What are Russia's gains from the Iran war? 'We are not losers; we are winners' The world's militaries spent $2.88 trillion in 2025, an increase of 2.9 percent from the year before, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute's (SIPRI) latest report. To put that number into perspective, $2.88 trillion amounts to $350 of military spending for each person on the planet. In this visual explainer, Al Jazeera unpacks the rise of global militarisation, including how much each nation spends, which countries sell the most weapons, and how military spending compares with spending on healthcare and education. In 2025, the five biggest military spenders were the United States ($954bn), China ($336bn), Russia ($190bn), Germany ($114bn) and India ($92bn), accounting for more than half (58 percent) of world military spending. The US is by far the biggest spender, as it has been every year since World War II.

Latin American countries face a demographic transition to an aging population. The region must take advantage of the demographic dividend created by a larger share of the working-age population before its population ages and the costs of social services experience a notable increase. The adoption of information technology in education can stimulate economic growth while doing so in healthcare can help contain costs and increase quality of life. While traditional robotics have been used for quite a while in schools and to assist medical procedures, such as surgeries, social robots, which emphasize social interaction with users as their main affordance, have recently been developed and increasingly adopted. Traditional robotics has focused on technical aspects such as mobility, control, and sensing.

In a stark white browser tab, Sam -- a young blonde woman with perfectly shaped lips -- asks me for the solution to 2 2. I immediately think of the infamous Star Trek: The Next Generation episode in which a tortured Captain Picard is shown four lights. If he admits there are five lights, the ordeal will stop. I'm at home, staring at the future face of the metaverse and trying valiantly not to think about memes from a TV show known for its exploration of ethics and humanity. Sam isn't a real person -- she's a digital human created by Auckland-based tech company Soul Machines. Designed to have a short conversation with visitors about herself, she runs on a proprietary "digital brain" and studies my expressions via webcam.

Capitalism has been the most successful economic and political system in the history of humanity. It has pushed private companies to innovate and create new products and services that, in turn, has helped billions of people to see huge improvements to their quality of life worldwide. After the world wars, the growth of businesses in capitalist societies needed human labor to grow, creating a sizable and healthy middle class in the process. Hundreds of millions of people moved from living in tiny shacks and apartments to living in their own houses and driving their own cars to work. The work itself, thanks to the progress of technology, was becoming gradually cleaner, more interesting and more dependent on using one's brain instead of hands.

Billions of workers around the world are paid to perform easy-to-automate or repetitive tasks. Whether it's administrative work, scheduling, decision making, inventory or most, a robot could usually do it better... and faster. Artificial intelligence develops more and more each given year, promising to redefine the way we live, move and work. The AI analytics research industry funding has rising from an $8.2 billion investment in 2013 to a predicted $70 billion by 2020, according to a Bank of America report citing IDC research. A recent Harvard Business Review study found that managers currently spend about 54% of their time handling administrative coordination and control when they could be making higher judgement calls.

Ambarish is the founder and CEO of Blippar, an augmented reality and image recognition platform. Leading venture capitalists, scientists and CEOs all have the same prediction for artificial intelligence: machines will take jobs away from both blue- and white-collar workers, "eat the world" and, ultimately, overthrow humanity. These histrionics have driven a widely accepted negative narrative about this technology's potential impact on the future of humanity. Bringing artificial intelligence into the mainstream world should be met with hope and empathy, not fear. The concerns of these experts -- wealthy men with unparalleled access to utilities, healthcare, public safety, education and job opportunities -- are the concerns of privilege.