After Zohran Mamdani's victory, Republicans are fearmongering about Democrats turning socialist. Meanwhile, Donald Trump is busy taking stakes in private companies and ordering them around. With the victory of Zohran Mamdani, a self-described democratic socialist, in New York City's mayoral election last week, socialism is on the march. "This is the future House Democrats want, and your city could be next," an N.R.C.C. ad blared the day after Mamdani won. Mamdani is hardly representative of the national Democratic Party.

At the start of the millennium it was widely presumed each successive generation would achieve a higher level of prosperity than the last. Today that is no longer the case. Just 19% of Americans expect their children's lives to be better than their own, while two-thirds believe their country will be economically weaker by 2050. So our zeitgeist is increasingly one of pessimism, from anxiety about the climate crisis to concern over rising inequality. According to the historian Adam Tooze, we are living through a "polycrisis" – where such challenges are not only simultaneous but mutually reinforcing.

The real problem of Apple is that Tim Cook is not a product guy. And without a renewal of product strategy, Apple will lose its place on the technology throne, after it has maximized the addressable market of its downstream evolution. As most of my readers know by now, I am a fervent supporter of Apple products for some 25 years. Not for some fuzzy nostalgic reason but because Apple has an entirely different focus than other computing companies. I realized way back when Apple built QuickTime directly into the operating system the company had set itself a fundamentally different objective concerning the audience and values it aimed to pursue.

As the indomitable Coronavirus continues its reign over the world, the lifestyle of mankind has changed drastically. People have been maintaining social distancing, started working from home, finding time to engage more with the family, and slowing down on business activities. This change in lifestyle will have a lasting effect even in the post-COVID-19 world. The fear in people's mind, the time they have now to themselves, the pause in the rat-race will create a different world for the generations of the future. The home-office concept will be the most enduring practice in the post-COVID-19 world.

In June, 1972, Ángel Parra, Chile's leading folksinger, wrote a song titled "Litany for a Computer and a Baby About to Be Born." Computers are like children, he sang, and Chilean bureaucrats must not abandon them. The song was prompted by a visit to Santiago from a British consultant who, with his ample beard and burly physique, reminded Parra of Santa Claus--a Santa bearing a "hidden gift, cybernetics." The consultant, Stafford Beer, had been brought in by Chile's top planners to help guide the country down what Salvador Allende, its democratically elected Marxist leader, was calling "the Chilean road to socialism." Beer was a leading theorist of cybernetics--a discipline born of midcentury efforts to understand the role of communication in controlling social, biological, and technical systems.

The real problem of Apple is that Tim Cook is not a product guy. And without a renewal of product strategy, Apple will lose its place on the technology throne, after it has maximized the addressable market of its downstream evolution. As most of my readers know by now, I am a fervent supporter of Apple products for some 25 years. Not for some fuzzy nostalgic reason but because Apple has an entirely different focus than other computing companies. I realized way back when Apple built QuickTime directly into the operating system the company had set itself a fundamentally different objective concerning the audience and values it aimed to pursue.

Every Artificial Intelligence researcher has probably a vision of how intelligent machines will reshape the world. My idealistic view is one in which automation maximizes people's freedom by giving us more time to concentrate on the things we enjoy the most. Research in all areas is astonishing: we live better and longer, and our planet has started to heal. Robots lead to superlative boosts in productivity, and an unprecedented abundance reduces tensions amongst people. We have more time to learn and inform us, and machines enable us to manage much more knowledge, so we take better decisions.

The idea that computers will soon steal our jobs is an article of faith among many of the world's most powerful people. The argument goes like this: breakthroughs in robotics and artificial intelligence will make it possible to automate various kinds of labour. Self-driving cars will replace taxi and truck drivers; software will replace lawyers and accountants. We'll end up with a world where machines do almost all of the work. Over the last few years, a growing chorus of pundits, academics and executives have made this scenario seem inevitable – and imminent. There are many reasons to be sceptical of their claims.

Almost 200 years after Mary Shelley made AI an object of fear and awe in Frankenstein, humanity is looking at a proliferation of super-smart creations: robots. Automated technology of all sorts – from industrial to humanoid to seemingly harmless conveyors of "artificial smartness" – will soon transform our lives. But need we fear it? Will AI take our jobs away? Or will robots, by handling all the mechanics and rote work necessary for economic productivity, liberate us to be more creative, caring and "humanly intelligent"? What, in the end, can humans do that machines cannot? I sat down with Kevin Kelly to get some answers, as he lays them out in his new book, The Inevitable: Understanding the Twelve Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future," out June 6th. Take a listen over at Ricochet, and read edited excerpts below. PETHOKOUKIS: The book obviously is about technology but it's not a book about gadgets. Thank you, that's a synopsis of the general drift of the book, which is to ...