Hatem Khaled/Reuters

A Palestinian man inspects a house hit in an Israeli strike amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas, in Rafah, in the southern Gaza Strip, May 7, 2024.

Seven months into the war in Gaza, on the cusp of a possible cease-fire, the United States is taking a more cautionary stance toward the military aid it provides Israel. 

Last week, President Joe Biden paused a shipment of 3,500 bombs to Israel out of concern that they would be used in a planned invasion of Rafah in southern Gaza, according to administration officials. This is the first time since the Oct. 7 attack on Israel by Hamas that the U.S. has put military aid on hold in order to send a message about Israel’s military response.

And President Biden said today in a CNN interview that, while the U.S. is committed to Israel's defense, if Israel goes into Rafah “we’re not going to supply the weapons and artillery shells used,” due to concerns for civilian lives at risk.

The U.S. has long been Israel’s strongest diplomatic and military ally, and overall political support remains strong. At the end of April, President Biden signed an unprecedented $26 billion aid bill destined for Israel.

Yet Israel’s conduct in Gaza, where health authorities are reporting a death toll of over 34,000, has prompted growing concern about the way U.S. funding and arms are being used. Public opposition to Israel’s actions has intensified, especially on university campuses in the U.S. and abroad as students call for divestment from Israel.   

Voices within the Democratic Party have called for Mr. Biden to take into consideration Israel’s conduct as a condition for providing aid. 

At the same time, questions are surfacing about whether aid has already been violating U.S. laws such as the Leahy Act, which prohibits the U.S. from providing military aid if there is credible evidence of gross human rights violations. 

This week, the Biden administration is expected to inform Congress about whether it believes Israel has broken international or U.S. laws in Gaza. 

Some analysts say this moment marks a turning point in how U.S. aid to Israel will be administered going forward. 

“It reflects this sea change,” says Linda Robinson, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. “Longtime supporters of Israel have now come to the realization that it does the U.S. and Israel no good to apply this blanket support for Israel, which has really cost Israel in the court of world opinion.”

SOURCE:

ForeignAssistance.gov, Congressional Research Service, Nasdaq Global Select Market Composite

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Jacob Turcotte/Staff

Concern among U.S. lawmakers swelled following an Israeli airstrike that killed seven World Central Kitchen aid workers on April 1. Forty Democratic members of Congress, including longtime Israel supporter Nancy Pelosi, wrote a letter to President Biden urging him to withhold “unjustifiable” arms transfers until an investigation could be conducted into the incident.

Israel receives a standing $3.8 billion each year from the U.S, making it the largest recipient of American military aid. The latest package includes $5.2 billion for Israel’s Iron Dome defense system, $3.5 billion for arms purchases, $4.4 billion for other defense supplies and services, and $1 billion for weapons production. The Biden administration has reportedly authorized over 100 separate military sales to Israel since Oct. 7, though only two have been made public. 

Aaron Stein, president of the Foreign Policy Research Institute, says the latest round of military aid to Israel is needed for “keeping elements of their military whole [for] the defense of the country.”

Proving that Israel has broken international laws of warfare using U.S. supplies is sticky. “Once the weapon leaves the United States, and it’s given to somebody else, the oversight ... is negligible,” he adds. 

While nearly 6 in 10 Americans in a Pew Research Center poll say Israel’s reasons for fighting Hamas are valid, a recent Gallup survey finds that a majority – 55% – now disapprove of Israel’s military action in Gaza. 

Charles Blaha, who oversaw human rights compliance by recipients of U.S. military assistance until last August, recently spoke out about repeated cases of “special treatment” Israel has received in response to allegations of Israeli military abuses of Palestinians. Last October, Josh Paul resigned from his post overseeing arms transfers to foreign militaries in protest of the U.S. “rushing” arms to Israel without sufficient debate. 

“If there’s no accountability [for the Israeli military] and we continue to supply arms, then ultimately our governments are culpable of – at the very least – negligence,” says Iain Overton, executive director of the London-based nonprofit Action on Armed Violence. “But at the very worst, I’d say we’re in step with the same level of abuse.”

The foreign aid bill contains $9 billion in humanitarian relief for war-torn regions, including an expected $2 billion for residents of Gaza.

Editor's note: This article has been updated with a new third paragraph, with President Biden's comment on a possible invasion of Rafah. 

The 2023 predictions were scary. Artificial intelligence would:

• Replace 300 million full-time jobs worldwide over time.
• Encroach on tasks of 2 in 5 workers.
• Drive a bigger wedge between rich people and poor people.

So far, the impact of AI on the U.S. economy has proven far more limited. Examples of massive layoffs are less frequent than some expected. Some researchers now say the technology could help low-skilled workers more than it will hurt them. 

New technology always brings change and some people will lose their jobs even as new opportunities appear. But if the process unfolds over decades rather than a few years, then many employees and employers have time to adjust.

“Disruption is something we’ve seen over and over,” says Daniel Keum, a management professor at Columbia University. “Over time, new industries emerge. People learn how to be productive with the technology. ... But again, the bad news hits first.”

Jay Johnson, who works in advertising in Chicago, was laid off recently. His industry is pushing hard to incorporate AI chatbots, which understand and generate humanlike speech, to analyze marketing trends and generate ad copy. As the sole provider for his wife and his two young children, he’s now looking for another job.

“Challenges always exist,” he says. “It’s how we adapt and move through them.”

How companies are incorporating AI

Companies are adopting the new technology in various ways. Some emphasize efficiency.

In March, IBM disclosed a “workforce rebalancing,” reportedly in marketing and communications, that will lay off several thousand employees. Another multinational company is using AI to step up its marketing game in South America, says Dr. Keum. Instead of launching one marketing campaign per month per country, it now targets specific consumers within those countries and updates the plans weekly.

David A. Lieb/AP/File

Workers at a Medicaid call center review information regarding eligibility determinations Aug. 16, 2023, in Jefferson City, Missouri. Some companies are beginning to use artificial intelligence, or "AI assistants," to handle online chats with customers.

One sector feeling the heat: customer service. In February, Swedish consumer finance firm Klarna announced that AI was now handling two-thirds of its online chats with customers, doing the work of 700 full-time agents. Since the company uses contractors, Klarna didn’t have to fire anybody. It announced a hiring freeze instead. The company still relies on experienced workers to handle complex or sensitive cases, according to a spokesperson. 

It’s this human-machine collaboration – rethinking and redesigning work in light of AI – that will separate winners from losers, says Erik Brynjolfsson, director of Stanford University’s Digital Economy Laboratory and co-founder of Workhelix, a consulting firm. In a research paper published last year, he and six co-authors found that the introduction of an AI assistant not only improved productivity of customer support workers at a large software firm, but also led to better customer satisfaction and reduced worker turnover. 

Moreover, the technology didn’t drive a wedge between the most- and least-skilled workers; it instead helped bridge the knowledge gap, Dr. Brynjolfsson adds. AI boosted productivity for new workers and the least skilled workers by 34%, while it had negligible effects for the most skilled. By investing in retraining and work redesign, while keeping people in charge, “you can create a huge amount of value for the customers,” he says. “That is a pretty optimistic story.”

Where job losses are landing 

Which story is winning out – layoffs or happier, more productive employees – is hard to discern.

Tech sector layoffs surged in 2023 as Amazon, Meta, Alphabet, and Microsoft poured billions of dollars into AI. The pace of firings has barely diminished this year with more than 75,000 employees laid off worldwide, according to Layoffs.fyi, a tracker of tech layoffs started by a Bay Area entrepreneur. While companies point to various factors, such as post-pandemic restructuring and cost-cutting, they’re increasingly hesitant to mention AI.

Elaine Thompson/AP/File

Employees walk through Amazon's headquarters Nov. 13, 2018, in Seattle. Tech sector layoffs rose in 2023 as Amazon, Meta, Alphabet, and Microsoft poured billions of dollars into AI.

Why? Companies may want to avoid public backlash for replacing people with machines, said Andrew Challenger, senior vice president of Challenger, Gray & Christmas, in a company press release in March. The Chicago-based outplacement firm started tracking AI-related layoffs last year and found 3,900 in a single month. By the first quarter of this year, that total had dwindled to 383 for all three months.

Job losses are only part of the problem. Workers may find new jobs, but if those positions pay substantially less, their standard of living falls. That’s what happened to many manufacturing workers in the 1980s and 1990s, displaced by robotics and a wave of globalization. It’s happening now for a new class of well-educated workers.

Demand for skilled AI workers

Those with high-level AI skills are in strong demand from companies eager to take advantage of the technology. “We’re hiring dozens,” says Robert Murphy, chief economist for Infineo, a tech company aiming to revolutionize life insurance through AI and blockchain technology. Some companies pay the most skilled workers $900,000 or more in salary and benefits. 

Three-quarters of knowledge workers say they already use AI on the job, nearly double the share of just six months ago, according to a Microsoft/LinkedIn survey of workers and employers in the United States and 30 other countries released Wednesday. “2024 is the year AI at work gets real.”

Other well-educated workers have found themselves on the wrong side of the technology. 

After earning her Ph.D in art history in 2017, Allison Harbin became a researcher for academic journals. Once ChatGPT was released publicly in 2022, a fifth of her income dried up. She took a job doing “prompt engineering” – editing AI chatbots’ responses during their training. But the pay was low, and even with a new job, her income still isn’t stable. 

“I’m not even going to put this on my résumé,” she says. 

“Old jobs are going to be eliminated,” says Dr. Brynjolfsson of Stanford. “There’s just a lot of creative destruction and churn. [However], the tools [of AI], when used correctly, will help rebuild the middle class and will help create more widely shared prosperity.”

The atmosphere around Victory Day on May 9, a holiday celebrating the anniversary of the Soviet Union’s victory over Nazi Germany in 1945, is always charged with martial fervor and a sense of Russia’s enduring resilience. The intensity almost makes it feel as though the war ended only recently.

This year, it seems even more immediate.

With Moscow’s “special military operation,” as its invasion of Ukraine is still officially known, well into its third year, there is a distinct note in official messaging that suggests that World War II never really ended. Victory is a concept that has morphed from the past to future tense.

Since the war in Ukraine started, the Kremlin has sought to conflate the Soviet Union’s 20th-century struggle against Nazi Germany with today’s campaign to “denazify” Ukraine – a claim most in the West find incomprehensible. But the Kremlin appears to have convinced most Russians that they are not fighting a war for territory and regional control in Ukraine, but facing a recurring effort by the united West to subdue Russia.

In this reading, Ukraine is merely acting as the West’s battering ram.

“From the Russian point of view this is an existential challenge that we face every century,” says Sergei Markov, a former Kremlin adviser. “United Europe turns and attacks Russia.

“In the 19th century, it was Napoleon. In the 20th century, it was Hitler. We see NATO threatening in the same way today. We always won in the past, and we shall win again.”

Built in the West, captured in Ukraine

That idea has been made explicit in a major exhibition of captured Ukrainian military equipment, in Moscow’s central Victory Park, timed to coincide with Victory Day.

On display, in a square adjacent to a major war memorial, are around 40 tanks, fighting vehicles, and armored personnel carriers. Russian soldiers attend each piece, explaining to visitors which country built and donated it to Ukraine – most of them are NATO members – and the circumstances under which it was captured by Russian forces.

Fred Weir

A Ukrainian-made T-64 tank at an exhibition in Moscow's Victory Park of weapons captured from Ukrainian troops.

Huge crowds have thronged the exhibition since it opened on May 1, in a mood of excitement and intense interest. Visitors, many of them on a family outing, enter past a huge placard that reads “Our Victory is Inevitable!” and one of the first items on show is a World War II-era German self-propelled gun, displayed under a sign reading “History Repeats Itself.”

The stars of the show appear to be a U.S. Bradley Fighting Vehicle, and a badly-battered M1 Abrams tank, whose progress from the battlefield in eastern Ukraine to Moscow was avidly detailed by Russian military video bloggers.

Other vehicles lined up in the open air include tanks, armored personnel carriers, and suchlike made in countries ranging from Britain to Turkey to Australia.

“The display of these defeated weapons will have a tonic effect on the Russian public,” says Mr. Markov. “There is still a great deal of respect among Russians for Western technology, so seeing these smashed weapons up close will temper that.”

Russian Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Maria Zakharova urged foreign diplomats to visit the exhibition to see how “the West destroys peace on the planet.” Russian TV later broadcast a visit by dozens of emissaries from countries of the Global South, escorted through the exhibition by Russian military brass.

NATO and Russian troops once marched in step

The Soviet Union used to celebrate Victory Day with a massive military parade only on key anniversaries, usually giving war veterans pride of place. Boris Yeltsin revived the tradition on the 50th anniversary in 1995, and Vladimir Putin has made it an annual event, involving huge Red Square reviews of troops and weaponry.

Also on display are features such as the “immortal legion,” in which average citizens come out into the streets bearing photos of ancestors who fought in World War II.

Early in the Putin era the Kremlin tried to emphasize the shared victory of Russia and the West over Nazism, and it was common to see Western military attachés in Red Square reviewing stands along with Russian officials on May 9.

In 2010, NATO troops actually took part in the Red Square parade, marching under the gaze of then-Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and Chinese leader Hu Jintao. But following Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, Western leaders boycotted the event, though the Kremlin still tried to find ways to stress the element of common victory over fascism.

The war in Ukraine has banished any hope of reconciliation with the West, perhaps irrevocably. Russian leaders have been surprised by the extent and depth of Western support for Kyiv, and the Kremlin narrative has shifted from a limited “special military operation” in Ukraine toward the notion of a new chapter in Russia’s historic confrontation with the West.

Thursday’s big military parade will be opened by a contingent of Ukraine war veterans, marching through Red Square under the eyes of Mr. Putin and other top leaders, according to the Defense Ministry. Very few World War II veterans are still alive, though they will doubtless also be honored.

“The cult of victory has long ago turned into the cult of war, and the celebration of May 9th in the Putin manner should confirm this symbiosis over and over,” says Andrei Kolesnikov, a Carnegie fellow who lives and works in Russia.

Dmitry Oreshkin, an independent political analyst, notes that wars have contributed much to President Putin’s popularity.

“For an average Western person it might seem a bit strange that people who don’t live all that well would put a stress on victory and high fighting spirit,” he says. “But remember that the events that have consistently strengthened Putin’s rating have all been military operations – Chechnya, Georgia, Crimea, Syria, and now the present war.”

Petr David Josek/AP

Supporters of Donald Tusk celebrate his election victory last October at his party headquarters. Younger Poles helped him win.

Life in Poland is finally moving in the right direction, says Łukasz Dryżałowski.

The Warsaw-based engineer-turned-filmmaker helped rally friends and strategize how and where to vote six months ago, in an election that saw 69% of Poles under 30 turn out to vote. That youth mobilization, which surpassed even Poland’s communism-toppling election of 1989, proved crucial to ousting the conservative Law and Justice Party.

During their eight years in office, Law and Justice raised social insurance payments which particularly impacted younger Poles like the 32-year-old Mr. Dryżałowski, rolled back civil rights including access to abortion, quashed media and judiciary independence, angered the European Union, and oversaw skyrocketing costs, including apartment prices.

But now that Prime Minister Donald Tusk and his coalition are in office, even if it’s only been a few months, Mr. Dryżałowski feels that a difference has been made.

“It’s not like we will wake up tomorrow and everything will go back to some kind of normal,” he says. The coalition “hasn’t done anything on abortion rights yet, and it’s been 200 days since election. It should have happened by now. But there is a guarantee that we will stay in the European Union. They’ve stopped any kind of ‘Polexit’ signals.”

Courtesy of Łukasz Dryżałowski

Warsaw filmmaker Łukasz Dryżałowski felt Poland was heading in the wrong direction, so in the lead-up to last year's elections he rallied friends to vote.

But now that Law and Justice has been relegated to the opposition, the enthusiasm younger Poles carried leading up to the election now runs the risk of ebbing; Mr. Dryżałowski himself has warned of “burnout.” Experts say that their engagement – or disengagement – comes at a critical time for Poland’s democracy, as it tries to rebound from the backsliding under Law and Justice’s tenure.

“They voted and felt like ‘I’m a good citizen,’ but you have to do more, to engage, not only in political parties but within nongovernmental organizations, and to be active on social media,” says Adam Kądziela, a political analyst.

A new era of civic participation?

Learning to live inside of a democracy takes education.

After the fall of communism in 1989, Poland began a peaceful building of a modern democratic system. But becoming an active participant in that system doesn’t happen overnight, says Dr. Kądziela, author of the report, “The Political Portrait of Young Poles 2023.”

Participation needs to be taught in schools, woven into the social fabric, and propagated via civic institutions such as the media, says Dr. Kądziela, and it was a slow, evolving process. “Our parents’ generation lived under a communist regime, so we didn’t know how to build our democratic competencies,” he says. “We’d lost the current young generation between ages 18 and 38” to apathy.

An inherent distrust of the state has been woven into Polish society over centuries of struggle against a monarchy or a centralized power. Then came the modern communist era, which perpetuated that feeling of “the state as almost a sort of oppressive outside power,” says Helena Chmielewska-Szlajfer, a sociologist and assistant professor at Kozmiński University.

“So you have this fascinating paradox in Poland of intuitive, actual civic practice which was unofficial” because organizing was dangerous during the communist era, she says, “coupled with a historic distrust of institutions. People trust other people, but not necessarily institutions.”

That’s why October’s youth turnout is a possible indication of a new era of civic participation via government institutions. “Change was the biggest motivation. Young people were frustrated,” Dr. Kądziela says, pointing to record levels of inflation felt more keenly by young working people.

As the election approached, Mr. Dryżałowski made promotional films for a progressive party as a contractor and drove to a less-progressive district to cast his vote, calculating he’d have more impact there. “I called my friends, we went to vote, and we did it,” ousting Law and Justice, he says.

Michał Kiedrzyński, a 21-year-old computer science student, voted for the first time in October. He’d been activated by worries about Poland’s direction. “People in my bubble were generally upset about all kinds of things,” says Mr. Kiedrzyński.

Lenora Chu

“Europe leaning more right-wing is not what we need right now,” says computer science student Michał Kiedrzyński, who voted for the first time in October.

These young people are part of a broader generational change, says Dr. Chmielewska-Szlajfer. “Poland is a very unique country in the sense that it’s dynamic, and in the way people understand and do democracy. We’ve been doing a super fast-forward, making up for decades that we were behind the Iron Curtain.”

Or a “one-time mobilization”?

Yet Polish politics is less than inspiring for young people. For the past two decades the political scene has largely revolved around two men - Donald Tusk, now 66 as he starts his second stint as prime minister, and Jarosław Kaczyński, the Law and Justice leader who is now 74. The average member of parliament is in their 50’s.

And that’s been anathema to young Poles. In most elections they’ve been less engaged and hold less sway than graying Poles, say pollsters.

Klaus Bachmann, a historian at SWPS University of Social Sciences and Humanities in Warsaw, thinks the October vote was a “one-time mobilization,” he says. “I don’t think this means they really want to engage in politics. Politics is kind of repellent for young people, and they will wait to see what the new government is doing and if they like it.”

Lenora Chu

“I would like Poland to be more modern and less old-fashioned,” says Karolina Jakubczyk, a 22-year-old recruiter.

Karolina Jakubczyk, a 22-year-old recruiter, exemplifies a strong sense of civic duty as well as the risk of ebbing enthusiasm. She wants a more modern and less old-fashioned Poland, and points out that an aging society should have more young people in charge.

Yet she doesn’t have the “patience” to run for office herself. And, after an initial post-election spurt of interest in parliamentary proceedings on television, she ultimately tuned out. “The politicians were comical; it wasn’t worth following anymore,” she says. “I was turned off.”

Mr. Dryżałowski, the filmmaker, says he’s not necessarily more engaged either. “For now, I got what I wanted, and now I have to wait and see where things go.”

He wouldn’t mind some help with housing, which Mr. Tusk’s coalition hasn’t yet tackled. He and his girlfriend have been searching for a flat to buy for months, in a housing situation so dire that two thirds of young Poles live with or get financial help from their parents.

“We’re still looking.”

Piotr Żakowiecki contributed to this report.

A police officer pointing a gun at Mburu Wanyoike’s head was his Saul-to-Paul, Damascus moment.

He was 17 years old and out for a late-night walk in Mathare, the informal settlement in the Kenyan capital where he lived. The officer was searching for members of a gang who had committed a robbery the day before, and mistakenly thought Mr. Wanyoike was one of them. 

He wasn’t, but he was also no stranger to that life. By that point, he had been a gun runner for another gang in the area for three years. He had been shot twice, and several friends had been killed.

But with the cop’s gun leveled at his forehead, he had a sudden realization. “I knew that I had to change my ways,” he remembers. 

He started distancing himself from his gang, and working out regularly to channel his energy in a different direction. Two years later, a fencing coach suggested he try the sport. Mr. Wanyoike was quickly hooked. In 2021, he opened a fencing club in the same neighborhood where he once smuggled guns, hoping to give other young people a positive outlet to channel their energies, too.

So far, it has been a success. Fifteen members of his club are on Kenya’s national fencing team. Mr. Wanyoike himself would have competed in the African Olympic qualifiers in Algeria recently, if torrential rains in Nariobi had not delayed his flight beyond his starting time.

But the club’s challenges – especially the prohibitive costs of fencing – mirror broader difficulties faced by many African athletes trying to reach the global elite. 

Make a plan

It’s a few minutes past 8 a.m. in Mathare, and a conductor leans out of the back of a minibus, calling out its destination. His voice rises above the din of the busy street, where tin shacks jostle for space with stout apartment blocks and small informal shops. 

This is home to the Tsavora Fencing Mtaani club, whose name loosely translates to “great neighborhood fencing club.”  

Lenny Rashid Ruvaga

Mburu Wanyoike (left) and Eline Marendes give an exhibition fencing match in a street in Mathare, an informal settlement in Nairobi.

The club’s luminous green walls are decorated with inspiring phrases such as “Take action” and “Make a plan.” A group of fencers, local high school students, starts filing in for their daily practice.

“The equipment room was left open, and you are all late,” Mr. Wanyoike barks. “Give me 20.”

“Yes, Coach,” they all shout in unison, dropping to the floor to do the push-ups. 

Sixteen-year-old Eline Marendes took up fencing two years ago on a whim. At the time, she was part of an acting troupe that moved around Mathare on weekends to teach people about social issues.

“I chanced upon Wanyoike at a television station where we had gone for an interview,” she says. He invited her to check out his gym, and she says she found the idea of a sport involving sword fighting thrilling. 

Eline is soft-spoken, but once she puts on a glove and grips an epee – the slender, blunt sword she uses to fence – her competitive nature takes charge. 

At the Thursday practice, she lunges at a teammate with whom she is fighting. The tip of her weapon grazes the other fighter just below her chest. At the same moment, her opponent lands her own jab. 

The referee gives the point to Eline’s opponent. “Ref, that was definitely [my] point, and you know it,” she says indignantly.

Watching in studious silence is Mr. Wanyoike. He has been training in epee – one of the three main styles of fencing – for nine years.

Three years ago, he opened this club to create a safe space for young people in Mathare, he says. “Most of the youth here can, and do, easily get lost in crime or drugs.”

Building a new sport

But fencing – a sport that has its roots as a leisure activity among European aristocrats – is expensive. Mr. Wanyoike says it typically costs a young fencer in Kenya about $2,500 a year to train and compete, an impossibly high sum in a neighborhood where most families live on less than $3 a day.

Lenny Rashid Ruvaga

Fencer Eline Marendes poses in Nairobi. Her club boasts 15 members of Kenya's national fencing squad.

To fund his operation, Mr. Wanyoike works as a fencing coach at private schools in Nairobi. He pays for his students’ equipment – which they share – with donations and maintains it using money he earns competing as a fencer himself. His students dream of the Olympics, but that would require building a ranking at smaller international competitions first. And that, of course, takes money, too. 

At the moment, Kenya has just one Olympic-level fencer. Alexandra Ndolo, who is ranked 14th in the world in women’s epee, has a Kenyan father but grew up in Germany. She competed for Germany for most of her career before beginning to represent Kenya in 2022. 

“So far, I have organised and financed all of my fencing seasons,” Ms. Ndolo wrote on Instagram last year. “I have planned, booked, and paid for every training camp and competition,” she explained, adding that this was “unheard of for a fencer.” 

Less-well-known fencers need outside help, says Stephen Okalo, the secretary-general of the Kenya Fencing Federation and Mr. Wanyoike’s former coach. “We need more competition halls, more referees, and many more fencers to attend international competitions for the sport to really grow,” he says.

Fencing is not the only sport in which Kenya has many talented athletes but too few resources, says Francis Mutuku, secretary-general of the National Olympic Committee of Kenya. 

Indeed, the country will compete in only a handful of sports at the Paris Olympics later this year, with the majority of its five dozen athletes participating in athletics. 

Mr. Wanyoike had dreamed of being part of the team marching beneath Kenya’s flag along the Seine in July. It would have been an uphill battle to get that far, he knows; most of his opponents on the international level have trained since childhood. It was especially disappointing that he did not get a chance to qualify because weather conditions delayed his flight, but he is not giving up.

“I will continue to focus on my training regimen,” he told the Monitor. “My main focus now is the 2028 Olympics.”

Back at Tsavora Fencing Mtaani club, practice is wrapping up. Mr. Wanyoike gathers his students around him for a quick pep talk as the students peel off their uniforms and prepare to filter back into the city outside. 

“Don’t let the environment you find yourself in define who you become,” he says.

Reuters

An illustration on AI shows figurines with computers and smartphones.

The future of the global economy has “brightened,” found the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a group of 38 wealthy countries. The OECD’s economists cited many factors for a potentially better rate of growth. But one stands out: a rapid rise in the use of artificial intelligence to improve worker productivity.

The OECD cited a couple of examples: People who write for a living and now rely on AI are about 50% more efficient. Computer coders are 60% more efficient.

These gains are “huge,” Clare Lombardelli, OECD’s chief economist, said last week. Yet they don’t quite capture future gains, she added, as the world begins to use AI to change “what we do as well as how we do it.”

That’s not all. The promise of AI to boost output per capita may help counterbalance a widespread worry that the future is hindered by a “scarcity of ideas,” according to an OECD report in April. The reason: AI, which is innovative enough, has begun “triggering an acceleration of innovation.”

Companies adopting AI have produced higher numbers of patents and new products. In particular, Al will enhance basic research by quickly generating new hypotheses that will then yield new inventions. This will allow researchers to “go beyond the low hanging fruits of scientific discovery,” the OECD found. AI “may continuously push out the productivity frontier.”

Ideas “are different from nearly all other goods in economics,” said Charles Jones of the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research at a symposium last year. Unlike material goods or workers, ideas do not have rivals because they are “infinitely usable” by any number of people. 

“In the long run, growth in living standards is determined by growth in the worldwide number of people searching for ideas,” he said. That number is determined by available talent, level of investments, migration patterns, and the size of the world population. As for AI’s potential to boost growth, he added, it is “perhaps the most uncertain but also has the greatest upside potential.”

“Artificial intelligence appears to be a new general purpose technology, perhaps on par or even exceeding electricity and the semiconductor,” he said.

For all its potential for misuse, AI at least has begun to alter how the world thinks about sources of inspiration. Or as economist Paul Romer, a winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, has noted, “We consistently fail to grasp how many ideas remain to be discovered.”