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Professor of international affairs at Johns Hopkins SAIS and co-author, with Abraham Newman, of Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy.

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  AI labs fund social science partly to manage the fact that the AI buildout is unpopular, seeking ways to make it more acceptable to the public.

  Their words

  I suspect that some of the labs' willingness to put money into the social sciences stems from the realization of senior people that the practical build out of AI is highly unpopular in the U.S and their urgent desire to figure out how to sugarcoat the pill so that it will get swallowed

  How should social science think about AI?programmablemutter.com

Emeritus professor of war studies at King's College London; wrote Strategy: A History and Command, and writes about the wars in Ukraine and Gaza as they happen.

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  The scale of civilian deaths in Gaza followed from Israeli leaders' strategic choices, not from the AI used to pick the targets.

  Their words

  The high levels of Palestinian civilian casualties reflected the strategic choices made by the Israeli leadership.

  AI and the New Fog of Warsamf.substack.com

Professor of psychology at UCLA, where he studies human memory, attention and cognitive ageing, and author of Better with Age: The Psychology of Successful Aging.

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  Walking three or four times a week grew older adults' hippocampus by one percent and left their memory better a year later, which no pill has managed.

  Their words

  But in the walking group the group that was randomly assigned to walk three four times a week for 40 minutes compared to a stretching group who's still engaging in exercise but not cardiovascular exercise. The walking group their you know hippocamp is actually increased in volume by 1%. So you're changing the the brain, but you're also changing the behavior. Their memory was much better a year later.

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Palaeontologist at Queen Mary University of London; studies dinosaur behaviour and writes about what the fossil record can and cannot tell us.

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  Being big pays off every day and is punished in extinctions, which is why body size keeps getting reset rather than climbing forever.

  Their words

  You're dominant in contests, particularly with conspecifics. If you're trying to win a territory or win mating rights, bigger things usually beat up smaller things. So there's going to be selection favoring them. But then big things don't usually do well in extinction events, so that tends to reset the clock by killing off the big stuff, and then smaller stuff does better again.

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Staff writer at The New Yorker, where he writes the Infinite Scroll column, and author of Filterworld and The Longing for Less.

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  People's desperate need to manipulate their own image, and their acceptance of being human-machine hybrids in the AI era, is reflected in current ugly, artificial-feeling consumer aesthetics.

  Their words

  I think this slop-adjacent realm of dupe products and Instagrammable potions points to our increasingly desperate need to manipulate our own images, and an acceptance of the fact that we're kind of hybridized monsters ourselves in this post-A.I. human-machine moment

  Labubus and the brainrot aesthetickylechayka.substack.com