Danger in West’s `human-centered’ regulating of AI, converging with China’s authoritarian model COMMENT | ROBERT SKIDELSKY | With investors pouring billions of dollars into artificial intelligence-related startups, the generative AI frenzy is beginning to look like a speculative bubble akin to the Dutch tulip mania of the 1630s and the South …
Read More »FrankenTech is upon us
At a time of geopolitical conflict and ideological polarisation, can we prevent it being weaponized? COMMENT | ROBERT SKIDELSKY | In Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, scientist Victor Frankenstein famously uses dead body parts to create a hyperintelligent “superhuman” monster that – driven mad by human cruelty and …
Read More »Can governments still steer the economy?
The national budget’s purpose should be to use fiscal policy to protect the least well-off from disruptive blows COMMENT | Robert Skidelsky | In 1969, the British financial journalist Samuel Brittan published a book called `Steering the Economy: The Role of the Treasury’. At the time, it was still widely assumed that …
Read More »Globalisation’s latest last stand
Geopolitics is once again threatening to break international order lacking strong political foundations COMMENT | Robert Skidelsky | Is the world economy globalising or deglobalising? The answer would have seemed obvious in 1990. Communism had just collapsed in Central and Eastern Europe. In China, Deng Xiaoping was unleashing capitalist enterprise. And …
Read More »Think twice before sanctioning Russia further
The sanctions imposed so far on Russia do not yet threaten the survival of the Russian state. But President Vladimir Putin may regard a Western attempt to cut off the remainder of Russia’s international trade, especially in energy, as an existential threat. COMMENT | ROBERT SKIDELSKY | The West has …
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