With Rishi Sunak as prime minister of the UK, it is now impossible to deny what has been evident for some while: Indian talent is revolutionizing the Western world far more than had been expected 10 or 15 years ago. You might think UK leadership is an exception, but consider the US. It is…

This year has brought a lot of innovation in artificial intelligence, which I have tried to keep up with, but too many people still do not appreciate the import of what is to come. I commonly hear comments such as, “Those are cool images, graphic designers will work with that,” or, “GPT-3 is cool,…

In the latest news from the labor wars, workers at a Starbucks in Portland, Maine, just voted to unionize, while those at an Amazon warehouse in upstate New York voted not to. Opinions on the value of unions obviously differ, and passions run high. As an economist, I try to assess these kinds of…

If 2021 was the breakthrough year for mRNA vaccines, then 2022 may be the breakthrough year for artificial intelligence. So far there have been major advances in text generation and image generation, and now investor Nat Friedman is predicting big developments in AI personal voice assistants. More…

I am writing this from Amritsar, India, in the state of Punjab. The Sikh Golden Temple here is one of India’s leading attractions, and last night I shared space with thousands of people over the course of four or five hours. In that time, I saw only two people who might qualify as White Westerners…

In May, for the first time in more than three decades, Germany’s storied trade surplus disappeared. Not only is imported natural gas more expensive, but demand in China is falling — neither of which is good news for Germany. Nevertheless, the fallout will be more manageable than many people expect,…

One of the longstanding worries about the technologies of artificial intelligence is that they will enable surveillance, autocracy and maybe even totalitarianism. These views no longer seem so convincing. The world’s autocratic states are not exactly turning these technologies to their advantage,…

Kim Stanley Robinson writes bestselling novels about a colony on Mars. Elon Musk talks of actually colonizing Mars. There is even a 30-page constitution, courtesy of a Yale political science class, for a Mars settlement. The actual prospects for a settlement remain uncertain, but the question of…

“Beware the nested game.” It is one of the least-known but most useful adages to keep in mind when following international affairs, and it is especially relevant now that Lithuania has announced a blockade of sanctioned Russian goods. A nested game is what it sounds like — a game within a game…

America needs to build a new and greener energy infrastructure, yet there is a problem standing in the way. Or maybe I should say flying in the way, because that obstacle is birds — and, more generally, the human bias toward the status quo when animal interests are at stake. We have to be more…