CThi Nguyen is a gamer. Many people are gamers—artists, technologists, business leaders, even certain journalists—but many others still hold their noses at the term, as though there’s something overwh

PUTTING THE PEDAL TO THE METAL IN

Lizzie Wade Apocalypse How catastrophe transformed our world and can forge new futures 320pp. William Collins. £20. Luke Kemp Goliath’s Curse The history and future of societal collapse 592pp. Viking.

acton.org The “greatest prophets” of free-market capitalism “saw the trade-off from the beginning”, says Thomas Dias. Adam Smith’s famous pin factory showed the division of labour enables the producti

DEEPMIND COFOUNDER DEMIS HASSABIS HAS ALREADY WON A NOBEL PRIZE AND A KNIGHTHOOD FOR HIS INSIGHTS INTO HUMAN BIOLOGY. HIS AI STARTUP ISOMORPHIC LABS COULD DELIVER EVEN BIGGER BREAKTHROUGHS.

Spotting cancer with computer vision. Pulling together weather data for better predictions. Solving long-running research quandaries such as protein folding. These are useful tasks for AI that benefit