Technology

I recently walked past an old minicab stand which, during our younger student days, sallied my friends back and forth between the city’s nightlife and our more affordable suburban digs. It is gone now; only a dilapidated and cordoned-off shack remains of a once-thriving minicab empire. Like thousands of others across the western world, the business went into terminal decline the moment Uber appeared in our lives. Yet a simple check of the app today shows the price of an Uber is not substantially less than a minicab ride back then. Uber rocketed to celestial heights because it was heavily subsidized by venture capital – driving the value through the floor, bankrupting all physical competitors, before it then jacked up the price to create an instant monopoly.

Elon Musk, already the richest person who ever lived, is at the center of the biggest share offering of all time. A valuation of $1.75 trillion at IPO would hand $75 billion to his company, SpaceX. Musk is being allocated two sets of shares, with performance-based conditions. They will materialize if SpaceX reaches a market capitalization of $7.5 trillion, and if a colony of a million people is established on Mars. The first of these is possible, the second is not. On the face of it, you wouldn’t bet against SpaceX. By 2024, it was launching more rockets than the rest of the world combined. Its Starlink internet service generates oodles of cash. It has more than 9,600 satellites in orbit that require constant replenishment, so the market is firm.

Last December, in a piece called “The Data Center Backlash Is Global,” I reported that residents around the world were rising up against Big Tech just as they have risen up against Big Wind and Big Solar, rejecting applications to use land. Sure, AI may be a world-changing technology, but the rush to build massive new data centers has resulted in dozens of rejections or restrictions on projects from Indianapolis to Dublin, Ireland. People are worried about property values, water usage, electricity costs and what it means for the neighborhood: “quality-of-life impacts,” as a member of the Indianapolis council, who led the opposition to Google’s billion-dollar project, explained.

If ever there was an exercise in futility, and a demonstration in intentional stupidity, it was the just dropped UFO files from the US Department of War. The release comes after President Trump ordered in February that the Pentagon and other agencies identify and publish governmental files related to “alien and extraterrestrial life, unidentified aerial phenomena, and unidentified flying objects.” “These files, hidden behind classifications, have long fueled justified speculation – and it’s time the American people see it for themselves,” said Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, in a statement posted to social media. “This release of declassified documents demonstrates the Trump Administration’s earnest commitment to unprecedented transparency.

What to make of the new AI election ad created by the filmmaker Charles Curran on behalf of Spencer Pratt, a reality TV star who is running to be Mayor of Los Angeles? The radio host Buck Sexton has already hailed the video as the future of political communication, and Jeb Bush has called it “maybe the best political ad of the year.” The video, which Pratt did not commission, but did repost on social media, shows California worthies – incumbent Mayor Karen Bass, Gavin Newsom, and Kamala Harris – assembled for a sinister banquet. Victims are brought before them: a mother whose children are being harassed by the city’s homeless, and a prostrate Hugh Jackman, who begs to be allowed to rebuild his house in Pacific Palisades.

The world’s first fully robotic assault on an enemy position was, of course, captured on video by a drone hovering above.President Volodymyr Zelensky recently revealed that the pioneering mission by the Ukrainian army had taken place last year in Kharkiv Oblast. He added that in the last three months Ukraine has conducted 22,000 missions using robotic vehicles. Robots, he stressed, are replacing soldiers on the frontline with Russia. Video of the assault has been passed to The Spectator by the 3rd Assault Brigade, the unit behind the mission. It shows that a Russian fortified dugout was first attacked by a suicide drone that exploded inside and then a Targan – “cockroach” in Ukrainian – remote control vehicle parked outside and detonated its mine. https://twitter.

The Ukrainian unmanned ground vehicle rolled up to a small bunker hidden in a thicket in Kharkiv oblast then stopped. Another remote-controlled vehicle had just detonated its 66lbs of explosives at the Russian bunker’s entrance, which was still smoldering. And before that a kamikaze drone had dived inside and exploded. The operator was about to detonate his explosives when two Russian soldiers pushed a sign through the bunker’s shattered roof saying they were surrendering. They were directed to Ukrainian lines by a drone and taken into custody as POWs. So ended the world’s first fully robotic assault on an enemy position. The remotely operated vehicle in this attack is called a Targan (“cockroach” in Ukrainian) and looks like a miniature flatbed without the cab.

When Apple named its next chief executive last month it did so without ceremony. Tim Cook will become executive chairman on September 1; John Ternus, his senior vice-president of hardware engineering, will succeed him as CEO. The announcement came with a photograph, not a keynote: the two men walking through Apple Park, the circular glass campus in Cupertino that Steve Jobs designed with the British architect Norman Foster and did not live to see completed. It was the first Apple succession of the post-masterpiece age, and the prose matched. Apple said the transition had been approved unanimously by its board after a “thoughtful, long-term succession planning process.” Cook had spent 15 years building a company that could change its CEO without spectacle.

“Europe is desperate for Energy, and yet the United Kingdom refuses to open North Sea Oil, one of the greatest fields in the World.” Donald Trump said this month on Truth Social. It is, to use the President’s phrase, “Tragic!!!” But the necessity of oil hasn’t always been recognized. Back in 2008, while running for the White House, Barack Obama declared that one of the major challenges facing the US is “what we will do about our addiction to foreign oil.” His solution was to switch America to renewables. In that address, known as the “New Energy For America” speech, Obama said, “We simply cannot pretend, as Senator McCain does, that we can drill our way out of this problem.

The key event in the return of the Artemis II crew was the moment of real drama during what mission controllers call Entry Interface. The capsule is 400,000 feet above the Earth and still traveling at 25,000 miles an hour. They were among the fastest humans even though they did not break the incoming speed of the Apollo 10 mission. It is only fourteen minutes until splashdown in the Pacific, there is no turning back, no second chance, re-entry will happen no matter what. A few hours earlier the crew donned their orange so-called crew survival suits and lowered their visors. In essence these are personal spacecraft providing everything they need to survive for up to six days. Their water-cooled inner suit was keeping them cool even though the cabin temperature was normal.