The concern that a country’s best and brightest will leave and seek their fortunes by making a career elsewhere is a recurrent theme throughout history, although the narrative seems to have accelerated in recent years. There has even been an effort to develop a ‘brain drain index’, which places Somoa at the top (most brain…

The day after the recent US elections, where the world’s richest man spent over $200 million on a single US Senate race in Texas to no avail, it is worth reflecting on how technology interacts with corporate or state corruption. What role does technology play in either enhancing or fighting against corruption? The OECD has…

Inspired by a discussion with Santi after class, I thought it would be interesting to explore the case of human cloning. in 1969. J.B.S. Haldane first introduced the idea of human cloning, but it wasn’t until 1997 that Ian Wilmut in Edinburgh cloned the first adult mammal, a sheep called Dolly, by transferring the nucleus…

Last week, the managing director of the IMF, Kristalina Georgieva, wrote a blog post in which she described how “expectations may run ahead of productivity gains” and how, in “a severe scenario, we could see a market correction that cascades through the highly leveraged and circular AI ecosystem” as well as drawing attention to the…

Mustafa Suleyman, the CEO of Microsoft AI, recently wrote an essay warning that uncontrolled, autonomous AI could lead to a new ‘silicon species’ that could begin to rival humanity for resources. On BBC Radio 4’s Today Programme Suleyman argued that tech companies risk creating autonomous AI systems capable of setting their own objectives, earning money,…