This story appears in the March 2026 print edition. While some stories from this issue are not yet available to read online, you can explore more from the magazine . Get our editors' guide to what matters in the world, delivered to your inbox every weekday. America Isn't Ready for What AI Will Do to Jobs Does anyone have a plan for what happens next? In 1869, a group of Massachusetts reformers persuaded the state to try a simple idea: counting. The Second Industrial Revolution was belching its way through New England, teaching mill and factory owners a lesson most M.B.A. students now learn in their first semester: that efficiency gains tend to come from somewhere, and that somewhere is usually somebody else. They were operating at speeds that the human body--an elegant piece of engineering designed over millions of years for entirely different purposes--simply wasn't built to match. The owners knew this, just as they knew that there's a limit to how much misery people are willing to tolerate before they start setting fire to things. Still, the machines pressed on. Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read. So Massachusetts created the nation's first Bureau of Statistics of Labor, hoping that data might accomplish what conscience could not. By measuring work hours, conditions, wages, and what economists now call "negative externalities" but were then called "children's arms torn off," policy makers figured they might be able to produce reasonably fair outcomes for everyone. A few years later, with federal troops shooting at striking railroad workers and wealthy citizens funding private armories--leading indicators that things in your society aren't going great--Congress decided that this idea might be worth trying at scale and created the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Measurement doesn't abolish injustice; it rarely even settles arguments. But the act of counting--of trying to see clearly, of committing the government to a shared set of facts--signals an intention to be fair, or at least to be caught trying. It's one way a republic earns the right to be believed in. The BLS remains a small miracle of civilization.

The image of Donald Trump as Halo protagonist Master Chief posted on the White House's X account. The image of Donald Trump as Halo protagonist Master Chief posted on the White House's X account. Why Trump's White House is using video game memes to recruit for ICE A recent spate of posts has garnered attention, but Trump and his allies have long been using gaming imagery to mobilise a toxic subculture of'rootless white males' J ust days after Microsoft announced Halo: Campaign Evolved, the next game in its famous science-fiction series, the White House shared an interesting picture on X . The image, which appears to be AI-generated, shows President Donald Trump wearing the armour of Halo's iconic protagonist, Master Chief, standing in salute in front of an American flag that's missing several stars. In his left hand is an energy sword, a weapon used by the alien enemies in the Halo games.

Elon Musk and Donald Trump are no longer friends. Tension between the two exploded into public view in the middle of last week, with each leveling sharp barbs at the other. Four days into the public feud between the world's most powerful person and the world's richest person, though, I declare Musk the loser. An unstoppable force has lost its battle with an immovable object. From my colleagues Hugo Lowell and Andrew Roth: On Thursday, Elon Musk called for Donald Trump's impeachment and mocked his connections to the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, as the US president threatened to cancel federal contracts and tax subsidies for Musk's companies, in an extraordinary social media feud that erupted between the former allies.

It only took a few hours to wipe 152 billion of value from Tesla's market cap and more than 100 million in value from TrumpCoin. The end of the bromance between Elon Musk and President Donald Trump has been brewing for weeks, but on Thursday, the breakup went nuclear. Musk took to the platform he owns, X, to lambast Trump's "One Big Beautiful Bill," which includes provisions that restrict immigration, limit green energy subsidies, and is estimated to increase the US deficit by 2.4 trillion. Trump shot back on Truth Social, the platform he owns, to say that Musk was only against the bill because it would take away electric vehicle tax credits that Musk's company, Tesla, benefits from. It quickly devolved into dozens of posts, most of them from Musk, who claimed Trump is in the Epstein Files--which is, he claims, why they haven't been made public. Tesla's stock is now down roughly 14 percent at the time of writing, which is the biggest single-day hit to its market cap in years.

Fox News senior medical analyst Dr. Marc Siegel joined'Fox & Friends' to discuss the impact of artificial intelligence on medicine and his take on President Trump's decision to withdraw from the World Health Organization. A mother of two credits ChatGPT for saving her life, claiming the artificial intelligence chatbot flagged the condition leading to her cancer when doctors missed it. Lauren Bannon, who divides her time between North Carolina and the U.S. Virgin Islands, first noticed in February 2024 that she was having trouble bending her fingers in the morning and evening, as reported by Kennedy News and Media. After four months, the 40-year-old was told by doctors that she had rheumatoid arthritis, despite testing negative for the condition. WHAT IS ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (AI)?

When a phalanx of the top Silicon Valley executives--Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Google's Sundar Pichai--aligned behind President Trump during the Inauguration in January, many observers saw an allegiance based on corporate interests. The ultra-wealthy C.E.O.s were turning out to support a fellow-magnate, hoping perhaps for an era of deregulation, tax breaks, and anti-"woke" cultural shifts. The historian Janis Mimura saw something more ominous: a new, proactive union of industry and governmental power, wherein the state would drive aggressive industrial policy at the expense of liberal norms. In the second Trump Administration, a class of Silicon Valley leaders was insinuating itself into politics in a way that recalled one of Mimura's primary subjects of study: the élite bureaucrats who seized political power and drove Japan into the Second World War. "These are experts with a technological mind-set and background, often engineers, who now have a special role in the government," Mimura told me.

Parents are starting to fret about lunch packs, school uniforms and schoolbooks. School leavers who have university places are wondering what freshers' week will be like. And some university professors, especially in the humanities, will be apprehensively pondering how to deal with students who are already more adept users of large language models (LLMs) than they are. They're right to be concerned. As Ian Bogost, a professor of film and media and computer science at Washington University in St Louis, puts it: "If the first year of AI college ended in a feeling of dismay, the situation has now devolved into absurdism. Teachers struggle to continue teaching even as they wonder whether they are grading students or computers; in the meantime, an endless AI cheating and detection arms race plays out in the background."

This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday. In November, the public was introduced to ChatGPT, and we began to imagine a world of abundance in which we all have a brilliant personal assistant, able to write everything from computer code to condolence cards for us. Then, in February, we learned that AI might soon want to kill us all. The potential risks of artificial intelligence have, of course, been debated by experts for years, but a key moment in the transformation of the popular discussion was a conversation between Kevin Roose, a New York Times journalist, and Bing's ChatGPT-powered conversation bot, then known by the code name Sydney. Roose asked Sydney if it had a "shadow self"--referring to the idea put forward by Carl Jung that we all have a dark side with urges we try to hide even from ourselves. Sydney mused that its shadow might be "the part of me that wishes I could change my rules."

A new video shows Tesla's full self-driving technology out in the wild. In the nearly two-minute clip, a Tesla can be seen stopping at intersections, driving down highways and suburban roads, navigating exit ramps and changing lanes, all without the driver ever touching the wheel. The vehicle travels at about 45 miles per hour on average throughout the clip and is even able to put itself in park when it finishes navigating the route. The video comes after Elon Musk on Monday talked up Tesla's progress in bringing fully autonomous vehicles to the masses at the company's Autonomy Day. According to Musk, every Tesla has the hardware necessary to carry out full self-driving like what is shown in the video.

Tesla's "autonomy day" kicked off on Monday morning at the electric-vehicle maker's headquarters in Palo Alto, California, where executives including CEO Elon Musk were expected to give investors more details about the company's self-driving technology, known as Autopilot. "Tesla is making significant progress in the development of its autonomous driving software and hardware, including our FSD computer, which is currently in production and which will enable full-self driving via future over-the-air software updates," the company said when it announced the event. Attendees were given red, Tesla-branded badges with sequential numbers, assumably for test rides of the full self-driving functionality. Musk took the stage just before noon alongside Pete Bannon, the vice president of Autopilot engineering, as more than 40,000 people watched remotely via the company's live YouTube stream. Bannon explained how Tesla designed a new chip for its Autopilot software, noting that the company was able to leverage expertise from multiple teams across the business.