With his 2,141 SoundCloud followers, veteran U.K. psychedelic-music producer Darren Sangita didn't exactly wound Spotify when he pulled his music from the streaming service last month. "I'm a zed-list music celebrity," he says. But he couldn't support a company whose founder, Daniel Ek, invested more than $114 million in Helsing, a European security startup that manufactures artificial-intelligence software to "keep liberal democracies from harm." "The circumstantial evidence points to a massive investment in military/AI tech," says Sangita, who runs indie label Sangita Sounds. "I was just enormously disappointed. Are there not any other alternatives that Mr. Ek could have possibly thought about investing in to make the world a more beautiful and perhaps a safer place to live?"

While populist politicians lower the standards of public discourse and cynically ignore science and shun data-driven debate, Azeem reminds us each week in Exponential View what the curious mind can learn.

Daniel Ek is a Swedish entrepreneur and a technologist who started the music streaming service Spotify. Just three weeks after it went public, Spotify plans to host an event for the press in New York Tuesday morning, where we'll likely get the first clues to where the music streaming service goes from here. The Swedish company didn't reveal much in its press invitation, other to say that we'd hear what's next for the company's mobile app. That doesn't necessarily rule out a new hardware announcement from Spotify, though it is hard to predict what that product or products could be. One logical guess might be a smart, voice-driven speaker, a market currently dominated by Amazon's Echo speakers with Alexa, and that also includes various Google Homes and the Apple HomePod.