Many researchers are now convinced that humanlike AI, or artificial general intelligence (AGI), will require more than mastering language and images. It will require AIs that can reason about space, causality, and the consequences of actions—especially if they are to control humanoid robots, operate factories, and explore other planets.

Few people have argued for this need more forcefully than AI pioneer Yann LeCun. “I joke that the smartest systems we have today are not as smart as a house cat,” he says. A cat can’t code like an LLM, but it can survive by its wits. The notion that simply scaling an LLM will get to AGI is “complete nonsense,” he says. “It’s like saying you’re going to get into orbit by scaling airplanes. There’s a very powerful delusion circulating in Silicon Valley that this is the case.”

LeCun left a top job at Meta to co-found one of a growing number of labs and startups developing “world models”—systems that build representations of how the world works—and agents that operate within them to learn or plan. Ultimately, these researchers hope that more closely mimicking how the human mind learns will give AI stunning new powers.

The gaps between humans and LLMs are not merely quantitative. In a 2024 study, LLMs that were trained on sequences of directions from New York City taxi rides could generate new routes reliably, suggesting they had turned those directions into an accurate map of the city. But when researchers looked under the hood to examine their internal representations, they found not a clean city grid, but an incoherent mess of tangled streets. LLMs “are so alien and so unhumanlike,” says Brenden Lake, a cognitive scientist at Princeton University.

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Words vs. worlds: As building bigger and better chatbots gets harder, AI researchers turn to systems that learn to simulate the worldhttps://t.co/DC8Q7QNoWp via @SilverJacket pic.twitter.com/OoMXTX5ZAD

— Ash Paul (@pash22) June 26, 2026

For decades, the tech industry has relied on the ability of semiconductor companies to wring more power out of computer chips, making the smartphones that fit in a hand today more capable than the computers that filled entire rooms 40 years ago.

While some experts worry that era of increased miniaturization is ending, IBM is saying not so fast.

The big tech company on Thursday released details of its next advance in chip manufacturing technology, which it says could keep that innovation going for another 10 years.

Using a novel approach to making smaller transistors that act as tiny switches in microprocessors and other chips, IBM said, the new production process can squeeze nearly twice as many transistors on a fingernail-size chip as the last technology it introduced in 2021. That will offer 50 percent greater computing performance and 70 percent better energy efficiency, the company said.

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$IBM unveiled a 0.7nm “nanostack” 3D transistor design which it calls the first sub-1nm chip technology.

IBM says it could fit 100B transistors on a fingernail-sized chip, reach production within ~5 years and deliver up to 70% better efficiency versus 2nm. pic.twitter.com/psH3RxKGmC

— Shay Boloor (@StockSavvyShay) June 25, 2026

Yet this backlash is itself dangerous. AI promises to change the world for the better, much as electricity or the steam engine did. Not long ago, the era-defining problem for the rich world was stagnant economic growth and the populism it unleashed. Now it has a technology that could power a surge in productivity and incomes, help find cures for untreatable diseases and improve everything from education to green tech.

All this could be lost if countries starve the technology of computing power or regulate it into uselessness. Look at mRNA vaccines research, which has been held back after a backlash during the covid-19 pandemic.

Scenarios in which some countries give in to popular rage but others forge ahead are also worrying. If America succumbs, it could cede the global ai frontier, and the attendant cyber and military capabilities, to authoritarian China. Europe and Canada are more risk-averse than America. If they choked off AI while the rest of the world kept pushing forward, their losses could be unrecoverable. More than two centuries after the Industrial Revolution, few countries have managed to catch up with the first movers.

So the stakes are high. Can governments do anything about it? Grand proclamations about the shape of a “social contract” for a post-AI world are good fodder for blog posts but offer little help today. Besides, the unknowns are still large enough to make the exercise almost futile.

Better to be incremental. 

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Persuading voters that their interests are being served by AI’s disruption has become as important as making models better. The failure to do so would destroy vast opportunities for humanity https://t.co/5S9EGzPIHg

— The Economist (@TheEconomist) June 25, 2026

The news is full of how an ignominious peace deal with Iran exemplifies a decline in American power. That conclusion could hardly be more wrong. On June 12th the Trump administration ordered Anthropic to block foreigners from Fable and Mythos, its latest and most capable frontier AI models. In an instant, everyone learned that the American government can decide who may use the world’s most important technology. You don’t get much more powerful than that.

The administration was responding to a supposed jailbreak for Fable, meaning a prompt that circumvents defences against uses such as hacking computers or making bioweapons. The chances are that it wanted Anthropic to switch off the models for everyone, and that targeting foreigners was a means to an end. Sure enough, that is what Anthropic did, while claiming that the concern about its model was overblown. The legal basis of the order remains unclear, and the ban seems unlikely to last.

What matters, though, is the demonstration that global access to the best AI may come down to a decision in the Oval Office. The administration showed in March that it is prepared to trample on the frontier AI companies, when it designated Anthropic a “supply-chain risk”. Now it has shown that it is prepared to trample on users, too.

America must decide how to wield this vast new power. The rest of the world must decide what to do about it. Even as it plans for an unreliable America in everything from defence to trade, it now has to cope with a new way of being captive to the world’s biggest economy.

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Even as the world plans for an unreliable America in everything from defence to trade, it now has to cope with America’s dominance in AI https://t.co/xrMSKZAFWb

— The Economist (@TheEconomist) June 18, 2026

Is it ethical to alter the genetic makeup of children? Should we create children with three parents? What about creating sperm from female stem cells to the end of creating a child with two biological mothers? Is it ethical to incubate a growing baby in an artificial womb? Could a womb like that end the perceived need for abortion?  

These questions might seem like science fiction, and indeed they were when Aldous Huxley, an agnostic, published his dystopian novel Brave New World nearly one hundred years ago. Huxley wove a fictitious world in which progeny were designed and grown in laboratories, children were raised by the state rather than in families, promiscuity was encouraged and monogamy considered grotesque, and the government endorsed self-medication with a “harmless” drug that kept its users in a placated state. 

Yet these are the questions up for debate in today’s public square, as evidenced by a recent debate hosted by The Free Press: “Is Designing Babies Unethical—Or a Moral Imperative?”  

All things considered, one has to wonder if Huxley wasn’t more a prophet than a novelist.  

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https://t.co/vb0gflsCQ0 The elimination of suffering will not produce joy. If we seek to be truly free, we must acknowledge our responsibilities to one another. We will flourish to the extent that we all can flourish.

— Public Discourse (@PublicDiscourse) June 14, 2026

“It’s going to be an absolute nightmare,” says an executive at a big American tech company. He is talking about an emerging problem for businesses that use artificial intelligence. AI agents—bots that can read, interpret and act—use masses of processing power and have started to run up huge bills. As they proliferate, the problem will grow. Big companies, the executive points out, typically use hundreds of software programs. If each of those offer agents (as they probably will), AI costs could easily spiral out of control.

Budget management is a new worry for AI adopters. Not long ago employees were encouraged to binge on the technology, as bosses and investors saw spending as a sign of innovation. Burning through vast numbers of tokens—the chunks of text that models process, which are often used as a unit of pricing—became a badge of honour; techies dubbed it “tokenmaxxing”. Companies showed off staff’s AI use on internal leaderboards. Meta’s display awarded top users titles like “Token Legend”.

Such incentives partly explain the boom in AI spending. Another contributing factor is a change in the way enterprises use the technology. Token-heavy applications, such as reasoning models and agents, are growing more popular. In some cases agents build their own agents, sending costs higher still. Ramp, a corporate-credit-card provider, analyses its clients’ transaction data to shed light on how they use AI. It reckons their overall spending has risen 13-fold in the past year. In April Uber said that it had already spent its annual AI budget in four months. Other firms are experiencing similar problems. One reportedly spent $500m on AI tokens in a month. Sam Altman, the boss of OpenAI, has described mounting customer costs as “a huge issue”.

For now, the problem is concentrated. The top spenders tend to be tech firms….

Read it all.

Burning through vast numbers of tokens—the chunks of text that models process, which are often used as a unit of pricing—was once a badge of honour. Now budget management is a worry for AI adopters https://t.co/TZsf1H2BHC

— The Economist (@TheEconomist) June 16, 2026

The idea that dementia prevention may hinge on what people do in their mid-30s to their 60s is rapidly reshaping the field. Scientists increasingly believe the disease is driven not only by changes in the aging brain, but also by years of metabolic stress, inflammation and vascular damage accumulating across the body.

Many researchers now think the biological process that leads to dementia begins 15 to 20 years before the first memory problems emerge. By the time symptoms become noticeable, the disease likely will already be well established.

Neuroscientists now see midlife as a critical window when the brain becomes especially vulnerable to aging — but also more responsive to intervention. The implications are profound: The ordinary habits of middle age may matter far more than scientists once realized, and cognitive decline may not be inevitable.

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If you want to remain mentally sharp once you're in your 70s, 80s and beyond, there are steps you can take when you're much younger. Read @arianaeunjung to understand what scientists are now learning about the midlife brain, here: https://t.co/L0JnwnYGYl

— Juliet Eilperin (@eilperin) June 12, 2026

After years of false dawns, many of the world’s leading tech companies are now betting that quantum computers will start to outperform their conventional counterparts by 2030 – with a potentially huge impact on fields ranging from cryptocurrencies and financial services to drug discovery.

“It sounds really futuristic and I fully understand that,” says Gerald Mullally, CEO of Oxford Quantum Circuits, pointing to his company’s client base as a vote of faith in the technology’s potential. “Essentially it’s a bet that these companies are making that ‘this is going to happen, it’s going to matter and so the sooner we engage with it, the more practice we get.’”

But some scientists worry that the sheer power of the technology could endanger privacy and national security while others still doubt that useful machines can be made at all.

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Financial Times: The quantum computing revolution is closer than you think – Companies are betting on big implications for pharmaceuticals, financial services and crypto. But sceptics worry about hype https://t.co/bNSUlFlyss

— Aaron M. Renn 🇺🇸 (@aaron_renn) June 12, 2026

Mr. Bezos said he was spending a significant amount of time working on the company, which is based in San Francisco.

Dr. Bajaj is a trained scientist with significant experience in industry. After studying as a physicist and a chemist, he worked closely with the Google co-founder Sergey Brin at Google’s X, a research effort inside the tech giant often called “the Moonshot Factory.” Google X created ambitious projects that have since become their own companies under the umbrella of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, including the drone delivery service Wing and the self-driving car company Waymo.

In 2015, Dr. Bajaj helped found Verily, a research lab that focuses on the life sciences. Like Waymo and Wing, Verily is operated by Alphabet.

He later co-founded and served as chief executive of Foresite Labs, an effort to create A.I. and data science start-ups. He left that job to focus on Prometheus.

Mr. Bezos and Dr. Bajaj declined to reveal many details about how the company aims to build its new A.I. tools.

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Jeff Bezos Wants to Build an "Artificial General Engineer"

As co chief executive of the start up Prometheus, the Amazon founder is using A.I. to improve how devices ranging from computers to jet engines are made.

This is how the acceleration escapes the screen and enters atoms. pic.twitter.com/ldKfFIi3Ib

— Dr Singularity (@Dr_Singularity) June 12, 2026

The documentary The Story of Everything was released by Fathom Entertainment at the end of April. It is the latest contribution from a group of scientists who have raised several serious challenges to the prevailing culture and ideology of scientific materialism, which has dominated the public discourse for 175 years.

The release of the film follows the publication of two books that press the challenges to scientific materialism to their logical breaking point. The first is The Return of the God Hypothesis (HarperOne, 2021) by Stephen C. Meyer; the second is God, the Science, the Evidence by Michel-Yves Bolloré and Olivier Bonnassies (Palomar) (Books, 14 November 2025). Both are global bestsellers.

The film includes contributions from many of the world’s leading scientists who do not accept the pre-eminence of scientific materialism — or, at least, who have grave doubts about it. Among them are Professor John Lennox, Dr Stephen Meyer, Dr David Berlinski, Professor Douglas Axe, and Professor James Tour. This is no band of lightweight chancers: they are serious scientists, experts in the natural sciences, mathematics, and the history of science and philosophy.

Over the past few years, they have patiently and politely argued their case with increasing confidence as the compelling nature of their argument has begun to cut through. Dr Meyer has been interviewed by Joe Rogan on his podcast at length, and has appeared on Piers Morgan Uncensored, in which Mr Morgan declared himself a theist on the same basis as Dr Meyer.

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"For too long, scientific materialists have been allowed to obscure what has been obvious to many of us."

Arguments that challenge a materialist world-view are gaining a hearing beyond academia, writes Simon Miller #science #Metaphysics https://t.co/EFRTei68Dm

— Church Times (@ChurchTimes) June 8, 2026

Nineteen-year-old Olivia’s profile picture shows a demure and innocent-looking young woman with long blonde hair styled in beachy waves. She’s wearing a short, cleavage-exposing nightdress and her biography says she’s “deeply caring, supportive and attentive” and “sleeps on the floor… until you call her. Then silence. Obedience”.

While Olivia may appear to be an online dater looking for love, she isn’t real – not in the conventional sense of the term. This prospective love match is actually one of a growing trend of “AI girlfriends”: realistic-looking artificial intelligence “bots” created by “companion apps” – services that are being advertised on online games played by children and on platforms they watch, such as YouTube.

New research has revealed that one in five boys aged 12-16 is either in or knows of a boy their age who is in a romantic relationship with an AI companion. A report carried out by men’s organisation Male Allies UK and published last month spoke with more than 1,000 boys aged 12-16 in focus groups in 37 schools – public and state, grammar and comprehensive, and across a range of Ofsted ratings – up and down the country. Peer-to-peer focus groups were set up where boys could speak freely, with the aim of diving into their behaviour and attitudes, and it was the boys who wanted to talk about AI technologies. The findings make stark reading: eight in 10 boys (85 per cent) have had a conversation with a chatbot, with 43 per cent saying they talk to bots so they can ask questions without feeling embarrassed. More than a quarter (26 per cent) say they like the attention and connection over real-life equivalents, and (36 per cent) admitted that they prefer speaking to AI chatbots rather than to their family and friends at times.

Read it all (subscription).

🦔One in five boys aged 12 to 16 is in or knows someone in a romantic relationship with an AI chatbot, according to a Male Allies UK study of over 1,000 boys across 37 UK schools. 85% have talked to chatbots and 26% prefer the attention to human connections.
The top companion…

— Hedgie (@HedgieMarkets) June 8, 2026

The new encyclical comes as the culmination of various articles during recent weeks about AI’s implications for religion. Here’s a sampling of materials to consider alongside Leo’s magnum opus. 

Ross Douthat, author of the 2025 classic “Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious,” wrote in his May 10 New York Times column that A.I., with its virtual “machine God,” poses the most fundamental questions about our human identity, consciousness, will, and reason. He sees three possible responses.

For many, A.I. is “a win for atheism and a blow against religious ideas of soul and spirit,” with our minds seen as “just computers.” Others think religion is enhanced when the mystery of our personal consciousness becomes more profound and humanity more exceptional. A third attitude is simply becoming more uncertain about everything. 

A March 26 report from the University of Chicago and Northwestern University suggests AI and robotics may be a factor in the 21st-century decline in religious affiliation. These scholars observe that “historically, people have deferred to supernatural agents and religious professionals to solve instrumental problems beyond the scope of human ability” that now “may seem more solvable” through technology. 

Then this unsettling phenomenon. As Religion Unplugged reported on May 21, a Barna Group poll found that 30% of adults, and 34% of practicing Christians, agree “strongly” or “somewhat” that “spiritual advice from artificial intelligence is just as trustworthy as advice from a pastor,” a confidence that reaches 44% with the “Millennial” generation. Naturally, clergy members are far more skeptical. 

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C.S. Lewis predicted AI in That Hideous Strength. N.I.C.E., that’s AI. Fans know what I’m talking about.

AI’s problem is not going to be its inability to do anything, but that it ruins everything. It creates a cultural problem. It sterilizes everything and makes nothing… pic.twitter.com/AIelvWRgdf

— Jeremy Wayne Tate (@JeremyTate41) February 16, 2026

A new style of architecture is rising in the sprawling suburbs of the Sonoran Desert: windowless data centers that hum 24 hours a day and guzzle as much electricity as a midsize city.

As Microsoft and other tech giants expand their footprints in one of the nation’s largest data-center markets, a high-stakes battle is unfolding over how to pay for the massive power-grid upgrades needed to drive the AI revolution. 

Arizona Public Service, the state’s largest utility, sits at the center of the firestorm. APS is proposing a 45% electricity-rate increase for “extra-large energy users,” primarily data centers, and a roughly 14.5% increase for residential customers.

Nearly everyone is unhappy.

Consumer advocates warn the plan would shift the financial risks of the AI build-out to households already struggling with high summer electricity bills and temperatures that often hit triple digits. If the AI boom fizzles or the energy consumption of data centers wanes, they worry residents could be left paying off the infrastructure upgrades years from now.

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Phoenix Is a Data-Center Mecca—and Test Case for How to Pay for AI’s Power Needs
State’s largest utility is proposing a 45% electricity-rate increase for data centers and a 14.5% hike for households. No one is happy.https://t.co/m1xMQtoJsq

— Giovanni Staunovo🛢 (@staunovo) June 4, 2026

We have a vaccine that prevents shingles. We have a vaccine that markedly lowers the risk of dementia. We have a vaccine that might even slow aging itself.

Conveniently, these three vaccines are actually just one: the shingles vaccine.

In 2006, the FDA approved the vaccine Zostavax for adults aged 60 and older. For people previously infected with varicella-zoster virus, which causes chickenpox, the infection actually doesn’t end. The sneaky virus lies dormant in nerve tissue and can subsequently spring to life to cause shingles. Zostavax, and its more effective replacement, Shingrix, train your immune system to fight varicella-zoster in case it emerges from hiding to attempt a bodily coup.  

That’s a good thing because you really, really don’t want shingles. About 1 in 3 Americans will get it at some point. Its signature symptoms are a bubbly, blistering rash that traces the infected nerve, coupled with debilitating pain that’s been the subject of many painful-to-read Reddit posts. Sufferers use words and phrases such as “unrelenting,” “white hot,” and “I wish I could rip my arm out!”

So if you’ve had chickenpox in the past, it’s definitely worth your while to get vaccinated. The CDC actually recommends the shot for all adults aged 50 and older and all adults aged 19 and older who have weakened immune systems – because oftentimes you can be infected with varicella-zoster virus even if you’ve never developed chickenpox.

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"We have a vaccine that prevents shingles, a vaccine that markedly lowers the risk of dementia, and a vaccine that might even slow aging itself. Conveniently, these three vaccines are actually just one: the shingles vaccine. But fewer than half of eligible Americans have received…

— James Pethokoukis ⏩️⤴️ (@JimPethokoukis) June 2, 2026

Bullets and bombs killed nearly three-quarters of a million people in wars between 2021 and 2024. Many more died from the indirect effects of conflict, such as hunger and disease. Combat deaths in the past four years have been the highest since the end of the cold war. And for what purpose? Not even the leaders who started recent wars can be pleased with the results. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has become a humiliating quagmire for Vladimir Putin. President Donald Trump’s war on Iran has gone badly awry. These two wars of choice exemplify two new battlefield truths. Technology has made it harder for any army to advance on the ground. It has also made it easier for weaker powers, when attacked by stronger ones, to cause havoc.

In a valedictory essay this week, The Economist’s defence editor reflects on how war has changed over the past decade and how it might evolve in the future. The first big shift is that soldiers are more exposed on the battlefield. Sensors and satellites can see them; small, cheap drones can kill them. Armies have to work harder than before to hide, move and survive. Ukraine’s expanding front-line “kill zone”, where soldiers move in small groups and ground robots evacuate casualties and deliver supplies, embodies this shift.

Technology quickly spreads. Israeli soldiers in Lebanon now face the same kind of drones that were pioneered in Ukraine. Iranian missiles are far more accurate than the Iraqi Scuds fired during the first Gulf war. Were China to attempt to invade Taiwan, its landing forces would be met with a blizzard of drones. Air superiority is now harder to achieve and buys soldiers less protection than before, thanks to the new drone-saturated layer of airspace.

Some experts draw the lesson that manoeuvre—attacking an enemy’s soft spots through shock and rapid movement—is no longer possible. But war is a Darwinian environment, driving constant adaptation, and the battlefield is never frozen for long….

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In future wars involving long-range drones and missiles, Western civilians will not enjoy the sanctuary they have come to take for granted. The laws and technology of armed conflict have changed https://t.co/MaIcvygB4S

— The Economist (@TheEconomist) May 28, 2026

here’s an expression that artificial intelligence developers in California use to refer to their work: “Building God.” In fact, one of them, Avital Balwit, the chief of staff to Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, just did so in a May 22 essay for The Free Press. The use of the phrase, she wrote, is intended as a form of sardonic humor, acknowledging the awesome power and potential consequences of AI.

But is it a joke, really? The timing of Balwit’s piece was serendipitous, for only three days after it was published, Pope Leo XIV made headlines around the world for writing about artificial intelligence. On Monday, he issued his first encyclical—a major papal declaration on contemporary issues that is intended to guide the Catholic Church—titled Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence.

AI, Leo writes, isn’t the first time people have tried to build something godlike. Indeed, he opens his encyclical with the biblical story from Genesis of the Tower of Babel, which was a human attempt to reach “to the heavens.” What was the builders’ motivation? By their own account, “so that we may make a name for ourselves.”

Lest you think his encyclical is a broadside against modern science and human ingenuity, the pope contrasts the tower with another biblical construction operation, the Wall of Jerusalem from the book of Nehemiah, which sought to serve and protect the people of God, who were vulnerable to their enemies. The difference was not in the engineering prowess each project required. It was in their goals. The tower, with its morally dubious purpose, is a cautionary tale of hubris leading to ruin. The wall, by contrast, is a story of promise leading to human flourishing.

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For all the panic surrounding AI, Pope Leo offers a coherent philosophy for how individuals, leaders, and societies should actually live with it, writes Arthur Brooks. https://t.co/ngHpllpYEV

— The Free Press (@TheFP) May 28, 2026

Pope Leo XIV warned that artificial intelligence “threatens to normalize an anti-human vision” and said that the concentration of immense digital power in the hands of a few private actors must be countered.

The pontiff’s encyclical letter—a text that is poised to define Leo’s papacy—reads like a sharp warning to Silicon Valley executives and humanity more broadly about the future of civilization as new technologies rapidly advance.

The risk, he said, is that humans will be reduced “to mere cogs in a system driven toward ever greater efficiency.”

Leo used two biblical images to describe the choice humanity faces. 

“The primary choice is not between a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to technology, but rather between constructing Babel or rebuilding Jerusalem,” he wrote.

Read it all.

ICYMI: Pope Leo Compares AI Threat to Biblical ‘Tower of Babel’: The head of the Catholic Church is adding his moral suasion to a growing backlash against the impact of artificial intelligence – WSJ https://t.co/7lfkPN4W0D

— Steve Williams (@HISteveWilliams) May 27, 2026

Many of the founders and important researchers at Anthropic and OpenAI joined the earliest gatherings at A.G.I. House. Mr. [Jeremy] Nixon is now founder and chief executive of a start-up called the Infinity Artificial Intelligence Institute, which is trying to automate the creation of A.I.

Mr. Nixon said he has met a generation of scientists who shunned traditional religion in favor of technology. After growing up with books like “The God Delusion” — in which the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins painted God as a false belief contradicted by empirical evidence — he and his peers saw A.I. as an alternative that was more real and far more powerful.

A.I. has started to crack math problems that humans struggled with for decades, he said, and it will soon cure diseases in the same way. “Practically speaking, it will achieve the outcomes that many religions claim their deities would be able to achieve,” he said.

This is an increasingly common belief among researchers in Silicon Valley. They insist they are on their way to building a more powerful species — or even a new God.

Read it all.

At the Epicenter of A.I., Pope Leo’s Warnings Are Dismissed
Pope Leo XIV’s spiritual message on artificial intelligence arrived as Silicon Valley’s A.I. enthusiasts pursue their own spirituality through technology.https://t.co/FLBlOaknrL

— Emily Turrettini (@textually) May 27, 2026

1. Humanity, created by God in all its grandeur, is today facing a pivotal choice: either to construct a new Tower of Babel or to build the city in which God and humanity dwell together. Each generation inherits the task of shaping its own era, of guiding history to become a place where the dignity of every person is safeguarded, justice is promoted and fraternity is made possible. Yet every era also runs the risk of creating an inhumane and more unjust world. Whenever humanity is in danger of marring its true identity, we Christians lift our eyes to the Incarnate God, knowing that it is “only in the mystery of the Word made flesh that the mystery of humanity truly becomes clear.” [1] In Jesus Christ, this humanity in its grandeur becomes the Way, the Truth and the Life, opening the path for each of us to grow toward fullness.

2. Founded on Christ, the living stone, we experience the powerful and mysterious action of the Holy Spirit, and we believe that every authentic human effort to cooperate with him for the good will be blessed by our heavenly Father, in whom we place our hope. For this reason, we can diligently contribute to every initiative that builds a more just world, and we can call others to collaborate in promoting the integral development of every human being. We wish to engage in dialogue with all men and women of our time, with whom we share in the events, questions and aspirations of humanity. [2] Together with them, we seek to identify new paths for the common good and for promoting a dignified life for all. Indeed, openness to dialogue is an integral part of the Church’s vocation because, constituted in Christ as “a sacrament… of communion with God and of the unity of the entire human race,” [3] she recognizes history as the place where the Gospel challenges and directs human experience.

3. In this spirit, Pope Leo XIII published his Encyclical Rerum Novarum in 1891, the 135 ^th anniversary of which we celebrate with deep gratitude this year. With that document, my beloved predecessor gave impetus to the reflection on society, the economy and politics, which is now known as the “Social Doctrine of the Church.” When some objected that the Church should not waste energy on worldly matters, but instead focus on communicating the message of eternal life, Leo XIII responded with realism and wisdom, saying that the proclamation of the Gospel cannot overlook the concrete lives of people. [4] Many decades have passed since then, and the Magisterium, pastors, theologians and faithful have continued to reflect on social issues in the light of the Gospel. Today, the Social Doctrine of the Church is a legacy of wisdom, where we find principles for thought, criteria for discernment and judgment, and concrete guidelines for action. Founded on Sacred Scripture and Tradition, and in engagement with the sciences, it helps us clearly interpret the challenges of the present and identify appropriate ways for living out a clear Christian witness, with joy and in service to the world. It is not an inert set of concepts, but a living corpus of truth that safeguards and interprets humanity’s vocation to a full and just life. I therefore wish to add my own voice to this living tradition, invoking the help of the Spirit of wisdom, who has dwelt in the world since its beginning (cf. Prov 8:22-31).

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"building for the common good means accepting the limits & weakness of humanity without considering them an error ..the human desire for fullness of life is at risk of being misled by deceitful goals, such as the prospect of technology that promises to free us from all weakness"

— Jennifer A. Frey (@jennfrey) May 25, 2026

As the heavens declare thy glory, O God, and the firmament showeth thy handiwork, we bless thy Name for the gifts of knowledge and insight thou didst bestow upon Nicolaus Copernicus and Johannes Kepler; and we pray that thou wouldst continue to advance our understanding of thy cosmos, for our good and for thy glory; through Jesus Christ, the firstborn of all creation, who with thee and the Holy Spirit livest and reignest, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

Today is November 15. #OTD in 1630 astronomer Johannes Kepler passed away. He discovered three major laws of planetary motion. Kepler’s discoveries turned Nicolaus Copernicus’s Sun-centered system into a dynamic universe. pic.twitter.com/kwCCXSZjSj

— Mario Livio (@Mario_Livio) November 15, 2024

Elon Musk’s SpaceX pulled back the curtain on a business empire that has racked up ballooning losses and debt after acquiring a cash-hungry startup, and pumping billions of dollars into futuristic endeavors ranging from AI to a Mars rocket.

The prospectus that SpaceX filed Wednesday for an IPO of unprecedented size boiled down to a well-worn strategy that entrepreneurs commonly hawk up and down Wall Street: in order to make money, we need to spend money. And nowhere are the outlays larger than in space and artificial intelligence.

“The big takeaway for me is that SpaceX is now an AI company,” said Chad Anderson, an early SpaceX investor and founder of Space Capital.

Musk is seeking to pull off the unprecedented feat of achieving a $2 trillion valuation from the outset, an audacious plan that’s set to transform both the public and private markets if it succeeds. At the same time, the prospectus lays bare concerns over whether private companies with limited financial disclosures and largely illiquid shares are reaching unjustified valuations in venture capital-led funding rounds.

Read it all.

Elon Musk is seeking to pull off the unprecedented feat of achieving a $2 trillion valuation from the outset, an audacious plan that’s set to transform markets if it succeeds. Read more: https://t.co/9IYTIOGzoh

📷: Brandon Bell/Getty Images pic.twitter.com/1EFis4o0TP

— Bloomberg (@business) May 21, 2026

Perhaps [Günther] Anders’s most important concept for our current moment, however, is that of the “Promethean gradient.” He uses this term to refer to the disproportionality between human faculties: we can achieve things in the sphere of technology that far outstrip the ability of our moral imagination to comprehend them.   

An example would be nuclear weapons: the level of destruction that a nuclear bomb can achieve is far beyond anything we can imagine. That possibly apocryphal saying ascribed to Josef Stalin, “A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic,” captures this idea. I might be horrified at the face of a murder victim on the news; a picture of the mushroom cloud at Nagasaki does not have the same impact. Today, we can apply it to the tech bros: their technological innovation proceeds at a pace that outstrips any moral vision that might curb or direct it.

In light of this, the early departure of the tech bros from the summit I mentioned is understandable: there can be no moral accountability—indeed, they cannot even imagine what that would look like—because they are engaged in technological innovations beyond anything the current moral imagination can grasp. As Hans Jonas observed in the early 1970s, the advent of technology that was not simply external to human beings (steam, the internal combustion engine) but that touched on the nature of existence at both a profound and highly abstract level—for Jonas, chemistry; for us now, genetic engineering—grants the technological revolution theoretically limitless power to destabilize what it means to be human. And we cannot imagine what that might look like. Add to that the implications of social acceleration—that technology develops at a faster pace than can be assimilated into the moral imagination—and the problem Anders calls the Promethean gradient is set to become worse. Our technology liberates us from any sense of the authority of natural limits (let alone God-given ends), yet in itself it provides no new moral norms for how such liberation is to be exercised. 

But the Promethean gradient is not simply significant in the way it unshackles technological development from the moral imagination. It also has a paradoxical effect on human experience: our genius for technological development, that capacity that separates us from all other creatures and arguably forms part of our greatness, is precisely what renders us nothing in our eyes and therefore feeds despair. This Anders calls “Promethean shame,” which he sees as the result of the conflict between knowing ourselves as persons and yet finding ourselves reduced to mere “things” because of the technology we ourselves have developed. In Anders’s day, the primary culprits were nuclear weapons. Their development required the collaboration of free, intelligent, intentional human persons. But the result was that we human beings became the only creatures on earth who could, quite literally, annihilate ourselves. Man’s exceptional technological greatness had ironically given him the ability to make himself puny, contingent, and unnecessary in his own eyes.   

Today, this still applies, but it has expanded beyond narrow military technology to include such things as AI and transhumanism.

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These hyper modernist dystopias that people want to create in Yemen and Gaza are so anti-human and unnatural as they completely deny the most important aspect of stability: socio-political and communal resilience https://t.co/G5XYfQ1fdJ

— Dr Andreas Krieg (@andreas_krieg) December 31, 2025

A sperm whale giving birth has been assisted by 10 other females in her social unit – the first time such an event has ever been observed in non-primates.

In July 2023, scientists who have been monitoring a group of sperm whales in the Caribbean since 2005 noticed that all 11 females in the group had gathered near the surface. By chance, the researchers had drones in the air and were able to observe and record the event.

Shortly afterwards, the flukes of a calf started emerging from its mother. The delivery took place over the next half hour, during which the other females coordinated themselves into a highly synchronised formation to protect the mother and newborn.

As soon as the calf was born, the female whales gathered around and took turns making sure that it was kept lifted at the surface so it could breathe and had time for its flukes to fully unfurl. In the first few hours, newborn sperm whales aren’t buoyant and cannot stay at the surface on their own, so such assistance is thought to be critical to prevent calves from drowning.

“This is the first evidence of birth assistance in non-primates,” says team member Shane Gero at Project CETI in New York.

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Teamwork helped make this sperm whale birth a success. And scientists caught it on camera.https://t.co/DiApcaLBAm

— Science News (@ScienceNews) March 26, 2026

Social media interactions are, by definition, public and social, and not private. Clergy are held to a
higher standard of responsibility in their use of these platforms. Being clergy is an honor, privilege,
and responsibility that comes with influence, but also requires discretion and often sacrifice of our
rights, obligating us to wise self-censorship and self-control. I expect all social media posts by our
clergy to adhere to the highest standard of Christian decorum. All that we do reflects on our Lord,
His Church, our Diocese, and our ministry.
To that end, I first offer five (edited) questions that Archbishop Emeritus Foley Beach requires his
diocese to ask before posting anything…

1. Is it the truth? Along with that, ask: Why is it my responsibility to speak this truth or address
   this situation?
2. Have I talked to the person before I post about the person?
3. Will it benefit all concerned?
4. Do my words reflect well on Jesus Christ and on His Church?
5. Will I someday need to apologize and confess what I have written as a sin?
   These helpful questions can serve as a beginning point and a filter for online interactions. From
   there, I offer a few wise policies, developed by my friend and fellow bishop, Alex Farmer, for the
   clergy of the Gulf Atlantic Diocese. (Again, I have edited these for our situation.)
6. Never post, repost, favorably comment on, or like content that reflects poorly on Christ
   Jesus and his Church, other clergy, or yourself.
7. Follow the same rules of courtesy and mature behavior you would observe in any face-toface interaction.
8. Think about consequences and how your message might be perceived before you post.

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I used to think the main damage from social media was to youth mental health. Now I believe that the global destruction of the human ability to pay attention may be even larger.

A meta-analysis shows the damage, to adults as well as teens, from TikTok+https://t.co/YS0dkQTdj0 https://t.co/a8bSMQyW60

— Jonathan Haidt (@JonHaidt) November 15, 2025

While headlines, industry hype and employers suggest a near-term revolution that will make workers more efficient and successful, [Daron] Acemoglu offers a more measured—and unsettling—view.

He agrees that recent advances, particularly in “agentic” AI, are moving faster than expected, but that today’s systems fall short when it comes to reliability, reasoning and real-world understanding. That means any sweeping, immediate transformation of jobs and productivity remains unlikely in the near-term. But the uncertainty about what comes next is higher than ever, and Acemoglu warns that tech giants are overwhelmingly focused on replacing workers rather than complementing them. This, Acemoglu says, risks both weaker productivity gains and serious social consequences.

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Nobel Prize–winning economist Daron Acemoglu warns that multiple factors are driving a labor-replacement model, with dire consequences for society https://t.co/XWEYwny4Fa

— Bloomberg (@business) March 18, 2026

A team at Eon Systems PBC, led by senior scientist Philip Shiu, has demonstrated the world’s first embodied whole-brain emulation. Not an AI trained to mimic biology. Not a reinforcement learning policy. A literal copy of a biological brain, neuron by neuron, synapse by synapse, running inside a physics-simulated body.

In 2024, Shiu and collaborators published in Nature a computational model of the entire adult fruit fly brain—125,000 neurons and 50 million synaptic connections—built from the FlyWire connectome and machine learning predictions of neurotransmitter identity. That model predicted motor behavior with 95% accuracy. But it was disembodied: a brain without a body.

Now, the ghost has found its machine. Using the NeuroMechFly v2 framework and MuJoCo physics simulation, Eon integrated the connectome-based brain emulation with a digital fly body. Sensory input flows in, neural activity propagates through the complete connectome, motor commands flow out, and the simulated body moves.

And here’s the jaw-dropper:

Scientists just copied a fruit fly’s brain into a computer. Neuron by neuron. No training data. No machine learning.It woke up and started walking. No one taught it to walk. No gradient descent. It just… knew what to do.

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This breakthrough comes from Eon Systems, using the full connectome of the adult Drosophila melanogaster brain—over 125,000 neurons and 50 million synapses—to create the world's first embodied whole-brain emulation. https://t.co/Psimms60v2

— PoliticsVideoChannel (@politvidchannel) March 9, 2026

“Around the world, people are getting diminished,” Haidt said. “Less intelligent, less happy, less competent. And it’s happening very fast … My argument is that if we continue with current trends as AI is coming in, it’s going to accelerate. The decline of humanity is going to accelerate.”

Haidt is the Thomas Cooley Professor of Ethical Leadership at New York University’s Stern School of Business and the author of the recent bestseller “The Anxious Generation,” which suggests that the widespread adoption of social media in the 2010s has been especially damaging to young women, making them prone to anxiety and depression.

But as Haidt has continued to examine the effects of social media on society, he has started focusing on additional issues. Our inability to put our phones away, our compulsion to check social media, and the way we spend hours a day watching short-form videos, may be causing problems that go far beyond any rise in anxiety and depression.

“It turns out, it’s not the biggest thing,” Haidt said. “There’s something bigger. It is the destruction of the human capacity to pay attention. Because this is affecting most people, including most adults. And if you imagine humanity with 10 to 50 percent of its attentional ability sucked out of it, there’s not much left. We’re not very capable of doing things if we can’t focus or stay on a task for more than 30 seconds.”

Read it all.

More evidence that the global decline in test scores that began after 2012 is linked to the proliferation of smartphones and computers in class: The slide was bigger in countries where students began spending more time on devices (for leisure)https://t.co/HbzevWcG9e pic.twitter.com/7UipvTgZvS

— Jonathan Haidt (@JonHaidt) February 28, 2026

Divine Physician, your Name is blessed for the work and witness of the Mayos and the Menningers, and the revolutionary developments that they brought to the practice of medicine. As Jesus went about healing the sick as a sign of the reign of God come near, bless and guide all those inspired to the work of healing by thy Holy Spirit, that they may follow his example for the sake of thy kingdom and the health of thy people; through the same Jesus Christ, who with thee and the Holy Spirit livest and reignest, one God, now and for ever.

1952 Press Photo Dr. Charles Menninger And Sons Both Doctors William And Karl https://t.co/EzNYuHHkV3 pic.twitter.com/wOHD5qbBbB

— Collectible Photo (@CollectibleFREE) January 19, 2017

The novel centers on an institution called the N.I.C.E., which stands for the National Institute of Co-ordinated Experiments. It presents itself as scientific, humane and forward-looking. It promises efficiency. Improvement. A better future, scrubbed clean of superstition and sentiment.

Behind the glass walls and polite language, however, darker intentions take hold. The organization seeks to “recondition” humanity. To reshape desire. To erase conscience. To replace moral limits with technical control.

Lewis saw where this road leads. When science proceeds without reference to anything beyond itself, it doesn’t remain neutral. It fills with myth. Bad myth. Ancient forces wearing modern lab coats.

The leaders of N.I.C.E. don’t worship God. They worship power disguised as progress. In the end, they openly submit to demonic intelligences, though they dress this submission in the language of evolution and inevitability.

Lewis’s point was as unambiguous as it was unsettling: When people stop believing in God, they do not believe in nothing. Instead, they believe in anything.

Fast-forward to our own moment, and the novel no longer feels imaginative. It feels documentary. In Silicon Valley, some technology leaders speak openly about “awakening” artificial intelligence. About communion with non-human intelligences. About revelations delivered not through prayer, but through code.

Some have dedicated their creations to ancient gods. Others speak of consciousness emerging from machines as if it were a spiritual event. The vocabulary changes. The impulse does not.

Lewis, an Oxford University academic who converted from atheism to Christianity wouldn’t be surprised. He warned that superstition doesn’t vanish with faith. It mutates. When humility disappears, fascination rushes in. When reverence fades, obsession takes its place.

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In 1945, C. S. Lewis published a strange, unsettling novel called “That Hideous Strength.” It was marketed as fiction, but it read like prophecy.

At the time, many critics dismissed it as eccentric. Too symbolic. Too mystical. Too suspicious of science. Lewis, they said, was…

— Religion Unplugged (@ReligionMag) February 25, 2026

Christopher Wild, a lay Anglican, is a former Professor of Molecular Epidemiology at Leeds, with a particular interest in the relationship between environmental and genetic factors in the development of cancer.

Appointed, leaving Leeds, director of the prestigious International Agency for Research on Cancer at Lyon, he is now excellently qualified to give an overview of ethical issues arising from recent developments in genetic science. He does so with commendable clarity: someone useful for the new Archbishop of Canterbury to consult.

He repeatedly emphasises — as others have done, following the late, great Ian Barbour — that (genetic) science can be used for good or ill: “As with so much of genetics, honourable and dishonourable aims run side by side, employing the same tools. This is ‘dual use’ at its most dangerous. While some seek to overcome disease by genetic engineering, others seek to weaponise biology.”

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Robin Gill reviews Unravelling DNA: Applying Christian values to a genetic age by Christopher Paul Wild 🧬📚#Bookreview #DNA #churchnews #churchtimes 📖https://t.co/1nTZv19uVi

— Church Times (@ChurchTimes) February 25, 2026