One chilly day in November 2025, community worker Mike Prado drove through Abilene, Tex., handing out blankets, socks, and jackets to unhoused individuals across the city. People sat on curbs, alleyway after alleyway, their meager belongings soaked by the previous night's hard rain. Prado has worked in this community for a decade, and was once homeless in Abilene himself. Prado has witnessed difficult years--but the current situation was the worst he'd ever seen, he told TIME. One man with a walker approached Prado outside of the Hope Haven offices--an Abilene nonprofit where Prado works, which operates a shelter and helps people with vouchers find housing--and accepted a jacket from him.

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.

Green onion pancakes and steamed pork buns individually wrapped in plastic at the 99 Ranch hot bar. A wheeled robot serving dim sum at Longo Seafood. Masks hanging off the ears of the Chinese millennials who smoke and play cards outside Boba Ave 8090 in San Gabriel. The new normal in the east San Gabriel Valley is here, and things may never be the same along Valley Boulevard, a vibrant commercial corridor that joins the four majority-Asian cities of Alhambra, Monterey Park, Rosemead and San Gabriel. Over the last decade, Chinese investment has transformed the area into an internationally known tourist area, and Valley Boulevard has become a kind of bellwether for Chinese investment in Southern California.

Benjamin Franklin said that only two things are certain in life: death and taxes. That explains why my colleagues at STATWORX were less than excited when they told me about their plans for the weekend a few weeks back: doing their income tax declaration. Man, I thought, that sucks, I'd rather spend this time outdoors. And then an idea was born. What could taxes and the outdoors possibly have in common?

Tax laws, for example, don't currently take automated workers into account. While human employees contribute payroll and income taxes, an automated "employee" doesn't, Abbott noted. Governments could lose out on quite a bit of income tax as AI becomes more prevalent and possibly displaces more human workers. Granted, that argument only works if displaced employees don't find other jobs. Abbott predicted that that may happen as AI becomes smarter at a rate that outpaces people's ability to learn new skills or find job training.

If we didn't have enough to worry about--Covid-19, a nation divided, massive job losses and civil unrest--now we have to be concerned that robots will take our jobs. The World Economic Forum (WEF) concluded in a recent report that "a new generation of smart machines, fueled by rapid advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics, could potentially replace a large proportion of existing human jobs." Robotics and AI will cause a serious "double-disruption," as the coronavirus pandemic pushed companies to fast-track the deployment of new technologies to slash costs, enhance productivity and be less reliant on real-life people. Millions of people have lost their jobs due to the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic and now the machines will take away even more jobs from workers, according to the WEF. The organization cites that automation will supplant about 85 million jobs by 2025.

A pandemic is raging with devastating consequences, and long-standing problems with racial bias and political polarization are coming to a head. Artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to help us deal with these challenges. However, AI's risks have become increasingly apparent. Scholarship has illustrated cases of AI opacity and lack of explainability, design choices that result in bias, negative impacts on personal well-being and social interactions, and changes in power dynamics between individuals, corporations, and the state, contributing to rising inequalities. Whether AI is developed and used in good or harmful ways will depend in large part on the legal frameworks governing and regulating it.

Benjamin Franklin said that only two things are certain in life: death and taxes. That explains why my colleagues at STATWORX were less than excited when they told me about their plans for the weekend a few weeks back: doing their income tax declaration. Man, I thought, that sucks, I'd rather spend this time outdoors. And then an idea was born. What could taxes and the outdoors possibly have in common?

This has given rise to an extreme theory that either AI or robots will replace humans in many jobs, pushing the unemployment rate close to 50 percent. Although the jobless rate reaching 50 percent may be an exaggeration, it appears all but certain that the rate of technological unemployment -- loss of employment caused by technological progress -- will reach 10 to 20 percent. This means that unless some steps are taken, the Fourth Industrial Revolution driven by AI, the "internet of things" and big data will lead the human race to a dystopia rather than to a utopia. What measures could be taken to lead us to an utopia instead? Gross domestic product, the total value of income earned in a country over a given period of time, is distributed to capital and labor.

Artificial intelligence (AI) could displace millions of jobs in the future, damaging growth in developing regions such as Africa, says Ian Goldin, professor of globalisation and development at Oxford University. I have spent my career in international development, and in recent years have established a research group at Oxford University looking at the impact of disruptive technologies on developing economies. Perhaps the most important question we have looked at is whether AI will pose a threat - or provide new opportunities - for developing regions such as Africa. Optimists say that such places could use rapidly advancing AI systems to boost productivity and leapfrog ahead. But I am becoming increasingly concerned that AI will, in fact, block the traditional growth path by replacing low-wage jobs with robots. As Kai-Fu Lee, a Beijing-based venture capitalist who invests in artificial intelligence, tells us, AI is potentially the most revolutionary technology to emerge this century.