Future

Thursday

John Pietro

Massachusetts Republicans pay the price for Trumpism

Massachusetts voters are known to be pragmatic. Despite being one of the most liberal states in the country, Massachusetts has had only one Democratic governor between 1991 and 2022. Yet the state’s Republican Party is anything but pragmatic. Hence the inevitable defeat of Republican Geoff Diehl in the gubernatorial race against Democrat Maura Healey. For those not from Massachusetts, there are a few things about the state’s political dynamics that need to be understood. First, it is overwhelmingly Democratic — the GOP holds three out of 40 seats in the state senate and 29 of the 160 seats in the state house. Before the midterms, Democrats controlled every statewide office except for the governorship, and now they control that too.

Saturday

Kit Wilson

Will our future lives be like a video game?

From our UK edition

A few years ago, the software company Owlchemy Labs released a computer game called Job Simulator. Its premise was simple. Players find themselves in a future world, roughly 30 years from now, in which super-efficient robots have snaffled up all the jobs. No longer needed for work, humans entertain themselves instead by donning virtual reality headsets and reenacting 'the glory days' — simulating what it was once like to be an office clerk, chef, or shopkeeper. The gameplay, therefore, consists entirely of, well, yeah… carrying out endless mundane tasks: virtual photocopying, virtual cooking, virtual newspaper sales. Job Simulator is pretty tongue-in-cheek, crammed full of dry, self-referential jokes.

Thursday

John Phipps

Boldly going where hundreds have gone before: Brave New Planet podcast reviewed

From our UK edition

Since technology is developing at such light-speed pace, why does it feel so strangely slow? There is a sense that driverless cars, green energy and of course certain vaccines are, for all their breakneck pace, still taking for ever to arrive. Watching the future emerge is like watching slow-motion footage of a high-speed train. We know it’s going quickly — but can we not just fast-forward? Perhaps it’s merely our heightened expectations, our diminished boredom thresholds. Some of our most distinguished thinkers and entrepreneurs have warned that an all-powerful artificial intelligence, badly calibrated, might represent the greatest threat to the long-term survival of humanity.