Science

Critics are right: the algorithms that increasingly run the world can be dangerous. Are human systems always better?

The self-serving myths of a new wave of defense tech, from Palantir’s Gotham to Israel’s Gospel.

The battle over copyright in the age of ChatGPT.

The seductions of medical surveillance.

Its potential to enhance civic engagement crucially depends on what policymakers want to learn from the public.

Nihon Hidankyo, winner of the 2024 Nobel Peace Prize, makes us see what we cannot: the consequences of our actions.

On the persistence of U.S. nuclear deterrence policy.

How accounting protocols undermine public goals—from decolonization to climate action.

The colonial making of Taiwan’s chip supremacy.

What Big Tech has done to our institutional and infrastructural imagination.

For Robert Jay Lifton, treating veterans’ trauma was an antiwar tool. How did PTSD, the diagnosis he helped create, come to accommodate state violence?

Israel’s attacks on health care workers and facilities in Gaza are unprecedented.

The post-work movement reckons with reproductive labor.

On art in the age of generative AI.

Instead of pouring public funds into private industry—as the United States did with COVID-19 vaccines—we must build public capacity and prioritize public objectives.

Generative AI has made it possible to create lifelike models of real people. Should we?

Within the next decade, we may well have systems that are serious candidates for consciousness.

The anti-regulatory ethos of libertarian economics has dire consequences.

Not as it’s traditionally done, but there are more equitable models.

In Foolproof, psychologist Sander van der Linden compares misinformation to viral infection—and claims to have a vaccine. 

But awareness alone won't solve the problem. Here's what we should do.

Two recent books force us to rethink what knowledge is, where it is located, and how it moves.