Inertia in international finance is a powerful force in its own right. But loyalty programs built on one member’s permanent goodwill tend to look sturdiest in the years just before their members start reading the fine print. Somewhere in a central bank “vault,” a finance minister sat down to do something no ordinary citizen would […]

Singularity is a myth with excellent production values: a clean villain, a clean apocalypse, and a clean date on the calendar. Reality is messier and less cinematic, a slow transfer of wealth, a quiet erosion of privacy, and a data center draining a town’s water supply. For thirty years, the idea that artificial intelligence will […]