In an era where artificial intelligence continues to dazzle with its capabilities, Google’s DeepMind lab has unveiled a new AI known as ‘Student of Games’ (SoG), with the power to outperform human intellect in games that range from the strategic depth of chess to the unpredictable nature of poker. This AI marks a clear leap towards the development of an artificial general intelligence, a technology that aspires to outpace human ability in a sweeping array of tasks.

Recounting SoG’s evolutionary roots, it is evident how the project draws on the heritage of two pivotal AI endeavors – DeepStack and AlphaZero. DeepStack, originating from a collaboration including Martin Schmid at the University of Alberta, was the first AI to triumph over professional poker players. AlphaZero, another DeepMind creation, shattered records by defeating top-tier human players in chess and Go. The distinction between two was their handling of games with different levels of accessible information to the player: poker, a game of hidden information, versus the complete transparency seen in chess.

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Google DeepMind's Student of Games AI Masters Both Chess and Poker https://t.co/GIqojvSVwm

— Amb Antonio Garza (@aogarza) November 16, 2023

We believe it’s in everyone’s interest to maintain a healthy ecosystem of information on YouTube. We have long-standing policies that prohibit technically manipulated content that misleads viewers and may pose a serious risk of egregious harm. However, AI’s powerful new forms of storytelling can also be used to generate content that has the potential to mislead viewers—particularly if they’re unaware that the video has been altered or is synthetically created.

To address this concern, over the coming months, we’ll introduce updates that inform viewers when the content they’re seeing is synthetic. Specifically, we’ll require creators to disclose when they’ve created altered or synthetic content that is realistic, including using AI tools. When creators upload content, we will have new options for them to select to indicate that it contains realistic altered or synthetic material. For example, this could be an AI-generated video that realistically depicts an event that never happened, or content showing someone saying or doing something they didn’t actually do.

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How is it that the noun “mission” has come so to dominate the avalanche of Anglican reports and episcopal directives? It is oddly contentless, unlike the older word “evangelism”, which suggests that we have the good news of the gospel to impart. What is little understood is how this word has come to be shaped by modern management theory.

Successful managers, Lyndon Shakespeare writes, are “makers of worlds by the use of words”, and those words must have particular qualities: “low in definition and direct reference, vague and mysterious in terms of precise content, easy to say, vivid and radical sounding in metaphorical and imagistic terms”. Two key terms that theorists employ for such world-making are “mission” and “vision”, and readers hardly need to be reminded of the recent use of these words in the Vision and Strategy documents.

The distinction between the two terms is that the vision gives the organisation direction and meaning, while the mission strategy points to how it will realise its purpose. The Church of England, however, while embracing managerialism with an unholy hospitality, has confused mission and vision so that mission has displaced the vision to become an end in itself. Every single facet of our lives as Christians is held to be for the sake of mission, and is subsumed in utilitarian fashion to this end.

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Critique of managerialism in the CofE by Alison Milbank ⁦@SaveTheParish⁩ https://t.co/TcJpCXeRK5

— john milbank (@johnmilbank3) October 28, 2023

Carbon emissions from the global electricity sector may peak this year, after plateauing in the first half of 2023, because of a surge in wind and solar power, according to a climate thinktank.

A new report on global electricity generation found that the growth of renewables was so rapid that it was close to the incredibly fast rate required if the world is to hit the tripling of capacity by the end of the decade that experts believe is necessary to stay on the 1.5C pathway.

It also noted that there had been only a slight increase in emissions in the first six months of the year, compared with the same period a year before.

The findings suggest the world may be close to reaching the peak of the global power sector’s carbon emissions, and they could soon even begin to fall in line with global climate targets.

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Global carbon emissions from electric power may peak this year, report says https://t.co/AVuFVBYBDq

— Guardian news (@guardiannews) October 4, 2023

Investors overseeing $23.6 trillion of funds have kick-started a campaign to pressure 100 companies to ramp up the fight against biodiversity loss.

Axa Investment Managers, Robeco, the Church Commissioners for England, Storebrand Asset Management and 186 other participants in the Nature Action 100 initiative have written to companies demanding “urgent and necessary actions” to protect and restore ecosystems, according to a statement released Tuesday.

The targeted companies include BHP Group Plc, Alibaba Group Holding Ltd, Nestle SA, Bayer AG, Amazon.com Inc. and Unilever Plc. They were selected based on their market values and participation in industries ranging from mining, food and pharmaceuticals to chemicals and forestry that are considered vital to reversing biodiversity loss by 2030.

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Investors overseeing $23.6 trillion of funds have kick-started a campaign to pressure 100 companies to ramp up the fight against biodiversity loss https://t.co/YBXl6RtBou

— Bloomberg (@business) September 26, 2023

The world is at “the beginning of the end” of the fossil fuel era, according to the leading global energy watchdog, which for the first time has forecast that demand for oil, natural gas and coal will all peak before 2030.

The International Energy Agency projected that the consumption of the three major fossil fuels will start to decline this decade because of the rapid growth of renewable energy and the spread of electric vehicles.

“We are witnessing the beginning of the end of the fossil fuel era and we have to prepare ourselves for the next era,” IEA head Fatih Birol said of the projections, due to be published next month in the body’s World Energy Outlook. “It shows that climate policies do work.”

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Today the Episcopal Church commemorates John Henry Hobart, Bishop of New York, 1830

Rector of Trinity Wall Street, 3rd Bishop of New York (1816-30) and founder of General Theological Seminary, he helped promote the extension of the Episcopal Church in Central & Western New York pic.twitter.com/wIkunzNNCd

— The Anglican Church in St Petersburg (@anglicanspb) September 12, 2023

…can A.I. invent?

Legal scholars, patent authorities and even Congress have been pondering that question. The people who answer “yes,” a small but growing number, are fighting a decidedly uphill battle in challenging the deep-seated belief that only a human can invent.

Invention evokes images of giants like Thomas Edison and eureka moments — “the flash of creative genius,” as the Supreme Court justice William O. Douglas once put it.

But this is far more than a philosophical debate about human versus machine intelligence. The role, and legal status, of A.I. in invention also have implications for the future path of innovation and global competitiveness, experts say.

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AI seems to have a limitless bag of tricks. But can it invent?

A group of legal experts are now pressing patent agencies, courts and policymakers to address that question. https://t.co/zq9yWs8soY

— The New York Times (@nytimes) July 15, 2023

An industrial arms race is under way. America welcomes it, saying the world needs green technologies and a diversified supply of chips. It is true that an ocean of public money is bound to accelerate the green transition and reshape supply chains in ways that should increase the security of democracies. Alas, the accompanying economic benefits being promised are an illusion. As we report this week, governments that subsidise and protect manufacturing are more likely to harm their economies than help them.

In ideal conditions, promoting manufacturing can add to innovation and growth. Towards the end of the 20th century South Korea and Taiwan caught up with the West thanks to the careful promotion of manufacturing exports. In industries like planemaking the enormous costs of entry and uncertain future demand can justify support for new firms, as when Europe backed Airbus in the 1970s. Likewise, targeted help can boost national security.

But today’s schemes are likely either to fail or to prove needlessly costly. Countries subsidising chips and batteries are not pursuing catch-up growth but fighting over cutting-edge technology. The market for electric vehicles and batteries is unlikely to become an Airbus-Boeing style duopoly. In the 1980s protectionists argued that Japan would dominate the strategically vital semiconductor industry, owing to its subsidised mastery of memory-chip making. It did not turn out that way.

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Governments are not wrong to pursue good jobs, the green transition or national security. But the potential for the manufacturing obsession to backfire is enormous https://t.co/BXCCBI1Ls0

— The Economist (@TheEconomist) July 16, 2023

Controversial AI theorist Eliezer Yudkowsky sits on the fringe of the industry’s most extreme circle of commentators, where extinction of the human species is the inevitable result of developing advanced artificial intelligence.

“I think we’re not ready, I think we don’t know what we’re doing, and I think we’re all going to die,” Yudkowsky said on this week’s episode of the Bloomberg Originals series AI IRL.

For the past two decades, Yudkowsky has consistently promoted his theory that hostile AI could spark a mass extinction event. As many in the AI industry shrugged or raised eyebrows at this assessment, he created the Machine Intelligence Research Institute with funding from Peter Thiel, among others, and collaborated on written work with futurists such as Nick Bostrom.

To say that some of his visions for the end of the world are unpopular would be a gross understatement; they’re on par with the prophecy that the world would end in 2012. That prediction was based on a questionable interpretation of an ancient text, as well as a dearth of supportive evidence.

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AI doomsday scenarios are gaining traction in Silicon Valley, which can deflect from actual harms like algorithmic bias and racism. https://t.co/Y6nJD8xkGl

— Bloomberg (@business) July 13, 2023

Simon Mackenzie, a security officer at the discount retailer QD Stores outside London, was short of breath. He had just chased after three shoplifters who had taken off with several packages of laundry soap. Before the police arrived, he sat at a back-room desk to do something important: Capture the culprits’ faces.

On an aging desktop computer, he pulled up security camera footage, pausing to zoom in and save a photo of each thief. He then logged in to a facial recognition program, Facewatch, which his store uses to identify shoplifters. The next time those people enter any shop within a few miles that uses Facewatch, store staff will receive an alert.

“It’s like having somebody with you saying, ‘That person you bagged last week just came back in,’” Mr. Mackenzie said.

Use of facial recognition technology by the police has been heavily scrutinized in recent years, but its application by private businesses has received less attention. Now, as the technology improves and its cost falls, the systems are reaching further into people’s lives. No longer just the purview of government agencies, facial recognition is increasingly being deployed to identify shoplifters, problematic customers and legal adversaries.

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British retailers are increasingly using AI facial recognition technology to combat shoplifting, raising questions about its spread as AI rapidly improves and falls in cost.https://t.co/8EH6oebJyp

— The New York Times (@nytimes) June 28, 2023

The Church of England Pensions Board is today announcing its intention to disinvest from Shell plc and other oil and gas companies which are failing to show sufficient ambition to decarbonise in line with the aims of the Paris Agreement.

The new investment restriction announced today will apply to all oil and gas companies that do not have short, medium and long term emissions reduction targets aligned with limiting global warming to 1.5°C, as assessed by the independent Transition Pathway Initiative. The exclusion will apply to equity and also debt investments.

“Today we announce our intention to disinvest from all remaining oil and gas holdings across our equity and debt portfolio,” said John Ball, Chief Executive Officer of the Church of England Pensions Board. “There is a significant misalignment between the long term interests of our pension fund and continued investment in companies seeking short term profit maximisation at the expense of the ambition needed to achieve the goals of the Paris Agreement. Recent reversals of previous commitments, most notably by BP and Shell, has undermined confidence in the sector’s ability to transition”.

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Church Commissioners for England to exclude oil & gas companies from investments portfolio over failure to align with climate goals. Pensions Board also to disinvest from oil & gas companies failing to show ambition to decarbonisehttps://t.co/nSHPLTZOEYhttps://t.co/BbntlGm7G6

— Church of England in Parliament (@churchstate) June 22, 2023

Headline rates of inflation across most of the world’s economies have fallen back sharply since the autumn but core rates — which exclude volatile categories such as energy and food — remain at or close to multi-decade highs.

These rates, seen as a better gauge of underlying price pressures, have sparked concern that central banks will struggle to hit their targets without wiping out growth.

“The next leg of the improvement in the inflation numbers is going to be harder,” said Carl Riccadonna, chief US economist at BNP Paribas. “It requires more pain, and that pain likely involves a recession in the back half of the year.”

Torsten Slok, chief economist at Apollo Global Management, added: “The only way to get inflation down to 2 per cent is to crush demand and slow down the economy in a more substantial way.”

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“The next leg of the improvement in the inflation numbers is going to be harder. It requires more pain:” BNP's Riccadonna

Apollo's Torsten Slok: “The only way to get inflation down to 2% is to crush demand.”
https://t.co/8BVmtH9pdm

— Lisa Abramowicz (@lisaabramowicz1) June 23, 2023

The Church Commissioners and the Church of England Pensions Board are to remove Shell, BP, and other oil and gas firms from their investment portfolios, because they are not reducing their carbon emissions quickly enough.

The investment bodies were instructed by the General Synod in 2018 to disinvest from fossil-fuel companies by 2023 unless the latter could prove that they were on the path to tackling climate change, in line with the Paris Agreement (News, 13 July 2018).

The Commissioners, who manage a £10.3-billion endowment fund, announced on Thursday that they had “decided to exclude all remaining oil and gas majors from [their] portfolio, and will exclude all other companies primarily engaged in the exploration, production and refining of oil or gas, unless they are in genuine alignment with a 1.5°C pathway, by the end of 2023.

“In 2021, the Church Commissioners excluded 20 oil and gas majors from [their] investment portfolio. [They are] now also excluding BP, Ecopetrol, Eni, Equinor, ExxonMobil, Occidental Petroleum, Pemex, Repsol, Sasol, Shell, and Total, after concluding that none are aligned with the goals of the Paris Climate Agreement, as assessed by the Transition Pathway Initiative (TPI).”

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The Church Commissioners and the Church of England Pensions Board are to remove Shell, BP, and other oil and gas firms from their investment portfolios, because they are not reducing their carbon emissions quickly enoughhttps://t.co/AvBQ86cUjC

— Church Times (@ChurchTimes) June 22, 2023

GASTON COUNTY, N.C. — Nothing remains of the hilltop home that once stood at the end of this gravel road in western North Carolina. The house burned to the ground months ago.

Children’s bikes and firewood piles litter the yards of a half-dozen ranch homes down the hill that are next in line to be erased from the landscape. The company that will soon own them plans to have these homes torched, too. It is only interested in what lies beneath.

A hint of that prize sits a few steps into the forest, where craggy outcrops stand in the shade of tall loblolly pines. Look closely and you’ll see the rocks are marked with sparkling pinstripes of pale green.

Those pinstripes are evidence of lithium, a lightweight element used to power electric vehicle batteries. And that green is gold to Piedmont Lithium, the company planning to tunnel 500 feet into the earth here to mine the lucrative mineral.

Lithium is expected to fuel America’s transition away from gasoline-burning automobiles. In the process, that harvest could generate $3.9 billion for this rural community in five years, according to Piedmont, which penned an agreement with EV giant Tesla in January.

Along a certain stretch — where North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia meet — lithium is quickly becoming king: It pushes up through the ground, oozes through recyclers’ shredding machines and will soon travel through the backwoods on aging rail lines. New mines — as many as three separate operations by 2030 — are only part of the story. Welcome to the Lithium Belt.

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Lithium is driving today’s clean energy transition just as fossil fuels drove the industrial revolution. But what is the trade off to the environment in the Southeast?
Fascinating read from @ClareFieseler on a journey across the Lithium Belt. https://t.co/b6OKcqPB9j

— Glenn Smith (@glennsmith5) May 21, 2023

This bubbling mixture of excitement and fear makes it hard to weigh the opportunities and risks. But lessons can be learned from other industries, and from past technological shifts. So what has changed to make ai so much more capable? How scared should you be? And what should governments do?

In a special Science section, we explore the workings of llms and their future direction. The first wave of modern ai systems, which emerged a decade ago, relied on carefully labelled training data. Once exposed to a sufficient number of labelled examples, they could learn to do things like recognise images or transcribe speech. Today’s systems do not require pre-labelling, and as a result can be trained using much larger data sets taken from online sources. llms can, in effect, be trained on the entire internet—which explains their capabilities, good and bad.

Those capabilities became apparent to a wider public when Chatgpt was released in November. A million people had used it within a week; 100m within two months. It was soon being used to generate school essays and wedding speeches. Chatgpt’s popularity, and Microsoft’s move to incorporate it into Bing, its search engine, prompted rival firms to release chatbots too.

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Rapid progress in AI is arousing fear as well as excitement. How worried should you be? https://t.co/YM85dCBxu3 pic.twitter.com/hWMRvB4C62

— The Economist (@TheEconomist) April 20, 2023

 The secret contract was finalized on Nov. 8, 2021, a deal between a company that has acted as a front for the United States government and the American affiliate of a notorious Israeli hacking firm.

Under the arrangement, the Israeli firm, NSO Group, gave the U.S. government access to one of its most powerful weapons — a geolocation tool that can covertly track mobile phones around the world without the phone user’s knowledge or consent.

If the veiled nature of the deal was unusual — it was signed for the front company by a businessman using a fake name — the timing was extraordinary.

Only five days earlier, the Biden administration had announced it was taking action against NSO, whose hacking tools for years had been abused by governments around the world to spy on political dissidents, human rights activists and journalists. The White House placed NSO on a Commerce Department blacklist, declaring the company a national security threat and sending the message that American companies should stop doing business with it.

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NEW: Days after the White House in 2021 blacklisted NSO, the notorious Israeli hacking firm, a secret contract was signed for a hacking tool. The contract states that the USG is the user. A thread https://t.co/i2PSUXq3NJ

— Mark Mazzetti (@MarkMazzettiNYT) April 2, 2023

Elon Musk and a group of artificial intelligence experts and industry executives are calling for a six-month pause in developing systems more powerful than OpenAI’s newly launched GPT-4, in an open letter citing potential risks to society.

Earlier this month, Microsoft-backed OpenAI unveiled the fourth iteration of its GPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) AI program, which has wowed users by engaging them in human-like conversation, composing songs and summarising lengthy documents.

“Powerful AI systems should be developed only once we are confident that their effects will be positive and their risks will be manageable,” said the letter issued by the Future of Life Institute.

The non-profit is primarily funded by the Musk Foundation, as well as London-based group Founders Pledge, and Silicon Valley Community Foundation, according to the European Union’s transparency register.

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A group of artificial intelligence experts and industry executives is calling for a six-month pause in developing systems more powerful than OpenAI's newly launched GPT-4.
Their open letter cites potential risks to society and to humanity. https://t.co/whnM8yn94A

— CBC News (@CBCNews) March 29, 2023

The speed of the change is astonishing. Since entering America in 2017, TikTok has picked up more users than all but a handful of social-media apps, which have been around more than twice as long (see chart 1). Among young audiences, it crushes the competition. Americans aged 18-24 spend an hour a day on TikTok, twice as long as they spend on Instagram and Snapchat and more than five times as long as they spend on Facebook, which these days is mainly a medium for communicating with the grandparents (see chart 2).

TikTok’s success has prompted its rivals to reinvent themselves. Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, has turned both apps’ main feeds into algorithmically sorted “discovery engines” and launched Reels, a TikTok clone bolted onto Facebook and Instagram. Similar lookalike products have been created by YouTube (Shorts), Snapchat (Spotlight), Pinterest (Watch) and even Netflix (Fast Laughs). The latest TikTok-inspired makeover, announced on March 8th, was by Spotify, a music app whose homepage now features video clips that can be skipped by swiping up. (TikTok’s Chinese sister app, Douyin, is having a similar effect in its home market, where digital giants like Tencent are increasingly putting short videos at the centre of their offerings.)

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Short-form video has taken over social media. Although users have a seemingly endless appetite for the format, it is proving less profitable for platforms than the old news feed https://t.co/3uUiiiW4VL

— The Economist (@TheEconomist) March 21, 2023

And here is my real beef with Welby’s Church: managerialism. The backdrop to Welby’s appointment was the banking crisis and the subsequent Occupy camp at St Paul’s Cathedral. The Church needed to get a bit more this worldly, many thought. It needed to understand finance and business. When it came to capitalism, Welby was a grown-up, having worked for Elf Aquitaine in a previous life. And 11 years in the oil industry clearly shaped his thinking about organisational structures. The old, slightly bumbling high-table, soft-power understanding of Lambeth Palace was not for him. Welby wanted to change things and have access to levers of real executive power.

But the Church of England is not set up like this. It never has been. The parish system is the very model of subsidiarity. If anything, the Church is a bottom-up institution rather than top-down. You bow to your bishop, but you don’t necessarily do everything he asks. Under Welby, however, the centre has grown ever stronger, the parishes increasingly weaker. Max Weber famously divided power into the charismatic, the traditional and the legal/rational. Welby is the first archbishop who has tried to govern through the latter.

The “Save the Parish” movement was established as a fightback. Too many bishops became middle managers, hidden behind their laptops. Directives and new initiatives came down from head office, which many of the clergy, myself included, received with an inner groan. In the face of declining attendance, we all had to learn that evangelical up-speak, and get on with the paperwork. Morale has plummeted.

The Church’s reaction to Covid was the depressing conclusion of Welby’s legal/rational approach to power.

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This is first rate: serious but not unsympathetic. It aligns with my thoughts: there is much to like about JW. He has been unfailingly kind towards me despite my implicit criticisms on Safeguarding. All the more reason to be “Father in God” rather than CEO https://t.co/qeiCvC9rIm

— MartinSewell (@SewellMartin) March 21, 2023

Workers who have ever dreaded writing a briefing for your boss, building a digital presentation of your ideas or sifting through long email threads to get caught up on the latest projects may soon have some assistance — in the form of artificial intelligence.

At least that’s what Google aims to do for workers who use its suite of enterprise software tools called Google Workspace, which includes Google Docs, Google Sheets and Gmail. The tech giant plans to integrate its office products with generative AI that can do things like generate an entire document or create images based on a prompt. Workers will be able to access these capabilities by clicking a new wand icon that’ll appear in their apps.

Google plans to begin rolling out some features, starting with writing functions in Google Docs and Gmail, to select enterprise customers within the next couple of weeks, it said. It’s unclear when other features may become available.

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Google Workspace, including Google Docs, Sheets and Gmail, will soon include generative AI tools that aim to aid with work. https://t.co/knON3lnVNg

— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) March 14, 2023

Another question is what will happen to the venture debt market. svb was a major player, with $6.7bn of such loans outstanding when it went under. Startups used this low-cost lending to top up balance-sheets between equity funding rounds. Most now expect such loans to become more expensive, especially for the youngest firms. Venture-capital outfits are unlikely to lower themselves en masse to the comparatively small returns offered by this sort of lending. Other wheels on the venture-capital machine will need oiling, too. For example, svb often provided bridge financing to venture-capital firms, allowing them to strike deals while awaiting cash from investors.

All this means that the loss of svb is likely to have a chilling effect on an industry already suffering from higher interest rates. Bankers may have to wait some time to see venture capital’s dry powder hit their deposit accounts—after all, in the last quarter, the amount of money flowing into startups globally fell by two-thirds. Limits on financing and difficulties banking baby firms will make the industry’s adjustment to higher rates more painful still. After such an adjustment, trips to the bank will remind dealmakers of their own mortality. That is not necessarily a bad thing.

Read it all (registration or subscription).

Startups used low-cost lending to top up balance-sheets between equity funding rounds. Most now expect such loans to become more expensive https://t.co/9Ty10mOPhT

— The Economist (@TheEconomist) March 14, 2023

“I think we might exceed a one-to-one ratio of humanoid robots to humans,” Elon Musk declared on March 1st. Coming from the self-styled technoking of Tesla, it was not so much a prediction as a promise. Mr Musk’s car company is developing one such artificially intelligent automaton, codenamed Optimus, for use at home and in the factory. His remarks, made during Tesla’s investor day, were accompanied by a video of Optimus walking around apparently unassisted.

Given that Mr Musk did not elaborate how—or when—you get from a promotional clip to an army of more than 8bn robots, this might all smack of science-fiction. But he has waded into a very real debate about the future of work. For certain forms of ai-enabled automation are fast becoming science fact.

Since November Chatgpt, an ai conversationalist, has dazzled users with its passable impression of a human interlocutor. Other “generative” ais have been conjuring up similarly human-like texts, images and sounds by analysing reams of data on the internet. Last month the boss of ibm, a computing giant, forecast that ai will do away with much white-collar clerical work. On March 6th Microsoft announced the launch of a suite of ai “co-pilots” for workers in jobs ranging from sales and marketing to supply-chain management. Excitable observers murmur about a looming job apocalypse.

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Absolute levels of adoption of industrial robots remain low. Even South Korean firms, by far the world’s keenest robot-adopters, employ ten manufacturing workers for every industrial robot https://t.co/mwHsvq9LoZ

— The Economist (@TheEconomist) March 9, 2023

When the US last week added several units of BGI Group, a Chinese genetic sequencing firm, to its entity list restricting technology transfer, the primary justification was that the company had been “contributing to monitoring and surveillance”, including of ethnic minorities. Yet the human rights implications of China’s domestic surveillance state aren’t Washington’s only concern. The new regulations also state that BGI’s programmes of “collection and analysis of genetic data [present] a significant risk of diversion to China’s military”. 

Biotechnology has quietly become America’s newest national security concern. From Congress to the intelligence agencies, Washington’s leaders have concluded that control over biotechnologies will be critical not only to the country’s health, but to national security as well.

Biotech tools have made rapid advances of late, enabling new therapies, vaccines, manufacturing techniques — and biosecurity risks. It’s long been recognised that DNA is just a complex type of code, telling cells how to operate. Gene-editing technologies have become more precise and vastly cheaper, making it easier than ever to “reprogramme” organisms. In addition, more powerful computing capabilities have provided new clarity into the meaning of DNA’s “code”.

One use of these capabilities is for manufacturing. For centuries, humans have relied on micro-organisms to produce beer and yoghurt, but with the right reprogramming, bacteria can be made to produce many new types of chemicals. In 2010, Darpa, the Pentagon’s long-range R&D arm, launched a programme called Living Foundries, aiming to synthetically manufacture 1,000 molecules….

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This author of Chip War keeping us on our toes re new competition coming down the track. There’s a new US national security obsession — biotech via @FT
https://t.co/tZrtlkHK9r

— George Magnus (@georgemagnus1) March 7, 2023

Faye Johnson-Smith thought it was too good to be true when her boss said she could have every Wednesday off without a cut in salary.

Her firm was taking part in a six-month trial, testing the costs and benefits of a four-day week on full pay.

Like most of the workers involved, Faye was much happier working shorter hours.

But at the end of the trial almost all the 61 employers, which included a brewery and a fish and chip shop, were also keen to keep the new work pattern.

The scheme, organised by 4 Day Week Global, took place between June and December 2022, and involved organisations across the UK, including some non-profit organisations, as well as private firms in recruitment, software, and manufacturing.

A report assessing its impact has found it had “extensive benefits” particularly for employees’ well-being.

Read it all.

Big day for the #4DayWeek as we reveal that almost almost every company that took part in the UK four-day week pilot has decided to continue with it at the end of the trial.

Surely the time has now come to begin rolling it out across the country.https://t.co/nKWaPyoQOF

— Joe Ryle (@JoeRRyle) February 21, 2023

At 82 years old, with an aggressive form of blood cancer that six courses of chemotherapy had failed to eliminate, “Paul” appeared to be out of options. With each long and unpleasant round of treatment, his doctors had been working their way down a list of common cancer drugs, hoping to hit on something that would prove effective—and crossing them off one by one. The usual cancer killers were not doing their job.

With nothing to lose, Paul’s doctors enrolled him in a trial set up by the Medical University of Vienna in Austria, where he lives. The university was testing a new matchmaking technology developed by a UK-based company called Exscientia that pairs individual patients with the precise drugs they need, taking into account the subtle biological differences between people.

The researchers took a small sample of tissue from Paul (his real name is not known because his identity was obscured in the trial). They divided the sample, which included both normal cells and cancer cells, into more than a hundred pieces and exposed them to various cocktails of drugs. Then, using robotic automation and computer vision (machine-learning models trained to identify small changes in cells), they watched to see what would happen.

In effect, the researchers were doing what the doctors had done: trying different drugs to see what worked. But instead of putting a patient through multiple months-long courses of chemotherapy, they were testing dozens of treatments all at the same time.

The approach allowed the team to carry out an exhaustive search for the right drug. Some of the medicines didn’t kill Paul’s cancer cells. Others harmed his healthy cells. Paul was too frail to take the drug that came out on top. So he was given the runner-up in the matchmaking process: a cancer drug marketed by the pharma giant Johnson & Johnson that Paul’s doctors had not tried because previous trials had suggested it was not effective at treating his type of cancer.

It worked. Two years on, Paul was in complete remission—his cancer was gone.

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On average, it takes more than 10 years and billions of dollars to develop a new drug.

Incorporating AI into the drug development pipeline could help create cheaper pharmaceuticals faster. https://t.co/xYVZFyA5fY

— MIT Technology Review (@techreview) February 15, 2023

State laws tend to allow the gambling industry to regulate itself, which means that these companies are expected to identify and exclude their steadiest customers. This has been as unsuccessful as one might expect; as much as 50 percent of revenue comes from “problem gamblers,” while one study showed that in 1998, only 4 percent of gambling revenue from video lottery games came from “responsible” gamers. Just as tobacco companies would go out of business if people used their products responsibly, gambling wouldn’t be a multibillion-dollar industry if it weren’t for addicts.

Marijuana has a more complicated legacy, especially because it has real (but rather modest) benefits for medicinal use. However, careful analyses show that marijuana legalization has contributed to a rise in opioid-related deaths, especially when dispensaries can legally sell all sorts of cannabis products. Permitting dispensaries also increases referrals for addiction treatment, which is unsurprising considering that higher-potency products are more dangerous. The best evidence we have suggests that marijuana is harmful to teenage brains as they develop and that more teenagers use marijuana when it is legalized in their state.

The industries that profit off addiction want to frame the question of access around “responsible use” and occasionally suggest that some people might have a genetic predisposition to addiction. This individualistic framing allows them to avoid talking about how much effort they’re putting into making their products as accessible as possible. Even more important, it elides the question of whether we are all better off when it’s easier to start an addiction and harder to escape one.

There’s a richer and more compelling vision, one that is drawn from philosophical traditions across the ages. It recognizes that our life together isn’t merely a series of contracts we negotiate, and that our ability to make good decisions isn’t based simply on our rationality. Virtue is not simply doing good deeds, but also a set of dispositions and habits that must be practiced in order to flourish. Just as people can be sucked into addictions, we can also work to develop the virtues inside us so that we can be kind, generous, and self-controlled throughout our lives.

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America Has Gone Too Far in Legalizing Vice https://t.co/b8WnbgFO49

— Matt Lewis (@mattklewis) February 13, 2023

The U.S. government may have awarded roughly $5.4 billion in coronavirus aid to small businesses with potentially ineligible Social Security numbers, offering the latest indication that Washington’s haste earlier in the pandemic opened the door for widespread waste, fraud and abuse.

The top watchdog overseeing stimulus spending — called the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee, or PRAC — offered the estimate in an alert issued Monday and shared early with The Washington Post. It came as House Republicans prepared to hold their first hearing this week to study the roughly $5 trillion in federal stimulus aid approved since spring 2020.

The suspected wave of grift targeted two of the government’s most generous emergency initiatives: the Paycheck Protection Program, known as PPP, and the Economic Injury Disaster Loan, dubbed EIDL. Started under President Donald Trump — and managed by the beleaguered Small Business Administration — the roughly $1 trillion in loans and grants aimed to help cash-strapped companies stay afloat financially during the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.

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Some $5.4B in #COVID19 aid may have gone to businesses using fishy Social Security numbers. Nearly 70,000 suspect SSNs, including ones that didn't exist or didn't match name & birth records.
House #Republicans are holding hearings on aid fraud this week.https://t.co/m4Mteizpdr

— Laurie Garrett (@Laurie_Garrett) January 30, 2023

Eighteen months ago, the online used car retailer Carvana had such great prospects that it was worth $80 billion. Now it is valued at less than $1.5 billion, a 98 percent plunge, and is struggling to survive.

Many other tech companies are also seeing their fortunes reverse and their dreams dim. They are shedding employees, cutting back, watching their financial valuations shrivel — even as the larger economy chugs along with a low unemployment rate and a 3.2 percent annualized growth rate in the third quarter.

One largely unacknowledged explanation: An unprecedented era of rock-bottom interest rates has abruptly ended. Money is no longer virtually free.

For over a decade, investors desperate for returns sent their money to Silicon Valley, which pumped it into a wide range of start-ups that might not have received a nod in less heady times. Extreme valuations made it easy to issue stock or take on loans to expand aggressively or to offer sweet deals to potential customers that quickly boosted market share.

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High valuations in Silicon Valley made it easy to issue stock or take on loans to expand aggressively or to offer sweet deals to potential customers that quickly expanded market share. Not anymore, @DavidStreitfeld reports. https://t.co/rHsLe5mXfZ

— NYTimes Tech (@nytimestech) January 24, 2023

The corporate cafeteria can be an especially lonely place these days.

“You used to walk in at 12 o’clock on a Tuesday and stand in line to get something,” said Casey Allen, 46, who works for a division of the agricultural chemical company BASF in Raleigh, N.C. “Now, you walk in and you’re usually first in line.”

A paternalistic fixture of white-collar life born of the Industrial Revolution, the office dining room survived the midcentury move to sprawling suburban office parks. It weathered the rise and fall of cubicle culture and power lunches, and more recently, the lavish excess of the Silicon Valley office lunch.

But as the American office emerges from its pandemic slumber, can the cafeteria survive layoffs, a workweek that sometimes requires only a few days in the mother ship and a new, more demanding generation of employees?

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Employees, especially younger ones, are demanding more culturally authentic meals and climate-friendly kitchen protocols, like reducing waste.

The Corporate Cafeteria Is Broken. So How to Feed Workers? https://t.co/CSz9fBWlSR

— Sean Graf (@seangraf) January 24, 2023

On a recent visit to Salt Lake City, Alexander Dyck ordered Chinese takeout and received a branded fortune cookie wishing him wealth and promoting FTX, presumably packaged before the crypto empire’s epic collapse. “I should have saved it,” he said regretfully.

Mr. Dyck is a professor of finance at the University of Toronto, who just published a provocative new study on the pervasiveness of corporate fraud. The study has been passed around in the world of academia in recent weeks, and has become a fascination among general counsels, corporate leaders and investors.

It suggests that only about a third of frauds in public companies actually come to light, and that fraud is disturbingly common. Mr. Dyck and his co-authors estimate that about 40 percent of companies are committing accounting violations and that 10 percent are committing what is considered securities fraud, destroying 1.6 percent of equity value each year — about $830 billion in 2021.

“What people don’t get is how widespread the problem of corporate fraud is,” Dyck said about his study, which was published in the Review of Accounting Studies this month.

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Just How Common Is Corporate Fraud? New research by Prof. Alexander Dyck and colleagues via @el72champs @dealbook “What people don’t get is how widespread the problem of corporate fraud is.” https://t.co/pKIrdc3D9r

— Rotman School (@rotmanschool) January 14, 2023