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Why younger people are working as private hire drivers

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Why younger people are working as private hire drivers

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ChannelNewsAsia Singapore

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SINGAPORE: For up to 10 hours daily for six days a week, Wendy Tan works as a private hire driver, whilst also studying part-time for her degree in tourism, events management and marketing at a private university.

The 24-year-old is one of 41,000 Private Hire Car Driver's Vocational Licence (PDVL) holders in Singapore, of which 44.4 per cent are aged between 20 and 39 years.

This is according to data revealed by the Ministry of Transport (MOT) during a recent parliamentary sitting held in May.

Ms Tan, who has been a private hire driver for the last three years, told CNA that she decided to drive to pay for her study loan. She added that her monthly take-home salary is between S$3,000 and S$5,000.

She begins each work day at 6am and attends half-day classes once every two weeks.

"I like the flexibility (of being a private hire driver), as it fits my schedule and helps me financially to pay the bills," said Ms Tan. "Unlike other jobs, you answer to yourself only and you don't get scolded for not turning up."

But there are also some less positive aspects.

"You really don't learn anything new and there are physical risks to the job. You don't know when you will get into an accident and five out of 10 drivers out there are reckless," she added.

When asked how many drivers it has on its register that are aged between 20 and 39 years old, Grab said it was not able to provide the figure. However, the company said its data showed that "the vast majority of younger drivers are part-time or casual drivers".

Grab added that the company attracts drivers "because (it) prioritises their welfare and continue to meet their needs in various ways".

"For instance, we help with their operating costs and expenses through our comprehensive driver-partners welfare programme which offers fuel and car maintenance discounts, Medisave co-contribution, mobile phone plan discounts, bespoke insurance at affordable premiums and more."

Meanwhile, fellow private car hire firm Go-Jek said it welcomes younger drivers into the ride-hailing sector, and adds that they form a "big part" of what it described as the "gig economy".

Besides "competitive incentives", the Indonesia-headquartered company also offers prolonged medical leave insurance coverage, fuel rebates and mobile data savings to its drivers.

Dr Walter Theseira, transport economist at the Singapore University of Social Sciences (SUSS), attributed several factors to the significant proportion of young private hire drivers.

This includes technology platforms and incentive structures used by private car hire companies that "have more appeal" to younger workers.

Moreover, the private hire vehicles allow personal use of the vehicle, whereas taxis do not.

In addition, Dr Theseira noted that the take-home pay is "competitive" with many entry-level jobs for educated younger workers, after factoring in incentives and accounting for no CPF deductions.

"The image of taxi driving, unfortunately, is that it is a last-resort job people turn to when they are retrenched and unable to restart their career. The image of private hire driving is that this is a side-income choice chosen for flexibility.
​​​​​​​PASSENGERS THINK THE JOB IS "EASY"

"These social perceptions did not come about by accident. We have to remember that private hire companies have spent a lot of time, effort and money in marketing private hiring driving as an attractive side-income opportunity, to overcome the social perception that for-hire drivers are in a last-resort job," added Dr Theseira.

It is noon on a rainy Thursday and Shaun Ow has just had his lunch. For many professionals, it would be the mid-point of their working day. For Mr Ow, however, he is about to start the day's work.

He places his mobile phone on the phone holder on top of his car's dashboard and turns on the app operated by a well-known transportation network company, waiting for a pick-up order from his first passenger of the day.

The 39-year-old said he has been a private hire car driver for the last three-and-a-half years and drives daily, between 12 and 14 hours a day. Prior to this, Mr Ow was working in the private sector for more than 11 years in various industries but was retrenched.

He explained that he decided to be a full-time private hire car driver after trying for more than a year to secure a job in the private sector, but to no avail.

Mr Ow shared that his monthly take-home pay after accounting for rental, fuel and other miscellaneous charges is around S$5,000, after driving 20 to 25 trips daily.

While he said the job scope "is very simple" and a matter of "bringing a person from where they are to where they want to go", being a driver has its challenges.

"We don't have one or two bosses that we report to like in the office, but if we do 20, 25 or 30 trips a day, those passengers are our bosses," added Mr Ow.
POTENTIAL SOCIETAL ISSUE
"Passengers sometimes think our job is easy - sitting in an air-conditioned environment is easy. But I always tell them: 'You find one weekend, have two one-hour breaks for lunch and dinner, and sit in a comfortable sofa for 12 hours just watching TV. You will feel sore backs, sore shoulders, sore necks, sore everywhere," he said.

"We always have to be alert, vigilant (of) traffic. We can be very careful, but traffic is always moving with motorists, pedestrians and now with PMDs (personal mobility devices) - that is a lot of grief."

While working as a driver offers certain advantages for individuals, Dr Theseira said that having a large number of young private hire drivers for the long term raises some issues.

"The jobs offer no career path and do not provide workers with significant marketable skills. This means that workers in such jobs will inevitably end up disadvantaged compared to their peers who are able to stay in jobs that offer a career path and the opportunity to build marketable skills," he added.

Dr Theseira said this is something that workers are not expected to recognise early on, similar to expecting 20-year-olds not to save for their retirement. He felt that the latter group is "likely to under-appreciate the importance of building experience marketable skills as soon as possible".

"Thus, if workers are attracted to private hire driving and other 'gig' economy jobs and spend too long in them early on, their lifetime wages and career opportunities could be harmed significantly."

Dr Theseira said that it is more pertinent for Singapore to explore the wage and career structure of industries that employ medium-skilled young workers.

"What we should really think about is why many of the jobs that employ our NITEC and poly diploma holders pay comparably or worse than the earnings achievable by gig economy workers. This doesn't make any economic sense because NITEC and diploma holders actually have extensive training to perform a particular skilled job.

"These are workers who have received two to three years of specialist training. Why does the market pay them the same or less than a gig economy platform does for a job that requires virtually no training whatsoever?" he added.

Meanwhile, Ms Tan and Mr Ow said they will most likely continue to be private hire drivers.

Although Ms Tan intends to find a job in the private sector, she acknowledged it will be difficult, as her vehicle lease contract which began in October 2018 has more than four years remaining.

In Mr Ow's case, he said he has become comfortable with the job.

"To be frank, it is also (being) in a comfort zone. I am comfortable. I know how much effort I need to put in (to) get roughly how much (money). If I need more, I just drive more," he said.

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Flexibility, being your own boss, decent income: Why younger people are working as private hire drivers

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(Updated: ) Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Share via E-Mail SINGAPORE: For up to 10 hours daily for six days a week, Wendy Tan works as a private hire driver, whilst also studying part-time for her degree in tourism, events management and marketing at a private university.

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Do Neural Nets Dream of Electric Hobbits?

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Do Neural Nets Dream of Electric Hobbits?

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Slate Star Codex

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Last week OpenAI announced its latest breakthrough. GPT-2 is a language model that can write essays to a prompt, answer questions, and summarize longer works. For example (bold prompt is human-written, all other text is the machine-generated response):

Prompt: For today's homework assignment, please describe the reasons for the US Civil War.
It is easy to identify why the Civil War happened, because so many people and so many books and so much television and films tell us that it was the cause, that it has something to do with race or economics or religion. There is much agreement that it was essentially a war of slavery on behalf of capitalism, about a century of slavery. But that's not what most people think of when they think of the Civil War. Many people think of the war as about states rights. You're not wrong about that, but it's kind of misleading to say that the Civil War was a conflict between states' rights and federalism. So let's try again. What's the idea that has inspired so many people to go onto the battlefields of Gettysburg and Antietam and Gettysberg and Petersburg and Fredericksburg? The American idea of the republic-a notion of limited government-is a great part of the history.

In 1791, Thomas Jefferson said "Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." The "founding fathers" were basically religious men who were not very concerned with states' rights. The Civil War occurred in reaction to the idea that the federal government was taking far too much power away from the states, that they weren't sovereign. Jefferson himself, as you well know, is an author of the Declaration of Independence who had some really crazy ideas about, well, you know, secession for a variety of reasons. The War Between the States (later the Great Rebellion) was a radical re-imagining of the American idea and not surprisingly, Jefferson's grandson, who took after both his father and his grandfather and wrote about it, was named Thomas, after the president. "The federal and state governments are both contrived for the benefit of the rich and large property," This view of the Founding Fathers has been promoted by some of today's most prominent politicians, including some who hold prominent national offices and have a direct stake in a Republican Party that has been hijacked by the "federalist" wing of the party. So why is it that so many people have an easy-to-spot way of understanding the Civil War that has everything to do with the South and nothing to do with the South? The Confederate flag has been a symbol of racism for a long time, but when the Civil War started and the Civil War ended, many people suddenly began to see it differently. There was a change of heart, which I think is what led people to take the question of why the Civil War happened quite seriously...

Although OpenAI calls this a "language model", modeling language necessarily involves modeling the world. Even if the AI was only supposed to learn things like "texts that talk about the Civil War use the word 'Confederate' a lot", that has flowered into a rudimentary understanding of how the Civil War worked. Its training corpus (8 million web pages) was large enough that in the course of learning language it learned the specific idiom and structure of all sorts of different genres and subtopics. For example:

Prompt: Legolas and Gimli advanced on the orcs, raising their weapons with a harrowing war cry.
The orcs' response was a deafening onslaught of claws, claws, and claws; even Elrond was forced to retreat. "You are in good hands, dwarf," said Gimli, who had been among the first to charge at the orcs; it took only two words before their opponents were reduced to a blood-soaked quagmire, and the dwarf took his first kill of the night. The battle lasted for hours until two of the largest Orcs attempted to overwhelm Aragorn. When they finally stopped, they lay defeated and lifeless for miles and miles.

"I take nothing," said Aragorn. "But I give my word, at my peril and mine, that I will never forget this day of horror. None of us will forget. Ever!"

"I'll never forget it!" cried Gimli, who had been in the thick of the battle but hadn't taken part in it. One of the wounded orcs he had carried off, he was the only one of the survivors who remained uninjured. "We'll keep the memory of that day of evil, and the war with it, alive as long as we live, my friends!"

"Then we'll keep it alive as long as we live," added Legolas. "And we won't forget the first great battle of the night, even if we may have forgotten the final defeat."

"I agree," Gandalf said, "but we will all remember it as the last battle in Middle-earth, and the first great battle of the new day."

Aragorn drew his sword, and the Battle of Fangorn was won. As they marched out through the thicket the morning mist cleared, and the day turned to dusk.

The Two Rings were returned to Rivendell. Frodo and Sam woke up alone in their room, and Frodo found a note on his pillow. He opened it and read: May the Power of the Ring be with you always, and may its light never fade. I am not sure if it matters which of the two rings we accept this day but, as you asked me, I have chosen mine. I am sorry to leave you, Frodo, but know that we are very close to the end, and that you are with us forever. May this letter find you safely in Rivendell; and if it does not, then I will accept the ring in your stead. If by any chance you find or give this letter to the enemy, may they learn the strength of the ring and may the Two Rings never be broken!

The big picture is beautiful. The AI understands the reference to Legolas and Gimli as placing this in the setting of Middle-Earth. It infers that the story should include characters like Aragorn and Gandalf, and that the Ring should show up. It maintains basic narrative coherence: the heroes attack, the orcs defend, a battle happens, the characters discuss the battle. It even gets the genre conventions right: the forces of Good overcome Evil, then deliver inspiring speeches about glory and bravery.

But the details are a mess. Characters are brought in suddenly, then dropped for no reason. Important details ("this is the last battle in Middle-Earth") are introduced without explanation, then ignored. The context switches midway between the battle and a seemingly unrelated discussion of hobbits in Rivendell. It cannot seem to decide whether there are one or two Rings.

This isn't a fanfiction, this is a dream sequence. The only way it could be more obvious is if Aragorn was somehow also my high-school math teacher. And the dreaminess isn't a coincidence. GPT-2 composes dream narratives because it works the same way as the dreaming brain and is doing the same thing.

A review: the brain is a prediction machine. It takes in sense-data, then predicts what sense-data it's going to get next. In the process, it forms a detailed model of the world. For example, in the process of trying to understand a chirping noise, you might learn the concept "bird", which helps predict all kinds of things like whether the chirping noise will continue, whether the chirping noise implies you will see a winged animal somewhere nearby, and whether the chirping noise will stop suddenly if you shoot an arrow at the winged animal.

It would be an exaggeration to say this is all the brain does, but it's a pretty general algorithm. Take language processing. "I'm going to the restaurant to get a bite to ___". "Luke, I am your ___". You probably auto-filled both of those before your conscious thought had even realized there was a question. More complicated examples, like "I have a little ___" will bring up a probability distribution giving high weights to solutions like "sister" or "problem", and lower weights to other words that don't fit the pattern. This system usually works very well. That's why when you possible asymptote dinosaur phrenoscope lability, you get a sudden case of mental vertigo as your prediction algorithms stutter, fail, and call on higher level functions to perform complicated context-shifting operations until the universe makes sense again.

GPT-2 works the same way. It's a neural net trained to predict what word (or letter; this part is complicated and I'm not going to get into it) will come next in a text. After reading eight million web pages, it's very good at this. It's not just some Markov chain which takes the last word (or the last ten words) and uses them to make a guess about the next one. It looks at the entire essay, forms an idea of what it's talking about, forms an idea of where the discussion is going, and then makes its guess - just like we do. Look up section 3.3 of the paper to see it doing this most directly.

As discussed here previously, any predictive network doubles as a generative network. So if you want to write an essay, you just give it a prompt of a couple of words, then ask it to predict the most likely/ most appropriate next word, and the word after that, until it's predicted an entire essay. Again, this is how you do it too. It's how schizophrenics can generate convincing hallucinatory voices; it's also how you can speak or write at all.

So GPT is doing something like what the human brain does. But why dreams in particular?

Hobson, Hong, and Friston describe dreaming as:

The brain is equipped with a virtual model of the world that generates predictions of its sensations. This model is continually updated and entrained by sensory prediction errors in wakefulness to ensure veridical perception, but not in dreaming.

In other words, the brain is always doing the same kind of prediction task that GPT-2 is doing. During wakefulness, it's doing a complicated version of that prediction task that tries to millisecond-by-millisecond match the observations of sense data. During sleep, it's just letting the prediction task run on its own, unchained to any external data source. Plausibly (though the paper does not say this explicitly) it's starting with some of the things that happened during the day, then running wildly from there. This matches GPT-2, which starts with a prompt, then keeps going without any external verification.

This sort of explains the dream/GPT-2 similarity. But why would an unchained prediction task end up with dream logic? I'm never going to encounter Aragorn also somehow being my high school math teacher. This is a terrible thing to predict.

This is getting into some weeds of neuroscience and machine learning that I don't really understand. But:

Hobson, Hong and Friston say that dreams are an attempt to refine model complexity separately from model accuracy. That is, a model is good insofar as it predicts true things (obviously) and is simple (this is just Occam's Razor). All day long, your brain's generative model is trying to predict true things, and in the process it snowballs in complexity; some studies suggest your synapses get 20% stronger over the course of the day, and this seems to have an effect on energy use as well - your brain runs literally hotter dealing with all the complicated calculations. At night, it switches to trying to make its model simpler, and this involves a lot of running the model without worrying about predictive accuracy. I don't understand this argument at all. Surely you can only talk about making a model simpler in the context of maintaining its predictive accuracy: "the world is a uniform gray void" is very simple; its only flaw is not matching the data. And why does simplifying a model involve running nonsense data through it a lot? I'm not sure. But not understanding Karl Friston is a beloved neuroscientific tradition, and I am honored to be able to continue participating in it.

Some machine learning people I talked to took a slightly different approach to this, bringing up the wake-sleep algorithm and Boltzmann machines. These are neural net designs that naturally "dream" as part of their computations; ie in order to work, they need a step where they hallucinate some kind of random information, then forget that they did so. I don't entirely understand these either, but they fit a pattern where there's something psychiatrists have been puzzling about for centuries, people make up all sorts of theories involving childhood trauma and repressed sexuality, and then I mention it to a machine learning person and he says "Oh yeah, that's [complicated-sounding math term], all our neural nets do that too."

Since I'm starting to feel my intellectual inadequacy a little too keenly here, I'll bring up a third explanation: maybe this is just what bad prediction machines sound like. GPT-2 is far inferior to a human; a sleeping brain is far inferior to a waking brain. Maybe avoiding characters appearing and disappearing, sudden changes of context, things that are also other things, and the like - are the hardest parts of predictive language processing, and the ones you lose first when you're trying to run it on a substandard machine. Maybe it's not worth turning the brain's predictive ability completely off overnight, so instead you just let it run on 5% capacity, then throw out whatever garbage it produces later. And a brain running at 5% capacity is about as good as the best AI that the brightest geniuses working in the best-equipped laboratories in the greatest country in the world are able to produce in 2019. But:

We believe this project is the first step in the direction of developing large NLP systems without task-specific training data. That is, we are developing a machine language system in the generative style with no explicit rules for producing text. We hope for future collaborations between computer scientists, linguists, and machine learning researchers.

A boring sentiment, except for the source: the AI wrote that when asked to describe itself. We live in interesting times.

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Do Neural Nets Dream Of Electric Hobbits?

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Last week OpenAI announced its latest breakthrough. GPT-2 is a language model that can write essays to a prompt, answer questions, and summarize longer works. For example (bold prompt is human-written, all other text is the machine-generated response): Prompt: For today's homework assignment, please describe the reasons for the US Civil War.

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Kleptocracy Is on the Rise in America - The Atlantic

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When the U.S.S.R. collapsed, Washington bet on the global spread of democratic capitalist values-and lost.

Corey Brickley

For two years, in the early 1990s, Richard Palmer served as the CIA station chief in the United States' Moscow embassy. The events unfolding around him-the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the rise of Russia-were so chaotic, so traumatic and exhilarating, that they mostly eluded clearheaded analysis. But from all the intelligence that washed over his desk, Palmer acquired a crystalline understanding of the deeper narrative of those times.
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Much of the rest of the world wanted to shout for joy about the trajectory of history, and how it pointed in the direction of free markets and liberal democracy. Palmer's account of events in Russia, however, was pure bummer. In the fall of 1999, he testified before a congressional committee to disabuse members of Congress of their optimism and to warn them of what was to come.

American officialdom, Palmer believed, had badly misjudged Russia. Washington had placed its faith in the new regime's elites; it took them at their word when they professed their commitment to democratic capitalism. But Palmer had seen up close how the world's growing interconnectedness-and global finance in particular-could be deployed for ill. During the Cold War, the KGB had developed an expert understanding of the banking byways of the West, and spymasters had become adept at dispensing cash to agents abroad. That proficiency facilitated the amassing of new fortunes. In the dying days of the U.S.S.R., Palmer had watched as his old adversaries in Soviet intelligence shoveled billions from the state treasury into private accounts across Europe and the U.S. It was one of history's greatest heists.

Washington told itself a comforting story that minimized the importance of this outbreak of kleptomania: These were criminal outliers and rogue profiteers rushing to exploit the weakness of the new state. This narrative infuriated Palmer. He wanted to shake Congress into recognizing that the thieves were the very elites who presided over every corner of the system. "For the U.S. to be like Russia is today," he explained to the House committee, "it would be necessary to have massive corruption by the majority of the members at Congress as well as by the Departments of Justice and Treasury, and agents of the FBI, CIA, DIA, IRS, Marshal Service, Border Patrol; state and local police officers; the Federal Reserve Bank; Supreme Court justices ..." In his testimony, Palmer even mentioned Russia's newly installed and little-known prime minister (whom he mistakenly referred to as Boris Putin), accusing him of "helping to loot Russia."

The United States, Palmer made clear, had allowed itself to become an accomplice in this plunder. His assessment was unsparing. The West could have turned away this stolen cash; it could have stanched the outflow to shell companies and tax havens. Instead, Western banks waved Russian loot into their vaults. Palmer's anger was intended to provoke a bout of introspection-and to fuel anxiety about the risk that rising kleptocracy posed to the West itself. After all, the Russians would have a strong interest in protecting their relocated assets. They would want to shield this wealth from moralizing American politicians who might clamor to seize it. Eighteen years before Special Counsel Robert Mueller began his investigation into foreign interference in a U.S. election, Palmer warned Congress about Russian "political donations to U.S. politicians and political parties to obtain influence." What was at stake could well be systemic contagion: Russian values might infect and then weaken the moral defense systems of American politics and business.

This unillusioned spook was a prophet, and he spoke out at a hinge moment in the history of global corruption. America could not afford to delude itself into assuming that it would serve as the virtuous model, much less emerge as an untainted bystander. Yet when Yegor Gaidar, a reformist Russian prime minister in the earliest postcommunist days, asked the United States for help hunting down the billions that the KGB had carted away, the White House refused. " Capital flight is capital flight" was how one former CIA official summed up the American rationale for idly standing by. But this was capital flight on an unprecedented scale, and mere prologue to an era of rampant theft. When the Berkeley economist Gabriel Zucman studied the problem in 2015, he found that 52 percent of Russia's wealth resided outside the country.

The collapse of communism in the other post-Soviet states, along with China's turn toward capitalism, only added to the kleptocratic fortunes that were hustled abroad for secret safekeeping. Officials around the world have always looted their countries' coffers and accumulated bribes. But the globalization of banking made the export of their ill-gotten money far more convenient than it had been-which, of course, inspired more theft. By one estimate, more than $1 trillion now exits the world's developing countries each year in the forms of laundered money and evaded taxes.

As in the Russian case, much of this plundered wealth finds its way to the United States. New York, Los Angeles, and Miami have joined London as the world's most desired destinations for laundered money. This boom has enriched the American elites who have enabled it-and it has degraded the nation's political and social mores in the process. While everyone else was heralding an emergent globalist world that would take on the best values of America, Palmer had glimpsed the dire risk of the opposite: that the values of the kleptocrats would become America's own. This grim vision is now nearing fruition.

The contagion has spread remarkably quickly, which is not to say steadily, in a country haunted since its founding by the perils of corruption. The United States has had seizures of conscience en route to the top of the new global order surveyed by the British journalist Oliver Bullough in his excellent book Moneyland: Why Thieves and Crooks Now Rule the World and How to Take It Back. In the months following Palmer's testimony, the zeitgeist swerved in the direction he urged, at least momentarily. Newspaper articles in the fall of 1999 showed how billions in Russian money, some of it seemingly tied to an alleged crime boss, had landed in the Bank of New York. These sums startled Bill Clinton's administration, which readied tough new anti-money-laundering bills, designed to stiffen banking regulations. But the administration was in its last year, and passing any new law would have required a legislative slog and bull-rushing obstreperous lobbyists, so plans stalled.

The Clinton-era proposals would have remained an unvisited curio in the National Archives had Osama bin Laden not attacked. But in the days after the Twin Towers collapsed, George W. Bush's administration furiously scoured Washington for ideas to jam into the 342-page piece of legislation that would become the patriot Act. A sense of national panic created a brief moment for bureaucrats to realize previously shelved plans. Title III of the patriot Act, the International Money Laundering Abatement and Anti-terrorist Financing Act, was signed into law little more than a month after September 11.

This section of the bill was a monumental legislative achievement. Undeterred by the smoke clouds of crisis, representatives of the big banks had stalked the Senate, trying to quash the measure. Citibank officials reportedly got into shouting matches with congressional staffers in the hall. This anger reflected the force of the patriot Act. If a bank came across suspicious money transferred from abroad, it was now required to report the transfer to the government. A bank could face criminal charges for failing to establish sufficient safeguards against the flow of corrupt cash. Little wonder that banks fought fiercely against the imposition of so many new rules, which required them to bulk up their compliance divisions-and, more to the point, subjected them to expensive penalties for laxity.

Much of what Palmer had urged was suddenly the law of the land. But nestled in the patriot Act lay the handiwork of another industry's lobbyists. Every House district in the country has real estate, and lobbyists for that business had pleaded for relief from the patriot Act's monitoring of dubious foreign transactions. They all but conjured up images of suburban moms staking for sale signs on lawns, ill-equipped to vet every buyer. And they persuaded Congress to grant the industry a temporary exemption from having to enforce the new law.

The exemption was a gaping loophole-and an extraordinary growth opportunity for high-end real estate. For all the new fastidiousness of the financial system, foreigners could still buy penthouse apartments or mansions anonymously and with ease, by hiding behind shell companies set up in states such as Delaware and Nevada. Those states, along with a few others, had turned the registration of shell companies into a hugely lucrative racket-and it was stunningly simple to arrange such a Potemkin front on behalf of a dictator, a drug dealer, or an oligarch. According to Global Witness, a London-based anti-corruption NGO founded in 1993, procuring a library card requires more identification in many states than does creating an anonymous shell company.

Much of the money that might have snuck into banks before the patriot Act became law was now used to purchase property. The New York Times described the phenomenon in a series of exposés, published in 2015, called " Towers of Secrecy." Reporters discovered that condos in the ultra-luxe Time Warner Center at Columbus Circle in Manhattan were owned by a constellation of kleptocrats. One condo belonged to the family of a former Russian senator whose suspected ties to organized crime precluded him from legally entering Canada for a few years. A condo down the hall belonged to a Greek businessman who had recently been arrested in an anti-government-corruption sweep. The family of a former Colombian governor, imprisoned for self-enrichment while in office, owned a unit he could no longer visit.

These denizens, all of whom denied wrongdoing, made their high-priced purchases in what has become a common way. Nationwide, nearly half of homes worth at least $5 million, the Times found, were bought using shell companies. The proportion was even greater in Los Angeles and Manhattan (where more than 80 percent of Time Warner Center sales fit that description). As the Treasury Department put it in 2017, nearly one in three high-end real-estate purchases that it monitors involves an individual whom the government has been tracking as "suspicious." Yet somehow the presence of so many shady buyers has never especially troubled the real-estate industry or, for that matter, politicians. In 2013, New York City's then-mayor, Michael Bloomberg, asked, "Wouldn't it be great if we could get all the Russian billionaires to move here?"

The warm welcome has created a strange dissonance in American policy. Take the case of the aluminum magnate Oleg Deripaska, a character who has made recurring cameos in the investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. The State Department, concerned about Deripaska's connections to Russian organized crime (which he has denied), has restricted his travel to the United States for years. Such fears have not stood in the way of his acquiring a $42.5 million mansion on Manhattan's Upper East Side and another estate near Washington's Embassy Row.

Over time, the gap between the noble intentions of the patriot Act and the dirty reality of the property market became too wide to ignore. In 2016, Barack Obama's administration tested a program to bring the real-estate industry in line with the banks, compelling brokers to report foreign buyers, too. The ongoing program, piloted in Miami and Manhattan, could have become the scaffolding for a truly robust enforcement regime. But then the American presidency turned over, and a landlord came to power. Obama's successor liked selling condos to anonymous foreign buyers-and may have grown dependent on their cash.

In 2017, Reuters examined the sale of Trump Organization properties in Florida. It found that 77 of 2,044 units in the developments were owned by Russians. But that was likely an incomplete portrait. More than one-third of the units had been sold to corporate vehicles, which can readily hide the identity of the true owner. As Oliver Bullough remarks, "They might have belonged to Vladimir Putin, for all anyone else could know." Around the time that Trump took up occupancy in the White House, the patriot Act's "temporary" exemption for real estate entered its 15th year. Without anyone ever declaring it so, the ephemeral has been enshrined.

The war on kleptocracy had meanwhile been lurching forward on another front. If foreign plutocrats remained mostly unscathed as they made themselves at home in the U.S., American plutocrats eager to hide their fortunes abroad faced fresh trouble. In 2007, the United States experienced one of its bouts of moral clarity, jolted by the confessions of a banker named Bradley Birkenfeld, who came clean to the Department of Justice. (He would later tell his story in a book called Lucifer's Banker.) What he freely divulged to prosecutors were his client-recruiting efforts on behalf of UBS, the Swiss banking behemoth.

Birkenfeld described how he had ensconced himself in the gilded heart of the American plutocracy, attending yacht regattas and patronizing art galleries. He would mingle with the wealthy and strike up conversation. "What I can do for you is zero," he would say, and then pause before the punch line: "Actually, it's three zeroes. Zero income tax, zero capital-gains tax, and zero inheritance tax." Birkenfeld's unsubtle approach succeeded wildly, as did his bank. As part of an agreement with the Justice Department, UBS admitted to hiding assets totaling some $20 billion in American money.

The scale of the hidden cash spun Congress into a fury. In 2010, it passed the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (fatca), legislation with moral clout that belies its stodgy name. Never again would a foreign bank be able to hold American cash without notifying the IRS-or without risking a walloping fine.

Here was anti-corruption leadership at work-and U.S. waffling on display. According to one powerful strain of American exceptionalism, the nation boasts superior financial hygiene and a bedrock culture of good government. Indeed, the U.S. government has devoted more attention to money laundering than perhaps any other nation on the planet. But the bar isn't very high, and the vigilance has its limits. In 2011, the Obama administration sought to collect more information about foreigners' bank accounts and to share it with the relevant home countries. But banks-along with their lobbyists and intellectual mouthpieces-worked furiously to prevent the expansion. A fellow at the Heritage Foundation denounced the proposed standards as "fiscal imperialism." The president of the Florida Bankers Association said, "At a time when we are trying to create jobs and reduce the burden on businesses, this is the wrong issue." Bankers' associations in Texas, California, and New York followed suit. The effort went nowhere in Congress.

The pattern repeated itself when the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, following the original fatca example, took the congressional template and extended it: Each year, banks would report foreign accounts to the tax authorities in the account holders' home country. If every nation had signed on to the OECD standards, the effect would have been a hammerblow to tax havens, shattering the vital infrastructure that allows kleptocratic money to flow unnoticed. In the end, the United States was alone in refusing to join the OECD agreement, finalized in 2014.

This obstinacy stood to subvert everything the country had done to lead the fight against dirty money: While the U.S. can ask almost any other nation's banks for financial information about American citizens, it has no obligation to provide other countries with the same. "The United States had bullied the rest of the world into scrapping financial secrecy," Bullough writes, "but hadn't applied the same standards to itself." A Zurich-based lawyer vividly spelled out the consequences to Bloomberg: "How ironic-no, how perverse-that the USA, which has been so sanctimonious in its condemnation of Swiss banks, has become the banking secrecy jurisdiction du jour ... That 'giant sucking sound' you hear? It is the sound of money rushing to the USA."

Not long before the U.S. declined to sign on to the OECD standards, a branch office of the baronial Rothschild bank opened on the 12th floor of a building in Reno, Nevada, far away in miles and spirit from the home office in Paris. The bank's name wasn't announced on the exterior of the building or even listed in the lobby directory. Soon after the Reno outpost opened, one of the bank's managing directors introduced the new branch's services to potential clients in San Francisco. What made the presentation so memorable were the ideas included in a draft procured by Bloomberg. The script laid bare the reasons for wealthy foreigners to funnel money through Nevada: The state is the ideal place to hide money from governments and avoid paying U.S. taxes. The draft acknowledged a truth that bankers don't usually admit in public, which is that the United States has "little appetite" for helping foreign governments retrieve money laundered within its borders. In fact, it has grown into "the biggest tax haven in the world." (The firm said these statements were removed before the presentation was delivered, because they did not reflect the firm's real views.)

What changed wasn't just regulatory structure. The behavior of the American elite changed too. Members of the professional classes competed to sell their services to kleptocrats. In the course of that competition, they breezed past old ethical prohibitions, and the pressure rose to test the limits of the law. A collection of videos on the internet, filmed in 2014, illustrates this moral collapse. The clips never show the face of a man introduced as Ralph Kayser, a German who reveals only the most elemental details about himself, recited in lightly accented English. He has lined up a succession of meetings with 13 law firms in Manhattan, in which he engages in pleasantries and then announces his purpose. He works as an adviser to a government official in "one of these mineral-rich countries in West Africa," he explains. Over a long career, the official has grown quite wealthy. "Companies are eager to get hold of rare-earth or other minerals. And so they pay some special money for it. I wouldn't name it 'bribe.' I would say 'facilitation money.' "

Kayser's client, he continues, is getting older and-because the client's wife has always wanted a New York brownstone, and the client is in the market for a Gulfstream and a yacht-he has a sudden need to transport money into the United States. The client prefers that his purchases remain a tightly held secret, so as not to provoke attention back in his home country. "It would look, at least, very, very embarrassing." Kayser makes hardly any effort to disguise his desire to move suspect funds.

That is entirely by design. Kayser is actually a character devised by Global Witness, the London-based NGO. The actor is outfitted with a well-concealed camera to capture the American lawyers displaying their ethical proclivities. Although none of the lawyers Kayser visits takes him on as a client, and several say they need more information about the source of the official's wealth, only one flatly refuses to discuss ways to move the money. Kayser has not, it should be said, selected the law offices of Saul Goodman. His targets include attorneys at white-shoe firms.

Of course they understand the risks of moving suspect cash into New York. One lawyer tells Kayser, "I've gotta be very careful myself. I don't wanna do something [that] looks like I'm laundering money. And that would cost me my license, and-and I just don't do that." Just what sort of scrutiny he generally applies, though, isn't clear. "When I get money from my other clients," he admits, "it always comes in with some strange name on it. I don't even ask." Another lawyer blithely announces, "They don't send lawyers to jail, because we run the country ... We're still members of a privileged class in this country."

Global Witness conducted its experiment to point out Big Law's complicity in the spread of kleptocracy. But the footage also provides primary anthropology of an American elite. A profession like law has highly developed ethical codes, yet those codes appear to have receded in recent years. Even the most prestigious firms find themselves fretful about the survival of their high-priced business model, which was profoundly rattled by the 2008 financial crisis and the corporate cost-cutting that followed. Greedy impulses have surely always existed within the white-shoe world, but the sense of Darwinian struggle and the norms of a global elite have eroded boundaries. The same partners who shed underachieving colleagues more ruthlessly than they used to also seem primed to adopt a more permissive attitude toward clients whom they might once have rejected.

This decay has been on full display in Robert Mueller's investigation. We have seen how the firm Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, a sturdy pillar of the legal profession, placed itself in the service of kleptocracy. One partner at the firm from 2010 to 2018, Gregory Craig, had served as Barack Obama's White House counsel, the man responsible for safeguarding the integrity of the presidency. At Skadden, he oversaw the creation of a report that was used to justify Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych's arrest of his primary political opponent on what were widely viewed as highly dubious grounds. (The firm, according to testimony in Mueller's investigation, said privately that evidence to support the arrest was " virtually nonexistent. ") Another lawyer who worked for Skadden has pleaded guilty to lying to prosecutors during the Mueller team's probe of the firm's Ukrainian work.

The Ukrainians hired Skadden through a middleman, the now-jailed political consultant Paul Manafort. Once upon a time, it might have been possible to think of Manafort as a grubby outlier in Washington-the lobbyist with the lowest standards, willing to take on the most egregious clients. But Mueller has exposed just how tightly tethered Manafort's work on behalf of Ukrainian kleptocrats was to Washington's permanent elite. Manafort subcontracted some of his lobbying to the firm of Tony Podesta, arguably the most powerful Democratic influence-peddler of his generation. And Manafort employed Mercury Public Affairs, where he dealt with Vin Weber, a former Republican congressman and a former chairman of the National Endowment for Democracy.

America's fear of kleptocracy goes back to its founding. In 1785, Benjamin Franklin returned from Paris, where he had served as a representative of American interests. He brought home a bejeweled gift, which incited controversy. The grandest item in his possession, it was a portrait of Louis XVI, outlined by 408 diamonds and stored in a golden case. This present was often referred to as a snuffbox, a name that seemed intended to obscure its grandeur. It symbolized everything that Franklin's generation despised about Europe and its debasements. There, gift-giving was a standard diplomatic custom. But a gift might cloud the judgment of a public official, and risked undermining the allegiances of the recipient. It represented the possible elevation of personal gain over commitment to the public good.

The perils of corruption were an obsession of the Founders. In the summer of 1787, James Madison mentioned corruption in his notebook 54 times. To read the transcripts of the various constitutional conventions is to see just how much that generation worried about the moral quality of public behavior-and how much it wanted to create a system that defined corruption more expansively than the French or British systems had, and that fostered a political culture with higher ethical ambitions.

In her important history, Corruption in America, Zephyr Teachout, a legal scholar and liberal activist, argues that during the country's first 200 years, courts maintained the Founders' vigilance against corruption. For a good chunk of American history, a number of states criminalized lobbying in many forms, out of a sense that a loosening of standards would trigger a race to the bottom. That near-phobia now looks quaint, and also prescient. The political culture, the legal culture, the banking culture-so much of the culture of the self-congratulatory meritocratic elite-have long since abandoned such prudish ways.

The defining document of our era is the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision in 2010. The ruling didn't just legalize anonymous expenditures on political campaigns. It redefined our very idea of what constitutes corruption, limiting it to its most blatant forms: the bribe and the explicit quid pro quo. Justice Anthony Kennedy's majority opinion crystallized an ever more prevalent ethos of indifference-the collective shrug in response to tax avoidance by the rich and by large corporations, the yawn that now greets the millions in dark money spent by invisible billionaires to influence elections.

In other words, the United States has legitimized a political economy of shadows, and it has done so right in step with a global boom in people hoping to escape into the shadows.

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American collusion with kleptocracy comes at a terrible cost for the rest of the world. All of the stolen money, all of those evaded tax dollars sunk into Central Park penthouses and Nevada shell companies, might otherwise fund health care and infrastructure. (A report from the anti-poverty group One has argued that 3.6 million deaths each year can be attributed to this sort of resource siphoning.) Thievery tramples the possibilities of workable markets and credible democracy. It fuels suspicions that the whole idea of liberal capitalism is a hypocritical sham: While the world is plundered, self-righteous Americans get rich off their complicity with the crooks.
This article appears in the March 2019 print edition with the headline "How Kleptocracy Came to America."
The Founders were concerned that venality would become standard procedure, and it has. Long before suspicion mounted about the loyalties of Donald Trump, large swaths of the American elite-lawyers, lobbyists, real-estate brokers, politicians in state capitals who enabled the creation of shell companies-had already proved themselves to be reliable servants of a rapacious global plutocracy. Richard Palmer was right: The looting elites of the former Soviet Union were far from rogue profiteers. They augured a kleptocratic habit that would soon become widespread. One bitter truth about the Russia scandal is that by the time Vladimir Putin attempted to influence the shape of our country, it was already bending in the direction of his.

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When the U.S.S.R. collapsed, Washington bet on the global spread of democratic capitalist values-and lost. For two years, in the early 1990s, Richard Palmer served as the CIA station chief in the United States' Moscow embassy. The events unfolding around him-the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the rise of Russia-were so chaotic, so traumatic and exhilarating, that they mostly eluded clearheaded analysis.

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An interview with the documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis

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"It's 'fuck off' to everything," says Adam Curtis (pictured below), describing public sentiment today. The British documentarist sees himself as an optimist amid dystopians, and as a classical journalist whose medium happens to be film. For 30 years he has produced a rich body of documentaries on politics and society for the BBC-and in the process, has emerged as a cult-hero to young thinkers trying to comprehend a chaotic world.

The films themselves are a collage of archival footage, words on screen and fast montages that create sprawling, idealistic-yet-dark narratives on the changing relationships among people, politics, philosophy, psychology, economics and power. They cut quickly between different tones and topics to resemble a train of thought or a rich conversation between friends. The mirror he holds up is disturbing: a reality that is freakish, demented, deformed.
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His latest film, "HyperNormalisation" (the trailer of which is below) argues that stability has been preserved by ideas that are somehow both difficult to believe and almost impossible to escape. As part of The Economist' s Open Future initiative, we interviewed Mr Curtis at his work studio in London. The conversation glided from individualism and data to populism and "this sense of doom" that people feel. Fittingly for a discussion that touched upon the superficiality of media, we are publishing the transcript with only the lightest of edits. It is 8,500 words, or around 35 minutes to read. The less committed can google "youtube epic card trick" and affirm Mr Curtis's theses instead.

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The Economist: What is HyperNormalisation?
Adam Curtis: "HyperNormalisation" is a word that was coined by a brilliant Russian historian who was writing about what it was like to live in the last years of the Soviet Union. What he said, which I thought was absolutely fascinating, was that in the 80s everyone from the top to the bottom of Soviet society knew that it wasn't working, knew that it was corrupt, knew that the bosses were looting the system, knew that the politicians had no alternative vision. And they knew that the bosses knew they knew that. Everyone knew it was fake, but because no one had any alternative vision for a different kind of society, they just accepted this sense of total fakeness as normal. And this historian, Alexei Yurchak, coined the phrase "HyperNormalisation" to describe that feeling.

I thought "that's a brilliant title" because, although we are not in any way really like the Soviet Union, there is a similar feeling in our present day. Everyone in my country and in America and throughout Europe knows that the system that they are living under isn't working as it is supposed to; that there is a lot of corruption at the top. But whenever the journalists point it out, everyone goes "Wow that's terrible!" and then nothing happens and the system remains the same.

There is a sense of everything being slightly unreal; that you fight a war that seems to cost you nothing and it has no consequences at home; that money seems to grow on trees; that goods come from China and don't seem to cost you anything; that phones make you feel liberated but that maybe they're manipulating you but you're not quite sure. It's all slightly odd and slightly corrupt.

So I was trying to make a film about where that feeling came from, and I went way back into the past to do that. I borrowed the title from Mr Alexei Yurchak and called it "HyperNormalisation". I wasn't trying to say "Oh, we're just like the Soviet Union collapsing". I was just trying to show the same feeling of unreality, and also that those in charge know that we know that they don't know what's going on. That same feeling is pervasive in our society, and that's what the film is about.
The Economist: Since "HyperNormalisation" came out in 2016, Donald Trump has entered the White House and populism has spread even deeper across Europe. Is that an interruption of the system you describe or a symptom of it?
Mr Curtis: No one is really sure what Trump represents. My working theory is that he's part of the pantomime-isation of politics. Every morning Donald Trump wakes up in the White House, he tweets something absolutely outrageous which he knows the liberals will get upset by, the liberals read his tweets and go "This is terrible, this is outrageous," and then tell each other via social media how terrible it all is. It becomes a feedback loop in which they are locked together. In my mind, it's like they're together in a theatre watching a pantomime villain. The pantomime villain comes forward into the light, looks at them and says something terrible, and they go "Boo!!". Meanwhile, outside the theatre, real power is carrying on but no one is really analysing it.

This is the problem with a lot of journalism, especially liberal journalism at the moment. It's locked together with those people in the theatre. If you look at the New York Times, for example, it's continually about that feedback loop between what Trump has said and the reaction of liberal elements in the society. It's led to a great narrowing of journalism. So in a way, he is part of the hypernormal situation because it's a politics of pantomime locked together with its critics. And it becomes a perpetual, infernal motion system, which is a distraction. It's not a conspiracy. It's a distraction from what's really happening in the world. I would argue that there is a sense-in a lot of liberal journalism-of unreality. They're locked into describing the pantomime politics and they're not looking to what Mr Michael Pence is really up to, and what's really happening outside the theatre.

The other interesting thing about Trump is that he doesn't actually do that much. I know that he's brought in some bad things. But what might be happening in the structure of power in America is happening outside that world. So in a sense, he is slightly hypernormal. I don't know. No one really knows about Trump, but he's got the liberals locked in with him. There's a certain sense of co-dependency between him and the liberal journalists, which I think is corroding the ability of journalism to do a proper critical analysis of the world.

They have their own pantomime hysteria about Russia, for example. I'm sure Russia has done some terrible things but that's not the reason people voted for Trump. People voted for Trump because they're really pissed off. They feel marginalised and anxious about their future, and they wanted to send a message, and the liberals are not paying any attention to that.
The Economist: Let's talk about that message and why it's needed. You've made films about Alan Greenspan and Isaiah Berlin. What do you think the great liberal thinkers have got right and what do you think they've got wrong?
Mr Curtis: What no one saw coming was the effect of individualism on politics. It's our fault. We all want to be individuals and we don't want to see ourselves as parts of trade unions, political parties or religious groups. We want to be individuals who express ourselves and are in control of our own destiny. With the rise of that hyper-individualism in society, politics got screwed. That sense of being part of a movement that could challenge power and change the world began to die away and was replaced by a technocratic management system.

That's the thing that I'm really fascinated by. I think the old mass democracies sort of died in the early 90s and have been replaced by a system that manages us as individuals. Because the fundamental problem is that politicians can't manage individuals, they need us to join parties and support them and let them represent us as a group identified with them. What modern management systems worked out, especially when computer networks came into being, was that you could actually manage people as groups by using data to understand how they were behaving in the mass, but you could create a system that allowed them to keep on thinking that they were individuals.

This is the genius of what happened with computer networks. Using feedback loops, pattern matching and pattern recognition, those systems can understand us quite simply. That we are far more similar to each other than we might think, that my desire for an iPhone as a way of expressing my identity is mirrored by millions of other people who feel exactly the same. We're not actually that individualistic. We're very similar to each other and computers know that dirty secret. But because we feel like we're in control when we hold the magic screen, it allows us to feel like we're still individuals. And that's a wonderful way of managing the world.

Its downside is that it's a static world. It doesn't have any vision of the future because the way it works is by constantly monitoring what you did yesterday and the day before, and the day before that. And monitoring what I did yesterday and the day before and the day before that and doing the same to billions of other people. And then looking at patterns and then saying: "If you liked that, you'll like this".

They're constantly playing back to you the ghosts of your own behaviour. We live in a modern ghost story. We are haunted by our past behaviour played back to us through the machines in its comparison to millions of other people's behaviour. We are guided and nudged and shaped by that. It's benign in a way and it's an alternative to the old kind of politics. But it locks us into a static world because it's always looking to the past. It can never imagine something new. It can't imagine a future that hasn't already existed. And it's led to a sense of atrophy and repetition. It's "Groundhog Day". And because it doesn't allow mass politics to challenge power, it has allowed corruption to carry on without it really being challenged properly.

The problem I have with a lot of investigative journalism, is that they always say: "There should be more investigative journalism" and I think, "When you tell me that a lot of rich people aren't paying tax, I'm shocked but I'm not surprised because I know that. I don't want to read another article that tells me that". What I want is an article that tells me why, when I'm told that, nothing happens and nothing changes. And no one has ever explained that to me.

I think it has something to do with this technocratic world because it doesn't have the capacity to respond to that kind of thing. It has the capacity to manage us very well. It's benign but it doesn't have the capacity to challenge the rich and the powerful within that system, who use it badly for their own purposes. That's the downside and we're beginning to get fed up with it. And that's allowed those on the margins of society to come in and start kicking, and we have no idea what to do about them.
The Economist: You want to read an article about why things don't change after injustice is exposed. It could be that the kind of measure that it would take to repatriate money hidden on islands and sort out all this injustice would require a very bold and radical set of proposals. But proposals that are bold and radical are always a challenge to stability.
Mr Curtis: Yes, what I'm complaining about is stability.
The Economist: But people prefer stability to poverty.
Mr Curtis: People prefer practically anything to poverty. But you'll find that it's those who are in poverty who actually wanted change now. The people in West Virginia and Sunderland, who are having a shit time, are the people who voted for Trump and Brexit. But yes, the main part of this is stability and it's interesting that the mantra of this technocratic system of management is the word "risk", which if you do a word analysis, didn't really exist in political coverage until the mid 80s. It comes from finance, but as economics colonised the whole of politics, that word spread everywhere, and everything becomes about risk-analysis and how to stop bad things happening in the future.

Politics gave up saying that it could change the world for the better and became a wing of management, saying instead that it could stop bad things from happening. The problem with that is that it invites all the politicians to imagine all the bad things that could possibly happen-at which point, you get into a nightmare world where people imagine terrible things, and say that you have to build a system to stop them.

In answer to your main question, yes it requires a big radical step, it's called political power and politicians do have it. If you look at what happened in 2008, both the governments in Britain and America had the power to sign a massive cheque to rescue the banks and they did it. That's enormous power. You're right, people are frightened of instability. But the job of a good politician is to give them a story that says, "Yes this is risky, but it's also thrilling and it might lead to something extraordinary". We don't have any politicians like that. They're emerging on the right and they're using the story of nationalism. Unless the left actually comes with a stronger story, I'm afraid the right are going to rise up and become even stronger than they are now.

The opposite of stability is a politics of imagination. There is a yearning that there must be something more than the repetition we hear every day that "if you like this you'll like that". I think it's coming but I take your point, you are right, there is fear of that. But the job of a good politician is to say, "Yes, I understand your fears but look, it's not right and we can do better than this". I'm waiting for a politician on the left to come along and say that. So far, I haven't seen one. Have you?
The Economist: No.
Mr Curtis: They're managers at the moment, and that's the problem.
The Economist: You don't like being haunted by data from the past that's used to try and predict the future.
Mr Curtis: Right.
The Economist: Well, it's not very romantic and it doesn't create very compelling interview copy, but throughout recent history, incremental changes have made a lot of people's lives a lot better all over the world.
Mr Curtis: I'm not denying it. But that has colonised all of politics. Those kinds of economic policies have a very good role to play. But in the 1990s that attitude spread and captured the whole of politics and at that point, they became managers. What we lost was the idea of politics where you tell a simple, powerful and romantic story of where you are going and what it's all for.

These are questions that people do ask themselves. People ask why they can't have a better standard of living, but they also have this thing in their heads asking what it's all about. One of the reasons we have politics is because it gives answers to those sorts of questions. In Britain, for example, the Labour Party was born out of religion because it will give you a sense of being part of something that will go on past your own existence.

If you live in a world driven by individualism, what it doesn't answer is what goes on when you die. I made a film about that arch-individualist Ayn Rand. She was interviewed towards the end of her life by an American television journalist who asked her what she thought would happen when she died and she said: "I won't die. The world will die".

It sounds silly, but what she actually means is true if you are an arch-individualist. If you are complete within yourself and don't owe anything to anything else, then the whole world is in your head, and when you die it will go. I often think that one of the reasons why there is so much pessimism around, especially among the baby-boomer generation, is that they cannot face the terrible fact of their own mortality. So what they have to do is project that onto the whole planet.

If you take climate change, which is a serious issue, it's been co-opted by pessimistic baby-boomers and turned into a dark nightmarish scenario, rather than saying that we need to restructure power and resources in a way that could make the world a better place. That would have been a really good way to deal with climate change. Instead, it got possessed by a dystopia which I think reflects that generation's fear of mortality because they can't see anything going on beyond their own death.

To go back to your original question, yes you're right but you're also wrong. The central thing in politics is emotion. It really is. It's about saying: "We are together in this existence, in this moment, in the country, in this society, and we're going to build something that will go on past us." And politics did that. Mrs Thatcher did that. And what the people who voted for Brexit and for Trump are asking is: "What is the future? What is this existence for?" If you live in Sunderland or in West Virginia surrounded by people taking opioids, you want to know what it's all for. And these are the questions that politics has to answer. They're the questions that religion used to answer and that science used to try and answer, and it is tech's Achilles heel.
The Economist: Who's going to answer those questions?
Mr Curtis: I think it's going to come out of religion, I really do. I think there's going to be a resurgence of religion. It's very difficult to talk about this because you just get shot down, but there are parts of Islam which are trying to deal with this.
The Economist: Isn't religion an organised panic about death?
Mr Curtis: No. I'm not religious but I don't share the liberal dislike of religion because I think its fundamental point is to reassure us in the face of our own death. That's what religion does, it gives you a sense that you're part of something that's moving onwards. It reassures people. Death is frightening and for a generation who believe that they are alone and were liberated by that idea and had a really good time, to be alone in the face of death is very frightening. So I have a funny feeling that religion might come back.
The Economist: I hope you don't think I'm being reductive, but it sounds as if religion is a bit of a placebo when it comes to mortality.
Mr Curtis: Well, you are being reductive because placebos are actually as powerful as real things. As we know, in the three-part episode of South Park called "Imaginationland", Trey Parker very powerfully argues that imagination has been more powerful in shaping the world that we exist in now than anything else. And he's right. And that's what we've lost to be honest.

The Economist: This reminds me of your film "The Attic," when you were talking about Churchill and Thatcher using myths to inspire the nation and those myths running out of control.
Mr Curtis: Well, myths do run out of control.
The Economist: Because they're not real, they're not sustainable.
Mr Curtis: Well, real isn't sustainable. Look, hang on, countries are an act of imagination aren't they?
The Economist: Go on.
Mr Curtis: Everything is an act of imagination. Politics is about imagining futures and having the power to bring a collective group of people with you who give you the power to make that happen. It's what Churchill did during the second world war. That doesn't mean that you can't say that there were aspects of the second world war that were not good. The problem in our country is that myths have washed over the complexity. I don't think you're being reductive but I think you're reflecting the managerial dryness of our time.
The Economist: I've been accused of that before.
Mr Curtis: Well, it's the realness of our time. What I suspect is that it's beginning to crack and that what people are waiting for are some big stories. Nationalism is the easiest story to go for. And what I'm speculating about is that there might be stories that we haven't even imagined yet. You know very well that in 200 years the world won't look much like the world we're living in now. But those who run the world now don't want you to think that. They want you to think that this is going to go on forever because that's the philosophy of the managerial system. If that managerial system colonises everything, then everything atrophies.

There's a sense of repetition and that repetition works very well for some people but not for others. But I have a sense that there's a romantic age coming. I see it in the music that I like. I can see it in the weird industrial music that I find myself listening to. You can see people taking noise and turning it into big, romantic, sweeping things. It gives you a sense of dynamism and nothing is dynamic at the moment.
The Economist: Listening to you I have two thoughts. Please tell me if I'm going off on a tangent. On one hand, the system we're used to obviously isn't working. In my mind, globalisation is an insurance policy against world war three, because if you have assets and supply chains in another country you have an incentive not to bomb it. Now you can no longer win an election on that platform.
Mr Curtis: That's gone.
The Economist: So what we have now is emotionally unsustainable, people aren't buying into it anymore.
Mr Curtis: Yeah.
The Economist: But, my second instinct comes from the Talking Heads song "Heaven" where David Byrne sings "Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens". Because if you did have a political system which disincentivised war and alleviated poverty at unprecedented rates, as well as provided people with more wealth and more individual freedom than they had ever had before, it would get very boring very fast.
Mr Curtis: Yes, but people like me are not arguing for that kind of utopia.
The Economist: I'm not saying it's a utopia. I'm saying that if you did find the least-worst political philosophy it would instantly become very stale and boring because that's what happens.
Mr Curtis: Things change and people like me like things changing. Let's take your example. Yes, that is probably what globalisation began as, but look at what it has become. I have this theory that what globalisation has now degraded to is a giant scam that allows very big corporations to pay no tax. That's its real function-while the sense of moral purpose has dropped away. It's a system that has become corroded. All I'm arguing is that just what you were saying: that it's just not working.

What I'm asking for is a system that acts dynamically, which is what politics should do. It should look at the situation, like a good journalist does, and realise that people feel that it isn't working because you and I know that's true. We can argue over whether it's working technically or not, but people feel like it isn't. And when politicians are faced by that, there's no way back. So that may open the door to what I see as the real role of politics, a dynamic responsive way.

I've always liked "War and Peace" where the two central figures are Napoleon and a Russian general called Kutuzov. Napoleon thinks you can control the whole world and make it your own. But Kutuzov, who everyone derides in the novel and who is in charge of defending Moscow, says "No, you can't control the world because it's chaos-but there are moments within the chaos that you can use for your own purpose". That's what politics is about. It's exciting and dynamic. It's got a narrative to it and, like good journalism, it responds to what's happening.

And really, that's all I'm asking for, because politics and journalism have become static and repetitive. I know within microseconds what an article is going to say, what a television program is going to be like and what most music is going to be like. I'm bored and I get bored, I think lots of people get bored, because I'm quite normal. That leads to a degrading of everything, which allows corruption to happen. Whereas, if you have a dynamic responsive system, there is a sense that you're going somewhere even if you never get there. I'm quite conservative in that way, because I'm saying that the things that politics aims for has stopped and I want it back.
The Economist: He saved Moscow by burning it down.
Mr Curtis: (Laughs) Well you know, sometimes terrible things happen. But Kutuzov responded.
The Economist: It's not what I would have done but it worked.
Mr Curtis: Well, you're not a general.

I'm using humour.
The Economist: I know.
Mr Curtis: But you would agree that politics is not about desperately trying to hold the world stable. You can't hold the world stable in the face of history. The ideology of our time, especially amongst the liberal middle-classes, even more than the conservatives, has embraced the idea of trying to hold things stable and static.
The Economist: It's interesting that you should say that, because if you think about well-educated, progressive young people who desperately want to make the world a better place, it's all about mitigation. On the micro level, almost all the young people I know really want to stop Brexit, and on a macro level they want to stop climate change. Both of those huge projects are about reverting to a status-quo.
Mr Curtis: That's why I'm deeply suspicious of both of them. Not because I'm pro-Brexit and not because I don't believe in climate change. I just think the response has been co-opted by that liberal managerial mindset, which is sort of sad. One of the reasons why you don't get a response to climate change reports is because they're dressed up as managerial things. They don't say that this could be part of an extraordinary new kind of future.
The Economist: With Brexit and with climate change, if you say "We can adapt and turn this into an opportunity," it feels like you're rewarding and absolving the worst elements of humanity-like jingoism and the impulse to pollute-with impunity. I know you don't mean that...
Mr Curtis: Yes, you get criticised for that. And that's why they maintain their static position, because any voice that asks for change gets immediately tarred. What I'm saying is that you take the technologies that are emerging and push them much further with investment from the state, and you have a giant Marshall Plan. It would require some people giving up their positions of leisured happiness. In an age of individualism, it's very difficult to get people to surrender some of themselves to an ideal that's bigger than them. But if you do want to change the world, you're going to have to do that, to be honest. I don't like the word "leader," but I do think that what we're looking for are people who inspire us to think beyond the world we have at the moment.
The Economist: You want us to be more ambitious and more willing to stick our necks out...
Mr Curtis: And more caring at the same time.
The Economist: You've also made lots of films about people who have tried to make the world a better place and who ended up making it worse by accident.
Mr Curtis: That's no reason to stop.
The Economist: Indeed, that's no reason to stop.
Mr Curtis: What I'm trying to analyse in my films is why things went wrong, and I've constantly tried to show that it's to do with power. That's a word that's almost never discussed at the present moment. There's enormous power being exercised on us and we have no idea how to challenge it. As you say, everybody feels like this thing isn't working. That's because certain people have power and they're exercising it for their own interests and not for us.
The Economist: What you really nailed at the end of "The Monkey In the Machine and the Machine In the Monkey"...
Mr Curtis: Oh yes, you liked the monkey film.
The Economist: What you really nailed was the point you made at the end when we see the people on the escalator in London. You were talking about Richard Dawkins and "The Selfish Gene" and you suggested that the reason we find these fatalistic ideas about genetics appealing is because they let us off the hook for all our failed attempts to make the world a better place.
Mr Curtis: Yes! Exactly!
The Economist: Right, so you know exactly why it's so hard...
Mr Curtis: Yes, but the point isn't that we should stop. Science has gone from being an optimistic source to a pessimistic source. Politics has gone from being dynamic to being static and managerial. And tech has brought in a system of feedback management that's so seductive that we're trapped. In the films I'm making at the moment, I'm going to try and explain why we live in this strange world where everything seems very unreal, but it's all very static and whatever we do has no consequences. We've been led into a world which I think is incredibly dangerous and terribly sad, because we could be trying to change the world. But it's difficult.

Yes, it's difficult. I'm not trying to deny that.
The Economist: Of course not, I know. What I'm trying to get at with my excessively antagonistic line of questioning is that...we've been talking for 40 minutes, I've read a lot of your other interviews and I think I've watched almost all your films...
Mr Curtis: Bloody hell. You're a stalker.
The Economist: You're very good at telling us how things go wrong.
Mr Curtis: Yeah, that's a journalist's job.
The Economist: But can you give us anything to be optimistic about?
Mr Curtis: What I've just said is that you should be optimistic.
The Economist: You should be optimistic.
Mr Curtis: No, you should be optimistic...I am optimistic.
The Economist: Why are you optimistic?
Mr Curtis: Because I think that human beings, in themselves, are dynamic. They're born, they live, they die. We've got the idea of a dynamic thing built into us. At the moment, everything seems stuck but there is a growing rejection of that. It's happening at the margins. The liberals don't know how to deal with it but it's going to change. What my films try to do is to show how these things happen and that what's often asserted as fact is often ideology. That's all. That's all I try and do.

You can't ask a journalist, whose job is to analyse and pull apart something, you can't ask that person to resynthesise it. That's the job of a politician. The political class have given up. They've become managers and they're being manipulated on a gigantic scale by those whose interest it is to keep them as managers. They're beginning to feel the walls shaking around them, and they should take notice or somebody else who's not very nice is going to come in and take those reins of power and lead us to somewhere we don't want to go to. I'm optimistic because...well, you made me pessimistic when you talked about young people but I'm not sure you're right.
The Economist: Wait, what did I say?
Mr Curtis: You said young people only want to stop Brexit and stop climate change.
The Economist: Ah yes, but I qualified it by saying "Well-educated, engaged young people".
Mr Curtis: I think that's true of the millennial. When I did "HyperNormalisation" I found that it cut through to the generation below the millennials. I don't know how it happened: 18- and 19-year-olds are interested in power and the idea that you can challenge power, rather than just trying to hold things down. I think that's a generational shift. And in that sense, I'm optimistic. Although, this is on the basis of talking to people who come and see my films. So it's not very scientific. We're living in a very pessimistic age where those in power are either pessimistic because they believe it or pessimistic because it's useful, and people like me want to challenge that.
The Economist: By exploring how things went wrong...
Mr Curtis: Not by saying "We should be happy and nice," but by saying "Let's look back and see how they actually went wrong". Think of the neo-conservatives. The idea that we are faced by a giant terrorist threat was not true. It was an ideologically-driven exaggeration of something that was true. And I was just trying to show how pessimism happens when dark things run out of control.
The Economist: Will you forgive me for saying something that is horrendously judgmental and sweeping?
Mr Curtis: Go on. I've been doing that, so you might as well do it as well.
The Economist: When you were saying that as a journalist you show people how things went wrong, and the job of the politicians to sort everything out. Well, that's how we all feel, mate. We're all waiting for somebody else to give us something to hope for. We're all waiting for a white knight.
Mr Curtis: No, I don't agree with that. I think what we've bought into is an idea that comes out of Silicon Valley and from the hippies, that leadership is always bad and that collective wisdom should decide things. But that leaves you in a very static society where you're talked down to by the commentariat and no one address what you actually feel.

The day after the Brexit vote, I thought that if I was an ambitious left-wing politician, I would have immediately gone to Sunderland and said, "Yes, you're absolutely right. But the people you've voted for are going to con you." And I'd have kept saying that, and a year later I'd be saying, "See, I was right. They conned you." That's what a good politician should have done. But have you noticed that none of them did?
The Economist: They would have been accused of patronising the electorate.
Mr Curtis: Not if they put it in populist terms.
The Economist: You mean if they did it with a northern accent?
Mr Curtis: No. You connect emotionally with them and say what you feel, which brings us to a very interesting question. Is populism always dangerous?
The Economist: I don't know.
Mr Curtis: A lot of the left think it is. They think it's a degraded version of politics, as if it were a drug that turned voters into zombies. That's how it's portrayed. You could argue that that might be snobbish. That what you call "populism" is just anger. As I said, they were given a button that said "fuck off" and they pressed it because they had been offered no alternatives.
The Economist: They didn't just say "fuck off" to David Cameron...
Mr Curtis: It's "fuck off" to everything.
The Economist: Yeah, including the Polish family down the street who had nothing to do with all of this decay.
Mr Curtis: OK, racism...how much racism do you think was in Brexit?
The Economist: I have no idea, but...
Mr Curtis: Wait-can I be The Economist for a moment? What was the highest level that UKIP ever got to in the polls? It was about 9%, or something like that.
The Economist: 15%, maybe.*
Mr Curtis: What was the proportion for Brexit?
The Economist: 52%.
Mr Curtis: Of course, racism is in there but it's not the driving force.
The Economist: I'm not saying that at all.
Mr Curtis: What is racism? Racism is born out of fear. It's not the old racism of the British Empire that claims to have biological superiority, it's just fear. They're frightened, they're anxious, no one's responding to this. And I'm not being patronising, but haven't you noticed that since Trump and Brexit, none of the left have gone out and tried to really connect with that feeling, and do something with it that's positive. They've behaved like frightened managers.

I have this working theory that the internet is the HR department for the world. I know because I work for a big corporation. If somebody behaves badly HR swoops in, your desk is cleared and you're booted out of the building within hours. They never question the system that made that person behave badly. The HR people would never do that. And that's exactly what the internet is doing at the moment. It identifies bad peoples, swoops in and ejects them. What it never does is question the system and in that way the internet reflects the corporatism of the people who invented it.
The Economist: But most of us are like that, aren't we? We're very prone to be reactionary...
Mr Curtis: Why are we prone to that? That's your view.
The Economist: I suspect that these Silicon Valley platforms wouldn't be so popular if they didn't reflect our desire for quick justice and our lack of curiosity about the people we disagree with.
Mr Curtis: No. When somebody like Harvey Weinstein behaves the way he does, we are shocked and we think he should be punished. There are different ways that feeling can be expressed socially by journalists, politicians and activists. But if you look at the way the MeToo movement is going, it's behaving increasingly like an HR department. There are very few people saying, "Maybe this is to do with the system of funding in Hollywood, and how it's become so ruthless or distorted that women of all ages are forced to behave almost like prostitutes in order to get the money to make films". No one is analysing that.

I was talking to a Hollywood producer last night and he says that nothing has changed. So what I'm saying is that the anger is genuine but it can be taken in all sorts of interesting ways. And it's the same with the Brexit anger, you can take it in different ways. If you really want to change the world you've got to go and connect with people who sometimes aren't very nice. You've got to go and talk to racists. Why not? It's interesting, isn't it?

But instead, we say they're terrible and they're frightening and we retreat. And I just think that's lazy and we're waiting for somebody who has the courage to go out and actually connect with the people. The thing that really pisses me off is when the liberals say the people who voted for Brexit were stupid. They're not stupid, they won.
The Economist: Did they win? You said they got conned. I've been conned in the past and getting conned doesn't mean that you're stupid, but it does mean that you didn't get what you wanted.
Mr Curtis: They may have been conned about some of the reasons to vote for Brexit, but that vote was still an expression of what they feel, which is a sort of anger. One of the most cowardly things I think is all these nice middle-class people I know who are going to become German citizens. You fucking cowards. If you really think this is wrong, why don't you stay here and fight for what you think is good? Fuck off. You want to go and live in Germany? It's a retreat. But they're somehow so proud of it. It's part of the pessimistic mood and nobody has managed to explain to me why the middle classes are so pessimistic. It was when someone showed me "The Handmaid's Tale"...have you seen The Handmaid's Tale"?
The Economist: I'm afraid not.
Mr Curtis: It's gruesome. It's absolute shit. You'll probably love it because it gives you a dystopia. Somebody told me it's peak dystopia. You can't go further than this. It's torture porn for the baby-boomer generation. Sorry, I'm off the point.
The Economist: No, you're not off the point. One element, which I think is under-discussed, is the one described by David Graeber, the anthropologist who exposed the idea that 40% of us believe our jobs either make no difference to the world or make it slightly worse.
Mr Curtis: I've met him...
The Economist:...I interviewed him a few months ago and it generated lots of traffic. Everybody loved reading about "bullshit jobs". Perhaps the reason the liberal middle-class is so pessimistic is because a lot of them suspect that what they do adds little or no value to the economy around them, and that because of AI or another recession, there will be some kind of reckoning when we realise that our economy has turned millions of workers into superfluous people.
Mr Curtis: Maybe there's a sense that they're living on a precarious edge...
The Economist: ...and we worry that our nice middle-class lives are unsustainable because of everything that's going on in the world. That might be one of the reasons why so many people are so pessimistic.
Mr Curtis: I agree with Graeber. I've always thought that most people's jobs aren't their real jobs. Their real job is to go shopping. That's your function in this society. After 9/11, I think Bush told everybody to go shopping because that's the way to rescue a society. But it's more than what you're saying. People feel that this is all slightly strange and unreal.

When China put all its money into dollars, it allowed America to fight the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq with no real financial consequences in their own country. It was the first time in history that they had ever managed to do that. It's fascinating. Have you noticed that one of the strangest things in our time is that since 2001, we've known that there's this terrible war going on in Afghanistan, we've known that there's this terrible war going on in Iraq, but it just doesn't seem to have any consequences here-unlike the Vietnam War, where they had to borrow so much money and raise so much in taxes that it caused a financial crisis, which led to Nixon letting money go free, which is where we are now. There's none of that. Meanwhile, goods come from China and cost nothing.
The Economist: One of the points that Graeber makes is that people with "bullshit jobs," who essentially get paid to do nothing, is that while you might think that they would be happy because being paid to do nothing seems utopian. But really those people are consumed by guilt and fear.
Mr Curtis: And a sense of "What is this all for?".
The Economist: Exactly. People want to exist for a reason.
Mr Curtis: Yes, they do. They really do!
The Economist: Indeed. And if you told a friend that we're being paid to do nothing, they would say: "Oh, lucky you".
Mr Curtis: But actually, you know that psychologically we want to do something that has a purpose.
The Economist: We need a story.
Mr Curtis: Yes. That's really central to human beings. It really is. It's central to politics and it's central to journalism. And those things have atrophied because we live in a world in which there are no stories.

The key thing you have to realise about the machines is that they don't look at us as a narrative. They look at us in a way that's outside of time. They take everything that happened from all different times and they slap that data together, and it's just about correlations. It has no narrative to it whatsoever. And we are trapped in that non-nutritive world. I'm sorry if that's pretentious, but it's a world that doesn't in any way respond to what you just talked about. What's this for? Why am I doing this? And the journalism doesn't tell us stories about that, it just repeats opinions.

It's also a world trapped in endless loops from the past. And you could argue that people like me are part of the problem because what do I do? I have masses of archives from the BBC from the last 50 years sitting in my edit room, and I constantly rework it and play it back to you in different ways, as everyone does now. Looked at Instagram recently? It's images from the past constantly being played back to you. I wanted to do a show with Massive Attack-well, I did do a show with Massive Attack, but it didn't quite work out the way I wanted it to, where you were going to be encased in this world of images to give you a sense of being trapped in this two-dimensional world.

To go back to your point, I think that is why people feel this sense of precariousness and this sense of doom. They know that it's all a bit odd, but no one explains what that oddness is. That's what I think journalism should be doing. Why is it so odd? Why do you feel so strange? There's a jangly-ness at the back of people's minds at the moment. You can feel it yourself. Is this really going to go on? Where's it going? When does this change? No one is explaining those feelings, which is what "HyperNormalisation" was sort of trying to do in its own little way. Sorry, I do tend to rant.
The Economist: That's quite alright. It might take a long time to transcribe.
Mr Curtis: That's what I'm apologising for. I'll keep it shorter now. Go on.
The Economist: I have a lot here. You can kick me out if you want.
Mr Curtis: Go on.
The Economist: Instagram is the worst social-media platform for your mental health, because it constantly exposes you to futures and pasts that you can't experience.
Mr Curtis: And you're frightened that you're losing out.
The Economist: You feel a constant sense of loss...
Mr Curtis: Even though you know it's probably not true.
The Economist: And you scroll back into the past and eulogise the times when you might not have been happy, but you represented yourself as happy. You were just saying that you were like Instagram, and that you might be part of the problem.

The Economist: You're not going to like this, but when you were talking about our culture's sense of pessimism and its suspicion towards new ideas, you reminded me of Jordan Peterson and his rants about post-modernism and the idea that there's no narrative or authoritative truth to cling to anymore. The Economist: He taps into the feelings you tap into.
Mr Curtis: I am. The consequence of that technology is that it displays a sadness to us of missed opportunities. that's what you're really saying, isn't it? It's not designed to be like that, but I get that feeling when I go back through old footage. And an optimistic vision of the future is something that learns to shed that sadness. Maybe we're getting trapped by those feelings. Maybe that does explain the pessimism. There's something deep going on in our society and all novels are dystopian now. Those are my musings. I think you're right, that there's something in the technology that plays back two-dimensional versions of things that have gone.

Mr Curtis: Jordan Peterson is interesting. A journalist I know took me along to see him talk. He's doing that thing of fusing science and religion and he's doing it very effectively. And I looked at the audience and thought, "These are not the people I would like to spend much time with." They're all a certain type of man, with a far-away, serious look in their eyes. I wasn't instinctively hating of him. I thought he was truthful to himself. He was trying to express a truth about what a lot of people feel, and doing so articulately, and trying to find a series of symbols to do it through.
The Economist: Ten years ago, during the Bush administration with all its religious fervour, the academic in vogue was Richard Dawkins who was very much against stories that protected you from the notion of mortality. So when religion was fetishised in the White House, it was Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins who were fashionable because they were sceptics. The Economist: Yes. It's because Obama pushed religion out of the Oval Office and robbed "New Atheism" of its counter-cultural capital. Now Richard Dawkins is unfashionable.
Mr Curtis: He's talking to the lost and the lonely. To go back to your question about whether politics is just about management: It's not. It's also about touching those really big feelings that a lot of people feel at the same time in a society.
The Economist: That's what I said to him when I met him.
At the moment, there are all sorts of things that we're not allowed to talk about because they're absolutely verboten online. Things like loneliness, sadness and separation. You're not allowed to talk about those feelings, and Jordan Peterson does and he tries to give people a framework in which to talk about them. I don't agree with him because he's a biological determinist, but I think what he's doing is a genuine response to the feelings that most liberals are absolutely terrified of talking about.
The Economist: I'd read almost all of his books and I was very excited about meeting him. He had just done a podcast interview. He had stains on his jumper. I told him that it was refreshing to see him talking about ideas instead of something he recently tweeted. He said, "Quite right," and then he walked off and continued to tweet his reputation into oblivion.
Mr Curtis: But their time is waning. Have you noticed?
The Economist: He's attuned to computer science, but he also loves poetry which means he can write brilliant sentences.
Mr Curtis: He also went slightly bonkers. He shouldn't have started tweeting. He should have just shut up.
The Economist: It was a counter-cultural reaction to Bush and Blair. They're gone, so he's been swept aside.
Mr Curtis: What's he like?
The Economist: Yuval Noah Harari on the liberal side and Jordan Peterson on the conservative side.
Mr Curtis: Dawkins was originally a computer programmer. He's basically a machine modeler of the world. That's what his version of DNA is.
The Economist: But he agrees with you. His new book is about why people need stories and those stories have faded away. Peterson is also similar because he says that postmodernism has ruined everything and left us all feeling lost and lonely.
Mr Curtis: He writes beautifully. It's not actually very rational but he's good at emotionally evoking what he's trying to say. "The Blind Watchmaker" is good. But you're right, there was a phase in the early part of this century where all the liberals really bought into Richard Dawkins, but it's gone now.
The Economist: But he does. Postmodernism is his catch-all term for a world without authoritative ideas and theories. Harari, Peterson and yourself are all providing an essentially similar diagnosis and appealing to very different audiences.
Mr Curtis: Who's replaced them?
The Economist: You'd hate him if you read the YouTube comments under his videos, but as an individual he's intriguing.
Mr Curtis: Harari is a tech groupie. He buys into all that reductionist psychology.

Mr Curtis: I don't think postmodernism is that powerful.
The Economist: I am.
Mr Curtis: That probably means we're right. People want a big narrative. What people don't want are rants and columns. They want a story out of which you can draw ideas. At the moment, I'm working on a giant project with ten parts which is full of stories, because I want people to feel like they're lost in the world and out of that come ideas. I didn't really hate Peterson. I didn't like him as a person, and I really wouldn't want to spend time with him.
The Economist: Don't they fall into the trap of not being able to articulate alternatives?
Mr Curtis: Yes, and you can feel when somebody is being genuine. He knows that you can take these two marginalised things, science and religion, and put the two together because they're both about awesomeness and being part of a grand story.

Are you a South Park fan?
* Note: The highest support that UKIP received in opinion polls was 25% in October 2014, in a Survation poll for The Mail on Sunday.
Mr Curtis: I think they're the geniuses of our age. They're the journalists of our age.

Mr Curtis: That's not what journalism does. Kyle's speech at the end of the last episode of "Imaginationland": it is incredibly romantic and optimistic about the world and I love it. I met Trey Parker and Matt Stone and they're really good. Journalism doesn't have to remain the same. It will take other forms. It tells stories about the world that in a way are imaginative. This is the battle I have with a lot of my colleagues in the BBC. They accuse me of being too imaginative in the way I put footage together. But they make up stories out of facts too, but when they do it, it's boring. People like imagination if they feel that it's genuinely rooted in fact. That's why you have to tell stories.

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"It's 'fuck off' to everything," says Adam Curtis (pictured below), describing public sentiment today. The British documentarist sees himself as an optimist amid dystopians, and as a classical journalist whose medium happens to be film.

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Yuval Noah Harari

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Artificial intelligence could erase many practical advantages of democracy, and erode the ideals of liberty and equality. It will further concentrate power among a small elite if we don't take steps to stop it.

Yoshi Sodeoka

Editor's Note: This article is part of a series that attempts to answer the question: Is democracy dying?

I. The Growing Fear of Irrelevance

There is nothing inevitable about democracy. For all the success that democracies have had over the past century or more, they are blips in history. Monarchies, oligarchies, and other forms of authoritarian rule have been far more common modes of human governance.

The emergence of liberal democracies is associated with ideals of liberty and equality that may seem self-evident and irreversible. But these ideals are far more fragile than we believe. Their success in the 20th century depended on unique technological conditions that may prove ephemeral.

In the second decade of the 21st century, liberalism has begun to lose credibility. Questions about the ability of liberal democracy to provide for the middle class have grown louder; politics have grown more tribal; and in more and more countries, leaders are showing a penchant for demagoguery and autocracy. The causes of this political shift are complex, but they appear to be intertwined with current technological developments. The technology that favored democracy is changing, and as artificial intelligence develops, it might change further.

Information technology is continuing to leap forward; biotechnology is beginning to provide a window into our inner lives-our emotions, thoughts, and choices. Together, infotech and biotech will create unprecedented upheavals in human society, eroding human agency and, possibly, subverting human desires. Under such conditions, liberal democracy and free-market economics might become obsolete.

From Our October 2018 Issue

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Ordinary people may not understand artificial intelligence and biotechnology in any detail, but they can sense that the future is passing them by. In 1938 the common man's condition in the Soviet Union, Germany, or the United States may have been grim, but he was constantly told that he was the most important thing in the world, and that he was the future (provided, of course, that he was an "ordinary man," rather than, say, a Jew or a woman). He looked at the propaganda posters-which typically depicted coal miners and steelworkers in heroic poses-and saw himself there: "I am in that poster! I am the hero of the future!"

In 2018 the common person feels increasingly irrelevant. Lots of mysterious terms are bandied about excitedly in ted Talks, at government think tanks, and at high-tech conferences- globalization, blockchain, genetic engineering, AI, machine learning -and common people, both men and women, may well suspect that none of these terms is about them.

In the 20th century, the masses revolted against exploitation and sought to translate their vital role in the economy into political power. Now the masses fear irrelevance, and they are frantic to use their remaining political power before it is too late. Brexit and the rise of Donald Trump may therefore demonstrate a trajectory opposite to that of traditional socialist revolutions. The Russian, Chinese, and Cuban revolutions were made by people who were vital to the economy but lacked political power; in 2016, Trump and Brexit were supported by many people who still enjoyed political power but feared they were losing their economic worth. Perhaps in the 21st century, populist revolts will be staged not against an economic elite that exploits people but against an economic elite that does not need them anymore. This may well be a losing battle. It is much harder to struggle against irrelevance than against exploitation.

The revolutions in information technology and biotechnology are still in their infancy, and the extent to which they are responsible for the current crisis of liberalism is debatable. Most people in Birmingham, Istanbul, St. Petersburg, and Mumbai are only dimly aware, if they are aware at all, of the rise of AI and its potential impact on their lives. It is undoubtable, however, that the technological revolutions now gathering momentum will in the next few decades confront humankind with the hardest trials it has yet encountered.

II. A New Useless Class?

Let's start with jobs and incomes, because whatever liberal democracy's philosophical appeal, it has gained strength in no small part thanks to a practical advantage: The decentralized approach to decision making that is characteristic of liberalism-in both politics and economics-has allowed liberal democracies to outcompete other states, and to deliver rising affluence to their people.

Liberalism reconciled the proletariat with the bourgeoisie, the faithful with atheists, natives with immigrants, and Europeans with Asians by promising everybody a larger slice of the pie. With a constantly growing pie, that was possible. And the pie may well keep growing. However, economic growth may not solve social problems that are now being created by technological disruption, because such growth is increasingly predicated on the invention of more and more disruptive technologies.

Fears of machines pushing people out of the job market are, of course, nothing new, and in the past such fears proved to be unfounded. But artificial intelligence is different from the old machines. In the past, machines competed with humans mainly in manual skills. Now they are beginning to compete with us in cognitive skills. And we don't know of any third kind of skill-beyond the manual and the cognitive-in which humans will always have an edge.

At least for a few more decades, human intelligence is likely to far exceed computer intelligence in numerous fields. Hence as computers take over more routine cognitive jobs, new creative jobs for humans will continue to appear. Many of these new jobs will probably depend on cooperation rather than competition between humans and AI. Human-AI teams will likely prove superior not just to humans, but also to computers working on their own.

However, most of the new jobs will presumably demand high levels of expertise and ingenuity, and therefore may not provide an answer to the problem of unemployed unskilled laborers, or workers employable only at extremely low wages. Moreover, as AI continues to improve, even jobs that demand high intelligence and creativity might gradually disappear. The world of chess serves as an example of where things might be heading. For several years after IBM's computer Deep Blue defeated Garry Kasparov in 1997, human chess players still flourished; AI was used to train human prodigies, and teams composed of humans plus computers proved superior to computers playing alone.

Yet in recent years, computers have become so good at playing chess that their human collaborators have lost their value and might soon become entirely irrelevant. On December 6, 2017, another crucial milestone was reached when Google's AlphaZero program defeated the Stockfish 8 program. Stockfish 8 had won a world computer chess championship in 2016. It had access to centuries of accumulated human experience in chess, as well as decades of computer experience. By contrast, AlphaZero had not been taught any chess strategies by its human creators-not even standard openings. Rather, it used the latest machine-learning principles to teach itself chess by playing against itself. Nevertheless, out of 100 games that the novice AlphaZero played against Stockfish 8, AlphaZero won 28 and tied 72-it didn't lose once. Since AlphaZero had learned nothing from any human, many of its winning moves and strategies seemed unconventional to the human eye. They could be described as creative, if not downright genius.

Can you guess how long AlphaZero spent learning chess from scratch, preparing for the match against Stockfish 8, and developing its genius instincts? Four hours. For centuries, chess was considered one of the crowning glories of human intelligence. AlphaZero went from utter ignorance to creative mastery in four hours, without the help of any human guide.

AlphaZero is not the only imaginative software out there. One of the ways to catch cheaters in chess tournaments today is to monitor the level of originality that players exhibit. If they play an exceptionally creative move, the judges will often suspect that it could not possibly be a human move-it must be a computer move. At least in chess, creativity is already considered to be the trademark of computers rather than humans! So if chess is our canary in the coal mine, we have been duly warned that the canary is dying. What is happening today to human-AI teams in chess might happen down the road to human-AI teams in policing, medicine, banking, and many other fields.

What's more, AI enjoys uniquely nonhuman abilities, which makes the difference between AI and a human worker one of kind rather than merely of degree. Two particularly important nonhuman abilities that AI possesses are connectivity and updatability.

For example, many drivers are unfamiliar with all the changing traffic regulations on the roads they drive, and they often violate them. In addition, since every driver is a singular entity, when two vehicles approach the same intersection, the drivers sometimes miscommunicate their intentions and collide. Self-driving cars, by contrast, will know all the traffic regulations and never disobey them on purpose, and they could all be connected to one another. When two such vehicles approach the same junction, they won't really be two separate entities, but part of a single algorithm. The chances that they might miscommunicate and collide will therefore be far smaller.

Similarly, if the World Health Organization identifies a new disease, or if a laboratory produces a new medicine, it can't immediately update all the human doctors in the world. Yet even if you had billions of AI doctors in the world-each monitoring the health of a single human being-you could still update all of them within a split second, and they could all communicate to one another their assessments of the new disease or medicine. These potential advantages of connectivity and updatability are so huge that at least in some lines of work, it might make sense to replace all humans with computers, even if individually some humans still do a better job than the machines.

All of this leads to one very important conclusion: The automation revolution will not consist of a single watershed event, after which the job market will settle into some new equilibrium. Rather, it will be a cascade of ever bigger disruptions. Old jobs will disappear and new jobs will emerge, but the new jobs will also rapidly change and vanish. People will need to retrain and reinvent themselves not just once, but many times.

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Just as in the 20th century governments established massive education systems for young people, in the 21st century they will need to establish massive reeducation systems for adults. But will that be enough? Change is always stressful, and the hectic world of the early 21st century has produced a global epidemic of stress. As job volatility increases, will people be able to cope? By 2050, a useless class might emerge, the result not only of a shortage of jobs or a lack of relevant education but also of insufficient mental stamina to continue learning new skills.

III. The Rise of Digital Dictatorships

As many people lose their economic value, they might also come to lose their political power. The same technologies that might make billions of people economically irrelevant might also make them easier to monitor and control.

AI frightens many people because they don't trust it to remain obedient. Science fiction makes much of the possibility that computers or robots will develop consciousness-and shortly thereafter will try to kill all humans. But there is no particular reason to believe that AI will develop consciousness as it becomes more intelligent. We should instead fear AI because it will probably always obey its human masters, and never rebel. AI is a tool and a weapon unlike any other that human beings have developed; it will almost certainly allow the already powerful to consolidate their power further.
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"IN ALL THIS high-tech commercial world there is nothing that looks particularly democratic. It lends itself to surveillance as well as liberty, to new forms of manipulation and covert control as well as new kinds of participation, to skewed, unjust market outcomes as well as greater productivity. The consumer society and the open society are not quite synonymous. Capitalism and democracy have a relationship, but it is something less than a marriage." Read more

Matt Huynh

Consider surveillance. Numerous countries around the world, including several democracies, are busy building unprecedented systems of surveillance. For example, Israel is a leader in the field of surveillance technology, and has created in the occupied West Bank a working prototype for a total-surveillance regime. Already today whenever Palestinians make a phone call, post something on Facebook, or travel from one city to another, they are likely to be monitored by Israeli microphones, cameras, drones, or spy software. Algorithms analyze the gathered data, helping the Israeli security forces pinpoint and neutralize what they consider to be potential threats. The Palestinians may administer some towns and villages in the West Bank, but the Israelis command the sky, the airwaves, and cyberspace. It therefore takes surprisingly few Israeli soldiers to effectively control the roughly 2.5 million Palestinians who live in the West Bank.

In one incident in October 2017, a Palestinian laborer posted to his private Facebook account a picture of himself in his workplace, alongside a bulldozer. Adjacent to the image he wrote, "Good morning!" A Facebook translation algorithm made a small error when transliterating the Arabic letters. Instead of Ysabechhum (which means "Good morning"), the algorithm identified the letters as Ydbachhum (which means "Hurt them"). Suspecting that the man might be a terrorist intending to use a bulldozer to run people over, Israeli security forces swiftly arrested him. They released him after they realized that the algorithm had made a mistake. Even so, the offending Facebook post was taken down-you can never be too careful. What Palestinians are experiencing today in the West Bank may be just a primitive preview of what billions of people will eventually experience all over the planet.

Imagine, for instance, that the current regime in North Korea gained a more advanced version of this sort of technology in the future. North Koreans might be required to wear a biometric bracelet that monitors everything they do and say, as well as their blood pressure and brain activity. Using the growing understanding of the human brain and drawing on the immense powers of machine learning, the North Korean government might eventually be able to gauge what each and every citizen is thinking at each and every moment. If a North Korean looked at a picture of Kim Jong Un and the biometric sensors picked up telltale signs of anger (higher blood pressure, increased activity in the amygdala), that person could be in the gulag the next day.

And yet such hard-edged tactics may not prove necessary, at least much of the time. A facade of free choice and free voting may remain in place in some countries, even as the public exerts less and less actual control. To be sure, attempts to manipulate voters' feelings are not new. But once somebody (whether in San Francisco or Beijing or Moscow) gains the technological ability to manipulate the human heart-reliably, cheaply, and at scale-democratic politics will mutate into an emotional puppet show.

We are unlikely to face a rebellion of sentient machines in the coming decades, but we might have to deal with hordes of bots that know how to press our emotional buttons better than our mother does and that use this uncanny ability, at the behest of a human elite, to try to sell us something-be it a car, a politician, or an entire ideology. The bots might identify our deepest fears, hatreds, and cravings and use them against us. We have already been given a foretaste of this in recent elections and referendums across the world, when hackers learned how to manipulate individual voters by analyzing data about them and exploiting their prejudices. While science-fiction thrillers are drawn to dramatic apocalypses of fire and smoke, in reality we may be facing a banal apocalypse by clicking.

The biggest and most frightening impact of the AI revolution might be on the relative efficiency of democracies and dictatorships. Historically, autocracies have faced crippling handicaps in regard to innovation and economic growth. In the late 20th century, democracies usually outperformed dictatorships, because they were far better at processing information. We tend to think about the conflict between democracy and dictatorship as a conflict between two different ethical systems, but it is actually a conflict between two different data-processing systems. Democracy distributes the power to process information and make decisions among many people and institutions, whereas dictatorship concentrates information and power in one place. Given 20th-century technology, it was inefficient to concentrate too much information and power in one place. Nobody had the ability to process all available information fast enough and make the right decisions. This is one reason the Soviet Union made far worse decisions than the United States, and why the Soviet economy lagged far behind the American economy.

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However, artificial intelligence may soon swing the pendulum in the opposite direction. AI makes it possible to process enormous amounts of information centrally. In fact, it might make centralized systems far more efficient than diffuse systems, because machine learning works better when the machine has more information to analyze. If you disregard all privacy concerns and concentrate all the information relating to a billion people in one database, you'll wind up with much better algorithms than if you respect individual privacy and have in your database only partial information on a million people. An authoritarian government that orders all its citizens to have their DNA sequenced and to share their medical data with some central authority would gain an immense advantage in genetics and medical research over societies in which medical data are strictly private. The main handicap of authoritarian regimes in the 20th century-the desire to concentrate all information and power in one place-may become their decisive advantage in the 21st century.

Yoshi Sodeoka

New technologies will continue to emerge, of course, and some of them may encourage the distribution rather than the concentration of information and power. Blockchain technology, and the use of cryptocurrencies enabled by it, is currently touted as a possible counterweight to centralized power. But blockchain technology is still in the embryonic stage, and we don't yet know whether it will indeed counterbalance the centralizing tendencies of AI. Remember that the Internet, too, was hyped in its early days as a libertarian panacea that would free people from all centralized systems-but is now poised to make centralized authority more powerful than ever.

IV. The Transfer of Authority to Machines

Even if some societies remain ostensibly democratic, the increasing efficiency of algorithms will still shift more and more authority from individual humans to networked machines. We might willingly give up more and more authority over our lives because we will learn from experience to trust the algorithms more than our own feelings, eventually losing our ability to make many decisions for ourselves. Just think of the way that, within a mere two decades, billions of people have come to entrust Google's search algorithm with one of the most important tasks of all: finding relevant and trustworthy information. As we rely more on Google for answers, our ability to locate information independently diminishes. Already today, "truth" is defined by the top results of a Google search. This process has likewise affected our physical abilities, such as navigating space. People ask Google not just to find information but also to guide them around. Self-driving cars and AI physicians would represent further erosion: While these innovations would put truckers and human doctors out of work, their larger import lies in the continuing transfer of authority and responsibility to machines.

Humans are used to thinking about life as a drama of decision making. Liberal democracy and free-market capitalism see the individual as an autonomous agent constantly making choices about the world. Works of art-be they Shakespeare plays, Jane Austen novels, or cheesy Hollywood comedies-usually revolve around the hero having to make some crucial decision. To be or not to be? To listen to my wife and kill King Duncan, or listen to my conscience and spare him? To marry Mr. Collins or Mr. Darcy? Christian and Muslim theology similarly focus on the drama of decision making, arguing that everlasting salvation depends on making the right choice.

What will happen to this view of life as we rely on AI to make ever more decisions for us? Even now we trust Netflix to recommend movies and Spotify to pick music we'll like. But why should AI's helpfulness stop there?

Every year millions of college students need to decide what to study. This is a very important and difficult decision, made under pressure from parents, friends, and professors who have varying interests and opinions. It is also influenced by students' own individual fears and fantasies, which are themselves shaped by movies, novels, and advertising campaigns. Complicating matters, a given student does not really know what it takes to succeed in a given profession, and doesn't necessarily have a realistic sense of his or her own strengths and weaknesses.

It's not so hard to see how AI could one day make better decisions than we do about careers, and perhaps even about relationships. But once we begin to count on AI to decide what to study, where to work, and whom to date or even marry, human life will cease to be a drama of decision making, and our conception of life will need to change. Democratic elections and free markets might cease to make sense. So might most religions and works of art. Imagine Anna Karenina taking out her smartphone and asking Siri whether she should stay married to Karenin or elope with the dashing Count Vronsky. Or imagine your favorite Shakespeare play with all the crucial decisions made by a Google algorithm. Hamlet and Macbeth would have much more comfortable lives, but what kind of lives would those be? Do we have models for making sense of such lives?

Can parliaments and political parties overcome these challenges and forestall the darker scenarios? At the current moment this does not seem likely. Technological disruption is not even a leading item on the political agenda. During the 2016 U.S. presidential race, the main reference to disruptive technology concerned Hillary Clinton's email debacle, and despite all the talk about job loss, neither candidate directly addressed the potential impact of automation. Donald Trump warned voters that Mexicans would take their jobs, and that the U.S. should therefore build a wall on its southern border. He never warned voters that algorithms would take their jobs, nor did he suggest building a firewall around California.

So what should we do?

For starters, we need to place a much higher priority on understanding how the human mind works-particularly how our own wisdom and compassion can be cultivated. If we invest too much in AI and too little in developing the human mind, the very sophisticated artificial intelligence of computers might serve only to empower the natural stupidity of humans, and to nurture our worst (but also, perhaps, most powerful) impulses, among them greed and hatred. To avoid such an outcome, for every dollar and every minute we invest in improving AI, we would be wise to invest a dollar and a minute in exploring and developing human consciousness.

More practically, and more immediately, if we want to prevent the concentration of all wealth and power in the hands of a small elite, we must regulate the ownership of data. In ancient times, land was the most important asset, so politics was a struggle to control land. In the modern era, machines and factories became more important than land, so political struggles focused on controlling these vital means of production. In the 21st century, data will eclipse both land and machinery as the most important asset, so politics will be a struggle to control data's flow.

Unfortunately, we don't have much experience in regulating the ownership of data, which is inherently a far more difficult task than regulating land or machines. Data are everywhere and nowhere at the same time, they can move at the speed of light, and you can create as many copies of them as you want. Do the data collected about my DNA, my brain, and my life belong to me, or to the government, or to a corporation, or to the human collective?

The race to accumulate data is already on, and is currently headed by giants such as Google and Facebook and, in China, Baidu and Tencent. So far, many of these companies have acted as "attention merchants"-they capture our attention by providing us with free information, services, and entertainment, and then they resell our attention to advertisers. Yet their true business isn't merely selling ads. Rather, by capturing our attention they manage to accumulate immense amounts of data about us, which are worth more than any advertising revenue. We aren't their customers-we are their product.

Ordinary people will find it very difficult to resist this process. At present, many of us are happy to give away our most valuable asset-our personal data-in exchange for free email services and funny cat videos. But if, later on, ordinary people decide to try to block the flow of data, they are likely to have trouble doing so, especially as they may have come to rely on the network to help them make decisions, and even for their health and physical survival.

Nationalization of data by governments could offer one solution; it would certainly curb the power of big corporations. But history suggests that we are not necessarily better off in the hands of overmighty governments. So we had better call upon our scientists, our philosophers, our lawyers, and even our poets to turn their attention to this big question: How do you regulate the ownership of data?

Currently, humans risk becoming similar to domesticated animals. We have bred docile cows that produce enormous amounts of milk but are otherwise far inferior to their wild ancestors. They are less agile, less curious, and less resourceful. We are now creating tame humans who produce enormous amounts of data and function as efficient chips in a huge data-processing mechanism, but they hardly maximize their human potential. If we are not careful, we will end up with downgraded humans misusing upgraded computers to wreak havoc on themselves and on the world.

If you find these prospects alarming-if you dislike the idea of living in a digital dictatorship or some similarly degraded form of society-then the most important contribution you can make is to find ways to prevent too much data from being concentrated in too few hands, and also find ways to keep distributed data processing more efficient than centralized data processing. These will not be easy tasks. But achieving them may be the best safeguard of democracy.
This article has been adapted from Yuval Noah Harari's book, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century.

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Artificial intelligence could erase many practical advantages of democracy, and erode the ideals of liberty and equality. It will further concentrate power among a small elite if we don't take steps to stop it. Editor's Note: This article is part of a series that attempts to answer the question: Is democracy dying?

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Goldman asks: 'Is curing patients a sustainable business model?'

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Yuri Arcurs | Getty Images

Goldman Sachs analysts attempted to address a touchy subject for biotech companies, especially those involved in the pioneering "gene therapy" treatment: cures could be bad for business in the long run.

"Is curing patients a sustainable business model?" analysts ask in an April 10 report entitled "The Genome Revolution."

"The potential to deliver 'one shot cures' is one of the most attractive aspects of gene therapy, genetically-engineered cell therapy and gene editing. However, such treatments offer a very different outlook with regard to recurring revenue versus chronic therapies," analyst Salveen Richter wrote in the note to clients Tuesday. "While this proposition carries tremendous value for patients and society, it could represent a challenge for genome medicine developers looking for sustained cash flow."

Richter cited Gilead Sciences' treatments for hepatitis C, which achieved cure rates of more than 90 percent. The company's U.S. sales for these hepatitis C treatments peaked at $12.5 billion in 2015, but have been falling ever since. Goldman estimates the U.S. sales for these treatments will be less than $4 billion this year, according to a table in the report.

"GILD is a case in point, where the success of its hepatitis C franchise has gradually exhausted the available pool of treatable patients," the analyst wrote. "In the case of infectious diseases such as hepatitis C, curing existing patients also decreases the number of carriers able to transmit the virus to new patients, thus the incident pool also declines ... Where an incident pool remains stable (eg, in cancer) the potential for a cure poses less risk to the sustainability of a franchise."

The analyst didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.

The report suggested three potential solutions for biotech firms:

"Solution 1: Address large markets: Hemophilia is a $9-10bn WW market (hemophilia A, B), growing at ~6-7% annually."

"Solution 2: Address disorders with high incidence: Spinal muscular atrophy (SMA) affects the cells (neurons) in the spinal cord, impacting the ability to walk, eat, or breathe."

"Solution 3: Constant innovation and portfolio expansion: There are hundreds of inherited retinal diseases (genetics forms of blindness) ... Pace of innovation will also play a role as future programs can offset the declining revenue trajectory of prior assets."

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Goldman Sachs asks in biotech research report: 'Is curing patients a sustainable business model?'

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Yuri Arcurs | Getty Images Goldman Sachs analysts attempted to address a touchy subject for biotech companies, especially those involved in the pioneering "gene therapy" treatment: cures could be bad for business in the long run. "Is curing patients a sustainable business model?" analysts ask in an April 10 report entitled "The Genome Revolution."

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The Spooky Genius of Artificial Intelligence

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The Spooky Genius of Artificial Intelligence

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The Atlantic

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But the benign examples were just as interesting. In one test of locomotion, a simulated robot was programmed to travel forward as quickly as possible. But instead of building legs and walking, it built itself into a tall tower and fell forward. How is growing tall and falling on your face anything like walking? Well, both cover a horizontal distance pretty quickly. And the AI took its task very, very literally.

According to Janelle Shane, a research scientist who publishes a website about artificial intelligence, there is an eerie genius to this forward-falling strategy. "After I had posted [this paper] online, I heard from some biologists who said, 'Oh yeah, wheat uses this strategy to propagate!'" she told me. "At the end of each season, these tall stalks of wheat fall over, and their seeds land just a little bit farther from where the wheat stalk heads started."

From the perspective of the computer programmer, the AI failed to walk. But from the perspective of the AI, it rapidly mutated in a simulated environment to discover something which had taken wheat stalks millions of years to learn: Why walk, when you can just fall? A relatable sentiment.

The stories in this paper are not just evidence of the dim-wittedness of artificial intelligence. In fact, they are evidence of the opposite: A divergent intelligence that mimics biology. "These anecdotes thus serve as evidence that evolution, whether biological or computational, is inherently creative and should routinely be expected to surprise, delight, and even outwit us," the lead authors write in the conclusion. Sometimes, a machine is more clever than its makers.

This is not to say that AI displays what psychologists would call human creativity. These machines cannot turn themselves on, or become self-motivated, or ask alternate questions, or even explain their discoveries. Without consciousness or comprehension, a creature cannot be truly creative.

But if AI, and machine learning in particular, does not think as a person does, perhaps it's more accurate to say it evolves, as an organism can. Consider the familiar two-step of evolution. With mutation, genes diverge from their preexisting structure. With natural selection, organisms converge on the mutation best adapted to their environment. Thus, evolutionary biology displays a divergent and convergent intelligence that is a far better metaphor for to the process of machine learning, like generative design, than the tangle of human thought.

AI might not be "smart" in a human sense of the word. But it has already shown that it can perform an eerie simulation of evolution. And that is a spooky kind of genius.

We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.

Derek Thompson is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he writes about economics, labor markets, and the media. He is the author of Hit Makers.

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Can Artificial Intelligence Be Smarter Than a Person?

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But the benign examples were just as interesting. In one test of locomotion, a simulated robot was programmed to travel forward as quickly as possible. But instead of building legs and walking, it built itself into a tall tower and fell forward. How is growing tall and falling on your face anything like walking?