “stands in solidarity with Israel at this difficult hour”.

it was not a sentiment restricted only to the upper echelons of Indian government. As Azad Essa, a journalist and author of Hostile Homelands: The New Alliance Between India and Israel, said: “This messaging gave a clear signal to the whole rightwing internet cell in India.”

In the aftermath, the Indian internet factcheckers AltNews and Boom began to observe a flood of disinformation targeting Palestine pushed out by Indian social media accounts, which included fake stories about atrocities committed by Palestinians and Hamas that were shared sometimes millions of times, and often using the conflict to push the same Islamophobic narrative that has been used regularly to demonise India’s Muslim population since the BJP came to power

, Zelenskiy indicated he was willing to consider aspects of the Chinese proposal. He said he planned to meet president Xi Jinping and said it would be “useful” to both countries and global security. “As far as I know, China respects historical integrity,” he stressed, adding: “Let’s work China on this point. Why not?”

Zelenskiy – who was dressed in a black fleece, khaki trousers and desert boots – said compromise with a “sick” and “bloody” Russian leadership was currently impossible.

He recalled how Ukrainians “didn’t run to Russian troops with flowers” when they came across the border a year ago and instead greeted them with weapons. Russia had turned from a “neighbour and friend” into a prodigious murderer that “killed and tortured people”, and abducted children, he said.

Peter Frankopan’s story of our relationship to the world across all planetary space and human time is necessarily vast – 660 pages of text, with footnotes relegated to 212 pages online – in which the grand cycle is enacted again and again

Volcanoes are the unexpected killers. Their spewing of ash into an atmosphere whose winds distribute it around the globe has repeatedly destroyed summers, devastated crops, induced famines and collapsed societies

From the very beginning, human beings have been actors in their own drama and responsible for large parts of their fate. Elasticity and inventiveness always win. Rigidity always fails, and so, for example, when the Qing dynasty began to collapse in late 18th-century China, beset by climate-induced crop failures, hunger and massive popular discontent, the contemporary administration in Japan, experiencing the same physical conditions, survived with no such difficulty.

What World One showed was that by 2040 there would be a global collapse if the expansion of the population and industry was to continue at the current levels.

The prediction, which recently reappeared in Australian media, was made by a program dubbed World One. It was originally created by the computer pioneer Jay Forrester, who was commissioned by the Club of Rome to model how well the world could sustain its growth.

In fact, 2020 is the first milestone envisioned by World One. That’s when the quality of life is supposed to drop dramatically. The broadcaster presented this scenario and how it would lead to the demise of large numbers of people: