Thursday 14 May 2026 The contemporary enthusiasm surrounding large language models has produced a curious and often underexplored phenomenon: the widening cultural divide between the people who build these systems and the professional communities expected to use them. The public conversation surrounding artificial intelligence frequently assumes that once the engineering challenge has been solved, practical adoption follows naturally. Yet in reality the greatest obstacles oft

Thursday 14 May 2026 The European Union has long aspired to strategic autonomy — a phrase that has acquired an almost liturgical quality in Brussels — yet nowhere has that aspiration been more quietly compromised than in the infrastructure of everyday payments. When a European citizen taps a card in a café in Lviv, Paris or Berlin, the transaction is, more often than not, routed through the networks of Visa or Mastercard — American corporations whose dominance of global payme

Thursday 14 May 2026 Since the end of the Kremlin’s self-declared “Victory Day ceasefire”, the skies above Ukraine have once again become saturated with the sound that has come to define this phase of the war: the mechanical buzzing of long-range Russian drones approaching in the darkness. Night after night, across Kyiv, Odesa, Kharkiv, Dnipro, Zaporizhzhia and smaller provincial towns less frequently mentioned in international headlines, air raid sirens have resumed their gr

Wednesday 13 May 2026 The dream of the driverless motor car is as old as the motor car itself – the removal of human frailty from the act of driving, the promise of a machine that neither drinks, nor tires, nor grows distracted. In a world in which road traffic collisions kill more than a million people annually, overwhelmingly through human error, the appeal of automation is self-evident. Yet the question of whether driverless cars are safe is not one that admits of a simple

Wednesday 13 May 2026 The concept of desert, that individuals ought to receive what they deserve, lies at the heart of both moral philosophy and the administration of justice. It is a notion that appears intuitive, even self-evident, and yet upon closer inspection it dissolves into a set of profound difficulties. In the aftermath of war, when societies seek to assign responsibility for atrocity and suffering, the appeal to desert becomes particularly acute. Nowhere is this mo

Wednesday 13 May 2026 Throughout modern history there has been a persistent argument about the relationship between ideas and machines. Do human beings first formulate moral, political and social doctrines, and then build technologies that express those doctrines? Or does the process run in the opposite direction — with technological innovation reshaping the possibilities of society, and with political philosophies emerging afterwards as rationalisations of material change? T