When I read a tweet about four noted Silicon Valley executives being inducted into a special detachment of the United States Army Reserve, including Meta CTO Andrew "Boz" Bosworth, I questioned its veracity. It's very hard to discern truth from satire in 2025, in part because of social media sites owned by Bosworth's company. But it indeed was true. Boz is now Lieutenant Colonel Bosworth. The other newly commissioned officers include Kevin Weil, OpenAI's head of product; Bob McGrew, a former OpenAI head of research now advising Mira Murati's company Thinking Machines Lab; and Shyam Sankar, the CTO of Palantir.

In the early hours of April 12, 1812, a crowd of men approached Rawfolds Mill, a four-story stone building on the banks of the River Spen, in West Yorkshire. This was Brontë country--a landscape of bleak moors, steep valleys, and small towns nestled in the hollows. The men, who'd assembled on the moors hours earlier, were armed with muskets, sticks, hatchets, and heavy blacksmith's hammers. When they reached the mill, those at the front broke windows to gain entry, and some fired shots into the darkened factory. But the mill's owner, William Cartwright, had been preparing for trouble.

Israel's war on Gaza, now well into its fourth month, has taken a toll on its own economy with many industries pausing business even as a few continue to get new investments. Since October, Israel's government has subsidised the salaries of reportedly 360,000 mobilised reservists deployed to Gaza – many of whom are high-tech industry workers in finance, artificial intelligence, pharmaceuticals and agriculture. In November, the Bank of Israel put the war's "gross effects" on Israel at 198 billion shekels ( 53bn) and pared back its estimates for economic growth to 2 percent per year for 2023 and 2024, down from 2.3 percent and 2.8 percent. In December, Israel's Finance Ministry said that the war will likely cost Israel approximately 13.8bn this year if its high-intensity phase concludes during the first quarter of 2024. In the midst of that, experts are watching to see how business is doing on the ground.

There's a lot of talent in the guard and reserve forces that the Department of Defense (DOD) could be using but is not aware of such as reservists in their civilian jobs might be working on cloud computing, software engineering, cybersecurity, or any number of other in-demand skills, according to Scott Sumner, technical project manager at the Defense Innovation Unit's Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning Portfolio. The DOD is hampered in its efforts to locate these individuals because it does not possess the resources necessary to do so. The department will be able to look for the appropriate matches with the assistance of Gig Eagle's AI-powered app. The platform will take into consideration the reservist's skill preferences as well as the biographical information that they enter the app, including their existing skill sets. The algorithm that controls the AI will focus on terms that are similar and imply or infer a specific talent or expertise.

Members of the Reserve and National Guard are highly skilled across a variety of private-sector industries and have the potential to make substantial contributions to Defense Department missions, a DOD official said. The problem is, the department is not always aware of that talent, said Scott Sumner, technical project manager at Defense Innovation Unit's artificial intelligence/machine learning portfolio. For example, reservists in their civilian jobs might be working on cloud computing, software engineering, cybersecurity or any number of other in-demand skills. The department has no way to find them or to know that those skills even exist, he said. That could soon change, Sumner said.

The government will aim to double the country's labor productivity to 2 percent in the three years through 2020 from 0.9 percent, the average in the five years through 2015, informed sources said. The government is set to include the target in a package of policy measures it plans to adopt on Friday to help realize a "productivity revolution," an initiative designed to ensure sustainable wage growth and overcome deflation, the sources said. The policy package is also expected to call for increasing corporate capital spending by 10 percent in fiscal 2020 from the fiscal 2016 level and achieving wage growth of at least 3 percent every year during the three-year intensive reform period through 2020. The government is set to pledge that it will utilize all policy measures to improve productivity, including the greater use of big data and artificial intelligence technology. Also in the package, the government plans to reduce corporate tax burdens to internationally competitive levels for companies actively boosting their wages and capital expenditures.