Technology

WATCH: the world’s first robotic assault on an enemy position

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

ukraine robotic assault

Inside the Killhouse: where Ukraine’s revolutionary military robots are developed

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

killhouse

Why Apple’s new CEO will play it safe

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

Meet Mythos: the new AI system causing panic over cybersecurity

It’s tempting, even fashionable, to pooh-pooh the hyperbole from our tech overlords. The release in 2022 of ChatGPT, the first mass-market conversational AI system, unleashed a volley of supercilious put-downs. The chatbot was not intelligent. It was merely hallucinating, manipulating statistics, regurgitating phrases from the internet: it was a “stochastic parrot.” Well, over the next three years, ChatGPT became unputdownable. It learned to handle photographs and videos, extract wisdom from dense textbooks, sound like Scarlett Johansson, write everything from code to songs to emails and offer tips on fixing washing machines. Not bad for a parrot. Since April 7, when the California lab Anthropic announced the latest version of its

mythos

How we all become numb

These nights, sleep won’t take me. Thirty-one weeks pregnant, I’m too big to ever be comfortable. I toss; I turn; I move to the guest room in the vain hope that having a bed to myself might offer some reprieve from the fact my bones can no longer support my weight. Some time around 3 or 4 a.m., I give up and open TikTok, where the algorithm offers its nightly liturgy of dread. “If you’re seeing this, it’s meant for you,” a woman in her car, voice low, telling me to install a Ring doorbell because somebody could be casing my house. I live in Chicago, and someone just stole my

numb assassination

The Palantir manifesto doesn’t go far enough

Tech companies like Palantir now find themselves in a bind. Wanting government contracts, they have a reason to stay politically neutral. At the same time, they rightly suspect that the greater part of the left has already marked them for destruction. The hostility has little to do with Silicon Valley’s enthusiasm for Austrian economics, or its occasional calls for a property-based franchise – an old National Liberal demand rather than a fascist one. Rather, the left is hostile to technology because it is America’s conservative party, suspicious of anything that threatens to undermine old solidarities. MAGA was quick to forgive corporate America after it called a, at least temporary, halt

alex karp palantir

Europe has squandered its energy security

“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,

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technology

Fighting technology is futile

A 20-year-old from Spring, Texas, named Daniel Alejandro Moreno-Gama has been charged with attempted murder after he was accused of throwing a Molotov cocktail at the gate of Sam Altman’s San Francisco home on April 10. He then allegedly walked toward OpenAI’s Mission Bay headquarters and told employees he intended to burn the building down as well. He was reportedly carrying a manifesto – a “three-part series,” according to Fox News – that included a list of other AI executives and investors and their home addresses and documents discussing potential risks that AI poses to humanity, with a section titled: “Some more words on the matter of our impending extinction.”

How Artemis II returned to Earth

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

Artemis II

Why Artemis II matters

Weren’t those images beamed back from the Artemis II mission something to catch the breath in the throat? If something in you wasn’t stirred by the sight of Earth, glimpsed through the window of the space capsule past the silhouetted face of the astronaut Christina Koch, I don’t think you can be fully alive. And what about the thought that for the first time in history, human eyes will look directly on the dark side of the moon; or that the inhabitants of that spacecraft will travel farther from our home than any humans have ever done? That for a few tens of minutes before earthrise, they will be wholly

The peptides market is exploding – but are they safe?

Two weeks before the 2024 presidential election, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. tweeted that “the FDA’s war on public health is about to end.” He then listed a host of treatments, all of which he claimed had been “aggressively suppressed” by a corrupt Big Pharma system. Two Ps – psychedelics and peptides – featured on that list of treatments, one more familiar than the other. You could be forgiven for thinking that peptides are a recent creation but they’re not. They’ve been around for a long time, but they’ve gained huge attention due to Wegovy and Ozempic. Peptides are natural compounds: short chains of amino acids (the building blocks of proteins)

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The arrogance of the tech-skeptics

If you’ve been paying attention to social media lately, then you already know the score: smartphones are corrupting our children, we need legal intervention immediately. Roughly half of US states have enacted some form of age-gating for social media or pornographic content. Australia banned under-16s from social media platforms outright, France and Indonesia followed suit and the United Kingdom is now asking people for their papers to read moderately offensive blog posts. You don’t need me to rehash this. The phones have nuked the interior lives of Gen Z, Gen A and the hitherto unborn Generations B and C. Every opinion lands somewhere between “protect the children” and “this is

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Why China has the edge in mining

Donald Trump wants to bring back mining and mineral processing to the US – and he needs to do this if he’s to continue fighting wars. “You cannot claim to have a military strategy without a clear idea of your supply chains,” says economic journalist Wolfgang Münchau. “The specific advantage that both Russia and China have over the West is not simply their wealth of metals and minerals – it’s the fact that they can also process them. China’s expertise in processing its raw material is unparalleled.” Trump has exhorted America’s traditional allies to take responsibility for their own mineral supplies as well as their own defense, and to ditch

How the West is empowering China’s war machine

The West’s technology brains and universities are arming China. A few of them are potentially breaking the law to do it, but most of them don’t need to. The front door has been open for years, and nobody in London or Washington has thought to close it. According to a federal indictment unsealed in Manhattan last month, on December 18, 2025, in a warehouse somewhere in Southeast Asia, a team of men used a hair dryer to peel serial-number labels off genuine server boxes and press them onto fakes. The real servers, loaded with some of America’s most restricted artificial intelligence hardware, are alleged to have long since been shipped

Will Artemis II fulfill our Space Age dreams?

As the Artemis II mission thundered into the sky last night, a full moon rose above Cape Canaveral. It was no coincidence: the timing of the lift-off was ordained by lighting requirements and the mechanics of the Moon’s orbit. The mission set off not in the direction of the Moon, but towards where the Moon will be in five days’ time when the spacecraft swings around it in what is called a “free-return trajectory.” The crew of four are the first in almost 54 years to go to the Moon. In a way, things have not changed so much since then. Over the ten-day Artemis II mission, when the crew

The age of the aircraft carrier is over

Ever since World War Two, America’s aircraft carrier fleets have served as imposing instruments of imperial power, roaming the oceans to cow recalcitrant nations into obedience. Favored by the Trump administration for this purpose, current experience indicates their day is done thanks to the proliferation of anti-ship missiles and the increasing ubiquity of drones. In America’s last Middle Eastern war but two, against the Yemeni Houthis in 2025, the carrier USS Harry S.Truman, complete with its attendant escorts, was driven into retreat, leaving antagonists in control of the Red Sea. On one occasion, the carrier’s desperate maneuver to avoid a Houthi drone caused an $80 million Hornet jet fighter to slide

Iranian hackers breach the gates of Kash’s Valhalla 

“See you in Valhalla” is how Kash Patel said farewell to Charlie Kirk. Unfortunately, it now seems that Patel’s own sanctum has now been breached. Iran-aligned hackers have broken into the FBI director’s personal email inbox and released the contents online. What did they leak? The un-redacted Epstein files? The truth behind the Kennedy assassination? Not quite. None of the 300 purloined emails were even sent during Patel’s time at the FBI. The hackers, no doubt cackling manically while doing so, instead released according to the Guardian: a series of personal photographs of Patel sniffing and smoking cigars, riding in an antique convertible and making a face while taking a picture

Kash Patel

‘LinkedIn speak’ is a disgrace

The past few years have seen a slew of devastating style assaults on the English language known as “LinkedIn speak.” You know the type of word salad: “synergize” instead of “combine,” “ideated” instead of “thought of,” “holistic” instead of – well – looking at something as a whole. Alarmingly, there is now an app, Kagi Translate, that allows you to type any sentence and it will deliver it for you in this wretched patois. For instance, write “I went to the zoo,” and Kagi gives you: “I had an incredible opportunity to observe high-performing teams in a diverse ecosystem and reflect on the importance of adaptability and strategic positioning.” Go on, try it. Or rather: “Step out of your comfort zone and embrace

Linkedin

How AI led a psychiatrist to a breakdown

This is the story of Paul, a 52-year-old psychiatrist who had a psycho-spiritual crisis triggered by overwork and overuse of AI. But this is not a usual AI cautionary tale, because Paul also says AI helped him navigate said crisis and make sense of it. Is he still in the grip of AI-induced mania? You decide. Paul has ADHD, and took a common form of stimulant to treat it until recently. He is interested in big ideas and spirituality. Early last year, he was working freelance and using AI to help him produce two or three 5,000-word reports a day. Because it was so useful at work, Paul started talking

The disembodied brain cells playing video games

In a suburban Melbourne industrial estate, hidden in a clutter of brutalist buildings and parked trucks, tomorrow’s world is taking shape. Here, an Australian tech start-up called Cortical Labs has caused an internet sensation. More than 40 million people have watched a clip of disembodied human brain cells playing the 1990s video game Doom. These cells are kept in petri dishes, wired up to computers and trained to do whatever the researchers want. “Right now, the cells play a lot like a beginner who’s never seen a computer,” says neuroscientist and Cortical Labs’s chief scientific officer, Brett Kagan. “But they can shoot, they can spin, they can seek out enemies

How we wage war in space

Operation Epic Fury marks a turning point in the art of war. The key to 20th-century battles was air power. In the past, space and cyber activities have traditionally played supporting roles as so-called force multipliers. But this is no longer the case. In this conflict they have become mainstream, carving out new fronts for the wars of the future. The use of space is no longer something that is just nice to have, because everything from comms to intel to navigation uses space and cyber assets. Along with the National Reconnaissance Office, which manages US spy satellites, the US Space Force uses a global sensor network of ground-based telescopes

Conspiracy culture will never be satisfied

American conspiracy culture is a tradition with a long lineage, though not a simple one. It runs through the John Birch Society and Mae Brussell, through Bill Cooper and Alex Jones, into QAnon and beyond. There are other tributaries – black nationalist suspicion of COINTELPRO, evangelical end-times theology, militia movements, UFO subcultures – but one dominant current exists in every conspiracy: it speaks from below. The conspirators operate as the hidden orchestrators of surface reality. The deep state, the intelligence agencies, the Fed, the media – at worst, Jews – all sit above normal people, controlling their world. The people telling these stories understand themselves as excluded from power. For

Are aliens really out there?

We have all wondered if we are alone in the cosmos; if beings born under the light of another star embark on fabulous voyages between the stars to reach us – their cosmic cousins. Those who believe the Earth has been visited by aliens must think all their dreams are coming true. The recent rumors are that Donald Trump will break the “truth embargo” and make an alien disclosure speech on May 1. Then there is Steven Spielberg’s film about aliens, Disclosure Day, due out in the summer. This is surely no coincidence. The UFO community is a money-making juggernaut that cannot change direction YouTuber Brian Tyler Cohen recently interviewed