Democratization

Access, participation, and public deliberation: who decides and who is left out.

The missing signatures featured image

The missing signatures

UN General Assembly week: twenty-two leaders call for an institution able to act on the frontier and the three countries that host the labs do not sign, the companies ask the …

Magnifica machinae: Leo XIV asks who owns the machine featured image

Magnifica machinae: Leo XIV asks who owns the machine

The first encyclical on artificial intelligence does with data and algorithms what Rerum Novarum did with the factory: it does not ask how to use them well but whom they belong to. …

What it costs not to surrender: MIT's report on AI and education, read on another budget featured image

What it costs not to surrender: MIT's report on AI and education, read on another budget

MIT documents "cognitive surrender" and answers with oral exams, portfolios, mentoring and more undergraduate research. Every one of those recommendations is paid for in teaching …

A private company's Slack featured image

A private company's Slack

The week the risk of extinction jumped from online forums to front pages, to the US Senate and to an interview in Buenos Aires: a threat that by definition includes all of us, …

Thirteen million lines in the margin: what makes this the good case featured image

Thirteen million lines in the margin: what makes this the good case

Claude formalized the first computer-checked proof of Fermat's Last Theorem in eleven days. The theorem is not the interesting part: that domain had a cheap, independent, hostile …

A Notice Pinned to a Locked Door featured image

A Notice Pinned to a Locked Door

The week protecting minors meant identifying every adult, a philosophy journal banned what it cannot detect, and Amazon finished scanning the books it then throws away.

Pax Silica featured image

Pax Silica

The week the United States asked thirty-five countries to pick a side, and the week both sides stopped for the same reason, for the same two weeks, entirely on their own say-so.

Three universal promises and not a single institution featured image

Three universal promises and not a single institution

A week of manifestos, because everyone writes manifestos now. Three far-reaching texts —one by a Nobel Peace laureate, one by a philosophy professor, one by Meta’s CEO— each …