In the US TV drama For All Mankind, settlers on a future Mars revolt against a scheme by an oligarch to replace all but 2 per cent of them with machines. This may be one case where science fiction captures a current angst. Read more
The coming IPO for SpaceX matters less for its gargantuan size than because it marks a dramatic change in the tech sphere. The IPO has the potential to make SpaceX one of the world’s most valuable companies, given suggestions that the listing could raise $80 billion in funding. This is far higher than the $26 billion raised by the world’s most profitable company, Saudi Aramco, in 2019. More significantly, however, after decades in which software has ruled America’s stock market, the SpaceX IPO represents a step toward a new age where the most valuable tech companies are centered around space. This signals a broader shift in investor confidence away from purely digital platforms and toward physical, infrastructure-heavy innovation. Read more
Could Canada someday become a thoroughly red country? This may not be as absurd as it seems.
Although by American standards Canada is already socialist, given its strong social safety net, the country has a market-based economy, with residual commitment to property rights and basic civil liberties. Yet underneath this comforting picture, the emerging reality is frightening. Read more
In the last decades of the 20th century, California reinvented a brash new capitalism that created new, more innovative archetypes. Today, some of those companies – Apple, Google and Facebook – are among the largest in the world, with assets greater than those of all but a few countries.
The students in a graduate-level course I teach on the social impacts of artificial intelligence include a game designer, a warehouse manager, and an HR specialist. Many of them express concern that their current jobs could disappear as AI is implemented in their industry. Yet when I visited a trade school in Newark, Ohio, there was little such concern.
U.S. President Donald Trump’s mindless, and frankly pointless, comments about Canada becoming the 51st state have stirred up latent Canadian patriotism. But it also may result in Canada, which is already economically moribund, further aligning itself with the permanent European Union bureaucracy. Read more
Whatever one thinks of the current war in Iran, allowing the fundamentally unstable Islamic Republic power over the world economy is truly a fool’s errand. In many ways, Iran’s attempt to control the Strait of Hormuz and the Red Sea is playing out in waters long shaped by piracy and imperial rivalry. Read more
The biggest long-range danger looming over the remaining liberal democracies does not come from U.S. President Donald Trump, Chinese President Xi Jinping, Russian President Vladimir Putin or the nutty mullahs in Iran now being pummelled. Instead, it comes from the seemingly inexorable force of technology that increasingly threatens not just to aid humanity, but replace it.
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One enduring criticism of President Trump’s border and immigration policies is that by rejecting mass immigration, the United States is both abandoning its historic purpose and squandering its economic future. Even establishment outlets like The Economist see the departure, forced or not, of up to 2 million illegal immigrants as auguring a “zero migration America.”
Gavin Newsom complains of “faux outrage” over his comments to a largely black audience in Atlanta about his SAT scores, in which he implied a shared lack of ability. No state makes more of its “enlightened” stance on racial justice than California. But few states do worse.
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