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How will the internet evolve in the coming decades?

Fiction writers have explored some possibilities.

In his 2019 novel “Fall,” science fiction author Neal Stephenson imagined a near future in which the internet still exists. But it has become so polluted with misinformation, disinformation and advertising that it is largely unusable.

Characters in Stephenson’s novel deal with this problem by subscribing to “edit streams” – human-selected news and information that can be considered trustworthy.

The drawback is that only the wealthy can afford such bespoke services, leaving most of humanity to consume low-quality, noncurated online content.

To some extent, this has already happened: Many news organizations, such as The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, have placed their curated content behind paywalls. Meanwhile, misinformation festers on social media platforms like X and TikTok.

Stephenson’s record as a prognosticator has been impressive – he anticipated the metaverse in his 1992 novel “Snow Crash,” and a key plot element of his “Diamond Age,” released in 1995, is an interactive primer that functions much like a chatbot.

On the surface, chatbots seem to provide a solution to the misinformation epidemic. By dispensing factual content, chatbots could supply alternative sources of high-quality information that aren’t cordoned off by paywalls.

Ironically, however, the output of these chatbots may represent the greatest danger to the future of the web – one that was hinted at decades earlier by Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges.

The rise of the chatbots

Today, a significant fraction of the internet still consists of factual and ostensibly truthful content, such as articles and books that have been peer-reviewed, fact-checked or vetted in some way.

The developers of large language models, or LLMs – the engines that power bots like ChatGPT, Copilot and Gemini – have taken advantage of this resource.

To perform their magic, however, these models must ingest immense quantities of high-quality text for training purposes. A vast amount of verbiage has already been scraped from online sources and fed to the fledgling LLMs.

The problem is that the web, enormous as it is, is a finite resource. High-quality text that hasn’t already been strip-mined is becoming scarce, leading to what The New York Times called an “emerging crisis in content.”

This has forced companies like OpenAI to enter into agreements with publishers to obtain even more raw material for their ravenous bots. But according to one prediction, a shortage of additional high-quality training data may strike as early as 2026.

As the output of chatbots ends up online, these second-generation texts – complete with made-up information called “hallucinations,” as well as outright errors, such as suggestions to put glue on your pizza – will further pollute the web.

And if a chatbot hangs out with the wrong sort of people online, it can pick up their repellent views. Microsoft discovered this the hard way in 2016, when it had to pull the plug on Tay, a bot that started repeating racist and sexist content.

Over time, all of these issues could make online content even less trustworthy and less useful than it is today. In addition, LLMs that are fed a diet of low-calorie content may produce even more problematic output that also ends up on the web.

An infinite − and useless − library

It’s not hard to imagine a feedback loop that results in a continuous process of degradation as the bots feed on their own imperfect output.

A July 2024 paper published in Nature explored the consequences of training AI models on recursively generated data. It showed that “irreversible defects” can lead to “model collapse” for systems trained in this way – much like an image’s copy and a copy of that copy, and a copy of that copy, will lose fidelity to the original image.

How bad might this get?

Consider Borges’ 1941 short story “The Library of Babel.” Fifty years before computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee created the architecture for the web, Borges had already imagined an analog equivalent.

In his 3,000-word story, the writer imagines a world consisting of an enormous and possibly infinite number of hexagonal rooms. The bookshelves in each room hold uniform volumes that must, its inhabitants intuit, contain every possible permutation of letters in their alphabet.

In Borges’ imaginary, endlessly expansive library of content, finding something meaningful is like finding a needle in a haystack.
aire images/Moment via Getty Images

Initially, this realization sparks joy: By definition, there must exist books that detail the future of humanity and the meaning of life.

The inhabitants search for such books, only to discover that the vast majority contain nothing but meaningless combinations of letters. The truth is out there –but so is every conceivable falsehood. And all of it is embedded in an inconceivably vast amount of gibberish.

Even after centuries of searching, only a few meaningful fragments are found. And even then, there is no way to determine whether these coherent texts are truths or lies. Hope turns into despair.

Will the web become so polluted that only the wealthy can afford accurate and reliable information? Or will an infinite number of chatbots produce so much tainted verbiage that finding accurate information online becomes like searching for a needle in a haystack?

The internet is often described as one of humanity’s great achievements. But like any other resource, it’s important to give serious thought to how it is maintained and managed – lest we end up confronting the dystopian vision imagined by Borges. Läs mer…

Horror films draw us into a world where our deepest anxieties are laid bare. They illuminate the darker recesses of the human psyche – ones that we often prefer to ignore.

And some of the most unsettling things we can imagine, it seems, are not zombies or aliens or demons, but ones that are closer to home: mothers. Bad ones.

The ‘Death Mother’

Psychologist Carl Jung spent a lifetime studying dreams, myths, fairy tales and religious symbols from around the world, attempting to boil them down to what he called “the collective unconscious.” At the heart of the collective unconscious, he believed, was a set of primal symbols, or archetypes, that speak to fundamental aspects of human experience: the father, the hero and the trickster, for example.

Of all these archetypes, Jung considered one the most significant: the mother.

The mother symbolizes the origin of our being; our existence is inextricably linked to hers. The Latin word for mother, “mater,” is the root of the word “matter” – the fundamental substance of our physical world.

At times, she is the “Great Mother”: a life-giving, nurturing figure. However, like all archetypes, she also has a shadow side: the “Terrible Mother,” characterized by coldness and destructiveness.

‘The Evil Mothers,’ by Giovanni Segantini (1894).
Belvedere Palace via Wikimedia Commons

Building on Jung’s work, psychoanalyst Marion Woodman introduced the idea of the “Death Mother.” While the Terrible Mother attacks her child’s mind and erodes their confidence, the Death Mother threatens her child’s body, even their life.

The Death Mother is so terrifying, Jungian scholar Daniela Sieff notes, because she makes people confront a disturbing idea: that “the belief that biology has programmed mothers to love and nurture every child they give birth to is a fantasy.” She is relegated to the deepest recesses of the collective unconscious – and horror films provide one of the few spaces where this ultimate taboo can be explored.

As a film scholar, I’ve noticed the prevalence of the Death Mother archetype in recent horror films. Like Woodman and Sieff, I believe she reflects one of the darkest elements of the collective psyche. I also believe that it can be productive to engage with her – that she can be transformed by bringing her to light.

A mother’s shadow

“Hereditary,” released in 2018, begins at the funeral of Annie’s domineering mother, Ellen, the leader of a satanic cult. In order to conjure Paimon, the demon she worshipped, Ellen needed a male host, which she tried to procure through her own son – leading to his suicide, her husband’s death and Annie’s mental illness.

Annie, an artist who makes dollhouses and miniatures, strives to be the best mom she can be to her two kids. Yet she is continually thwarted by the morbid grip of her mother’s shadow. The family home feels dark and cavernous, with each member isolated in their own space.

A miniature house of horror.
Reid Chavis via IMDB

Their grief escalates when Annie’s son, Peter, accidentally kills his sister, Charlie. As the family’s horrors escalate, Annie begins to replicate traumatic events within a diorama that she’s built of their own home, highlighting her desperate need to construct and control her reality.

It’s not enough to hold her demons at bay. While sleepwalking, Annie recalls, she once woke up covered in lighter fluid, about to torch both herself and her children.

This lack of maternal bond – a violation of the most basic societal expectations – lends the film its most profound sense of foreboding. While some of the terrors are supernatural, those elements only escalate toward the end. Before that, the horror emanates from severed maternal bonds. Annie reveals to her son, Peter, that she tried to miscarry him. And when her daughter, Charlie, was born, it was Annie’s mother who breastfed the infant: transmitting the spirit of the demon to her, and ultimately leading to her death.

Yet even as Annie tries to harm her children, she loves them, until she no longer can – setting up some of the film’s most disturbing scenes.

Nurturing revenge

The 2022 film “Hatching” is a Finnish horror-fairy tale exploring the devastating effects of a mother’s conformity to societal norms and its destructive consequences for her daughter. What should be maternal love becomes an unconscious quest for power.

The film centers on Tinja, a 12-year-old girl trapped in the highly controlled world of her mother, who is obsessed with showcasing their family’s seeming perfection on her video blog. A former figure skater who never fulfilled her dreams due to an injury, the mother fixates on Tinja’s career as a gymnast, cutting her off from friends and demanding constant perfection.

In the opening scene, a bird flies through the shimmering living room window, shattering the glass. Tinja attempts to nurse the injured bird back to health, but her mother coldly snaps its neck and instructs Tinja to bury it. In a moment of conflicted emotion, the child bludgeons the bird, supposedly to end its suffering.

Tinja becomes both daughter and mother in ‘Hatching.’
IMDB

She later discovers an egg in a nest and brings it back to her bedroom to incubate. Nourished by her tears, it hatches into a monstrous creature, Alli, who believes Tinja is its mother. Gradually, as the girl nurtures the hatchling, it starts to resemble Tinja, acting out her darkest desires – and eventually, it will subsume her.

“Hatching” illustrates the crux of the Death Mother figure: how mothering and nurturing can become enmeshed with violence and vengeance. As Woodman explains, a Death Mother compels her child to live out her own unfulfilled dreams, while the daughter’s own self is obliterated. Unable to bear the pressure, the child projects these repressed feelings onto others, including her own offspring – a manifestation of the unacceptable emotions she must hide from her mother’s scrutiny.

‘Be My Baby’

At first, motherhood seems far from “Barbarian,” a 2022 film set in a derelict Detroit neighborhood. The story unfolds in the only habitable house, purchased by a group of white finance bros who rent it out as an Airbnb.

Tess, a young filmmaker, is sharing the space with another tenant due to a booking mistake. Yet she becomes trapped – and he is devoured – by a bare-chested female monster in the basement.

Soon AJ, one of the house’s owners, shows up. A Hollywood actor who has been blacklisted by the film industry for accusations of sexual assault, he and Tess fight off the monster – credited as “the Mother” – who is now intent on nursing them.

Eventually, Tess learns that the home was once owned by a serial killer and rapist who kidnapped women, impregnated them and has been impregnating their offspring ever since, taking advantage of how the police have abandoned the area due to white flight. The maternal demon in the basement is the sole survivor.

After escaping, Tess walks off into the distance – to the Ronettes’ tune “Be My Baby.”

As much as the monster terrifies Tess in ‘Barbarian,’ she’s not the root of the problem.
IMDB

This house of horrors is where the violent legacies of patriarchy, misogyny, capitalism and gentrification all converge. The feral figure in the basement, the Death Mother, is not the true terror. Her evil emerges from a long history of cruelty against women, and of motherhood being both forced and oppressed.

Pressure valve

Actresses Toni Collette, who stars in “Hereditary,” and Sophia Heikkilä, in “Hatching,” have spoken positively about bringing their characters to light – and with them, the pressures that can make mothers “monstrous”.

Collette noted that drawing empathy for her character, the miniature artist Annie, was a healthy process, one that helped her connect more deeply to herself. Heikkilä recognized aspects of the perfectionist vlogger mother in herself, finding it a valuable cautionary tale.

Their insights suggest elements of the Death Mother are more prevalent than we want to admit, relegating her to the basement of our collective psyche. Horror can help us confront these shadows – potentially leading to catharsis. Läs mer…

In an era where digital devices are everywhere, the term “screen time” has become a buzz phrase in discussions about technology’s impact on people’s lives. Parents are concerned about their children’s screen habits. But what if this entire approach to screen time is fundamentally flawed?

While researchers have made advances in measuring screen use, a detailed critique of the research in 2020 revealed major issues in how screen time is conceptualized, measured and studied. I study how digital technology affects human cognition and emotions. My ongoing research with cognitive psychologist Nelson Roque builds on that critique’s findings.

We categorized existing screen-time measures, mapping them to attributes like whether they are duration-based or context-specific, and are studying how they relate to health outcomes such as anxiety, stress, depression, loneliness, mood and sleep quality, creating a clearer framework for understanding screen time. We believe that grouping all digital activities together misses how different types of screen use affect people.

By applying this framework, researchers can better identify which digital activities are beneficial or potentially harmful, allowing people to adopt more intentional screen habits that support well-being and reduce negative mental and emotional health effects.

Screen time isn’t one thing

Screen time, at first glance, seems easy to understand: It’s simply the time spent on devices with screens such as smartphones, tablets, laptops and TVs. But this basic definition hides the variety within people’s digital activities. To truly understand screen time’s impact, you need to look closer at specific digital activities and how each affects cognitive function and mental health.

In our research, we divide screen time into four broad categories: educational use, work-related use, social interaction and entertainment.

For education, activities like online classes and reading articles can improve cognitive skills like problem-solving and critical thinking. Digital tools like mobile apps can support learning by boosting motivation, self-regulation and self-control.

But these tools also pose challenges, such as distracting learners and contributing to poorer recall compared with traditional learning methods. For young users, screen-based learning may even have negative impacts on development and their social environment.

Screen time for work, like writing reports or attending virtual meetings, is a central part of modern life. It can improve productivity and enable remote work. However, prolonged screen exposure and multitasking may also lead to stress, anxiety and cognitive fatigue.

Screen use for social connection helps people interact with others through video chats, social media or online communities. These interactions can promote social connectedness and even improve health outcomes such as decreased depressive symptoms and improved glycemic control for people with chronic conditions. But passive screen use, like endless social media scrolling, can lead to negative experiences such as cyberbullying, social comparison and loneliness, especially for teens.

Screen use for entertainment provides relaxation and stress relief. Mindfulness apps or meditation tools, for example, can reduce anxiety and improve emotional regulation. Creative digital activities, like graphic design and music production, can reduce stress and improve mental health. However, too much screen use may reduce well-being by limiting physical activity and time for other rewarding pursuits.

Context matters

Screen time affects people differently based on factors like mood, social setting, age and family environment. Your emotions before and during screen use can shape your experience. Positive interactions can lift your mood, while loneliness might deepen with certain online activities. For example, we found that differences in age and stress levels affect how readily people become distracted on their devices. Alerts and other changes distract users, which makes it more challenging to focus on tasks.

The social context of screen use also matters. Watching a movie with family can strengthen bonds, while using screens alone can increase feelings of isolation, especially when it replaces face-to-face interactions.

Family influence plays a role, too. For example, parents’ screen habits affect their children’s screen behavior, and structured parental involvement can help reduce excessive use. It highlights the positive effect of structured parental involvement, along with mindful social contexts, in managing screen time for healthier digital interactions.

Shared screen time with family and friends can boost well-being.
kate_sept2004/E+ via Getty Images

Consistency and nuance

Technology now lets researchers track screen use accurately, but simply counting hours doesn’t give us the full picture. Even when we measure specific activities, like social media or gaming, studies don’t often capture engagement level or intent. For example, someone might use social media to stay informed or to procrastinate.

Studies on screen time often vary in how they define and categorize it. Some focus on total screen exposure without differentiating between activities. Others examine specific types of use but may not account for the content or context. This lack of consistency in defining screen time makes it hard to compare studies or generalize findings.

Understanding screen use requires a more nuanced approach than tracking the amount of time people spend on their screens. Recognizing the different effects of specific digital activities and distinguishing between active and passive use are crucial steps. Using standardized definitions and combining quantitative data with personal insights would provide a fuller picture. Researchers can also study how screen use affects people over time.

For policymakers, this means developing guidelines that move beyond one-size-fits-all limits by focusing on recommendations suited to specific activities and individual needs. For the rest of us, this awareness encourages a balanced digital diet that blends enriching online and offline activities for better well-being. Läs mer…

Everyone knows that climate change has consequences, such as a higher likelihood of severe floods, hurricanes and droughts. But here’s a lesser-known problem: Climate change makes toilets more likely to break, which leaves people more likely to “go” outside.

That’s what colleagues and I found when we studied households across six rural Cambodian provinces, focusing on their access to proper toilets and when people decide to abandon sanitary systems in favor of open defecation, or “going” outside.

We analyzed sanitation behavior surveys that were given to about 200,000 households every two years from 2013 to 2020. These questionnaires looked into how households maintained access to sanitary toilet systems, when these facilities were abandoned, and why. It also inquired about the poverty status of the households.

A second survey of 1,472 households that owned a pour-flush latrine purchased through local sanitation businesses supported by the nonprofit organization iDE looked at how well these toilets functioned, as well as attitudes toward waste management. In this case, waste management refers to how often and when latrine pits are emptied and whether the waste is contained in a safe and hygienic way.

Our goal was to establish how living in regions vulnerable to the effects of climate change affects how well sanitary toilets function, and the impact that has on households’ sanitation practices and perceptions.

The key result of our study, which was published in the peer-reviewed journal Environment, Development and Sustainability, was clear: In regions where climate change makes heavy storms and floods more common, households more frequently stop using and maintaining their toilets.

Toilet dysfunction, which temporarily prevents a toilet from flushing or from keeping human waste from entering the environment, is more frequent among households living in flood-prone regions during the rainy season. We found that for every point increase in the composite climate vulnerability index, toilet abandonment went up by 4%.

Unsurprisingly, we found that the poorest households were hit hardest. For every percentage point increase in the number of households living in poverty for any one district, toilet abandonment went up by 1.2%.

Why it matters

Going to the toilet is a basic human necessity, yet more than half the world’s population uses toilets that do not treat human waste before it reenters the environment, typically into rivers.

Moreover, a 2021 report by the World Health Organization and UNICEF found that about 673 million people have no toilets at all and are forced to defecate out in the open.

This is a huge source of pollution and a major risk to human health. Poor sanitation also drastically increases the burden on water treatment systems.

Nonprofits such as iDE, which I consult with and was a partner on this study, are working to improve toilet access and safe practices. In Cambodia, iDE has facilitated the sale of more than 411,000 pour-flush latrines across nine provinces since 2009, contributing to five of these provinces being declared “open defecation free,” meaning that people no longer go to the bathroom outside. Because people pay for their own toilets, they tend to maintain and use them, promoting long-term sustainability to sanitation access.

But this improvement is at risk of being reversed through the increased frequency of climate change-related weather events. In lower-income countries such as Cambodia, seasonal flooding, which is becoming more severe, threatens to disable and damage sanitation infrastructure.

Without improvements to strategies, products and services that mitigate and adapt to climate shocks, people are likely to unsafely dispose of their human waste or be forced to return to open defecation. This is a major contamination risk to water sources and the environment, increasing the risk of sickness.

What isn’t known

We are keen to form more partnerships to continue to study what difference other factors make when it comes to encouraging safe and sanitary toilet practices. This includes looking at the impact of the gender of household purchasers and users, and the proximity of communities to cities and transport links, as well as wastewater treatment options, the density of populations and political will to improve the sanitation of rural communities.

The Research Brief is a short take on interesting academic work. Läs mer…

This November, Bob Dylan performed the final concerts of his Rough and Rowdy Ways tour at the Royal Albert Hall in London. The tour picked up where Dylan left off just before the COVID pandemic – endlessly on the road since 1988. But now at the age of 83, the concerts might well be Dylan’s last.

The Rough and Rowdy Ways tour was billed as running from 2021 to 2024, but at the time of publication, there seem to be no future tour dates on the horizon. As Dylan himself wondered on his most recent album: How much longer can it last? How long can this go on?

Dylan has diced with death more than once – think of his infamous motorcycle crash in 1966, or his serious heart ailment in 1997 – and death has preoccupied his songs increasingly in recent years. Throughout this tour, Dylan’s thoughts have been heavily focused on his own mortality and his own legacy.

If the Albert Hall concerts this year are to be his last on the road, then it’s a fitting venue at which to bow out, having first played it nearly 60 years ago. Back then, Dylan was a restless, hungry artist, reinventing his sound, his image, his voice with every album – sometimes, within months of release.

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Between 1962 and 1966, Dylan went from being a Midwest folk singer to the voice of his generation beatnik, via civil rights firebrand, rewriting the popular music songbook as he went.

With each successive regeneration, he seemed determined not only to redefine rock and popular music, but to alienate his audience in the process as well. He was an artist in search of answers, who didn’t give those in his wake time to catch their breath. Sixty years on, and now well into his ninth decade, things haven’t changed.

His own version

Dylan’s final night at the Albert Hall was a summation of how he remains a defiant artist still forging new ideas. The performance contained highlights from his entire career. Eight of the 17 songs were written and released before the 1990s, while everything else was from the 2020 album after which the tour is named. But each song was radically reinvented, reworked to Dylan’s ever-changing vision, with some of the songs even being rearranged during his three-day residency at the Albert Hall.

Take My Own Version of You (2020), Dylan’s late masterpiece about the process of creation. In the song, the narrator – a modern-day Prometheus, maybe even Dylan himself – tells of his efforts to construct his vision from “limbs and livers and brains and hearts”.

Dylan in 2019.
Raph_PH/Wiki Commons, CC BY-SA

The song’s arrangement at the start of the Rough and Rowdy Ways tour was as a brooding, Tex-Mex noir. But by the tour’s end, Dylan had stripped his ode to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to its essentials, until all that was left by the final Royal Albert Hall concert was Dylan’s voice.

He rapped the lyrics, accompanied by his own sparse piano backing and the occasional guitar flourish. It was a performance that evoked similarities to Dylan’s rapid-style solo delivery of songs like It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding) (1965) on the same stage in the 1960s.

My Own Version of You is a song in which Dylan reflects on his own artistic and creative processes. And in its radical and stark new arrangement in this final concert, Dylan was returning to how he started: as an artist whose main tools have always been his voice and his words. It’s the reason he was awarded the Nobel prize for literature in 2016, after all.

Read more:
Bob Dylan’s Nobel prize – and what really defines literature

It’s perhaps unsurprising then that the entire concert was a reflection on the process of creation. Dylan’s process is to reshape, disassemble, reassemble and strip back. While the process is undoubtedly frustrating for some in the audience, as they struggle to guess what song Dylan is performing, it is also exhilarating to watch an artist reinventing himself and his songs in real time.

They become assemblages of the old and the new, the found and the borrowed. When I Paint My Masterpiece (1971) is no longer an elegiac sing-along song, but instead a reggae-influenced tune via Dylan’s own down-and-dirty blues of the Time Out of Mind album (1997), with a bit of his born-again gospel thrown in for good measure.

Dylan and singer Joan Baez during the civil rights March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, August 28 1963.
National Archives at College Park

All Along the Watchtower (1968) is no longer Dylan’s homage to Jimi Hendrix’s career-defining cover version, but a fable of hell trapped on a loop from which the narrator seeks escape, with echoes of T.V. Talkin’ Song (1990). And Every Grain of Sand (1981) becomes a melancholic requiem by an old man with no regrets, determined to rage against time. It conjures memories of Dylan’s version of Tangled Up In Blue, performed at the Royal Albert Hall in 2013.

If this was to be Dylan’s last ever live performance, then what does it say about him and his place in music history? Well, that he remains as vital an artist as he was in the 1960s, one who continues to reinvent himself, who continues to chase that restless, hungry feeling and who doesn’t look back, but constantly forward.

Dylan would leave behind an expansive body of work – both studio albums and live recordings – for scholars, critics and audiences alike to rediscover for decades, if not centuries to come. And in that rediscovery, they will learn much about what it means to be an artist. Läs mer…

Imagine getting a live art class from Leonardo da Vinci, or having a fully interactive discussion about the meaning of life with Socrates. You can now do this in your living room with a laptop and headset through startups like Ireland’s Engage XR and Sweden’s Hello History, combining the capabilities of artificial intelligence (AI) and the metaverse.

Tradition and technology have often been seen as distinct and even counterfactual, but clearly these technologies are now blurring the lines in ways that can alter how humans engage with cultural heritage.

Here are four emerging trends in this space:

1. New kinds of restoration

Many ancient texts are hard to access because they are close to crumbling or have parts missing, but AI is changing this using machine-learning algorithms to help make sense of fragments that are illegible to the human eye. For instance, this has been used to reveal the contents of papyrus that was charred by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD79.

There’s similar potential with ancient sites that have been damaged, whether through neglect or military conflict. Some are now being “restored” by metaverse companies 3D-modelling spaces from digital images which have been created from descriptions in old texts.

Indian startup Who VR, for example, has made a virtual-reality recreation of Sharda Peeth, a ruined Hindu temple and ancient centre of learning. Similarly, Legends of Amsterdam, uses AI to create photo-realistic videos and art prints depicting the Dutch capital and its culture hundreds of years ago.

Legends of Amsterdam uses AI to reimagine stills and videos from the Dutch capital.
Legends of Amsterdam, CC BY-SA

There are also AI companies teaching younger people how to use this technology to make recreations of their own. For example, Brhat, another Indian company, conducts workshops in creating AI visual content rooted in local cultural heritage.

2. Demystifying ancient langauges

Many old texts are written in languages known only to a limited number of people, such as Latin or Sanskrit. This poses barriers to accessing and understanding these historical works and their heritage.

The easiest solution is obviously just to use software that can translate the scripts, but AI offers much more interesting possibilities. For instance, an Indian startup called Mokx has built a chatbot called Arya with which you can discuss at length the Hindu Vedic scriptures. Similarly, there are AI assistants that have been trained on the Latin teachings and traditions of the Catholic church and the Hebrew equivalent for the Jewish Torah.

3. Virtual religion

Young people are engaging with cultural heritage in new ways thanks to these technologies. They are role-playing Indian demigods in a heritage game in the Sandbox metaverse, as well as Catholic clergy on the Roblox gaming platform.

The latter example comes from the Philippines. It involves hundreds of youngsters represented as avatars, attending a Sunday service in a virtual Quiapo Church – a popular Filipino Catholic place of worship. They listen to a sermon from a priest who is being role-played by another member of their Roblox group.

Similar Roblox Catholic services take place in other countries, including Poland and Vietnam. These both help to secure the future of such traditions, and gives youngsters from different parts of the world an easy opportunity to experience one another’s religious cultures.

Coming at spiritual experience from a different angle is Chakra VR, an app on Metaquest in which users meditate in the metaverse and learn about the seven chakras in the body.

4. Anthropomorphism

In some cases, we’re seeing AI combining with heritage in ways in which they take on human characteristics. AskMona is a good example, an AI chatbot deployed in places like the Colosseum Park in Rome and art exhibitions by the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris. Visitors can ask “Mona” whatever they like about what they are seeing, and it can begin to seem as if they are dealing with a human.

More exotic examples include the Impossible Torah, a series of written commentaries of the Jewish religious text by AI versions of famous authors such as William Shakespeare and René Descartes. Trained on the life and works of the character in question, this goes way beyond simple mimicry.

They each aim to talk about the Torah in the way that the character would have done, had they been available to write a submission in person. The examples of Da Vinci and Socrates at the beginning of the article fall into a similar category.

Also intriguing was an AI-powered church service held by the German Evangelical Church Congress in 2023. The pastor got Chat-GPT to write a sermon which was then delivered to the congregation by a photorealistic AI-created human.

This all demonstrates how technology is quickly changing the ways in which we interact with heritage and religion. As AI-driven chatbots and characters become increasingly common and take on a life of their own in the metaverse, these worlds will become ever more vivid and accessible.

And that level of immersion is nothing compared to what could be coming if brain-computer interfaces such as Neuralink become commonplace in years to come. No doubt they’ll be able to stimulate the right brain in ways which create deeply spiritual and lifelike experiences with limited distractions. It could lead us to hidden realms of spirituality and connections with the ancients that might lead to more evolved humans. For all the fears about technological advancement, it’s also fascinating to reflect on the huge potential benefits. Läs mer…

US president-elect Donald Trump has indicated that he will again withdraw his country from the Paris agreement and perhaps the UN climate process altogether. The uncertainty this has created was palpable in the negotiation rooms and hallways of the Cop29 climate summit in Baku, Azerbaijan, where I wrote this.

I have studied the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and its global assessments of scientific knowledge for over 15 years and have followed how its most recent reports are being used in official climate negotiations. As I document in my book, the US and its domestic politics has influenced the organisation of global climate science, and the climate agreements that depend on it, since the IPCC was established in 1988.

From the outset, proposals from the US were influential in the design of a specifically “intergovernmental” body to provide the world with climate science, rather than one lead by scientists themselves. This gave governments a central role in the organisation and its assessment process. Most notably, governments had line-by-line approval of the most read component of the thousand page IPCC reports: the much shorter Summary for Policymakers.

In the second round of the IPCC’s assessment reports in the 1990s, climate scepticism in the US would shape how one of the most important sentences was received – sowing uncertainty that facilitated president George W. Bush’s rejection of the Kyoto protocol, a precursor to the Paris agreement.

In 1996, the IPCC concluded that “the balance of evidence suggests that there is a discernible human influence on global climate”. Controversy around the scientific veracity of this finding was initiated by an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, in which an American physicist accused the lead authors of corrupting the IPCC peer-review process.

This uncertainty was mobilised in a 1998 anti-Kyoto protocol petition, which indicated that there was “no convincing evidence” that human release of greenhouse gases will cause “catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate”.

In 2000, soon after taking office, president Bush rejected the Kyoto protocol because, he said, it exempted 80% of the world. In a letter justifying the move, he also cited incomplete knowledge of climate science.

Climate protesters in Seoul, South Korea, in 2005.
Jeon Heon-Kyun / EPA

The Bush administration’s hostility to climate science would shape IPCC reports throughout the 2000s. Scientists adopted new methods for evaluating scientific uncertainty and ensured a clear line of sight between the main reports and their summaries. For some this made for conservative reports, for others it laid incontestable ground for international climate policymaking.

Put to the test by Trump

The drafting and implementation of the 2015 Paris agreement took place within this context and with US politics firmly in view. An agreement was crafted that would not need senate approval and which depended on national pledges and collective reviews. The strength of this architecture was immediately put to the test during the first Trump presidency.

The IPCC’s sixth assessment cycle, which began in 2015, was set to be its most ambitious and costly round of reports. It would play a pivotal role in implementing the Paris agreement by providing the best available science for the “global stocktake”, where countries assess collective progress towards meeting the long term temperature goal.

However, on taking office, Trump withdrew funding from the organisation, creating a large budget shortfall. When a hugely influential special report on the impacts of warming at 1.5°C was published in 2018, the US government along with Saudi Arabia, Russia and Kuwait, initiated a political struggle when they refused to formally welcome the report at that year’s climate summit in Poland.

We cannot depend on the US

The Paris agreement attempted to bring science from the IPCC and political negotiation at UN climate talks closer together so that parties could be responsive to the latest knowledge and increase collective ambition over time.

This change in US administration is likely to strengthen efforts by some countries to undo this closer alignment between climate science and politics. The wrangling over the IPCC was on view in the first week of Cop29, as countries wrestled over language to identify the IPCC’s role in the second global stocktake.

However, climate action has always been about more than one state. Once Kyoto failed, the architects of the Paris agreement understood that the collective response can never be dependent on the US. Some researchers have observed that, if anything, Trump’s first attempt to withdraw the US from the Paris agreement strengthened it.

Even if this time around Trump withdraws from the entire UN climate convention, the US is likely to maintain influence over the process, as it does other global environmental treaties such as the convention on biological diversity.

Trump’s election still matters, of course. It slows and delays the transition from fossil fuels and increases the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. A more muted US presence was already detectable in the Cop29 negotiating rooms that I observed.

Trump matters to climate politics, yes. But so does everyone else on the planet, and it is that which is most important to keep in view.

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In a book I wrote with a colleague on organisational failures (The Apology Impulse) the inability of many of them to confront their failures, except to say a meaningless “we’re sorry”, is legend.

We highlighted the many cases of organisations in the private and public sector apologising profusely for a high-profile failure, but not taking any personal or organisational responsibility for it. We concluded, after looking at hundreds of organisational failures, that the very act of apologising is itself in crisis.

Organisations are confused and gripped by a range of anxieties. They worry about the consequences of apologising, including the humiliation that comes with admitting wrongdoing. And their (unfounded) fear of inviting litigation often prevents them from giving apologies when they’re most needed.

Crisis communication is becoming a costly business and often the conclusion is that it’s easier not to apologise at all. When an apology is forthcoming, it happens too late or in a wording so cautious as to be stripped of all meaning for the victims.

And in a multi-media age, the fear of potential damage to an organisation’s image and brand will encourage them to be less open and transparent about their failure.

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In the case of the Church of England, there may be a number of additional obstacles which may have inhibited organisation leaders from confronting the appalling behaviour of John Smyth over the years. The now deceased barrister violently abused an estimated 100 boys, many of whom he met via his work with the church.

First, the church is meant to be the “moral” role model of the country. So to admit to itself or to the outside world, that this kind of behaviour exists within its own structures may be difficult to acknowledge or to confront.

Second, the church is a highly hierarchical organisation. People further down the hierarchy might want to cover up their failures to protect their career ambitions or to protect the church’s image and reputation. This may help explain why people did not come forward, despite open concerns about Smyth.

Justin Welby has resigned as Archbishop of Canterbury in the wake of a review that found evidence that Smyth’s crimes had been covered up by the church since the 1980s. Welby said he took responsibility for the “conspiracy of silence” within the church since 2013, when police had been notified about the abuse but the allegations were not properly followed up by the church.

Confronting hierarchy

But there are practical questions to ask about who was responsible for managing this process to ensure that proper safeguarding was put in place. In other words, who had delegated responsibility for this particular individual and situation? Welby may be morally responsible but that doesn’t quite answer the question of who failed to act at the time. This shows lack of senior leadership by the church, who have a duty of care for those under the guidance of the church.

As Helen-Ann Hartley, the Bishop of Newcastle, has highlighted, there appears to be a lack of willingness among many bishops to confront the top leadership of the Church over their accountability for their lack of leadership on this safeguarding issue. This may come down to their personal career concerns or not wanting to rock the proverbial boat.

Welby has taken the fall but there are many more questions to answer.
Alamy

These organisational shortcomings were highlighted in the review of the church’s response to the Smyth case. The review warned of excessive deference to senior clergy in leadership roles and failures of leadership and accountability in safeguarding.

This will all require a serious culture change programme in the future. But as Machiavelli wrote in the Prince:

It should be borne in mind that there is nothing more difficult to arrange, more doubtful of success and more dangerous to carry through than initiating change. The innovator makes enemies of all those who prospered under the old order, and only lukewarm support is forthcoming from those who would prosper under the new.

Change will be needed, nonetheless, and this situation has provided the church the opportunity to seriously explore its leadership and organisational culture – a process that should not stop at the resignation of the archbishop. Läs mer…

Thanks to bestselling authors like Jonathan Haidt and Jean Twenge, the public has become increasingly aware of the rapid rise in mental health issues among younger people in many western countries. Their warnings about the destructive impact of social media have had an effect, reflected not least in a wave of schools across Europe banning smartphones.

While it’s good to draw attention to the rising rates of depression and anxiety, there’s a risk of becoming fixated on simplistic explanations that reduce the issue to technical variables like “screen time”. In my book, Why We Worry: A Sociological Explanation, I aim to broaden the discussion.

A hallmark of Twenge and Haidt’s arguments is their use of trend lines for various types of psychological distress, showing increases after 2012, which Haidt calls the start of the “great rewiring” when smartphones became widespread. This method has been criticised for overemphasising correlations that may say little about causality. Another problem is the limited timeframe of these analyses.

Most of the graphs in Haidt’s book The Anxious Generation begin around 2002 and end around 2018. Drawing definitive conclusions from just 16 years of data presents several challenges.

One such challenge is that earlier increases are obscured. For instance, when Haidt shows a rise in psychological distress in Nordic countries starting in 2010, we don’t see what happened before 2002. It risks giving the impression that nothing changed before the spread of smartphones.

However, in Sweden, the Public Health Agency has collected data on mental wellbeing among young people since 1986. Looking at self-reported issues with low mood, it’s clear there has been a longer upward trend since the 1980s.

Proportion of boys and girls, ages 11-15, who report feeling low almost every day during the last six months from 1985-86 to 2017-18, Public Health Agency of Sweden.

Similarly, although the 2010s brought a spike among girls, sleep problems have increased long before the introduction of smartphones.

Proportion of boys and girls, ages 11-15, who report having sleep problems almost every day during the last six months from 1985-86 to 2017-18, Public Health Agency of Sweden.

We also see an earlier onset of rising mental health issues in countries like Norway and the UK. According to a review in the journal Psychological Medicine, the reported prevalence of long-standing mental health conditions among four- to 24-year-olds increased sixfold in England between 1995 and 2014 and more than doubled in Scotland between 2003 and 2014.

The US also shows a longer-term increase in mental health issues. Twenge, one of the most prominent critics of youth smartphone use, wrote in 2000 that the “average American child in the 1980s reported more anxiety than child psychiatric patients in the 1950s”.

In 2011, she noted that “almost all of the available evidence suggests a sharp rise in anxiety, depression, and mental health issues among Western youth between the early 20th century and the early 1990s”.

This brings us to a mystery that deepens when we examine the World Mental Health surveys – a series of community psychiatric
surveys coordinated by the World Health Organization and conducted in 30 countries.

Mean lifetime prevalence of mental disorders in the World Mental Health surveys in the country income groups (2001-11)

In 17 of 18 mental problems, there is a consistent pattern of prevalence being lower in the low- and lower-middle-income countries than in high-income countries. This stark difference, which contrasts sharply with patterns in physical health, cannot be explained by smartphone access, as the national surveys were conducted between 2001 and 2011.

So, what can explain this geographical and historical variation beyond the introduction of smartphones and social media?

Numerous academics, including me, have pointed to factors such as an increasing intolerance for uncertainty in modernity, a fixation – both individual and collective – on avoiding risk, intensifying feelings of meaninglessness in work and life more broadly and rising national inequality accompanied by growing status anxiety. However, it’s important to emphasise that social science has so far failed to provide definitive answers.

One could contend that all social problems, even those that social science has yet to fully understand, affect mental health. It seems unlikely that the political and social challenges we face wouldn’t influence our wellbeing. Reducing the issue to isolated variables, where the solution might appear to be to introduce a new policy (like banning smartphones) follows a technocratic logic that could turn good health into a matter for experts.

The risk with this approach is that society as a whole is excluded from the analysis. Another risk is that politics is drained of meaning. If political questions such as structural discrimination, economic precarity, exposure to violence and opioid use are not regarded as shaping our wellbeing, what motivation remains for taking action on these matters? Läs mer…

International cocoa prices have experienced a historic price surge, rising by over 300% in the space of 12 months from £2,166 per tonne of cocoa in April 2023 to £9,980 by April 2024. Prices have fallen since then, and are currently hovering around the £6,400 mark at the time of writing.

This rally, which is the highest on record for cocoa, was driven by poor harvests in the Ivory Coast and Ghana. Powerful El Niño weather events, coupled with years of underinvestment that left Ghana’s cocoa trees vulnerable to diseases, have decimated yields.

In February 2024 Ghana’s cocoa board, Cocobod, revised its cocoa crop forecast down 40% from its initial target of 820,000 metric tonnes for the 2023–24 season. Ghana and the Ivory Coast account for nearly 60% of global cocoa production, so markets reacted to the news swiftly.

We are researchers of the global cocoa trade, and one of us is particularly familiar with the mechanics of Ghana’s cocoa sector. Fuad is currently the head of the Ghana Cocoa Marketing Company UK, which facilitates trade transactions between the Cocoa Marketing Company Ghana (CMC) – a subsidiary of Cocobod and the monopoly seller of Ghanaian cocoa beans – and its clients across the world.

The tripling of cocoa prices in London, which serve as the benchmark for west African cocoa, should have been a blessing for Ghana’s economy and its cocoa farmers, many of whom have long struggled with low incomes. However, the prices farmers are paid for their cocoa (farmgate prices) remained well below international market prices despite the extraordinary surge.

Cocobod increased farmgate prices by 58% in April, followed by another 45% hike at the start of the 2024–25 season in September. This latter move increased the price farmers are paid per tonne of cocoa from 33,120 Ghanaian cedis (£1,599) to 48,000 Ghanaian cedis (£2,304).

A further 3.3% price increase was announced by Ghana’s president, Nana Akufo-Addo, during the celebration of Ghana’s National Farmer’s Day on November 8 in a bid to motivate cocoa farmers.

These price hikes are significant, but they have not kept pace with the movement in the global benchmark. This has led to a growing gap between farmgate prices in Ghana and the Ivory Coast, and the international market.

The gap between the global benchmark cocoa price and the farmgate price received in Ghana and the Ivory Coast grew last year.
KnowledgeCharts LLC

Locking prices in early

In our recent working paper, we show that the limited pass-through of global prices to farmers in Ghana was primarily due to the combined effect of a longstanding forward sales strategy and a financing structure that relies on a loan sourced from a group of international banks (a syndicated loan).

For decades, the CMC has used forward sales to hedge against downward trending prices. This involves selling up to 70% of the anticipated cocoa crop between nine and 12 months ahead of harvest to international traders and local processors at prices tied to the global benchmark.

The average price secured through these contracts is then used to set farmgate prices before the start of each cocoa season. This system protects farmers from price drops in a declining market, but it does not allow them to benefit if the spot price at harvest is above the forward price that is achieved by the CMC.

With a near-tripling of cocoa prices in only 12 months, the average forward prices secured by the CMC were significantly lower than the levels achieved in international spot markets. This limited the potential for a substantial increase in farmgate prices.

Besides price risk management, the forward sales fulfil another role. For over 31 years, Cocobod has relied on a syndicated loan to finance the purchase of cocoa beans from farmers, as well as farming inputs such as fertilisers and jute bags. The forward contracts are used as collateral against which the loan is drawn.

Cocobod has raised nearly US$28 billion (£21.6 billion) through the loan since its inception. Given the size of the cocoa sector in the overall economy – cocoa has ranked consistently among Ghana’s top four exports over the past three decades – the loan’s importance goes beyond the cocoa trade.

The loan has provided the Ghanaian central bank with the ability to borrow hard currency at affordable interest rates. Hard currency is needed to pay for imports and to stock up on foreign exchange reserves. This is particularly needed now as Ghana’s debt crisis has made other means of external borrowing more challenging since 2021.

Because of the need for collateral to secure the loan, forward contracts must be signed and prices locked in before the season starts. This limits the volume of cocoa that can be sold at a more favourable spot price when market conditions improve.

Cocoa prices surged by more than 300% between April 2023 and April 2024.
CW Studios Global / Shutterstock

Breaking free

A downward trending cocoa price over the longer term remains a concern. But extreme weather caused by climate change, and the resulting increased market volatility, have put into question the sustainability of both the forward sales system and the loan.

So, in August 2024 the chief executive of Cocobod, Joseph Boahen Aidoo, announced that Ghana would not raise a loan for the 2024–25 season. The decision to end three decades of dependency on this financing model was made in light of significantly higher interest rates, which has made offshore borrowing much less attractive.

Cocobod’s new financing model requires licensed buying companies (LBCs), which are responsible for purchasing cocoa beans from farmers at the price set by Cocobod, to secure funding independently. Previously, they received centralised funding from Cocobod through the loan.

Under this new system, LBCs primarily source funding from international cocoa traders and, to a lesser extent, domestic banks. The LBCs buy cocoa from farmers with the secured funding and deliver it to the CMC. They are then reimbursed for the amount they paid farmers for the beans plus an agreed margin for their service by Cocobod.

However, the need for LBCs to secure their own financing within a short planning window poses challenges for some in the 2024–25 season, particularly as local firms face hurdles in accessing affordable domestic credit. In an effort to ensure sufficient volumes, many international traders have established sourcing partnerships with local buyers. But some local buyers argue that this could further consolidate power among multinational firms because the buyers would essentially become beholden to them.

Ghana’s 31-year reliance on the cocoa-backed loan has constrained its ability to fully capitalise on price rallies. The shift to a new financing model grants the CMC flexibility to time its cocoa sales, utilising both forward and spot contracts. It also has the potential to improve cash liquidity for Ghana’s cocoa buying companies.

With proper execution and commitment by Cocobod to ensure timely reimbursement, this approach could reshape Ghana’s cocoa industry and significantly improve the livelihoods of nearly 1 million cocoa farming families. Läs mer…