What does Elon Musk do with all his money? Tesla boss Elon Musk has been one of the world's richest people for several years now, and that wealth recently went stratospheric when he became the first half-trillionaire. Despite this, Musk has insisted he leads a largely unglamorous lifestyle. He said in 2021 that he lived in a Texas home valued at $50,000 (£38,000). His former partner Grimes, with whom he has two children, told Vanity Fair in 2022 he does not live the extravagant life of excess luxury many assume.

As the promise of artificial intelligence (AI) captivates biomedicine, few people are riding the wave like Priscilla Chan--because few people have her resources. Trained as a pediatrician, Chan and her husband, Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg, co-run a philanthropy that launched in 2015 with the wildly ambitious--some would say quixotic--goal of curing, preventing, or managing every disease by the end of the century. The couple pledged nearly their entire fortune-- 45 billion then and more than 200 billion today--to the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI), which would also support their education and progressive causes. Recently, however, the foundation has wound down support for almost everything but science. And this week, CZI announced it is increasing its research spending, doubling down on AI, and vowing to meet Chan and Zuckerberg's biomedical goal even earlier--although CZI won't set a specific target.

In an experiment last year at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, more than fifty students from universities around Boston were split into three groups and asked to write SAT-style essays in response to broad prompts such as "Must our achievements benefit others in order to make us truly happy?" One group was asked to rely on only their own brains to write the essays. A second was given access to Google Search to look up relevant information. The third was allowed to use ChatGPT, the artificial-intelligence large language model (L.L.M.) that can generate full passages or essays in response to user queries. As students from all three groups completed the tasks, they wore a headset embedded with electrodes in order to measure their brain activity.

Profound changes to the substance and structure of our lives -- wrought by disruptive technologies ranging from smartphones and social media to newly ascendent AI -- often go unnoticed amidst the rush of daily life. Over 30 percent of U.S. adults report "almost constant" online activity, something that would have been impossible only two decades ago. From an early age, children are exposed to digital technologies, and one recent study found that two- and three-year-olds average two hours of screen time daily. Nor is this phenomenon simply a matter of media consumption. Ordinary market transactions, whether online shopping or home mortgage applications, are now facilitated through sophisticated algorithmic systems.

As more nurses leave their jobs in hospitals and health-care centers, foundations are pouring millions of dollars into efforts to ensure that more stay in the profession and get more out of the job than just the applause and pats on the back they got during the bleakest days of the pandemic. The gift is designed to extend for decades. The latest grant installment will focus on improving access to care and attracting people of diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds to the nursing work force. Projects include programming robots to take care of some of the routine aspects of nursing and providing extra training to nurses before they are thrown into the pell-mell of the hospital floor or busy clinic. That extra instruction could have helped nurses like Muroo Hamed, who worked grueling hours in difficult circumstances through the early stages of the pandemic.

Most of us don't think of power-hungry killer robots as an imminent threat to humanity, especially when poverty and the climate crisis are already ravaging the Earth. This wasn't the case for Sam Bankman-Fried and his followers, powerful actors who have embraced a school of thought within the effective altruism movement called "longtermism". In February, the Future Fund, a philanthropic organization endowed by the now-disgraced cryptocurrency entrepreneur, announced that it would be disbursing more than $100m – and possibly up to $1bn – this year on projects to "improve humanity's long-term prospects". The slightly cryptic reference might have been a bit puzzling to those who think of philanthropy as funding homelessness charities and medical NGOs in the developing world. In fact, the Future Fund's particular areas of interest include artificial intelligence, biological weapons and "space governance", a mysterious term referring to settling humans in space as a potential "watershed moment in human history".

Even during an actual pandemic, Flynn's focus struck many Oregonians as far-fetched and foreign. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he ended up losing the 2022 primary to the more politically experienced Democrat, Andrea Salinas. But despite Flynn's lackluster showing, he made history as effective altruism's first political candidate to run for office. Since its birth in the late 2000s, effective altruism has aimed to answer the question "How can those with means have the most impact on the world in a quantifiable way?"--and supplied clear methodologies for calculating the answer. Directing money to organizations that use evidence-based approaches is the one technique EA is most known for.

For PC Magazine's charter issue(Opens in a new window) in early 1982, the newly minted editor-in-chief and publisher David Bunnell flew to Seattle to interview a fresh-faced, 26-year-old Bill Gates, the president and co-founder of a little software company called Microsoft. Bunnell's goal with this exclusive interview was to understand the part Microsoft and its software played in the development of the groundbreaking IBM PC that was born less than a year earlier. After all, that IBM PC was the namesake of Bunnell's new publication. In the interview, the two discuss how much fun it was for Bill and his team to contribute to the IBM project, how gratifying it was to have been part of it, and how the IBM and Microsoft teams worked together to actually get it done. They even speak of shooting jokes back and forth via an early form of email used for communication between the two teams. Besides recalling many of the gritty details of how the software and hardware were developed together (it was a two-hour interview!),

Artificial intelligence presents itself in both grand and mundane ways. It accelerates the scientific process, leading most recently to the development of COVID-19 vaccines at record speed. It runs self-driving cars, allowing them to smoothly navigate downtown streets. And it manages our emails and online calendars, improving our productivity and well-being. But A.I.'s potential for transforming human learning and experience also sparks unease and raises fundamental questions.

Imagine if funding and donating to an NGO or a cause anywhere in the world was as easy as ordering on Amazon. With today's technology and integration of information, and a little bit of work filling in the gaps, this is doable. Philanthropy has seen many efforts through initiatives such as, for example, the Giving Pledge, a commitment by ultra-high-net-worth individuals to donate the majority of their wealth, to reach donors and expand giving. While these efforts are essential, more is needed to reach smaller classes of donor and to help them connect with credible causes that match their interests easily. With the Covid-19 crisis revealing deep structural and social inequalities across the globe, philanthropy and philanthropic dollars need to be optimised to help mitigate the urgent health, economic, social and fiscal impact of the pandemic.