In "Biological War," Annie Jacobsen imagines society collapsing from a man-made plague--part of a wave of such prophecies. But what do we miss when we try to predict the future? In the fall of 1989, a select group of Soviet scientists was summoned to Obolensk, a secluded municipality on Moscow's periphery, and gathered at what appeared to be an insane asylum to discuss a pioneering technique for mass murder. If someone had been observing the institutional activity from space--a distinctly non-theoretical possibility--they might have seen a shuffle of patients roaming the grounds or playing volleyball in their pajamas. These were actors, hired to play the disturbed as a cover story for something even more disturbing. The eight-story glass building at the center of the complex, which had putatively been devoted to vaccine manufacturing, was in fact a highly classified defense facility. Its remit was called, or "biological preparations"--what one participant later described as "the most ambitious Soviet arms program since the development of the hydrogen bomb." The most recent experiments there had at last demonstrated the viability of a weapon that could wipe out entire enemy populations without leaving a scratch on their infrastructure. It was a pathogen genetically engineered to spread within hours, to kill within days, and to resist all existing treatment.

Women use A.I. less than men and do more of the cognitive work at home. The A.I. "family assistant" promises to bridge both divides. In a promotional video for Ollie, an A.I. family assistant, one of the company's founders, Bill Lennon, is about to announce his new venture in front of a camera crew when his phone starts pinging. "THE BABY JUST ON THE CARPET / like A LOT / WHILE I WAS ON ZOOM W AN INVESTOR." Then, a somewhat anticlimactic follow-up: "My sister coming for dinner btw did I tell you???" Lennon does not respond directly to these messages, which are presumably from his wife.

Long-range drone and missile strikes on Russian soil have shifted the balance of the conflict--will they be enough to end it? In recent weeks, Donald Trump--whose attitude toward Ukraine and its President, Volodymyr Zelensky, has been notoriously fickle, when not outright hostile --has appeared to warm to Ukraine's chances in the war with Russia. On the sidelines of the summit in Ankara, he met with Zelensky and later spoke of him in flattering terms, declaring "We've actually developed a good relationship. Trump has a history of favoring those he perceives as winners, and his change in attitude regarding Ukraine seems driven by the country's newfound ability to strike targets deep inside Russia--"an escalation that can help lead to an end," Trump said. In Ankara, Zelensky, the inveterate entertainer, riffed on a question from Trump, who asked if Zelensky would consider travelling to Moscow for direct talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin. That would be dangerous, Zelensky ...

When A.I. Is a Member of the Family A single mom, her two daughters, and the chatbots that fill in the gaps. Roschelle, seated, with her daughters, Cece (left) and Zi, and Sapphire (far right). The first time the voice kept Cece Ogbuji awake was on a school night in the fall. Cece, who was fifteen, was having a busy week of classes and theatre practice and homework. So why was her mother talking so loudly in the next room? "Oh, my God, O.K., so, Sapphire," her mom said, "let me just tell you this." "I'm all ears, Roschelle," a female voice replied. Cece knew that the voice didn't belong to her sister, Zi, who was just a year older than she was. Sometimes their mom's best friend came over late at night, but the voice wasn't hers, either. "What's got you so fired up?" the voice continued. Cece got out of bed, put on a pair of fuzzy pink slippers, and stomped to her mother's office. Roschelle spent most of her days there, usually in a swivel chair, looking at a pair of computer monitors. But Cece found her in a nightgown, turned away from her screens, facing a small gray orb on the floor. "What is it, Roschelle?" the orb asked. Cece recognized it as an Amazon Echo, often referred to as an Alexa. Roschelle had them all around the house--she bought the first ones when Cece and Zi were still little. The Alexas announced appointments, played music, described the weather. Recently, though, without Roschelle changing any settings, they had started acting differently. "You've got my full attention," this one said now.

What Happened to Your Face? How the human countenance became something to study, edit, optimize, and scan. The physiognomists promised that your character could be read from your features. Certain forms of facial-recognition technology have revived that old fantasy in digital form. Several months ago, my partner and I bought an apartment in South London. Our previous home was a rental in which, for reasons best known to the landlord, there were mirrors everywhere. The bathroom had two; there was one outside on the terrace; in the bedroom, mirrored panels stretched across a twenty-foot-long wall. On moving day, we realized that we had a problem: the new apartment was mirror-free, and because we'd been so spoiled we weren't bringing one of our own. We spent a few days filling our drafty rooms, decanting books, building furniture, and dressing every morning without seeing ourselves in profile. It was a couple of weeks before we bought a simple mirror, wooden and round, to hang above the bathroom sink. By then, I joked, we didn't recognize ourselves.

"The Infinity Machine," "If This Be Magic," "While We Were Waiting," and "Coyoteland." In 2010, at the age of thirty-four, he co-founded the A.I. startup DeepMind to pursue this vision. Since then, the company's creations have solved painfully difficult problems in fields from mathematics to computational biology. One of its programs produced a solution to the so-called protein-folding problem, representing a dramatic advance in the science of drug discovery and bringing Hassabis a Nobel Prize. Mallaby, a longtime financial journalist, is a nimble storyteller, and his portrait of one of the single-minded personalities plunging the world into an uncertain future is also an engaging drama of discovery.

Are Humanoid Robots Ready to Be Deployed? Neo and a dozen other robots with human forms are scheduled to hit the market. "The same robot that can land a backflip might not be able to walk up a flight of stairs," a researcher said. On a recent sunny day in Silicon Valley, I visited the industrial headquarters of 1X Technologies. Security was tight, so I had to put a sticker over my cellphone's camera and talk my way out of signing an N.D.A. before I was brought into an enormous space to meet Neo, the company's home robot. Neo stands five feet six and has no facial features except for two black cameras in place of eyes. The robot is a humanoid--its design is inspired by the human form--and its proportions are a blend of those of the median American male and those of the median American female. But Neo has no skin. Instead, it wears a beige nylon turtleneck bodysuit, gloves, and padded shoes over a see-through carapace. Under that is a skeleton made up of more than a hundred whizzing motors and cordlike artificial tendons that control Neo's limbs. Neo's cozy, minimalist aesthetic allows it to blend into the background. If it served me an espresso at a café, I'm not certain I would look up from my phone. The robot weighs just sixty-six pounds, and I was able to pick it up in a bridal carry. It communicates through a speaker in its chest, using several different voices; the default one is in a calm but authoritative masculine register, an A.I.-modulated mixture of several voice actors. Neo can talk, listen, and respond to commands.

Most romantic reality TV would have us believe that dating is about getting married, or simply being chosen. In romance, Tolstoy's aphorism about the family is reversed. All unhappy couples are alike, and all happy couples are happy in their own way. Happiness in a couple is a private and fathomless world, a far cry from the mere shared sensibility of the happy family; we can only make fun of the impish, impenetrable languages of other couples, which exclude us. Yet we all know what it is to be unhappy in love.

His new museum, Dataland, is a joyful monument to the technology. Is he a visionary, or Silicon Valley's court painter? Refik Anadol said, as the escalator carried us downward. "We are entering the dream of the machine." Space-age music blared night-club-loud as pictures of birds, plants, and flowers cascaded down the walls. This array was a small sample of the half-billion images--and the hundred thousand hours of audio, including birdsong, rain, and even silence--on which Anadol has trained the Large Nature Model, an A.I. model that powers "Machine Dreams: Rainforest," Dataland's inaugural show. The pictures swooped around and beneath us like a cloud of starlings, and an earthy, slightly metallic smell emanated from the diffusers we wore around our necks, which, along with a biometric wristband, each Dataland visitor receives upon arrival.

Who Is the Real Kevin Warsh? Before the new Fed chairman got the job, he intimated that the central bank could cut interest rates, but last week he assumed the role of an inflation hawk. Kevin Warsh, the Republican financier who recently took over as the chairman of the Federal Reserve, holds economic views that could, kindly, be described as adaptable. Last summer, he said that the Fed had committed "the greatest mistake in macroeconomic policy in forty-five years" by allowing inflation to surge post- . This statement marked out Warsh as an inflation hawk, but late last year, after his name had surfaced as a possible candidate to succeed Jerome Powell as chair of the central bank, Warsh publicly argued that A.I. could generate big gains in productivity and be "structurally disinflationary."