A recent piece in Science. "Why I may ‘hire’ AI instead of a graduate student", by Ariel Rosenfeld, a researcher I know well and whose early career enthusiasm and earnestness I remember with real appreciation, contains one sentence that stopped me cold: "The issue is not whether
In the 1630s, the Dutch Republic experienced what is often described as the first recorded speculative bubble: Tulip Mania. Prices for rare tulip bulbs soared to extraordinary levels before collapsing abruptly in 1637. Nearly four centuries later, massive capital flows into AI chips, data centers, and foundation models raise a
The India AI Impact Summit from 16-20 February 2026 in New Delhi was unlike the closed-door gatherings in Bletchley or the more government-centric forum in Paris. Around 300,000 people from every background walked through the doors, students, developers, civil servants, teachers, small business owners, a crowd
still from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QiT2yK-5-yg I recently reacted, rather negatively, to the interview with Yuval Harari at Davos 2026, My reaction was not quite on the points that it should have been. So let me restate my position more carefully. My concern is not
Photo by Sonika Agarwal on Unsplash Recent conversations with colleagues brought me, again, to the topic of synthetic data. Their arguments were familiar and, in many cases, reasonable: lack of representative data, privacy constraints, rare events, safety-critical edge cases. Synthetic data promises relief. Yet the more I listened, the
AI
“Those who only know Medicine, don’t even know Medicine". This sentence attributed to Abel Salazar (Portuguese physician, scientist, and artist who became significant for modernizing medical science in Portugal and linking science with humanist culture) this sentence that I found engraved on a wall of University of Porto,
AI
This reflection is prompted by attending the AAAI conference last week, an event that, with 10,000 participants, reached a record size, but the unease it triggered extends well beyond this particular meeting. Perhaps this reads as the perspective of a grumpy old lady. Point taken. But, if so, it
AI
This recent Science article on malicious AI swarms offers a sobering and largely convincing analysis of how agentic AI, when scaled and left unchecked, can threaten democratic discourse and institutions. I agree with most of its diagnosis: the combination of large language models with autonomous agents creates a powerful new
AI
Image by Istvan Brecz-Gruber from Pixabay 2026 is only a couple of weeks in, and AI is forcing concrete political choices. Governments have blocked systems like Grok over real-world harm [1], while energy and housing policies are being reshaped to accommodate power-hungry data centres, making clear that
On my upcoming book "The AI Paradox: How to Make Sense of a Complex Future". Princeton University Press, to appear Feb 17, 2026 I have been working in artificial intelligence since the late 1980s, long before AI became something people used daily or feared in headlines. Over the
Hanna Barakat & Archival Images of AI + AIxDESIGN / https://betterimagesofai.org / https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Artificial intelligence does not transform society on its own. What truly shapes the future are human choices: the data we collect and value, the goals we set, the economic incentives we accept
(c) João Maia Pinto & Público (First published in Portuguese in Público on 28 December 2025) As this year draws to a close, it is hard to ignore the profound impact that artificial intelligence has had on public debate, economic strategies, geopolitical manoeuvring, and everyday practices. To grasp the speed