From Montenegro to northern California, the tech elite dream of building cities where they make the rules. Is this, finally, their moment? The shirtless man in the golden mask and cape has plans to lead his own country one day. There is no location yet, but it will be a crypto-and AI-powered paradise of medical experimentation, filled with people who want to "make death optional," he says. For now, though, he's leading a sparsely attended rave on the second floor of a San Francisco office building. A DJ is spinning at one end of an open room. A handful of people sway and jump on the space cleared out as a dance floor. At a nearby table, coffee is available with many alternative milks.

This paper examines how competing sociotechnical imaginaries of artificial intelligence (AI) risk shape governance decisions and regulatory constraints. Drawing on concepts from science and technology studies, we analyse three dominant narrative groups: existential risk proponents, who emphasise catastrophic AGI scenarios; accelerationists, who portray AI as a transformative force to be unleashed; and critical AI scholars, who foreground present-day harms rooted in systemic inequality. Through an analysis of representative manifesto-style texts, we explore how these imaginaries differ across four dimensions: normative visions of the future, diagnoses of the present social order, views on science and technology, and perceived human agency in managing AI risks. Our findings reveal how these narratives embed distinct assumptions about risk and have the potential to progress into policy-making processes by narrowing the space for alternative governance approaches. We argue against speculative dogmatism and for moving beyond deterministic imaginaries toward regulatory strategies that are grounded in pragmatism.

Cutaway view of a fictional space colony concept painted by artist Rick Guidice as part of a NASA art program in the 1970s. This story was originally published by Undark and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Elon Musk once joked: "I would like to die on Mars. Musk is, in fact, deadly serious about colonizing the Red Planet. Part of his motivation is the idea of having a "back-up" planet in case some future catastrophe renders the Earth uninhabitable. Musk has suggested that a million people may be calling Mars home by 2050 -- and he's hardly alone in his enthusiasm. Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen believes the world can easily support 50 billion people, and more than that once we settle other planets. And Jeff Bezos has spoken of exploiting the resources of the moon and the asteroids to build giant space stations. "I would love to see a trillion humans living in the solar system," he has said. Not so fast, cautions science journalist Adam Becker.

The US Navy has released stunning images showing its incredible new drone-destroying laser weapon in action for the first time. The HELIOS system was tested aboard the USS Preble, with photos capturing its bright beam shooting an unmanned aerial vehicle out of the sky. HELIOS, which stands for High Laser with Integrated Optical-dazzler and Surveillance, was developed by Lockheed Martin in 2021 and delivered to the Navy a year later. The system blasts more than 60 kilowatts of directed energy, enough to power up to 60 homes, at the speed of light and can hit targets up to five miles away. It is designed to counter a range of threats, including drones, small boats, and potentially incoming missiles.

At 2.16pm California time last Sunday, the US billionaire tech investor Marc Andreessen called it. "DeepSeek R1 is AI's Sputnik moment," he posted on X. A Chinese startup, operating since 2023 and helmed by a millennial mathematician, had unveiled a new chatbot that seemed to equal the performance of America's leading models at a fraction of the cost. Never mind that its answers on everything from the status of Taiwan to the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre were curbed by Chinese Communist party (CCP) censors. To Andreessen, a veteran of decades of technology booms and busts, it was like the Soviet Union getting the first satellite into orbit in 1957 and shocking America. The next day, shares in several of the world's biggest companies plunged – including the biggest fall in US market history for microchip maker Nvidia, which lost nearly 600bn.

Nothing cheers up a tech columnist more than the sight of 600bn being wiped off the market cap of an overvalued tech giant in a single day. And yet last Monday that's what happened to Nvidia, the leading maker of electronic picks and shovels for the AI gold rush. It was the biggest one-day slump for any company in history, and it was not alone – shares of companies in semiconductor, power and infrastructure industries exposed to AI collectively shed more than 1tn in value on the same day. The proximate cause of this chaos was the news that a Chinese tech startup of whom few had hitherto heard had released DeepSeek R1, a powerful AI assistant that was much cheaper to train and operate than the dominant models of the US tech giants – and yet was comparable in competence to OpenAI's o1 "reasoning" model. Just to illustrate the difference: R1 was said to have cost only 5.58m to build, which is small change compared with the billions that OpenAI and co have spent on their models; and R1 is about 15 times more efficient (in terms of resource use) than anything comparable made by Meta. The DeepSeek app immediately zoomed to the top of the Apple app store, where it attracted huge numbers of users who were clearly unfazed by the fact that the terms and conditions and the privacy policy they needed to accept were in Chinese.

Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. On Thursday evening, President-elect Donald Trump announced on his Truth Social platform that he would be appointing David O. Sacks--the "PayPal Mafia" alum, longtime venture capitalist, All-In Podcast co-host, Elon Musk pal, and rock-ribbed Silicon Valley conservative--as the "White House A.I. & Crypto Czar." In his statement, Trump wrote that "Sacks will focus on making America the clear global leader" in artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency, which he deemed to be "two areas critical to the future of American competitiveness." In addition, Sacks will "safeguard Free Speech online," "steer us away from Big Tech bias and censorship," and "lead the Presidential Council of Advisors for Science and Technology." For his first-ever Truth Social post, the incoming czar responded to Trump with gratitude and claimed that he "looks forward to advancing American competitiveness in these critical technologies."

Joe Rogan was left stunned after hearing how AI will be the main fighters in future wars. The celebrity podcaster was taken back when his podcast guest, Homeland Security Advisor and billionaire Marc Andreessen, suggested AI-powered jets that travel five times the speed of sound, Mach 5, are going to be more common'within a few years.' 'Image a thousand of these things coming over the horizon right at you,' Andreessen said. 'It really changes the fundamental equation of war.' He explain that instead of needing the most soldiers and material to win, people with the most technology and money will take over. Andreessen also noted that there are'a bunch of reasons' why he believes a future of AI-piloted fighter jets is all but inevitable.

Hardly a week passes without another billionaire endorsing Donald Trump. With Joe Biden proposing a 25% tax on those with assets over 100m ( 80m), this is no shock. The pro-Trump multimillionaire club now includes a growing number of venture capitalists. Unlike hedge funders or private equity barons, venture capitalists have traditionally held progressive credentials. They've styled themselves as the heroes of innovation, and the Democrats have done more to polish their progressive image than anyone else.

In his polarizing "Techno-Optimist Manifesto" last year, venture capitalist Marc Andreessen listed a number of enemies to technological progress. Among them were "tech ethics" and "trust and safety," a term used for work on online content moderation, which he said had been used to subject humanity to "a mass demoralization campaign" against new technologies such as artificial intelligence. Andreessen's declaration drew both public and quiet criticism from people working in those fields--including at Meta, where Andreessen is a board member. Critics saw his screed as misrepresenting their work to keep internet services safer. On Wednesday, Andreessen offered some clarification: When it comes to his 9-year-old son's online life, he's in favor of guardrails.