People may one day drill for copper as they now drill for oil
Jul 7th 2021COPPER WAS the first metal worked by human beings. They hammered it into jewellery and ornaments as much as 11,000 years ago. Today, Homo sapiens uses more than 20m tonnes of the stuff a year, much of it in buildings and electrical infrastructure. More will be required in coming decades, to meet the…
AI is transforming the coding of computer programs
Jul 7th 2021GPT-3 IS quite a beast. The Generative Pre-Trained Transformer 3, to give its full name, is a language model developed by OpenAI, a part-commercial, part not-for-profit artificial-intelligence (AI) laboratory in San Francisco. GPT-3 was trained on an unprecedented mass of text to teach it the probability that a given word will follow preceding…
The Saudi-Emirati rift within OPEC is a sign of things to come
Jul 7th 2021IT IS RARE for spats about oil supply to break out between Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). The countries’ views on output usually align. Traders and analysts regard them, along with Kuwait, as the core of the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). So eyebrows were raised in early…
America leaves Afghanistan on the brink of collapse
Jul 7th 2021KABUL AND MAZAR-I-SHARIFWERE IT NOT for the Kalashnikov, the photograph would have been unremarkable. The framing is off-centre. The photographer’s shadow can be seen at the bottom. In the background is the western gate of Mazar-i-Sharif, just some 15km from the centre of Afghanistan’s fourth-biggest city. In the middle is a bored-looking man…
King Mswati III, Africa’s last absolute monarch, cracks down
Jul 7th 2021THABANI NKOMONYE was last seen alive on May 8th. A few days later the body of the 25-year-old law student was found in a field near Manzini in Eswatini. The police say he died in a car crash. Friends and family say the police killed him.Mr Nkomonye’s death has sparked protests across the…
Stubborn optimism about China’s economy
Jul 3rd 2021PICTURE THE moment of confusion in a taxi in Guiyang, a city in south-western China. Your columnist had asked the driver to go to the new district. “The new new district or the old new district?” he asked. It was, it emerged, the old new district—a place that seven years ago, on an…