This week’s covers

Our two covers this week are the yin and yang of technological progress. Both AI-powered war and solar energy are being transformed by the head-spinning, pundit-confounding reality of exponential growth. When something doubles and doubles again, our brains find it hard to comprehend. It suddenly emerges from the background and becomes world-changing. Even as you try to catch up, it accelerates away from you.

We have reached that point with the technologies behind both our cover stories. When solar power was a tenth of its current size a decade ago, it was still seen as marginal, even by experts who knew how fast it had grown. Consider that the next ten-fold increase, over the next decade, will be equivalent to multiplying the world’s entire fleet of nuclear reactors by eight in less than the time it typically takes to build just a single one of them. Then imagine what will happen in the decade after that.

In the same way, artificial intelligence has become capable of astonishing feats of object recognition and higher-order problem solving. In due course, “decision-support systems” may be able to grasp the baffling complexity of war rapidly and over a wide area—perhaps an entire battlefield. AI systems, coupled with autonomous robots on land, sea and air, are likely to find and destroy targets at an unprecedented speed and on a vast scale.