Katie Drummond: And we obviously know you well on this show because you cohost our Thursday episodes with Mike and Lauren. Katie Drummond: And let's get right into it. So Zoë, two weeks ago on February 20th, you published a story on WIRED.com about a 1 spending limit being placed on government employee credit cards. Walk us through that first story. You've subsequently published more reporting on that topic this week, but tell us sort of where this came from at the outset.

The Transform Technology Summits start October 13th with Low-Code/No Code: Enabling Enterprise Agility. Artificial intelligence is already making its mark on the global economy, and private businesses are not the only ones putting it to good use. Government agencies of all types are adopting AI as well, and in some ways, exceeding the private sector's ability to leverage AI for massive data analysis and cutting-edge applications. Whether this sounds like innocent adoption of new technology or a nefarious plot to control the citizenry depends on your political perspective, of course. However, there is no denying that the same technology that is currently powering the likes of giants like Facebook and Amazon to leverage user information in pursuit of profits, is also available to all aspects of government, including taxation, defense, intelligence agencies, and other key entities like agriculture and labor.

Future Tense is a partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona State University that examines emerging technologies, public policy, and society. From 1449–74, an association of market towns and cities along the Baltic coast in Europe known as the Hanseatic League waged an on-again, off-again war with England over maritime trading privileges. Hanseatic man-of-war ships, including the feared Peter von Danzig, raided the English coast. The Anglo-Hanseatic War ended with the Treaty of Utrecht in 1474, which gave the Hanseatic League access to many British ports and ownership of the London Steelyard until it sold the property in 1853. At its zenith in the 15th century, the Hanseatic League boasted about 200 cities across seven countries, flexing its economic might across Europe, imposing blockages to promote its interests, and even waging wars.

We are barreling toward a future of automation. A great proportion of the six million US manufacturing jobs that have disappeared over the last few decades were lost as a direct result of automation's slow absorption of physical labor and factory work. Now the pace is quickening and thanks to developments in artificial intelligence, automation's reach is expanding, too. According to Elon Musk, self-driving cars will displace 15% of the world's workforce. Musk warns that driverless cars are closer than they might appear.