Showing 1 - 10 of 16
Musk's Starship: If it sounds too good to be true...
News, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 06/12/2025
» Elon Musk promised to build a spaceship that would put people and cargo into Earth orbit at one-hundredth of the current cost per kilo and even enable human beings to create a colony on Mars. A great many people were seduced by the idea, including me.
Can Ukraine survive Trump presidency?
News, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 21/05/2025
» We are getting very close to the point where Donald Trump realises that his dear friend, Vladimir Putin, has been playing him for a fool. The Russian president never had the slightest intention of moderating his war aims, which include the annexation of much of Ukraine and the demotion of the rest to the status of a puppet state.
South Asian nuclear war would hit globe
Oped, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 01/05/2025
» India and Pakistan have had several shooting matches since they carried out a total of nine underground nuclear weapons tests in 1998. However, they don't make Putin-style thinly veiled threats to use their nukes (around 170 nuclear warheads each at the moment), and they do understand that escalation from smaller, "conventional" wars is the real danger.
Next chapter in Thailand's political saga
News, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 22/08/2024
» 'I consult with my father on all issues, whether on private matters or about work, and have done since I was young," said Paetongtarn Shinawatra, Thailand's new and youngest prime minister at 38 years of age. She is the third member of the Shinawatra family to hold this office, and part of the "evil cycle" that has paralysed the country's politics for the past 18 years.
In Ukraine, the generals are not the problem
Oped, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 14/02/2024
» "God is usually on the side of the big battalions," Voltaire allegedly said. Not always, but "usually". So how much do you want to bet?
AI is not going to wipe humans out just yet
News, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 05/06/2023
» I'm looking at a headline this morning that screams "AI Creators Fear the Extinction of Humanity", and I suppose they could turn out to be right. But it's still a bit early to declare a global emergency and turn all the machines off.
The molecular line between life and death
Oped, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 01/03/2023
» 'We are but one very small company [among] many hundreds of companies using AI software for drug discovery and de novo design. How many of them have ... the know-how to find the pockets of chemical space that can be filled with molecules predicted to be orders of magnitude more toxic than VX?" This is a warning that requires a little explanation.
Micro-suicide drones a real Xmas t(h)reat
News, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 21/12/2022
» Some lucky boys and girls are going to find micro-suicide drones in their stockings this Christmas! Get your orders in now!
The 'defence' follies of 'little boys' at play
Oped, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 26/03/2021
» In the early decades of the Cold War, this was the season when North Atlantic Treaty Organization (Nato) defence chiefs would announce their spending plans for the next year, and they would almost always "discover" some new threat from the Soviet Union to justify the money. In the United States, for example, the intelligence services traditionally found a Soviet armoured brigade hiding in Cuba every February or March.
Are we ready for the first real automatons?
Oped, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 30/01/2021
» They were planning to put on a play written by an artificial intelligence programme in Prague, capital city of the Czech Republic, this month, to mark the invention of robots (or at least the idea of robots) in the same city exactly one hundred years ago. The coronavirus pandemic got in the way of that, and it will now only be available free online late next month. Kind of symbolic, really: the future is quite different than what they expected.