Fifty years after her death in New York, Hannah Arendt has become the most popular philosopher of our time. For good reason: Her views are just as timely as ever. It must be so nice to play Hannah Arendt. No fewer than five actresses are on stage this evening at the Deutsches Theater Berlin to portray the philosopher. The piece is an adaptation of the graphic novel by American illustrator Ken Krimstein about the philosopher's life, called The Three Escapes of Hannah Arendt," combined with scenes from the famous interview that journalist Günter Gaus conducted with Arendt in 1964 for German public broadcaster ZDF. The article you are reading originally appeared in German in issue 49/2025 (November 28th, 2025) of DER SPIEGEL. They play Arendt and a few of her contemporaries, the philosopher Martin Heidegger, the writer Walter Benjamin, her husband Heinrich Blücher. There is a great deal of speech in the play, especially from Arendt herself. The places of her life are ticked off, her ...

President Donald Trump holds charts as he speaks about the economy in the Oval Office, August 2025. President Donald Trump holds charts as he speaks about the economy in the Oval Office, August 2025. If the first term of Donald Trump provoked anxiety over the fate of objective knowledge, the second has led to claims we live in a world-historical age of stupid, accelerated by big tech. But might there be a way out? T he first and second Trump administrations have provoked markedly different critical reactions. The shock of 2016 and its aftermath saw a wave of liberal anxiety about the fate of objective knowledge, not only in the US but also in Britain, where the Brexit referendum that year had been won by a campaign that misrepresented key facts and figures.

This article looks at AI misalignment through the framework of totalitarianism, as laid out in Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism. I don't want to make any glib moral comparisons between the very real, singular horrors of totalitarianism in the 20th century and the still hypothetical problems of AI misalignment; but I believe the parallels are worth exploring nonetheless. In her magnum opus, Arendt describes a historical and political backdrop spawning a political movement fundamentally at odds with human flourishing, such a perverse break with previous forms of government as to constitute humanity-destroying machine. Nick Bostrom's famous paper thought experiment imagines an AGI with a mandate to make as many paperclips as possible; carried out by an all-powerful agent, this banal but unconstrained (read totalitarian) reward function results in the apocalypse. Both are powerful machines that proceed logically and implacably, without the guidance natural human intuition, towards a goal fundamentally at odds with human flourishing. A totalitarian government distinguish itself from other authoritarian forms of government (even fascist dictatorships like Mussolini's Italy) in its perpetual movement towards dominating every aspect of life.

Stand aside humanity, you're holding up the progress. We've passed the point of usefulness for Homo sapiens, now is the dawning of the Homo Faber era. The idea that "I think therefore I am" has become quaint in this new age of builders and creators. But has our continued obsession with technology and progress actually managed to instead set back our capacity for humanity? In his new book, The Myth of Artificial Intelligence: Why Computers Can't Think the Way We Do, author and pioneering researcher in the field of natural language processing, Erik J Larson, investigates the efforts to build computers that process information like we do and why we're much farther away from having human-equivalent AIs than most futurists would care to admit.

From foreign intervention in free elections to the rise of the American surveillance state, the Internet has transformed the relationship between the public and private sectors, especially democracy's public sphere. The global pandemic only further highlights the extent to which technological innovation is changing how we live, work, and play. What has too often gone unacknowledged is that the same revolution has produced a series of conflicts between our desires as consumers and our duties as citizens. Left unaddressed, the consequence is a moral vacuum that has become a threat to liberal democracy and human values. Surveillance in the Internet Age, whether by governments or companies, often relies on algorithmic searches of big data.

Last month, two parliamentary reports on the involvement of the British intelligence services in torture and rendition were released last week. What has been hypothesized by several journalists is now confirmed: that British functionaries--to include soldiers, civil servants and intelligence officers with MI5 and MI6--knew about and participated in a vast array of human rights abuses committed during the capture and interrogation of terrorism suspects. The Guardian's Peter Beaumont writes with great contempt for what has transpired since 2001, "[A]s it is now quite clear, it was all a bloody lie. The answers given to journalists at the Observer over the years, as well as colleagues at The Guardian and those at other news organisations, as they investigated these allegations, were rotten with untruth and evasion." Governments' lying to their citizens about covert wars is hardly new, nor is the pervasive use of kidnapping of terrorism suspects by the CIA to include its many "black sites."

Leading South African law firm, Webber Wentzel, has announced it has chosen legal AI company Luminance to provide doc review services for M&A transactions. This is the latest in a series of client wins for the UK-based AI company, which last week also announced it had partnered with Sweden's Delphi and also Luxembourg's Arendt & Medernach. In the latter case the Benelux firm will be making use of Luminance's new real estate document review capacity. Until recently the company had been focused on M&A due diligence work. In a statement Webber Wentzel said it'particularly values the platform's built-in collaboration tools which will allow its lawyers to quickly group and assign documents, track live progress, and significantly reduce the amount of time spent organising workflow'.

We demonstrate CHISSL a scalable client-server system for real-time interactive machine learning. Our system is capable of incorporating user feedback incrementally and immediately without a pre-defined prediction task. Computation is partitioned between a lightweight web-client and a heavyweight server. The server relies on representation learning and off-the-shelf agglomerative clustering to find a dendrogram, which we use to quickly approximate distances in the representation space. The client, using only this dendrogram, incorporates user feedback via transduction. Distances and predictions for each unlabeled instance are updated incrementally and deterministically, with O(n) space and time complexity. Our algorithm is implemented in a functional prototype, designed to be easy to use by non-experts. The prototype organizes the large amounts of data into recommendations. This allows the user to interact with actual instances by dragging and dropping to provide feedback in an intuitive manner. We applied CHISSL to several domains including cyber, social media, and geo-temporal analysis.