Technology can be a powerful force for good. It can also be an enormous factory for harmful ideas. We tried to keep both of those things in mind when creating the 10 Breakthrough Technologies of 2026. The billionaire investor Peter Thiel (or maybe his ghostwriter) once said, " We were promised flying cars, instead we got 140 characters ." That quip originally appeared in a manifesto for Thiel's venture fund in 2011. All good investment firms have a manifesto, right?

Big Tech has lost its way. At WIRED's Big Interview event, Techdirt editor Mike Masnick and Common Tools CEO Alex Komoroske announced a manifesto designed to help the industry get back on track. Alex Komoroske has always been at odds with Big Tech's darker side. Though he cut his product-management teeth at Google and Stripe, he was never comfortable with the industry's increasing prioritization of profits over people. Once during his time at Google, he extolled the societal benefits of a project only to be met with, "Oh Alex, you'd be a VP by now if you just stopped thinking through the implications of your actions."

The accelerated evolution of digital infrastructures and algorithmic systems is reshaping how the humanities engage with knowledge and culture. Rooted in the traditions of Digital Humanities and Digital Humanism, the concept of "Cyber Humanities" proposes a critical reconfiguration of humanistic inquiry for the post-digital era. This Manifesto introduces a flexible framework that integrates ethical design, sustainable digital practices, and participatory knowledge systems grounded in human-centered approaches. By means of a Decalogue of foundational principles, the Manifesto invites the scientific community to critically examine and reimagine the algorithmic infrastructures that influence culture, creativity, and collective memory. Rather than being a simple extension of existing practices, "Cyber Humanities" should be understood as a foundational paradigm for humanistic inquiry in a computationally mediated world. Keywords: Cyber Humanities, Digital Humanities, Transdisciplinary Epistemology, Algorithmic Reflexivity, Human-centered AI, Ethics-by-Design, Knowledge Ecosystems, Digital Sovereignty, Cognitive Infrastructures

Techno-optimism – the belief that technology will usher in a golden age for humanity – is in vogue once more. In 2022, a clutch of pseudonymous San Francisco artificial intelligence (AI) scenesters published a Substack post entitled "Effective Accelerationism", which argued for maximum acceleration of technological advancement. The 10-point manifesto, which proclaimed that "the next evolution of consciousness, creating unthinkable next-generation lifeforms and silicon-based awareness" was imminent, quickly went viral, as did follow-up posts. Effective accelerationism, or "e/acc", exploded from being a fringe movement dedicated to pushing back against AI extinction-fearing "doomers" to being namechecked by major Silicon Valley CEOs such as Garry Tan, the CEO of start-up accelerator Y Combinator; Sam Altman, head of OpenAI; Marc Andreessen, the billionaire software engineer; and Elon Musk. In 2023, Andreessen issued his Techno-Optimist Manifesto, expanding beyond the e/acc's focus on AI to encompass all questions of technological progress.

Analysis of parliamentary speeches and political-party manifestos has become an integral area of computational study of political texts. While speeches have been overwhelmingly analysed using unsupervised methods, a large corpus of manifestos with by-statement political-stance labels has been created by the participants of the MARPOR project. It has been recently shown that these labels can be predicted by a neural model; however, the current approach relies on provided statement boundaries, limiting out-of-domain applicability. In this work, we propose and test a range of unified split-and-label frameworks -- based on linear-chain CRFs, fine-tuned text-to-text models, and the combination of in-context learning with constrained decoding -- that can be used to jointly segment and classify statements from raw textual data. We show that our approaches achieve competitive accuracy when applied to raw text of political manifestos, and then demonstrate the research potential of our method by applying it to the records of the UK House of Commons and tracing the political trajectories of four major parties in the last three decades.

Explainable AI (XAI) is concerned with how to make AI models more understandable to people. To date these explanations have predominantly been technocentric - mechanistic or productivity oriented. This paper introduces the Explainable AI for the Arts (XAIxArts) manifesto to provoke new ways of thinking about explainability and AI beyond technocentric discourses. Manifestos offer a means to communicate ideas, amplify unheard voices, and foster reflection on practice. To supports the co-creation and revision of the XAIxArts manifesto we combine a World Caf\'e style discussion format with a living manifesto to question four core themes: 1) Empowerment, Inclusion, and Fairness; 2) Valuing Artistic Practice; 3) Hacking and Glitches; and 4) Openness. Through our interactive living manifesto experience we invite participants to actively engage in shaping this XIAxArts vision within the CHI community and beyond.

On Tuesday 4th February 2025, the Children's AI Summit brought together around 150 children from across the UK to share their messages for global leaders, policymakers, and AI developers on what the future of AI should look like. Hosted by the Children and AI team in The Alan Turing Institute's Public Policy Programme and Queen Mary University of London, the event aimed to put children's voices and experiences centre stage by exploring how the technology impacts young people today, and how children can shape its future. As part of the summit, a Children's Manifesto for the Future of AI was developed. This incorporates ideas that were submitted in the run-up to the event, and was refined with the help of summit participants. The Turing's Children and AI team are attending the Paris AI Action Summit this week and will be taking the Children's Manifesto for the Future of AI with them, as well as screening a short film made at the Children's AI Summit.

Whether they are called manifestos or contracts, the documents published by political parties ahead of an election are rather less substantial than their many pages would suggest. They are full of best-case scenarios, undetailed proposals and dubious costings, and it is hard to picture the impact each party would have on the UK if they followed through with their pitches. So I've been feeding party literature into the political strategy video game Democracy 4, to see how these policies might play out. The results were … well, you'll see. Democracy 4 lets you play out your political fantasies (or nightmares) to see the impact of your choices and, ultimately, if you can get re-elected.

In his polarizing "Techno-Optimist Manifesto" last year, venture capitalist Marc Andreessen listed a number of enemies to technological progress. Among them were "tech ethics" and "trust and safety," a term used for work on online content moderation, which he said had been used to subject humanity to "a mass demoralization campaign" against new technologies such as artificial intelligence. Andreessen's declaration drew both public and quiet criticism from people working in those fields--including at Meta, where Andreessen is a board member. Critics saw his screed as misrepresenting their work to keep internet services safer. On Wednesday, Andreessen offered some clarification: When it comes to his 9-year-old son's online life, he's in favor of guardrails.

The field of AIED, as defined by the work conducted under the auspices of the International Society of Artificial Intelligence in Education, has been built on big and well-intentioned ambitions to understand, devise and scale-up best learning and teaching practices to as many students as possible. This ambition has been bolstered most notably by the Bloom (1984) studies, which are still routinely cited throughout the AIED literature as a key justification and motivation for the field. This ambition had bootstrapped much of the work within the field and it has spurred in-depth research examining how specific populations of students learn, what are the prerequisites (cognitive, affective, and pedagogic) for successful learning, and how AIED technologies might be designed to help develop and capitalise on such learning prerequisites. Personalisation through adaptivity of assessment and feedback (for the purpose of this article used in the broad sense of pedagogical support) remains at the heart of the work conducted by AIED researchers, regardless of their specific areas of specialisation, or their philosophical or epistemological perspectives. This is why, to date, the AIED community repeatedly voted to retain its long-debated connection with the wider field of AI - a domain like AIED insofar as its central paradigm of adaptive agent technologies, but unlike AIED as far as its aim to emulate human capacities only to the extent that it is useful to a given application's success in achieving its specific goals.