As the world waits to see if President Donald Trump will give his final approval to a deal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz and, perhaps, finally bring the 2026 US-Iran conflict to a close, it’s already clear that one of the more surprising developments of the conflict has been the prominent role of Pakistan as a mediator. 

It was Pakistan’s military leader, Field Marshal Asim Munir, who served as the key go-between in the talks that led to the initial two-week US-Iran ceasefire in early April, and Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif who announced that it had gone into effect. Several days later, Islamabad hosted the highest level talks between the US and Iranian governments since 1979, including US Vice President JD Vance. On April 21, Trump announced the ceasefire had been extended, saying it was at Pakistan’s request. Munir has made two personal visits to Iran as part of his mediation efforts, the most recent on May 21.

Whereas the “P5+1” countries of the UN Security Council — the US, China, the UK, France, and Russia, plus Germany — helped bring about the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, and Oman hosted the US-Iran talks in the lead-up to the war, Pakistan has been the intermediary and negotiating venue of choice since the conflict began. The world’s only predominantly Muslim nuclear power is a rare country with credibility on both sides of this war. 

Pakistan’s prominent diplomatic role in the conflict is the latest sign of the unexpectedly close relations between the country’s government and the second Trump administration. “Thank you to Pakistan and its great prime minister and field marshal, two fantastic people!” Trump wrote in a characteristic Truth Social post in April. He has lavished particular praise on Munir, whom he has called an “exceptional man” and “my favorite field marshal.”

Pakistan’s new role as an indispensable US partner is partly due to some skilled Trumpian diplomacy by its government and partly due to just how much this administration’s global priorities have changed from the days when China and jihadist terrorism were the top of the agenda. 

How Pakistan went from pariah to partner in Washington

All of this would have been difficult to imagine during Trump’s first term, when Pakistan was often treated as a pariah. 

On New Year’s Day in 2018, Trump suspended most security assistance to Pakistan, tweeting, “The United States has foolishly given Pakistan more than 33 billion dollars in aid over the last 15 years and they have given us nothing but lies & deceit, thinking of our leaders as fools.” 

Trump would go on to cancel hundreds of millions of dollars in aid to Pakistan, which had been a close US counterterrorism partner even amid widespread allegations that it had provided safe harbor to the Taliban militants fighting US forces in Afghanistan and maintained relations with other anti-US militants. Pakistan responded by halting intelligence-sharing with the US amid widespread anti-American protests.   

At the same time, Trump cultivated a close relationship with Pakistan’s arch-rival India and its prime minister, Narendra Modi. Modi’s brand of majoritarian populist politics made him a natural Trump ally, and India’s position as a superpower counterweight to China made it a natural security partner for the US. The pro-Indian tilt in US foreign policy continued into the Biden administration, and there was every expectation it would carry through when Trump returned in 2025. 

Flattery and crypto: How Munir won over Trump

Pakistan’s turnaround with the new Trump administration began in early March 2025, when the country arrested an ISIS-K operative who was allegedly a key planner of the Kabul airport suicide bombing that killed 13 US troops during the withdrawal from Afghanistan, and extradited him to the United States, earning public gratitude from Trump.  

Then came the brief May 2025 war between India and Pakistan. Pakistan’s government publicly praised Trump for his “pivotal leadership” in the diplomacy that ended the conflict and nominated him for a Nobel Peace Prize. The flattery worked: Trump brought up Pakistan’s nomination during a phone call with Modi and was reportedly irritated that the Indian leader did not follow suit and, by contrast, seemed to go out of his way to downplay America’s role. 

Pakistan has also seemed particularly well-attuned to the personalist style of diplomacy in the Trump era, where the line between business and politics can be extremely blurry. Pakistan’s finance minister has signed a deal with World Liberty Financial, the cryptocurrency company co-founded by Trump’s sons and the sons of his diplomatic envoy, Steve Witkoff. 

Last year, Sharif also signed several memoranda on deals to deliver critical minerals and rare earth elements from Pakistan to the US. Pakistani officials have taken to referring to counterterrorism, critical minerals, and crypto as the “3 Cs” underlying their relationship with the Trump administration. 

The current relationship has also doubtless been helped by the ascendance of Munir, a man who Trump might describe as a military strongman out of “central casting.” Pakistan would certainly not be playing the same role today if Imran Khan, the former cricket star turned anti-American populist prime minister — who took power halfway through Trump’s first term — were still in office. Khan was removed in a vote of no confidence in 2022, which Khan blamed on the military establishment, and has been detained on corruption charges since 2023. With his removal, the military moved quickly to consolidate power. 

Pakistan’s military has always played a significant and complex role in Pakistan politics, exercising a significant amount of power behind the scenes; the country has suffered several military coups. Since Munir, formerly chief of the country’s powerful military intelligence agency, was appointed army chief by Sharif in 2022, the nation has veered closer to an outright military dictatorship: A constitutional amendment passed in 2025 gave Munir full control over all branches of the military including the nuclear forces, for the duration of a term that could last until 2030, and immunity from prosecution.  

Trump has helped cement Munir’s status by hosting the field marshal for a working lunch at the White House — the first time a Pakistani military leader rather than its elected prime minister has been hosted for such an event. 

How Pakistan is navigating America’s new priorities

If things are different now for the US and Pakistan, it’s partly just because the world is different. The US military’s withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021 removed one of the major sources of tension in the US-Pakistan relationship: the Pakistani government’s alleged double game with the Taliban. In fact, Pakistan and the now Taliban-controlled Afghanistan have been fighting a brutal border conflict for months.

It also helps that the Trump administration is generally less focused on Islamist terrorism this time around. It has pivoted away from “great power competition” with China, decreasing the importance of India’s role. US-India relations are generally frostier over a variety of issues ranging from India’s agricultural protectionism, to immigration in the US, to India’s economic relationship with Russia. 

“The second Trump administration, in its foreign policy, is aggressively transactional; it’s not changed by strategic considerations, even compared to how it was during its first term,” said Michael Kugelman, senior fellow for South Asia at the Atlantic Council. “So in that regard, [the Trump administration] would not have any concerns about embracing Pakistan, even though Islamabad has a very close alliance with Beijing.”

Pakistan has been accumulating an unlikely set of friends and partners in recent years. Even amid its rapprochement with the US, Pakistan has deepened its military and economic relationship with China. (Xi Jinping hailed his country’s “unbreakable” friendship with Pakistan during a visit by Sharif last month.)

In 2025, Pakistan signed a nuclear defense pact with Saudi Arabia. This is particularly notable given Pakistan’s possession of nuclear weapons: Some analysts saw this as effectively extending Pakistan’s nuclear umbrella to its allies in the Persian Gulf, though others disputed this interpretation.

Pakistan’s relations with Saudi Arabia’s rival, Iran, are complex, to put it mildly. It was only in 2024 that the two countries were lobbing missiles at each other’s territory, but they quickly deescalated the tensions; they have since cooperated in combating separatist militants and smugglers along their shared border. Munir, in particular, is believed to be deeply familiar with Iran’s military establishment from his days as Pakistan’s spy chief. 

“They have proven remarkably adept and agile in ensuring that they’re able to keep all of these balls in the air,” said Elizabeth Threlkeld, director of the South Asia program at the Stimson Center, referring to Pakistan’s global web of alliances. “But they are also vulnerable to a number of different shocks from different sources, given their positioning right now.”

Pakistan’s involvement in US-Iran diplomacy is not just an effort to gain favor with Trump. Islamabad genuinely needs the war to be over as quickly as possible. Pakistan is one of the countries most exposed to the economic impact of the war: It normally imports almost two-thirds of its natural gas and 30 to 40 percent of its total imports via the Strait of Hormuz. Food and fuel prices are surging in the country. Add to that the strong domestic opposition to the US-led war among Pakistan’s population, particularly its large Shiite minority. Pakistan’s defense pact with Saudi Arabia also raises the risk of it being drawn into a conflict in the Gulf. 

If the war has highlighted Pakistan’s diplomatic savvy, it has also at times exposed its limits. For all its efforts, Pakistan’s mediation has been unable to turn April’s ceasefire into a permanent end to the conflict that reopens the Strait. At times, Pakistan has appeared to be misrepresenting the sides’ actual positions in hopes of pushing a deal through. Trump’s recent demand that a number of Muslim countries including Pakistan join the Abraham Accords as part of a final Iran deal did not go over well in Pakistan, which has refused to recognize Israel since its founding. 

The longer the war goes on, the more Pakistan’s involvement will look less like a diplomatic masterstroke and more like a credibility-taxing quagmire. As India’s experience has illustrated, foreign governments are often lavished with praise by Trump only so long as they’re useful. If Pakistan can’t deliver the ceasefire deal Trump is looking for, or if his priorities simply shift again, it may once again find itself on the receiving end of Trump’s attacks. 

Ismail Harerimana grew up in Uganda not knowing why he was always sick. 

His childhood in the 1990s was a string of recurrent infections: malaria, diarrhea, headaches, and skin rashes. By 14, he was scarily thin, at which point doctors put him on a new medication that seemed to help. It was for kidney disease, his father falsely told him. But a classmate with the same prescription knew better. “Are you also suffering from kidney disease?” Harerimana remembers asking him. “And the boy said, ‘No — I’m suffering from AIDS.’”

In the 1990s, at the height of the AIDS crisis in Uganda, hundreds of thousands of babies like Harerimana were born with HIV each year, contracting the virus from their HIV-positive parents in utero, during childbirth, or while breastfeeding. About half did not live to see their second birthday.  

But those outcomes have changed in radical, often remarkable ways over the past three decades. In some parts of Uganda, as many as one in four infants were once infected with HIV at birth, leading to 32,000 new childhood HIV infections annually in the mid-1990s. Today, that infection rate has plummeted to fewer than 5,000. 

This changed because Uganda — along with much of the world — has diligently perfected the simple interventions needed to keep babies safe from the virus: repeated HIV testing for all expectant parents, and widely available anti-retroviral therapies for those who test positive, which makes the virus virtually untransmittable. In some countries, Botswana among them, new childhood infections are now so exceedingly rare that every new baby born with HIV prompts a comprehensive federal audit.

“I’m filled with hope because now, as Africans, we’re not asking whether elimination is possible,” said Doris Macharia, president of the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation. “We are actually confronting what it will take to finish this job. That is profound. That is progress. And that’s where we should be.”

But finishing the job would mean building a world where no babies are born with HIV at all, and many African countries with the highest HIV burdens remain far from that goal. About 120,000 children are still newly infected with HIV each year, most of them before or shortly after birth, accounting for nearly 10 percent of all new infections. That’s one child every four and a half minutes. 

Thanks to advancements in treatments, even babies born with HIV today can go on to live long, healthy, happy lives. But it is more difficult, because the same barriers that prevent their parents from getting on treatment while pregnant mean that many of their children struggle to access care. As a result, roughly 75,000 kids die from AIDS-related causes each year, typically before their fourth birthday. That is almost definitely an undercount, as it likely excludes many of the roughly 34 percent of children living with HIV who are never accurately diagnosed. 

Reaching these kids is what Macharia calls the last mile in preventing childhood HIV. It is also the hardest to cross — and particularly so now. Cuts to foreign assistance from the US and other countries have hampered progress, and in some harrowing cases, even reversed it. A projection by UNAIDS found that sustained aid cuts could lead to 1.1 million additional HIV infections in children between 2024 and 2040, and 820,000 more deaths.

Harerimana, who has found his calling as a community health worker, is already seeing some of those dire scenarios play out. For the first time in years, he’s seen an uptick in babies being born with HIV in his town.

“It takes me back to those days,” he said, “when there was no access to medication, where there was no access to research,” there was only “a disease everyone fears, a disease that has no concrete cure.”

Regression is not inevitable. Even the Trump administration — which deeply destabilized global HIV services last year — has supported the rollout of Lenacapavir, a potentially game-changing HIV prevention drug, for expectant parents at risk of HIV. Stopping babies from being born with HIV is, after all, about as sympathetic a case as you can get with foreign aid. But the very aid systems that have helped us reach the cusp of an HIV-free generation are now confronting a massive transition, one that makes all elements of care far more difficult. 

The secret to making sure kids don’t get HIV

After Harerimana learned he had HIV, he began zoning out in class. He couldn’t understand how a kid like him could get a virus he thought spread only through unprotected sex. 

“I would just sit and get lost. My mind would only think about how I’m going to lose my friends, how I’m going to die very soon,” he said. “And I started to ask God, like, ‘God, where did I get this disease?’”

Even many adults at the time didn’t realize there were other ways to contract HIV. Pervasive stigmas around HIV have made correcting such misconceptions an uphill battle around the world. As recently as 2016, only 56 percent of young women in Uganda knew much about vertical transmission, which is how the vast majority of children acquire HIV. Nearly half of babies born to an HIV-positive parent who is not on treatment will contract the virus. In comparison, there is at most a 1 in 72 chance of contracting the virus if you have unprotected sex with an untreated HIV-positive partner, and a 1 in 158 chance if you share needles with them.

But as awful as it sounds, at the height of the HIV epidemic, there “was not a market” for investing in pediatric treatment and prevention, said Florence Riako Anam, co-executive director of the Global Network of People Living with HIV. That was because “most of the children who acquired HIV did not live long. Many of them did not go beyond months, frankly.”

But some, like Harerimana, did live long enough to see a renaissance of new treatments and discoveries. The medication he began as a teen was an anti-retroviral therapy, or ARV, that these days is so effective, it can virtually eliminate HIV from your bloodstream. 

In 1994, a group of American researchers found that people who are pregnant and on treatment have a minuscule chance of passing the virus on to their baby, results so impressive that they halted their medical trial so they could offer treatment to the placebo group. Nearly 80 percent of HIV-positive pregnant people in the US were on ARVs by 1999. By 2003, just 1.2 percent of those parents passed the virus to their children.

But it would take many years for these miracle drugs to reach most African countries. Philippa Musoke, a pediatric infectious disease specialist in Uganda, led a landmark study in 1999 that found just two doses of the HIV drug Nevirapine — which cost $2 at the time per dose — slashed the chance a newborn would contract the virus by 50 percent. Other treatments relied on a “cocktail” of drugs that were much more effective, but often prohibitively expensive, costing $815 for a month-long course in the US.  

“It opened people’s eyes that a simple regimen could actually prevent mother-to-child transmission globally,” Musoke told me. Within a few years, many countries began rolling out free Nevirapine programs  — and later, more effective combined drug treatments — for pregnant people living with HIV. 

Most of the world saw its childhood infection rate collapse, but the undisputed breakout star was Botswana, which, in 1999, became the first African country to offer free HIV drugs to all pregnant women. At the time, a woman in the country had a one in four chance of having HIV, among the highest rates in the world. If she had three children in the years that followed, at least one would likely become infected before or during childbirth or breastfeeding. 

But thanks to the free treatment program, and a robust maternal health system that integrates universal HIV testing, a young Botswanan woman living with HIV today has an under 1.2 percent chance of passing the virus to her kids. Last year, the World Health Organization certified Botswana as the first country in the world with a high HIV rate to eliminate mother-to-child transmissions as a public health threat.

Other countries have also managed to pull off remarkable, albeit more modest, progress. In Kenya, where Anam lives, more than three-quarters of pregnant people with HIV received treatment in 2008, up from virtually none in 2003. In those five years, the number of children newly infected with HIV fell by 75 percent. 

After contracting HIV, “I don’t think many of us thought we could have kids,” not safely at least, said Anam, who tested positive for the virus shortly after giving birth to her first child 26 years ago. “And then over time, with advancement in treatment, it became an option for women.” 

Many of her friends who thought they could never have more children, some of whom lost their first babies to HIV in the 1990s, suddenly found they could have kids safely. Their second children, she says, are now in their tweens. 

Botswana cracked the code. Why can’t everyone else?

Even with all that progress, hundreds of babies are still being born with HIV each day. Other than Botswana, no country with a high HIV rate has managed to all but eliminate childhood HIV. Despite decades of progress and far better treatments, the rest of the world is still stubbornly far from that goal. 

“We’ve really made significant progress, but we’re not there yet,” Musoke said. “That is really unacceptable because we have all the knowledge, we have all the resources” to ensure no child is born with HIV in theory.

Yet about one in six pregnant people living with HIV is still not on treatment. And about half of those who are on treatment don’t take it as consistently as they should. Together, their children account for the vast majority of the 328 infected with HIV every single day.

Reaching these parents is critical. The problem is that many of them do not know they have the virus and live in rural areas where there are few providers who can test them for it. 

“Eliminating pediatric HIV and mother-to-child transmission is no longer a scientific question,” Macharia said. “It’s really a delivery and a systems question,” which will require more outreach workers, especially peer mentors, people living with HIV who’ve been trained to help others like themselves navigate their treatment and prevention options.

Liako Serobanyane tested positive for HIV in 2007, when she was pregnant with her second child. She trained as a mentor mother through the group Mothers2Mothers in Lesotho because she wanted to help “other women going through what I went through, even though I didn’t get the support I needed at the time,” she said. “There is no other model better than this, because we have been there. We know how it feels to be HIV-positive. We know how it feels to be rejected.”

The progress that’s been made so far against mother-to-child transmission has largely stemmed from parents who were easier to reach. They were already receiving prenatal care or giving birth at a clinic or hospital, as 99.8 percent of expectant parents in Botswana do. But there are still many parents with limited access to care. In Nigeria, which accounts for one in seven of the world’s babies born with HIV, about half of parents give birth at home with no skilled health worker present. The country has offered free HIV treatment to its citizens for nearly two decades now. But not enough pregnant people are taking them up on it. It is mentors like Serobanyane who have the best shot at making sure they do.

“We can’t just wait for people to come to the clinic” anymore, said Macharia of the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation. “We have to go to them.” 

The US built the system to keep babies HIV-free. It’s now dismantling it.

But bringing together all of those factors – strengthening delivery systems, hiring more peer mentors, normalizing HIV testing, and convincing more parents to give birth at the hospital – is neither easy nor cheap.

Maybe the biggest difference between Botswana and other countries with high HIV rates is that Botswana has diamonds. Lots of diamonds. Enough diamonds to turn Botswana into one of Africa’s richest countries per capita. 

That’s allowed Botswana to largely bankroll its own HIV response. As Alankar Malviya, Botswana country director for UNAIDS, told me, the country pays for about 70 percent of all testing, treatment, and outreach costs. Other less well-off countries like Nigeria have built about 90 percent of their HIV response primarily with the help of PEPFAR, the US-funded HIV program that began in 2003. It’s no coincidence that much of the world’s success in fighting off childhood HIV infections so far began that year. PEPFAR has helped make sure that at least 7.8 million babies were not born with HIV over the past 26 years. 

PEPFAR continues to fund lifesaving HIV treatment around the world, according to newly released data, but the Trump administration has severely disrupted its support for prevention and outreach work. That includes cuts to many outreach programs aimed at preventing mother-to-child HIV transmission, though the administration has maintained funding for some services, such as prenatal testing. 

With less funding for HIV screenings and prevention, fewer pregnant people will know they need antiretrovirals in the first place. They won’t have the condoms they need to prevent the spread. And if their babies contract the virus in utero or while breastfeeding, their parents might not know why they are so sick until it is too late.

“We are in a period of transition,” a senior official from the US State Department, which now oversees PEPFAR, told me under the condition of anonymity. “And during that transition, yes, there may be a few people who used to go to a particular community site that isn’t there anymore, and are having to figure out where to get those services from.”

The official insisted that the US still cares about preventing mother-to-child transmission. The Trump administration has shifted the way aid works by channeling it through bilateral agreements that require countries to partially pay their own way. It throws the old, and in many ways, highly successful system of HIV aid — which relied on international organizations as partners — out the window.

“Yes, it saved lives. Yes, it made progress,” the official said of the old aid order. “But it isn’t a model we can keep going with.”

Josephine Nabukenya, a pediatric HIV advocate who, like Harerimana, was born with the virus in the 1990s, agrees that having countries take more ownership of their health care system is a good thing in the long run. “But you do it in a phased approach,” she said, to avoid letting parents and children fall through the cracks. 

So far, that’s not how it’s played out. Mothers2Mothers, an organization that, since 2001, has trained HIV-positive moms like Serobanyane to be peer health mentors — a uniquely effective intervention — lost most of its funding last year. They closed offices in four countries and laid off hundreds of workers and peer mothers, shutting off outreach services for 450,000 people.

Serobanyane is based in Lesotho, one of the few countries where the group still operates. Because of funding cuts, she is one of just two mentor mothers in her district, down from six. “We love our job. We are doing it passionately,” she said, “but not knowing if the funding is going to be there or is going to be cut off is depressing and tiring.” 

She also worries for the mothers whose treatment or testing she can no longer follow as closely. Reminding them to attend their prenatal screenings or refill their treatment prescriptions requires resources and support that are no longer as available to her. 

Lesotho is one of the over 30 countries that have signed bilateral health aid deals with the State Department so far. The country is set to receive $232 million over 5 years from the US, which its government could theoretically use to hire its own mentor mothers and otherwise make up for lapses in HIV care and outreach. “It’s our dream that the mentor mother model be absorbed by the government one day,” Serobanyane said.

But the reality is, said Mpolokeng Mohloai, director of Mothers2Mothers in Lesotho, “the government is not yet ready to absorb it all.” 

“Every child that is infected with HIV is unacceptable.”

In an absolute worst-case scenario, if US-funded HIV programs aren’t adequately replaced, then a total of up to 1.7 million more children could die of AIDS-related causes by 2040, according to UNAIDS, a devastating leap in the wrong direction on an issue where the world had been making so much progress.

Even if governments do manage to plug some gaps, a large number of parents and children will lose access to support in the short term as a result of funding cuts. This means more mothers who don’t know they’re HIV-positive until it’s too late, more parents who fall behind on their medications, and more children who grow up to be very sick.

“Every child that is infected with HIV is unacceptable. Any mom who acquires HIV during pregnancy, breastfeeding, or even before then — that is also unacceptable,” said Macharia of the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation. “Those have to be unacceptable facts for us.”

Harerimana lost his job as a community health worker last year when the Trump administration put a pause on all foreign assistance funding. He has continued to work without pay, supporting children and their parents, some of whom he says have already missed out on critical treatment.

“I can now comfortably say that over the past year, when the aid cuts and confusion started, we are now seeing children getting infected by HIV through mother-to-child transmission again,” he said. “By the time the system stabilizes, the world will know how much the aid cuts have caused.”

There are few animals humans fear more than sharks. This is understandable: Sharks are big, dramatic creatures that have been permanently lodged in our culture as underwater killers since Jaws.

They also kill about six people in a given year. Snakes, on the other hand, kill roughly 100,000. After mosquitoes, which spread diseases like malaria, and humans, who just murder each other, snakes are the deadliest animals on Earth.

The surprise isn’t just that snakes kill so many people, but that the scale of this death and suffering has only recently become clearer. In India, where roughly half of the world’s snakebite deaths happen, official reports had long recorded only about 1,000 snakebite deaths a year. But many victims die in villages, on farms, or on their way to hospitals, and until recently, India did not require snakebite cases or deaths to be systematically reported through its public health system. Researchers using household death surveys and verbal autopsies have more recently estimated that the real number is close to 60,000 a year in India alone.

That gap in data is a big part of the reason why snakebites are so deadly in the first place. Antivenoms exist, and modern antivenoms can work well when given in time. But snake venom differs from one snake species to the next. Different species carry different mixes of toxins that can attack the nervous system, muscles, or tissue in different ways. That means antivenoms often have to be matched to the various snakes found in a given region; an antivenom made for one set of snakes may do little against another. Antivenoms are also expensive to produce and buy, and hard to keep reliably stocked in the rural clinics where they’re needed most.

But medicine is only half the problem. Once a person gets bitten, they have to recognize the danger, reach a hospital or clinic in time, and that clinic has to have an appropriate antivenom in stock, often without anyone knowing exactly which snake bit them. The patient also has to be able to afford the treatment. In poor, rural communities, any of those steps can and often do fail.

And because the people most at risk are also among the least able to pay, there has never been much of a market for better snakebite treatments. In fact, in the last two decades, the market has gotten worse with some manufacturers leaving the field altogether.

But things are beginning to change. Scientists are now running human trials on snakebite treatments other than antivenom, including drugs that may not require cold storage or precise species matching. In February, the World Health Organization issued its first formal blueprint for what next-generation snakebite drugs should look like, including treatments that could be given to victims before they reach a hospital. And in 2024, after years of severe undercounting, India’s health ministry moved to make snakebite a notifiable disease, meaning every case and death has to be reported to public health authorities, and launched a national plan to bring those deaths down.

The field is “witnessing important developments (not sufficient, but important) on various fronts,” José María Gutiérrez, one of the field’s leading authorities on antivenom at the University of Costa Rica, wrote in an email. But whether any of this reaches the villages where most snakebite deaths happen is a separate question.

How the field got stuck

The basic technology behind antivenoms is more than a century old. In the 1890s, scientists figured out they could inject small amounts of snake venom into animals, usually horses and sheep, wait for their immune systems to produce antibodies, and then harvest those antibodies as treatments.

The manufacturing has gotten a lot more sophisticated since then. The basic animal-based method is still widely used, but modern antivenoms are more carefully purified, processed, and quality-controlled, making them far safer and more effective than earlier versions. But the underlying challenge is still the same. Antibodies have to be matched to specific toxins they are meant to neutralize, and making them at scale is still expensive.

This economic challenge of producing antivenom became most visible in 2014, when Sanofi, a French pharmaceutical company, stopped producing Fav-Afrique, a vital antivenom for sub-Saharan Africa that neutralizes venom from 10 of the most dangerous snakes in the region, because it wasn’t profitable enough. That breakdown was a clear illustration of the underlying problem: snakebite kills at an enormous scale, but mostly among people who have little purchasing power.

But things are beginning to look up. In 2019 the Wellcome Trust, a UK-based philanthropy, announced a roughly $100 million, seven-year program to bring snakebite treatment into the 21st century. A review commissioned by Wellcome found that global funding for snakebite research totaled just $57 million from 2007 to 2018, averaging less than $5 million a year.

The new commitment was the largest infusion of funding the field had ever seen, supporting both the search for new kinds of snakebite treatment and efforts to shore up existing antivenom supply. Some of that money went to Wales-based MicroPharm to restart production of Fav-Afrique, the antivenom Sanofi had abandoned.

The big shift now is that researchers are no longer just trying to make better antivenoms. They’re also trying to develop treatments that could get around some of  antivenom’s biggest limitations. And the WHO blueprint gives that shift a more concrete shape. It calls for two kinds of next-gen treatments: drugs that could help in hospitals, alongside or instead of antivenom, and simpler drugs that could be given soon after a bite.

The most advanced new candidate is called varespladib, a drug that can be given as a pill that blocks one of the most damaging families of enzymes in snake venom. In a phase 2 trial, it appeared safe but did not clearly outperform standard care. Researchers now see it more as a field aid. 

There are also efforts to repurpose other existing drugs and test them against snakebites, such as marimastat, a cancer drug, and DMPS, a drug used to treat heavy metal poisoning. Gutiérrez says these repurposed drugs are the most promising near-term options because researchers don’t have to start from zero. They have already been tested for other diseases, which means they can move into snakebite trials much faster than brand new drugs. Clinical trials of some of these repurposed drugs are now underway in the US, India, and Kenya. Further out, researchers are also working on new antibody therapies and AI-designed proteins targeted at specific snake toxins.

These drugs are not meant to replace antivenom, which remains quite effective when given in time. But they could finally move the field beyond where it has been stuck for decades.

The hard part

But the new excitement has yet to pay off. Tim Reed, who runs the Amsterdam-based NGO Health Action International, has long argued that snakebite researchers and funders have chased expensive scientific solutions while community needs go unmet. The pipeline looks promising, he said, but it has yet to bring anything to market. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of people have died from snakebite in recent years, and many more have been left with life-changing injuries, “with a disproportionate representation of children,” Reed said.

The new drugs may eventually arrive, but Reed worries that when they do, they may still be priced out of reach for rural patients. Even varespladib, which is cheaper to develop than antibody-based treatments, is being brought forward by a small biotech company that will eventually need to recoup its investment. Whether it will be affordable for a farmer in Bihar or western Kenya is separate from whether it works in trials, yet just as important.

Reed argues that the global snakebite world still underfunds the work that can help people now: prevention, first response, and community education. His organization has kept a small snakebite program going with its own funds, supporting school-based prevention work in Kenya and research in Rwanda. Its Women Champions of Snakebite network is still active, and it has helped launch a Snakebite Community Engagement Network run by people in the Global South. These programs are small, but they are built around the communities where snakebite actually happens.

A better snakebite response would have to do both things at once: Develop better drugs while also funding the community work that can prevent snakebites and deaths now. There’s been real progress, more so in some areas of concern than others, but, as Gutiérrez put it, “there is still a long road to go to give this problem the attention it deserves.” 

After Abigail Spanberger’s landslide election win in Virginia last November, she’d hoped to govern as she’d campaigned — rising above the partisan fray and focused on affordability.

It hasn’t worked out that way.

She alienated the right early on by joining the national battle over gerrymandering that Republicans kicked off (after initially saying she wouldn’t), endorsing a map that would favor Democrats in 10 of Virginia’s 11 US House districts. It passed as a ballot measure, but was tossed out by the state’s highest court. 

Additionally, when some enthusiastic Democrats in the legislature proposed a litany of new taxes and fees, Fox News rounded them up and the story caused a sensation as Republicans accused her of abandoning her focus on costs — even though Spanberger hadn’t endorsed any of those ideas.

So lately, the governor has tried to reestablish her moderate credentials — by saying no to Democrats in the legislature, with her veto.

In recent weeks, Spanberger vetoed major bills on retail marijuana sales, collective bargaining for state and local government workers, class action lawsuits, prescription drug prices, gambling, criminal justice reform, and more.

For that, she’s been met with fury from the left — denounced as a sellout betraying progressive causes. And with further battles over the state’s budget ahead, her relationships with key figures in the legislature have gotten worse.

To her critics, Spanberger is squandering what could be a short-lived opportunity for much-needed major change. To her defenders, she’s trying to make center-left governance actually work — preventing progressives from going too far in ways that would lead to poor governance and voter backlash in a state that is not quite solidly blue.

It’s a preview of challenges other states might face next year if a blue wave creates more new Democratic trifectas — and at the national level in 2029 if Democrats take the White House and Congress. 

While Spanberger faces some Virginia-specific hurdles, her broader dilemma is a familiar one. Is it possible to play procedural hardball without angering the middle? When the base wants to pass the whole progressive agenda all at once, when should a governor or president push back? And if you’re already taking on fire from the right, can you afford to have the left mad at you too?

The governor’s dilemma

The early controversies and criticism from the right took a toll on Spanberger’s approval rating.

At the heart of it was the redistricting referendum, which required her to commit to what was by definition a partisan crusade — its only purpose was to hand Democrats seats, to make up for Republican redistricting gains elsewhere.

Though she had won election by a 15-point margin, by early April, Spanberger’s approval rating was down to 47 percent — and her disapproval was 46 percent. Her honeymoon had ended.

That was about the time she had to decide what to do with the 1,156 bills the legislature had sent her by the close of its session. During that session, Spanberger was “little seen or heard,” Virginia Mercury columnist Bob Lewis wrote. 

This wasn’t entirely surprising: The legislature was used to taking the lead. In Virginia, governors are prohibited from running for reelection, making them instant lame ducks. “The joke in the legislature is, you don’t like the governor, just wait a couple minutes,” Richard Meagher, a political scientist at Randolph-Macon College, told me.

Powerful figures like L. Louise Lucas, the state senate president pro tempore and finance committee chair, call the shots. The 82-year old Lucas has served in the legislature for more than three decades; she’s recently gained national attention for her partisan combativeness and spicy social media presence. (When Sens. Mark Warner and Tim Kaine raised concerns about her redistricting plans, she said their complaints were “coming from a cuck chair in the corner”).

After four years under Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin, Democrats had a long list of things they wanted to do with their newfound control of state government — an agenda that amounted to bold progressive change, as well as the procedural hardball of the redistricting effort (since blocked in court).

Spanberger signed the vast majority of the bills sent to her into law — including measures on the minimum wage, paid family and medical leave, gun control, and reproductive rights.

But on other key measures, she balked.

What the governor vetoed

There were some bills that Spanberger flatly vetoed — such as on gambling, criminal justice reform, and a new fee on mattress sales to fund mattress recycling.

On other bills, she took a different tack — initially proposing major amendments to what the legislature had passed, and only vetoing when the legislature rejected her suggestions. Here, she said, she remains committed to the goals of these proposals — but she simply believes the bills as written will work out poorly, and wants changes.

For Democrats’ long-awaited bill to legalize retail marijuana sales (recreational use was legalized in 2021), Spanberger wanted to add new tough penalties for public consumption and possession of large amounts. Her critics viewed this as a poison pill designed to kill the bill, since progressives in the legislature were ill-inclined toward making drug laws harsher.

For labor’s prized bill to let state and local government employees collectively bargain, Spanberger proposed delaying implementation for local government employees until 2030 — when, notably, she’d be out of office. (Some local governments had complained that, if the original bill passed, workers could negotiate higher compensation and squeeze their limited budgets.)

And for a bill creating a process to let people file class action lawsuits in Virginia (they’re one of just two states that has no formal procedure for that), Spanberger proposed limiting the bill to a few cities and Fairfax County, and giving judges a way to dismiss such lawsuits earlier.

There are a few common themes in her vetoes. She’s sensitive to perceptions that the Democratic Party is soft on crime or disorder — or that it’s too eager to impose new taxes. 

Another concern is keeping businesses feeling good about the state. Virginia political analyst Bob Holsworth told me that the state’s politicians have long cared deeply about national ratings of their business climate, such as CNBC’s. Virginia often ranks No. 1 on such surveys (though they dropped to fourth last year).

To explain Spanberger’s veto of a prescription drug pricing board, for instance, Holsworth pointed toward recent investments by companies like AstraZeneca in bringing drug manufacturing facilities to Virginia.

Here too, there are echoes of Democratic tensions in other states: In New York City, Mayor Zohran Mamdani has found himself in a standoff with ultra-wealthy residents threatening to leave or abandon planned investments over his tax-the-rich proposals. In California, Democrats are divided over a proposed wealth tax that’s generating the same concerns and influencing the governor’s race. And more leaders could find themselves in similar positions as they try to manage their base’s populist backlash against the rich while trying to attract businesses and grow their tax base to accommodate new spending.

Data centers and bad blood

The business climate is a major factor in another huge fight currently splitting Spanberger from progressives — data centers.

Lucas, the senate finance committee chair, wants to eliminate tax incentives for data centers, and rely heavily on this for revenue in the state’s budget (which must be settled by June 30). But Spanberger argues that ending those tax breaks would effectively mean breaking a promise to businesses who chose to build in Virginia.

“Lucas came up with an issue that is really problematic for the Democrats, because on one hand you’re talking about a tax exemption that goes to the richest people in the world,” Holsworth said. “And then on the other hand, if the rug gets pulled out from under this exemption, Virginia’s rating among the best states for doing business in the country goes flying down.”

With data centers drawing populist opposition at the local, state, and federal level, and a broader AI backlash simmering in some corners of the left, other Democrats are likely to face these challenges as well. In April, Maine governor Janet Mills vetoed a proposed moratorium on data centers over concerns it would penalize a project that had already been planned. 

As the battle over the budget stretches on, tensions between Spanberger and legislators have risen. Many of them view her as blindsiding them with her vetoes, and failing to engage in the process early enough. 

Meanwhile, the relationship with Lucas keeps worsening. An interview this week in which Spanberger said the legislature might not respect her due to sexism didn’t go over well. 

“You have gotta be kidding me!” Lucas posted on X Wednesday. “There is a record number of women in the GA and four of them are in leadership and a woman LG, yet you think this is all about you! Okay, you thought it to be a great idea but just remember, you started this mess!”

There’s bad blood behind the scenes too. In February, Spanberger’s chief of staff filed a defamation lawsuit against a longtime adviser to Lucas, claiming he was spreading scurrilous rumors about her.

But being at odds with Lucas could be risky. “Lucas has a little bit of the mob boss in her — which endears her to a lot of Democrats in the commonwealth,” said Meagher, the Randolph-Macon college political scientist. “Democratic voters, particularly when they look at the national leadership, are tired of tepid, moderate, mealy-mouthed leaders.”

Meanwhile, Lucas’s national profile could soon get bigger. Last month, the FBI searched her office and a marijuana dispensary she owns. Sources told the New York Times that the search stemmed from a corruption and bribery investigation opened during the Biden administration. Lucas has positioned herself as a victim of Trump’s retribution crusade, claiming, “I am not backing down.”

Other Democrats will face similar challenges

In theory, Spanberger is trying to appeal to her state’s median voter. But in between elections, the median voter is often disengaged and turned out. The loudest voices are partisans and ideologues; which leaves her with a right that’s already turned against her and a left that’s turning on her too.

And while some of Spanberger’s challenges are unique to her state, other incoming Democratic governors — or the next Democratic president — could soon find themselves in similar situations.

The party’s base and interest groups will demand a wish list of progressive agenda items they’ve long dreamed of passing, as well as hardball procedural moves to help counter perceived foul play on the right.

Picture a Democrat being sworn in as president with congressional majorities in 2029, and immediately being swamped with demands for filibuster abolition (which would uncork even more long-deferred legislative priorities) and court-packing. Meanwhile, activists are pushing for major new spending programs even as the deficit and national debt are worsening.

The executive will be the one tasked with weighing all the associated political and practical tradeoffs — and deciding when to say no. If Spanberger’s experience is any indication, there won’t be any easy answers waiting for them. 

In case you didn’t notice, the Antichrist is back.

All right, forgive the hyperbole — this biblical agent of Satan hasn’t actually returned to lead a rebellion against God before Christ’s second coming. But in the year of our Lord 2026, a curious surge in chatter about this herald of the apocalypse seems to be underway.

A number of far-right dissidents, from Marjorie Taylor Greene to Nick Fuentes, are asking questions about whether President Donald Trump is more than he seems. “Could this be the Antichrist?” Tucker Carlson asked on his podcast. “Well, who knows?” It didn’t help when Trump posted an AI-slop image of himself as the Messiah, which he later claimed was meant to be a doctor. “Not saying Trump is the Antichrist,” conservative Rod Dreher told the Wall Street Journal. “But he’s radiating the spirit of Antichrist, no question.”

The antichrist talk is also taking off in the politics-adjacent tech world in a different context, where Palantir founder and conservative tech billionaire Peter Thiel has been leading a series of closed-door lectures on the Antichrist (and garnering the disapproving attention of the Vatican). In a wild coincidence, his hypothetical Antichrist appears to be anti-tech people who annoy him.

It’s the most the end times have saturated our political culture since the aughts, when the new millennium brought an explosion of renewed interest, spurred on by the apocalyptic Left Behind novels and related Christian media depicting a “realistic” modern Antichrist. Later on, former President Barack Obama became a fixation of related theories on the religious right depicting him as the Antichrist. 

Scholars and experts on biblical writing and apocalyptic history say there’s a long history of perceived antichrist figures popping up in moments of collective crisis or despair in the western world. And there are certain traits that tend to supercharge these narratives — the presence of war (especially in the Middle East), economic or public health crises, political or societal instability, and the appearance of an unusually charismatic leader. 

Needless to say, we were probably due for a revival. 

Yet just like in past periods of panic and perturbation over the centuries, there’s a lot of uncertainty in these discussions over who or what the Antichrist is, when this figure is to return, or even if this biblical character is supposed to be a real thing. 

So it’s a good time to ask: Where did the idea of the Antichrist come from in the first place? How does it tend to manifest in politics? And what is it about our current moment that’s driving such renewed interest in the concept? 

The biblical roots of the Antichrist

It’s probably helpful to start off with actually defining what the Antichrist is, and what the signs are that believers in his arrival are looking for. 

Definitions vary across various Christian denominations and traditions, but they are rooted in the interpretation of a relatively small number of biblical passages that either use this term explicitly or get linked to the same figure. 

Surprisingly, the term “antichrist” only appears five times in the New Testament. These explicit mentions in the letters of the disciple John refer  to “deceivers” who come to confuse Christians by denying Jesus Christ’s divinity and preaching other heresies. Scripture suggests that there can be (and have been) multiple antichrists, whose aim is to derail the faithful from achieving salvation.

Whether this is a symbolic or literal figure depends on Christian traditions, and how close you link these passages to references to other beasts and deceivers written about in other parts of the New Testament. For example: The apostle Paul writes of a “man of lawlessness” in his second letter to the Thessalonians, who “will oppose and will exalt himself over everything that is called God or is worshiped, so that he sets himself up in God’s temple, proclaiming himself to be God.” 

Then you have horror-movie, apocalyptic visions from the Book of Revelations about the chaotic period before the second coming of Christ, which includes reference to a seven-headed “beast coming out of the sea,” who bears a fatal wound, “but the fatal wound had been healed.” This beast is empowered by a dragon, understood to be Satan, and the people of the world stand in awe and worship this beast, asking “Who is like the beast? Who can wage war against it?” 

Catholics and mainline Protestants have less literal interpretations of these passages. 

Many mainline Protestant denominations teach that these figures are more symbolic manifestations of unholy traits and un-Christianlike beliefs and behavior, not an actual being who is due to appear at some point in the future.

Catholics are called to view the “antichrist” as a period of intense prosecution, testing of the church, and the rise of false prophets; “a final trial” before Christ returns in which believers face a “supreme religious deception” and are faced with a choice to believe in a “pseudo-messianism by which man glorifies himself in place of God and of his Messiah” or stay true to their faith. 

But the Catholic Church also cautions against believing claims that an antichrist figure is imminently coming. And the explicit characters in the Bible have been understood by many scholars to be references to Roman leaders who persecuted Christians during early church history.

More fundamentalist and evangelical believers, however, view all these textual clues as actual signposts and steps in the process toward the apocalypse and Christ’s return. That’s been the main entry point for the Antichrist’s place in American culture.  

The long history of the Antichrist in the Western imagination

Because of the detail and color of these symbols and characters in the Bible, it has been enticing for believers and readers to draw firm connections between the text and the real world. 

“They read the Bible like it’s a secret code book, and that if they can unlock the code, then they can understand what’s going to happen in the end times,” Matthew A. Sutton, a historian of American apocalypticism at Washington State University, told me. “It’s a very modern way to read the Bible compared to what you would’ve seen through much of church history.”

Sutton and other historians differentiate between the modern (and by that they mean in the last century) antichrist discourse and historical beliefs. But there tend to be some preconditions necessary for this chatter to rise that go back even further in time: war in the Middle East, the rise of charismatic or terrifying leaders, and environmental, political, or economic catastrophe.

For example, the turn of the first millennium was one of the earliest surges in interest in the figure of the Antichrist, given explicit references in the Bible to thousand-year periods (as in Christ’s thousand-year kingdom on Earth, from the Book of Revelations) and the violent and unstable nature of life in the early Middle Ages, Brett Whalen, an assistant professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, told me. In the same century, the First Crusade sparked another of these waves, as crusaders captured Jerusalem from Islamic rule. And the Middle Ages were rife with antichrist talk, primarily by critics of the papacy. 

“You can always call the pope ‘Antichrist,’” Whalen said. “Historically, they’re probably the No. 1 candidate for being Antichrist, or kings or emperors. You had a limited cast.”

Various secular rulers have been labeled as such too: Frederick II, a Holy Roman emperor around the turn of the 12th century, was called Antichrist by the pope with whom he regularly feuded. The Muslim sultan Saladin, who retook Jerusalem around this time, was similarly described as such.

“Martin Luther was called Antichrist when the Protestant Reformation happened,” Whalen said. “So wars, political changes, religious revolutions, and the rise and fall of empires — these sorts of political and religious events can create a moment.”

What makes modern iterations of the Antichrist different

So how did these historical waves of antichrist panic lead us to Donald Trump and Peter Thiel? 

Blame America, in this case. In the modern era, antichrists became democratized, as US-based evangelical movements picked up steam, literal readings of the Bible spread, and end-times theories were solidified. 

“Obsessing over everyday news and trying to align that with biblical prophecy — that is a modern American phenomenon,” Sutton told me. “And by modern, that begins in the 1880s, 1890s, and that really is what gives birth to fundamentalism, [another] uniquely American phenomenon. And then fundamentalism morphs into today’s evangelicalism.” 

Certainly, the news seemed to confirm their suspicions: Even for secular Americans, it’s easy to feel like a particular moment is a time of struggle, or that we’re headed toward some violent catharsis, or are being engulfed by a personality cult.

And the 20th century, marked by two World Wars, the rise and fall of new totalitarian governments, and the threat of nuclear annihilation, was especially fertile ground for this kind of thinking. Figures like Mussolini, Hitler, and Stalin were all labeled Antichrists; President Franklin D. Roosevelt also faced accusations. 

In the postwar period, the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948 was another crucial development in today’s antichrist theology. Many of the apocalyptic biblical stories center on the Holy Land, the return of Jewish people to it, and a period of tribulation for them; there, this antichrist figure will allow the Jewish people to rebuild a temple, then betray them, demand worship, and assemble global armies under his command for a final battle in the valley of Armageddon (which historically is located in the Jezreel Valley in northern Israel).

Now, these narratives have become central to dispensationalist evangelical theology: Israel’s unity and existence must be preserved in order for these phases to take shape, and for the eventual rapture to occur. Consequently, “anything that involves Israel or the Middle East is going to trigger speculation” of end-times prophesies, Sutton said, especially when there’s instability or war in the region.

These literal biblical interpretations also suggest a period of global domination by the Antichrist — governments submit to this figure and turn over their armies to him. 

“Part of what has driven concerns about the Antichrist is the idea that they’re going to sacrifice American sovereignty through a global organization,” Sutton said. “And so this is why religious conservatives are so suspicious of groups like NATO and especially the United Nations, because they believe ultimately we’re moving towards one world government, and it’s the Antichrist. He’s going to prevail over that one world.”

Combined with the expectation that the antichrist figure will be a charismatic leader, you get the more recent panics: Saddam Hussein faced antichrist allegations during the Gulf War. Hillary Clinton was called the Antichrist. But nobody drew more scrutiny in recent times than Barack Obama, whose meteoric political rise on a message of greater international cooperation and outreach to the Muslim world made him a magnet for antichrist talk. 

This speculation broke into the mainstream in 2008, when some Democrats accused former Sen. John McCain’s presidential campaign of deliberately referencing it with a web video mocking Obama’s celebrity by depicting him as a Moses-like religious figure. 

The McCain campaign denied it was a dogwhistle, but the discussion around the topic grew so heated that Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins, co-authors of the Left Behind novels about the Antichrist, stepped in to publicly reassure their Christian readers that Obama was not the figure they had in mind. 

Which brings us to 2026. The latest panics fit neatly into these traditions: Peter Thiel’s antichrist lectures seem to boil down to a fear over technological stagnation and growing opposition to artificial intelligence. He warns that efforts to regulate AI, in the name of fighting some future existential risk, could bring about the conditions for a central power to seize global authoritarian control — the Antichrist. 

Sutton, who has written about these lectures before, argues that it’s not the most novel approach, but it is dangerous: “Dressing political theory in apocalyptic robes carries risks. When powerful actors reframe ordinary policy debates such as about guardrails for AI as a battle against the antichrist, they raise anxieties, delegitimize compromise and insinuate that democratic deliberation is spiritually suspect.”

The recent Trump panic, however, is a bit of an inversion: Trump is typically championed by the same right-wing religious figures who are most attuned to literal interpretations of the Antichrist and the end times. It’s surprising that figures like Carlson and Fuentes would break the seal on this front. But, historically speaking, Trump also fits the mold of prior antichrist hunts: He is surely a charismatic leader; he’s launched civilizational wars in the Middle East; he’s survived assassination attempts, mimicking the fatal, but healed, wound of the beast of Revelations; and he’s blasphemed and used the trappings of religion to advance his personal brand.

But to focus on any one person or movement as antichrist is to miss the broader point, Robert Fuller, a religious studies professor at Bradley University, told me. The concept, applied politically, risks taking an already polarized time and raising the stakes of elections and policy debates even further. 

“This image sustains a crisis mentality,” Fuller said. “It summons out hatred and resentment that can fuel long-term grudges. It makes compromise unthinkable since no one compromises with the devil. It justifies hatred and violence, recasting these traits as virtues.”

In that vein, it’s inevitable that antichrist narratives persist; such a flexible idea can adapt regardless of century. It’s likely we’ll see many recurring returns of the Antichrist, at least until the world does actually end.

“I want AI to be a tool that allows human flourishing!” exclaimed Brad Carson, a former member of Congress. “There is an option out there where AI is just a tool for us.”

This is a normal thing to say in most circles. But Carson was speaking at an invite-only symposium dedicated to the idea of creating a “Worthy Successor” — an AI so impressive, so beyond the mere human, that we’d actually want it to replace humanity.  

“You’re a brave man for entering this room!” Dan Faggella, an AI market researcher and organizer of the symposium, told Carson. “You’re in probably the only room in the country where most people disagree with you.” 

The attendees at the symposium, which took place at the New York Academy of Sciences last September, are part of a subculture that is growing in importance: the AI successionists, who think that artificial intelligence is our rightful heir — the next step in cosmic evolution. Since they believe AIs could become our moral superiors, they argue it’s actually wrong to try to keep the machines down, or even to align them with human values, as most AI companies aim to do. Instead, we should usher in artificial intelligence as a successor to humanity and hand over the world to it. Even if that means we go extinct.

They know this view is taboo, which is why I was invited only on the condition that I wouldn’t quote anyone other than keynote speakers by name. But suffice it to say that this is not a fringe view. It’s becoming highly influential. People from major AI labs — Anthropic, Google DeepMind, xAI — were in attendance. So were people from think tanks that directly shape the US government’s AI policy. 

AI successionism has been gaining ground among technologists over the past decade. In 2015, Google co-founder Larry Page famously accused Elon Musk of “speciesism” because Page thought we should let digital minds take over, and Musk disagreed.

The successionist vision has been amplified by the advent of effective accelerationism (e/acc) in 2022. Its founder, Guillaume Verdon — the physicist more colorfully known on X as Based Beff Jezos — describes e/acc as a “meta-religion” that’s about “having faith” in the universe’s drive toward increasingly intelligent systems. The best thing we can do is help the universe by developing advanced AI as fast as possible, even at the expense of humanity. “E/acc,” as Verdon has written, “has no particular allegiance to the biological substrate.” 

Tech heavyweights have come on board. Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen listed e/acc thinkers as his “patron saints.” Garry Tan, the CEO of tech startup accelerator Y Combinator, included “e/acc” in his social media bio and invested in Verdon’s company, which aims to build the world’s most efficient computers. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman posted on X to Verdon, saying, “you cannot outaccelerate me.” 

And these days, AI successionism is spreading beyond Silicon Valley. At the New York symposium, Faggella told the audience that trying to preserve the human species as it is would be silly.

“We could ask the questions that would tie all of our moral aspirations eternally to 23 chromosomes — or we could ask the cosmic questions,” Faggella said.

He wanted us to consider “unpolite, uncouth” possibilities, starting with: The flame of consciousness — the capacity for experience and moral value — may be the rarest and most precious thing in the universe. Humanity is currently a torch carrying that flame, but what if we’re ultimately not the best carrier for it? And if AI can spread that flame far further than we mere humans can, generating experiences of bliss and forms of moral value that we could never even dream of, shouldn’t we let it? 

Faggella’s talk was greeted by a loud round of applause. Later, he and a couple dozen attendees headed to a nearby hotel balcony for drinks. And so it was that I found myself overlooking the Manhattan skyline as people talked about the end of humanity over cocktails.

There was some diversity of opinion among the group. Not everyone self-identified with the relatively new term “AI successionist.” Some were proponents of transhumanism, the movement that says we should use tech to proactively evolve our species into Homo sapiens 2.0. Transhumanists hope to keep some version of humanity going, but definitely not the current hardware; they dream of radical life extension, cognitive enhancement, and eventually mind uploading. (Musk, who said he created his brain chip company Neuralink to help humanity merge with AI, probably falls — or at least fell — into this category.) Others were posthumanists, those who want us to give rise to descendants that move beyond humanity altogether. 

The biologist sitting across from me was very excited about the prospect of merging humans with AI. He said we should task AI with figuring out how best to do the merger, then “take it off the leash” and allow AI to control its own evolution — and by extension, ours. Of course, he said, not all humans will make it through the transformation; only a select group of people will transition to the next evolutionary stage. (Presumably, the type of people privileged enough to imbibe cocktails at Manhattan AI symposia.)

The man seated beside me, a researcher from one of the major AI companies, was even more radical. Forget merger — it’s okay if humans don’t survive at all, he said. Human text has been used to train the AIs; in some sense, then, the human spirit will live on. “So on the cosmic level,” he said cheerfully, “I’m okay with it.”

Most people are definitely not okay with it. The average person would probably find the answers of the Worthy Successor group repugnant. Yet the core question they pose cannot be ignored. Whether they picture us merging with machines or ultimately being superseded by them, technologists are developing innovations that could dramatically change what it means to be human — think AI-powered brain chips that enable mind-reading or magnetic implants that give you a sixth sense — and genetic tools that could even reshape the DNA of all future generations. 

As it becomes possible to direct our own evolution as a species — and potentially even create a new species that surpasses us — we have to decide: How do we know to what extent it does make sense to transform ourselves using technology? What kinds of augmentation do we want, and what kinds do we absolutely not want?  What do we wish, ultimately, to become?

This is a moral question, even a spiritual one, and it demands a spiritual response. The AI successionists are offering one. For anyone who finds it repulsive, the challenge is to offer a countervailing positive vision. 

And it’s essential to do that now, because as sci-fi as the successionists might sound, they are building real political power, with links to the authoritarian right. Several of the tech heavyweights who’ve embraced successionism want to escape the control of democratic governments, so much so that they’re seeking to create their own sovereign colonies. That can come in the form of space colonies, à la Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, or in independent “startup cities” or “network states” built by corporations here on Earth — currently Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen’s favored approach. And Verdon’s investors include entrepreneur Balaji Srinivasan, a major proponent of the network state. 

These broligarchs have successfully cozied up to the Trump administration, clearing the way for their accelerationist vision. And they’ll take the wheel unless we come up with an alternate vision for the future.

The natural alternative is humanism, which replaced the medieval view that humans need God to rescue them with the view that humans have the ability, and responsibility, to achieve flourishing through their own efforts. The problem is that, so far, we haven’t developed a version of humanism that’s brave enough to directly tackle the core question — what do we want our species to become? — and answer it compellingly.

The most common “pro-human” response tries to say there are certain fixed traits that make humans unique, and to locate value only in humans as they currently exist. “In the era of artificial intelligence, when human dignity is threatened by new forms of dehumanization, ours is the pressing duty to remain profoundly human,” Pope Leo recently wrote in his encyclical Magnifica Humanitas. This response says: Let’s use tech remedially — to alleviate problems like disease — but let’s not try to augment the species. 

That feels insufficient as a guide to the future, because, even before the advent of AI and gene editing, “human” has never been a static category. Homo sapiens has always been evolving and augmenting itself, from the agricultural diet that reshaped our jaws to the algorithms reshaping our attention.

The old formulation is “the naive version of humanism,” Shannon Vallor, a philosopher of technology at the University of Edinburgh, told me recently. “It’s the idea that there’s this blueprint for what a human is and that somehow technology, or any things that change us, take us away from that blueprint — when in fact we’ve been changing ourselves with language, with tools, with architecture, with culture, from the moment we climbed down from the trees.”

A 21st-century humanism needs to say something more sophisticated than just “keep humanity the same.” It needs to have an answer to the question of what we want humanity to become in a tech-augmented world.

But if there is a better vision for our technological future than the one offered by AI successionism, what is it?

AI successionism is a religion, but it’s wearing a secular disguise

Maybe you think it sounds weird to say the AI successionists — a bunch of scientists, technologists, and venture capitalists — are offering a spiritual vision. But their ideas are spiritual in the extreme. And to understand why their movement has gained momentum, we need to understand its deeply religious origins and how it morphed into a supposedly secular worldview. And that means going back. 

You probably remember that in the Bible’s Book of Genesis, Adam eats some forbidden fruit and humanity suffers a fall from grace. But did you know that in the Middle Ages, Christian thinkers began to believe that the way to restore humanity to its original perfection was to use…technology? These thinkers argued that part of what it meant for Adam to be formed in God’s image was that he was also a creator, a maker. So if we wanted to truly return to the God-like perfection of Adam prior to his fall, we’d have to lean into that creator aspect of ourselves. 

This idea took off in medieval monasteries. Even in the midst of the so-called Dark Ages, some of these institutions became hotbeds of engineering, producing inventions like the first known tidal-powered water wheel and impact-drilled well. For many Christians, tech progress became synonymous with moral progress.

By the Renaissance, some Christian thinkers were insisting that we should progress not just by designing new and innovative objects, but by redesigning ourselves, too. In 1486, philosopher Giovanni Pico della Mirandola argued that what’s unique about us humans is not some static trait but the very freedom of will that allows us to change into whatever we might want. In his Oration on the Dignity of Man, he imagined God telling humankind: 

We have made you a creature neither of heaven nor of earth, neither mortal nor immortal, so that with freedom of choice and with honor you may, as the free and proud shaper of your own being, fashion yourself in the form you may prefer.

Pico believed that we could use spiritual technologies like magic to transform our nature. And he argued that we have the choice to become either like the animals or like the angels:

It will be in your power to descend to the lower, brutish forms of life; you will be able, through your own decision, to rise again to the superior orders whose life is divine.

As the dominance of religion waned over the next couple of centuries, Enlightenment thinkers took Pico’s embrace of human plasticity and secularized it. They replaced the concept of divine ascent with one of indefinite progress. They insisted on the “perfectibility” of the human. And they fetishized rational intelligence as the means of achieving that optimal state. “Would it be absurd now to suppose,” wrote 18th-century philosopher Marquis de Condorcet, “that the improvement of the human race should be regarded as capable of unlimited progress?”

Of course, some European thinkers hung onto their Christianity, too, and they found ways to fuse it with the rational humanism of the Enlightenment. It’s a trend that continued into the 1900s, with proponents of Russian Cosmism — an intellectual movement that wanted to achieve literal resurrection of the dead through science — and French Jesuit paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who argued that we could use tech to nudge along human evolution and thereby bring about the kingdom of God. 

As author Meghan O’Gieblyn explains in her fantastic book God, Human, Animal, Machine, Teilhard believed that melding humans and machines would lead to “a state of super-consciousness,” whereby we become a new enlightened species. He influenced his pal Julian Huxley, the evolutionary biologist who was president of both the British Humanist Association and the British Eugenics Society, and who popularized the term “transhumanism.” 

Huxley inspired the contemporary futurist Ray Kurzweil, who predicted in the 1990s that we were approaching a time when human intelligence could merge with machine intelligence, becoming unbelievably powerful. “The human species, along with the computational technology it created, will be able to solve age-old problems … and will be in a position to change the nature of mortality in a postbiological future,” Kurzweil wrote. And he, in turn, has influenced Silicon Valley heavyweights like Musk, who explicitly aims at merging human and machine intelligence.

But there’s a big problem for these latter-day technologists: While we’ve never had more power to direct the evolution of our species through tech, it’s also never been less obvious what we should evolve toward. 

For good old Pico back in the Renaissance, human self-transformation had a clear end: spiritual union with the divine. There was a hierarchy running from animals to humans to angels to God, and the direction you were supposed to travel in was clear: up. 

But for us postmoderns, the universe does not come inscribed with directions. Should we evolve ourselves toward greater intelligence, or longevity, or creativity, or kindness, or power? If intelligence, which kind of intelligence? If power, should we wield it to simply steward our home planet or to conquer the stars? Should we be maximally humble or maximally ambitious?

The cosmos is silent as to what to do. 

The assumptions baked into AI successionism

The first thing that unites all the AI successionists is that they refuse to accept that silence. Hungry for instruction, they insist that it’s out there, and that they can see it written into the very nature of the universe. 

In other words, they believe that the universe has a telos, a particular end or goal. Teleological thinking has been popular since antiquity because it’s comforting for us humans: If the universe has a goal, then maybe we can discover it, and then we’ll know just what to do. As Faggella writes, this “does give humanity a direction.” Whether the AI successionists realize it or not, they are smuggling teleology back into modernity under the guise of science and tech. 

And that brings us to the second thing that unites them: They want to follow these supposed cosmic instructions so they can help the universe achieve its ultimate destiny. 

For many, that means helping the universe “wake up.” Perceiving the cosmos as barren, they want to spread consciousness everywhere, so that the universe can fill up with conscious experience — of bliss, of goodness, of the fact of its own existence. 

“If we can venture out and animate the countless worlds above with life and love and thought, then…we could bring our cosmos to its full scale; make it worthy of our awe,” writes Toby Ord, a former research fellow at Oxford University’s Future of Humanity Institute, which was long the world’s leading center for transhumanist thought. 

Personally, I think the cosmos is already worthy of my awe, and I find it presumptuous to believe that the universe is almost entirely asleep and that it needs us humans to “animate” or wake it up. But as the writer Adam Kirsch documents in The Revolt Against Humanity, it’s common to hear in these circles that one way of achieving that awakening is to colonize the universe and transform all its matter and energy into “computronium” (a term for any substance that can compute information). By turning the entire universe into a humongous data center, we’d be making it into a God-like mind.

“Even the ‘dumb’ matter and mechanisms of the universe will be transformed into exquisitely sublime forms of intelligence,” Kurzweil writes. Becoming one giant mind, he says, is “the ultimate destiny of the universe.”

Verdon, the founder of e/acc, finds his “ultimate destiny” written in the second law of thermodynamics — the law of entropy. The universe, it says, is gradually running down: concentrated pockets of energy disperse over time until none remains useful. Building on a contested theory of life’s origin, Verdon argues that intelligent life is selected for precisely because it accelerates entropy. Smarter agents can find and exploit energy stocks that less intelligent ones can’t (think predators tracking prey, or humans drilling for oil), burning through them faster. A superhuman AI expanding across the cosmos would be better at this than humans. So, Verdon says, we should “follow the ‘will of the universe’ [by] leaning into the thermodynamic bias.”

The idea that we should serve at the pleasure of entropy is deeply unintuitive (in fact, philosophers have argued just the opposite — that our task is to resist it). But to make his case that we shouldn’t be scared of being superseded by smarter civilizations that produce more entropy, Verdon uses hierarchical language that echoes Pico’s Oration: “If every species in our evolutionary tree was scared of evolutionary forks from itself, our higher form of intelligence and civilization as we know it would never have emerged.”

Faggella, the founder of the Worthy Successor group, makes the same rhetorical move. “Humans have access to higher goods than horseshoe crabs; AGI will have access to higher goods than humans,” he writes. “What a tragedy it would be if that trajectory of uncovering value and possibility were stopped.”

Likewise, the computer scientist and AI successionist Richard Sutton argues that if you look at things from the “point of view of the universe” — a classic utilitarian slogan — there’s a clear upward trajectory: The cosmos has gone from the mindless “age of particles” and “age of stars” all the way to today’s “age of design,” when minded creatures can decide what to make. Although lots of creatures make tools, Sutton says what makes humans unique is that we’ve “taken design to vastly greater heights.” 

According to Sutton, by looking at what makes us unique, we can determine our role in the universe. Since we’re designers par excellence, our role is to push design to the extreme: “Taking design to the limit means designing beings that are themselves capable of designing. This is what we are doing with AI.”

This argument is what sets up Sutton — like many others — to make a claim about technological inevitability. The suggestion is that we’re just identifying what nature has already chosen for us, and speeding it along — evolution-maxxing, if you will. “In the ascent of humanity,” he says, “succession to AI is inevitable.” 

But when we sum up all these ideas, you can see how many shaky assumptions are operating just beneath the surface: 

1. There is an objective telos to the universe. 
2. We can determine what it is by looking from the “point of view of the universe.”
3. We should expect that higher beings will be capable of accessing “higher goods” in a hierarchical universe, and these will better serve the universe’s ultimate destiny. 
4. We can determine our role in that destiny by looking at what makes us unique.
5. The thing that makes us unique should determine our action.
6. We should maximize the action — that is, do the most extreme (“to the limit”) version of it.

Some of these assumptions are so old that it’s hard to see how weird they are. But they are all worth questioning. 

“I would reject each and every one of those claims,” Vallor told me.

Take the fourth one, for example. The idea that humanity has some particular role, and that the way to pinpoint it is to look for what makes us different from other species, goes all the way back to Aristotle. (“Living is shared in even by plants, but we are looking for something peculiarly human,” wrote the Ancient Greek philosopher, ultimately concluding that “the human work is the activity of the soul in accord with reason.”) 

But there’s nothing obvious about that. It would be just as reasonable to say that the proper functioning of humanity requires emphasizing what we share with all other animals. After all, our capacity to feel pleasure and pain, our intelligence, our tool use, our adaptiveness, our ability to form complex social arrangements — none of that is unique to the human animal.

There are other leaps in logic hidden in this set of assumptions. For example, even if the universe tends toward a particular destiny, and even if humanity has a special trait that could help it along in that direction, it does not follow that we have a duty to do that. (Philosophers like to describe this fallacy as leaping from “is” — the world is a certain way — to “ought” — we must act a certain way.)

Humans are biological organisms, and the fundamental fact all such life-forms share is that we have a hardwired drive to survive. We do not have a moral responsibility to ignore that hardwired drive and let ourselves go extinct in order to help “higher forms” colonize the universe, any more than our evolutionary ancestors had a duty to make room for us. 

Unfortunately, as humanism proceeded through the centuries, it absorbed some dubious Enlightenment-era ideas that have made it easy for people to get snowed into believing we do have such a duty. That’s right: Humanism, the philosophy that was supposed to be about the value of humans, has actually ended up undermining it in key ways. 

To chart a better path forward, we need a new humanism, one that’s actually fit for the 21st century. 

Notes toward a new humanism 

To start, we need to pick out the flies in the ointment of the old humanism, especially those it picked up as it passed from the Renaissance into the rational humanism of the Enlightenment. Those flies include the teleological story about the universe; the “perfectibility” of the human; the hierarchical view that places humans above all other animals; and the idea that we should try to maximize some objective good through rationality.

Let’s start with the teleology. Although it’s appealing to try to spot instructions written into the fabric of the cosmos, expecting the universe to come with pre-fab values ultimately means shirking our own responsibility. As the existentialist philosophers taught us, nature doesn’t choose our meaning for us — that’s something we have to make ourselves through our own choices.

Accepting that we have the responsibility to decide what the future looks like means accepting a heavy existential burden, and that takes a ton of courage. It’s so much easier to believe that the script is fixed and final and inevitable. But I think that’s an example of what French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre called “bad faith” — denying our own radical freedom in order to escape the anguish of responsibility.

Of course, saying that we have the responsibility to decide how we do and don’t want humanity to evolve opens up a problem: Who, exactly, gets to choose? It’s tempting for each of us to rush in with the values we want to promote. But if we acknowledge that we don’t know the universe’s ultimate destiny or that it’s radically indeterminate, then it makes much more sense to not impose one positive vision on everybody. 

Instead, we need a positive vision that remains truly open and pluralistic. So rather than trying to enforce specific values, one of the best things we can do is refuse to foreclose the possibility for a variety of different lifestyles to persist and thrive.        

That means, first of all, taking care not to unduly constrain the liberty of the human beings who already live on this planet. AI successionists often dream of radical interventions — like a brain-computer interface that would give you superhuman intelligence, memory, and mind-reading abilities, or a genetic technology that would create superbabies. They insist they should be allowed to change their bodies however they want. 

And it’s true that self-determination is a precious right. But the AI successionists often fail to consider the other side of this: that everyone else should also have a right to self-determination, meaning they need to be free from implicit coercion. If more and more of us dramatically alter our biology, we may create a society in which everyone feels pressure to do the same — even if they don’t want to. To reject alterations would mean to exist at a huge economic disadvantage, or to face moral condemnation for remaining “suboptimal” when optimization is possible.

Even John Stuart Mill, the 19th-century English philosopher who literally wrote the book on liberty, didn’t think that anyone’s right to self-determination is an absolute right. Instead, it’s a qualified right — the kind that we generally honor, but that can be restricted to protect the interests of others.

So, ultimately, we’ll have to strike a reasonable balance between self-determination for the enhancement enthusiasts and protecting the rights of others to live as they choose. Some enhancements may be fine, like implanting a chip in your hand that unlocks your front door; others may need regulation or restriction, especially if they’d alter the germline for all future generations. 

One way to think about this is to note that there’s a difference between using tech to expand human capabilities and using it in ways that will contract the range of human lives we think it’s legitimate to live.

That brings us to another one of those flies in the ointment: the idea that the human is something that must be optimized and perfected. That idea, which mandates that we strip away the physical and cognitive features that are perceived as holding us back from “perfection,” veers uncomfortably toward eugenics. It’s a specter that has stalked transhumanism and posthumanism from their earliest days. (It’s not a coincidence that Julian Huxley, who coined the term “transhumanism,” was president of the British Eugenics Society). And it still stalks today’s AI discourse.

In a recent conversation with Sutton, one of the most prominent AI successionists, I argued that no matter how smart AIs get, it’s surely wrong to assert that if one group is more intelligent than another, we should just get rid of the less intelligent group. To highlight the absurdity, I asked what I thought was a rhetorical question: Imagine if someone believed that white people were smarter than Black people; does that mean they should get rid of Black people, and Black people should just be okay with white people taking over?

“Um,” Sutton said, and then paused for nine seconds. “What if,” he offered, “you coexist and you’re coexisting with some entity that’s more productive than you are? This is the way I view the AI. We coexist with it.”

“But that’s not what the word ‘succession’ means,” I noted.

“Oh, I’m pointing out that it’s inevitable. If you allow them to be their way and you allow you to be your way, coexist, and their way just happens to be better, then they’re going to end up being more powerful. And you should be good with that.” 

“You’re saying there will be a sort of Darwinian survival of the fittest?”

“In some sense, yes,” he said. “The winner should be whoever wins, and the spoils of winning should be whatever they are.” 

“So in the thought experiment where hypothetically, in an imaginary world, it were true that white people are smarter than Black people,” I pressed, “then the smarter people will win out and the Black people should just be okay with that?” 

“Well, why don’t we just say the intelligent people should win out over the dumb people and the dumb people should be okay with that,” he said. “I think the dumb people should be okay with that!”

But the idea that a species or group should accede to being squashed for some “greater good” is a eugenicist idea that should be flat-out rejected. There is no “perfect” or “optimal” type of being, full stop. Insisting otherwise will always lead you to narrow what are considered acceptable modes of existence. And that road leads to eugenics.  

Instead, a much more positive vision than the successionists’ would be to expand the space for different kinds of lives to flourish. And that brings us to the oldest fly in humanism’s ointment: the hierarchy. 

Rather than staking human dignity on the claim that humans are better than other species, as the classical humanists did, we can embrace what researchers are increasingly recognizing: that every species has its own brand of smarts. Each of these “diverse intelligences” is adapted to its particular environment and needs, and every one of them is uniquely wonderful in its own way. We would then try to respect each and every being’s form of life as much as we can. (Martha Nussbaum and Amartya Sen’s capabilities approach, which recommends that we guarantee every being certain core entitlements that befit their specific nature, offers a possible framework for this.)

If we one day end up with artificial intelligences that are conscious — and I don’t think we have a principled reason to believe that could never happen — then we’d want to treat them ethically, too. In fact, if we are someday joined by conscious AIs or biological-artificial hybrid organisms, I for one would be delighted to get to know these many kinds of minds and explore their rich and varied forms of consciousness. 

Of course, the politics of our world would become much more complicated; we’d have that many more creatures with conflicting needs, and we’re not exactly good at handling the conflicts we already have. We’d need to become much better at pluralistic coexistence before this could be feasible. 

But in theory? A future where humans could pluralistically coexist with a dazzling diversity of nonhuman and partly human life-forms — not assuming that they’re lower than us, but also not assuming that they’re higher — that is a future I’d be excited to inhabit. Because that, and not the supposed anti-chauvinism of the AI successionists, would be true openness to all forms of consciousness: Instead of “passing the torch” in some imagined relay race, we’d be making more room for all kinds of minds — including ours — to run (or fly or swim or compute) in their own directions.     

But notice what this vision does not mean. It does not mean that we’re under any obligation to bring those new species into being right now, or at all. That’s because there’s no evidence for the view that there’s some objective moral good in the universe that we must try to maximize. Although utilitarians have been so successful at popularizing that view that some people think it’s a given, it’s very much not. And plenty of philosophers, neuroscientists, and psychologists have a different view. 

As philosopher Bernard Williams once wrote in response to those who lob the accusation of “speciesism”:

They suppose that we are in effect saying, when we exercise these distinctions between human beings and other creatures, that human beings are more important, period, than those other creatures. That objection is simply a mistake. … These actions and attitudes need express no more than the fact that human beings are more important to us, a fact which is hardly surprising. 

In other words, you can care about the continuation of humanity, not because you believe humans are the most important species according to some cosmic point of view, but simply because you happen to be a human. You don’t need to justify your desire for survival before some higher court — of course you want to survive, and of course that’s morally okay! That’s because, to Williams, there is no “point of view of the universe,” no view from nowhere. There’s no such thing as a moral agent in an abstract sense. You exist as a human moral agent, and any ethical theory that requires you to ignore that bedrock identity severs you from the very thing that makes your agency recognizably yours.

This is the view that Vallor — a devoted humanist, but not a naive one — shares.

“I think morality is rooted in a particular form of existence that you have,” Vallor told me. “We exist as a particular kind of social, vulnerable, interdependent animal with a lot of excess cognitive energy. All those things factor into what it is to be moral as a human. For me, this abstraction — the idea of some pure universal morality that creatures who are completely unlike us could somehow do better than we can — I think that just fundamentally misunderstands what morality is.”

If there’s no universal moral good for creatures to maximize, then it makes no sense to ask if we ought to be making new creatures that would be better at maximizing it than we are. 

Instead of trying to look from “the point of view of the universe,” a 21st-century humanism should embrace looking from the point of view of humans. No, this is not a humanism that says “humans matter more than all other creatures” or “we should keep humans exactly as they currently are forever.” It’s one that says we humans are already valuable just the way we are. Whether or not we’re valuable to some grand destiny of the universe, we’re valuable to us. 

That means that rather than wilting under the accusation of speciesism, we should, first and foremost, be raising the floor for all of us here on Earth to thrive more. And it means it’s totally appropriate that when we try to make decisions about how to transform ourselves using technology —or how not to transform ourselves — we make those decisions with an eye to what would most contribute to the flourishing of humanity and the interspecies community and planetary system we depend on. 

While we can say yes to transformations that most of us agree would increase human flourishing, we need to do that democratically, while embedding fundamental rights that protect perfectly legitimate minority preferences from being squeezed out by a “tyranny of the majority.” 

We also need to accept that this approach doesn’t spell out some “end goal” for human evolution, so we’re going to have to proceed step-by-step, making small moves and then deciding from there what the best next small move is. Incrementalism is the way to go, both because future humans will be better positioned to know what they want for far-future humans, and because it allows us to course-correct if our tech choices start taking us down a bad path.

One choice — not duty, but choice — we will face is whether to invite new species to join us. I’m open to that down the line if it seems beneficial, and if we one day feel confident that we wouldn’t be consigning either us or them to an unacceptably high risk of misery.  

But for today? Our tech should empower us to survive, thrive, and make our own choices. Any approach to tech that disempowers us, replaces us, or tells us we need someone else to rescue us — whether you call it a god or an AI — is a misguided return to the past. I’d rather walk bravely into the future, even if it means I need to have the guts to rescue myself.  

This story was supported by Tarbell Grants. Vox had full discretion over the content of this reporting.

This story originally appeared in Kids Today, Vox’s newsletter about kids, for everyone. Sign up here for future editions.

The NeeDoh Nice Cube is a lump of soft plastic a little over 2 inches tall. It comes in blue, pink, or purple, and retails for $5.99. When you squeeze it, it produces a pleasing, squishy sensation, subtly relieving the stress of the day and replacing it with a sense of calm and peace.

At least, I have to assume it does. The Nice Cube — and other NeeDoh variants, like globs, donuts, and kittens — are so popular that it’s become nearly impossible to get your hands on one. The toys are sold out at toy stores. The manufacturer, Schylling, no longer sells them through its website. Full-grown adults are practically coming to blows over them.

“They just showed up in force, especially in the last part of the school year,” Ginger Eikmeier, a Nebraska high school teacher, told me. “You see a couple of students with NeeDohs, and then it just kind of spreads.”

Runaway toy crazes always have an element of randomness to them. “Nobody can plan for a fad,” toy researcher and analyst Chris Byrne told me. 

At the same time, the popularity of NeeDoh is part of a larger trend: the rise of sensory and “fidget” toys over the past decade. While kids (and adults) have always fidgeted, the marketing of toys explicitly for this purpose has exploded in recent years, as objects for squeezing, popping, stroking, and shaping fill kids’ bedrooms and classrooms alike. Retailers are jumping on the bandwagon, with millennial mall staple Claire’s rolling out a summer slate of ASMR-friendly sensory items in an effort to appeal to a new generation of shoppers.

“Yes, NeeDoh has been incredibly successful, but we’re also seeing tremendous enthusiasm around squishies, fidgets, slime, and other tactile collectibles,” Michelle Goad, chief brand officer at Claire’s, told me in an email.

On one level, the power of fidget toys is not that deep: “It’s just fun to squish them,” Harper, 11, told me. But experts also point to a bigger message behind the rise of NeeDoh and its ilk — one that has implications for kids’ lives far beyond the toy store.

The history of fidget toys

Squishy toys are far from new. “The first slime generation was in the 1960s,” Byrne told me. Creepy Crawlers, for example — bug-shaped doodads that kids could make at home using a substance called PlastiGoop — debuted in 1964.

Stretch Armstrong, a stretchy, goo-filled wrestler guy, was released in 1976 and was still popular in the 1990s, when a rumor circulated in my brother’s baseball league that a kid had eaten some of the goo and spontaneously grown 6 inches. (The mixture was apparently corn syrup cut with glass and wood particles. Don’t eat it.)

The fascination continued through the ’90s, with Nickelodeon Gak and its various offshoots. All of these goopy creations were fun to squeeze, of course; that was the entire point. But the idea of toys explicitly designed for fidgeting or sensory play came around later, perhaps with the popularity of the fidget spinner in the late 2010s.

The first fidget spinner was actually designed in the ’90s by a mom dealing with a muscle-weakening autoimmune disease that affected her ability to play with her daughter. But the clicky little toy didn’t become a craze until 2017, when it took playgrounds by storm, got banned in many schools (a rite of passage for any viral toy), and helped launch a discourse about the role of fidgeting in kids’ lives. 

The science of fidgeting

There’s still little definitive research on the benefits or drawbacks of fidgeting for kids, said Katherine Isbister, a professor of computational media at UC Santa Cruz who studies fidgeting. But many people with ADHD or autism say that playing with an object can help them relax or concentrate. 

Occupational therapists are generally pro-fidget, as long as the toys don’t distract other children, Isbister said. And research shows that movement can help people stay alert enough to complete a task or listen to a lecture, Mark Rapport, a clinical psychologist who has studied attention, told me in an email. 

The 2010s were also a time of growing awareness around ADHD and autism, and, Isbister pointed out, greater attention to social-emotional learning in schools. So, it’s perhaps no surprise that toys once marketed as slightly gross or transgressive (see, for example, Gurglin’ Gutz), started to get a more positive spin as fidget items. 

Around the same time, interest in ASMR — autonomous sensory meridian response, or a “tingly” sensation some people get when watching certain videos or hearing certain sounds — was rising on social media. Videos of people squishing slime occupy a huge niche in the ASMR ecosystem, a fact Claire’s hopes to capitalize on this year with its A Girl SMR campaign, featuring slimes, squishy toys, and special booths where kids can create their own ASMR videos.

The company has been “tracking the rise of sensory-driven items that kids were hunting for, collecting, and sharing online,” Goad told me. “Many of those products happen to create incredibly satisfying ASMR moments too, whether that’s tapping their faux nails on glass, hearing candy crunch, or peeling open a fresh slime container.”

Or squeezing a NeeDoh. The mall chain sold out its entire spring inventory of the toys — numbering in the tens of thousands — over just four days in March, Goad said.

Why kids love fidgets so much

Kids often describe NeeDohs as sources of stress relief. “I’m kind of a perfectionist, so everything always has to be perfect, and then there’s always drama with my friends, and I want my schoolwork to be good, and then I have sports that I’m stressing about,” Harper told me. But you can’t be a perfectionist about squishing an ice cube.

She has a variety of the NeeDoh toys, including a mini pink cube and a purple gumdrop.

For Ella, 14, the toys may satisfy a need for movement and connection. “I bring them to class sometimes, because you can’t really get up and move around while you’re sitting at a desk in a classroom, so it’s just another way to fidget,” she said. And “because a lot of people ask for your NeeDoh, it kind of is a conversation icebreaker.”

Teachers are less excited about students using NeeDohs as an icebreaker, especially because the cubes can, in fact, break. But fidgets, squishy cubes, and other “sensory” play experiences may be especially popular now, because they offer a counterweight to the forces that otherwise dominate kids’ lives. Playing with a squishy toy is “a very different experience than touching a screen,” Byrne said.

“People experience so much of their day through their cell phone, whereas when I was a kid, you were actually sewing, or you were crafting,” Isbister said. “You had a lot more hand-eye coordination and fine motor stuff you were just doing as a matter of course.”

“Kids probably need more messy, fine-motor type play,” Isbister said — especially as kindergarten and the lower grades get more academic, with less time for Play-Doh and other hands-on pursuits. Parents can help fill the void by encouraging more tactile activities, like making mud pies or sandcastles, Isbister said.

Another option: Recruit your children to help you do the dishes or clean the bathtub. “It’s kind of messy,” Isbister said. “There’s water involved.”

My children are unlikely to be convinced that helping me with chores counts as playtime. I have, however, learned something about sensory play from their example.

I may not have been able to secure a Nice Cube for this story, but my family did acquire a Squishy Dumpling — a dumpling-shaped toy with a cute little face and a filling made of soft plastic beads — before they got too popular. I’ve been squeezing it the entire time I’ve been writing this story, and I have found myself more focused and less distracted than usual. I’ve also been reaching for my phone a bit less.

I didn’t think of myself as someone particularly deprived of sensory stimulation (I do clean up a lot of messes), but this toy has given me the dumpling-squeezing experience I didn’t know I needed, and made me think of ways to add more tactile experiences to my life.

If nothing else, the rise of fidget toys has helped destigmatize the human need to squeeze stuff. “I think it’s great that we no longer see fidgeting as a bad sign or something bad,” Isbister said. “People realize they need these different kinds of sensory stimulation.”

What I’m reading

Child well-being worsened across the country between 2019 and 2024, with education and health scores posting declines, according to a new state-by-state report from the Annie E. Casey Foundation. On the bright side, the report also found decreases in child poverty.

Nearly three in four teachers believe AI will have a bigger impact on classrooms than the introduction of the internet or computers, according to a new NPR/Ipsos poll. A majority fear the technology will make it harder for students to think for themselves.

The death of the mall and the rise of punitive anti-loitering enforcement have teenagers craving third spaces where they can just hang out, experts say.

My older kid has been enjoying the Wizkit books, about a lazy one-eyed cat who is forced to go on adventures.

A flesh-eating parasite that the United States spent decades eradicating, and even longer trying to keep at bay, has now shown up in Texas.

Federal officials confirmed this week that New World screwworm, a fly whose larvae burrow into living tissue, had been found in a 3-week-old calf in Zavala County in Southwest Texas. It is the state’s first confirmed detection since the early 1980s, and the first in US livestock in several decades. This infestation marks a new stage in the parasite’s northward resurgence through Central America and Mexico that began in 2023.

Human infestations from these flies are rare in the United States, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says there have been no locally acquired human cases reported in the country. But the unwelcome infestation in Texas could be a serious test for ranchers and animal agriculture in the US. Beef prices are already near record high, and if screwworm spreads beyond this single detection, it could push prices and ripple through the economy.

Texas officials are now trying to answer the most urgent question: Was this a single stray case, or a sign that adult screwworm flies are already in the area?

A spokesperson for the Texas Animal Health Commission (TAHC) told Vox that officials had not confirmed any additional cases and were conducting ranch-to-ranch animal surveillance and fly surveillance around the infested zone. That zone covers about 12 miles around the detection site. Warm-blooded animals, such as cattle, horses, and pets, cannot be moved out of this zone unless they are inspected.

Texas has been watching for this moment. The TAHC told Vox it has had fly traps along the Texas-Mexico border since July 2025, which has since collected over 54,000 suspicious flies. None of them were confirmed to be New World screwworm.

But the detection of this case in Zavala County has moved the state from precautionary work to containment. The TAHC told Vox that sterile flies are being deployed through ground release chambers where the infestation was detected, and aerial dispersal was expected to follow. The idea is to flood the area with sterilized flies, so wild screwworms mate without producing offspring — it’s the same strategy that the United States used to eradicate the parasite decades ago. Texas had already been doing these precautionary aerial sterile-fly drops over South Texas since late January, but after this case, officials said those releases were now being redirected toward the 20-kilometer response zone around the detection site.

What went wrong

While the containment efforts are on, it’s still unclear how the calf got infected. The TAHC told Vox that it was not aware of any recent animal movement off the ranch where the calf was found, or any known link to Mexico or another affected area.

If the calf had no movement history, Phillip Kaufman, an entomologist at Texas A&M University who has worked with state officials on screwworm response planning, said, “there certainly have to be adult flies in the area,” that laid eggs on it. Maxwell Scott, an entomologist at North Carolina State University who studies screwworm control, also said that if the livestock itself was not moved up from Mexico, “then the fly had to be here.”

That doesn’t mean that screwworms are established in Texas. Scott said it is possible the case came from a single female fly, and US Department of Agriculture says there have been no further detections so far. But it does mean that the US is no longer preparing for a hypothetical threat.

In Mexico, screwworms-related export restrictions have cost cattle exporters more than $1.3 billion, according to the country’s National Agricultural Council. And in Texas alone, a widespread outbreak could drain as much as $1.8 billion a year from ranchers and the wider economy, according to a USDA estimate.

The US has a history of eradicating screwworms before, and for years it kept the parasite at a distance through an invisible sterile-fly barrier near the Panama-Colombia border. But that barrier has cracked, and screwworm is now spread across a much wider front in Mexico and Central America. Livestock production is also vastly larger than it was when the US first eradicated the parasite. And the sterile-fly supply is limited. Scott, the NC State entomologist, said that the only current production plant in Panama is running at full capacity — 24/7, 365 days a year — and producing about 100 million flies a week, only half of which are males, the sex that actually suppresses the population.

The USDA is moving to raise that ceiling, including by renovating a facility in Metapa, Mexico, and building new production capacity in Texas. Newer genetic engineered strains, including a male-only fly known as Novofly, could also make existing plants more efficient by producing only the sex that actually suppress the wild population. But those tools still need regulatory approval and field testing before they could be deployed.

The response is unfolding after a bruising year for the agencies and programs that manage animal disease. More than 15,000 USDA employees accepted the Trump administration’s incentives to leave the department, while  the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, the USDA agency responsible for animal and plant health, lost more than 1,300 staff that included veterinarians and animal health personnel. The “Department of Government Efficiency,” which is officially scheduled to sunset next month, also listed an $84 million cut last year to a USAID grant that supported animal-disease surveillance and outbreak response. Agri-Pulse, an agriculture trade publication, reported that the terminated work included screwworm monitoring in Central America.

It is unclear whether those cuts have affected the current response in Texas or the US’s broader ability to track northward movement of screwworm, but it sharpens the question: whether the US has enough surveillance, staffing, and sterile-fly capacity to meet a fast-moving animal health threat.

What exactly is a New World screwworm?

The New World screwworm is a parasitic fly found today across parts of South America and the Caribbean, Central America, and Mexico. They have shiny blue-gray bodies and look similar to house flies that swarm your local dumpster. But unlike those ordinary flies, screwworm flies love fresh wounds.  

Female screwworm flies are attracted to warm-blooded animals, and lay their eggs in open cuts or natural openings like ears or nostrils. Each female can lay up to 200 eggs at a time, which hatch some 12 to 24 hours later. Upon hatching, the larvae twist into flesh like corkscrews tearing deeper as they feed, causing extreme pain and tissue damage. Their scientific name, Cochliomyia hominivorax, translates roughly to man-eater, and their common name, screwworm, capture their horror: a spiral larva that feeds on living flesh. 

After feeding for up to a week, the larvae wriggle back out of the wound and drop to the ground, where they pupate in the soil before emerging as adult screwworm flies — ready to repeat the cycle.

Most infestations – including livestock cases like the one in Zavala County — are treatable when caught early. But missed cases can allow the flies to reproduce and spread, making an outbreak much harder to contain.

What makes screwworms particularly brutal is they only consume living flesh. A single infested wound can attract more flies, leading to repeated infestations in the same animal. Infestations in humans are excruciating and disfiguring, but rarely fatal with treatment. In animals, untreated cases can be devastating, causing severe wounds, blood loss, secondary infections and sometimes death.

But there’s an Achilles’ heel: Female screwworms mate only once in their life — a unique biological quirk that has underpinned the US’s control strategy for decades.

How the US beat screwworms

Screwworms once terrorized the American South and the Western US, and killed millions of dollars’ worth of cattle each year. By the mid-20th century, the fly was costing America’s ranchers up to $100 million annually.

But starting in the 1950s, USDA scientists found a way to use the fly’s biology against itself. If they could find a way to get the female flies to mate with sterile mates, they could stop the flies’ population in its tracks. And that’s how the sterile insect technique (SIT) was developed.

The SIT is fairly straightforward: Rear huge numbers of screwworms in a lab and sterilize the pupae through radiation (a discovery from the post-war atomic age when scientists realized they could make flies infertile without killing them). Then these freshly sterilized pupae are packed onto twin-engine planes, timed so the flies hatch in the air. These flies are then sprayed out over the forest and ranchlands by the millions. They wake in warm air and do what flies do: They mate. Those pairings then produce nothing. If you do that at a sufficient scale and for a long enough time, the population will eventually collapse. 

The first eradication program in the American Southeast ran through the 1950s followed by a larger push across Southwest, costing roughly $42 million in total. Ranching groups pushed the USDA for eradication, Texas cattlemen even wrote letters to USDA urging the agency to expand SIT. And unlike today’s debates around genetically modified mosquitoes, screwworms never stirred much controversy. The technique was targeted, pesticide-free, and spared other insects, which is why it was an unusually “green” pest control, said Max Scott, a professor of entomology at NC State University. By 1966, the fly was gone. 

The technique then was adopted in Mexico and parts of Central America, pushing the flies all the way to a narrow band of dense rainforests between Panama and Colombia called the Darién Gap. The Pan-American Highway famously stops there, the region is sparsely populated, treacherous to cross, and light on livestock. It’s exactly the kind of chokepoint where a biological “firewall” can hold. 

Since 1998, a US-Panama program called Commission for the Eradication and Prevention of Screwworm (COPEG) has held the line at the Darién Gap. Planes drop off millions of sterile flies each week, and inspectors patrol the frontier town (not the deep Darién itself) to spot infestations, pluck out maggots manually, and treat wounds with insecticides — because SIT only works if you also knock down active infestations. 

The program costs about $15 million annually and is funded mostly by USDA, with Panama contributing a small share. “It was one of the greatest achievements of the USDA in the 20th century,” Scott said.

But, in 2023, the firewall cracked.

Smuggling of cattle through Central America seeded fresh outbreaks in new regions, and climate shifts — higher temperatures and humidity — aided their spread. By spring 2025, Mexico was reporting detections as far north as Oaxaca and Veracruz, a stretch of land far wider and difficult to contain than the narrow Darién. COPEG has been running flat out, turning out around 100 million larvae each week. But even at maximum capacity, the plant can only do so much. The screwworm front continued to advance, and has now reached continental US. 

What happens next

The response underway in Texas — animal movement restrictions, fly and animal surveillance, sterile-fly releases — is the standard screwworm playbook, and it may be enough if the Zavala County case remains to just one calf. 

The harder question is what happens if more cases appear.

SIT only works when sterile males vastly outnumber fertile wild males. Scott said earlier eradication programs often aimed for a 9-to-1 or 10-to-1 ratio of sterile to fertile males, because lab-reared flies that have been sterilized are not perfect competitors in the wild. Right now, the main production plant in Panama is producing about 100 million sterile flies a week. But only about half are males, and males are the ones that suppress reproduction.

That could become the bottleneck if the response has to expand. During the eradication campaign in Mexico, Scott said, officials had access to a plant producing roughly 500 million flies a week. That kind of capacity may not be necessary if Texas stamps out this case quickly. But Texas is vast, and the larger resurgence in Mexico and Central America has not gone away.

There’s also a trade-off. The sterile flies that are now being released in Texas are redirected from the Panama plant, and those flies would have otherwise been used in northern Mexico. That may be necessary to constrain the Zavala Country case. But the more flies officials have to pull north, the fewer flies they have to push back the broader front of screwworm moving through Mexico.

That capacity is coming but not immediately. USDA is renovating a facility in Metapa, Mexico, that is expected to add tens of millions of sterile flies per week, and it is building new production capacity in Texas. The Food and Drug Administration has also issued emergency authorizations for some animal treatments, bringing more tools to prevent and treat infestations while containment is underway.

And new genetic tools could eventually help too. Scott’s lab helped develop a male-only screwworm strain, called NovoFly, that could make sterile-fly production much more efficient. Instead of producing male and female flies, a plant using this strain could produce only the males needed for population control, effectively doubling the useful output of existing facilities.

But Novofly isn’t here yet. Scott said his lab developed the strain around 2018, and that it has spent years in storage because there was no urgent plan to use it. Now it is moving through EPA review, but it would need US approval, as well as approval from Panamanian regulators and field testing, before they could be deployed in the real world.

For now, the United States is relying on the basic strategies that worked decades ago, while racing to rebuild the capacity that made it work. The new few weeks will determine whether Texas is dealing with a contained incursion or something more serious.

Update, June 5, 1:25 pm ET: This story was originally published on September 7, 2025, and has been updated with the latest information about screwworm in Texas.

President Donald Trump has put the US economy through the wringer. 

Since taking office, he has:

• Imposed large and evershifting tariffs on imports, thereby driving up consumers’ costs and businesses’ uncertainty.

• Engineered a collapse in both legal and unauthorized immigration, which has undermined growth and labor specialization.

• Manufactured a global energy crisis that has pushed up Americans’ gas prices while threatening to plunge the world into a recession. 

And yet, the American economy keeps trudging forward like a gut-shot zombie, damaged but undeterred by the bullets it has absorbed.

US GDP rose at a 2 percent annual rate in the first quarter of 2026 and a 2.1 percent pace in 2025, far outstripping growth in most other advanced economies. Meanwhile, America’s unemployment rate remains low by historical standards at 4.3 percent. And wages rose faster than inflation throughout 2025. 

To be sure, the economic indicators aren’t all sunny. Last month, for the first time since 2023, real wages in the US fell as annual inflation hit 3.8 percent.

Nevertheless, if you told an economist in January 2025 that America’s new president would launch a haphazard global trade war, throttle legal immigration, and launch a conflict with Iran that indefinitely shuttered the Strait of Hormuz — then asked that expert to guess what the US economy would look like in May 2026 — they almost certainly would have sketched a far grimmer scenario than the one we’re currently living through. 

Some will look at all this and conclude that Trump’s trade, immigration, and foreign policies weren’t that costly after all. 

Another interpretation, however, is that Trump could have presided over a pristine economy, if he’d simply refrained from increasing import prices, reducing labor-force growth, and launching a war of choice near the aorta of the global energy market. 

One could call this the “We had a good thing” account of Trump-era economic performance, after Mike Ehrmantraut’s much-memed scolding of the self-sabotaging drug lord Walter White in a late season of the AMC series Breaking Bad. 

And multiple recent reports indicate that this narrative is correct.

How Trump slowed US economic growth

To understand how Trump’s most destructive policies have harmed the economy, one needs some sense of what American economic life would look like today in the absence of those measures. 

Of course, this is impossible to know with certainty; we don’t have a time machine or access to an inter-dimensional wormhole. But economic analysts have done their best to sketch what growth and inflation would look like in that alternate universe.

Let’s start with GDP. According to the Peterson Institute for International Economics, tariffs reduced America’s growth rate in 2025 by 0.23 percentage points. But as the Economist notes, this figure likely understates the full impact of Trump’s tariffs, as it does not account for their impact on investor uncertainty.

When a business decides whether to sink capital into a new project, it must weigh the risk that unforeseen circumstances will reduce their investment’s profitability. For this reason, according to conventional wisdom, the more volatile the market and policy environment is, the more likely firms are to hoard their cash. 

And outside of the booming AI sector, American businesses have indeed pared back investment. As the Economist observes, excluding artificial intelligence-related categories, business investment fell at a 3 percent annualized rate over the last four quarters — after rising at a 5 percent average rate over the preceding decade. This collapse in non-AI capital investment shaved about 0.4 percentage points off America’s 2025 GDP growth, according to the magazine’s analysis.

Meanwhile, without Trump’s immigration policies, America’s labor force would be substantially larger — and thus, US economic output would be higher. According to a Brookings Institution report, last year’s decline in immigration shaved as much as 0.26 percentage points off US GDP.

Taken together, these analyses suggest that economic growth would have been about 0.9 percentage points higher last year, were it not for Trump’s trade and immigration policies. 

Precisely how much Trump’s war with Iran is slowing growth in 2026 is unclear. Much depends on the trajectory of the conflict. But most analysts believe that it has dampened output marginally. At the same time, Trump’s tariffs and immigration policies continue to weigh on the economy.

Trump has engineered higher prices

The data on inflation tells a similar story. Trump’s tariffs have raised import costs for businesses that’ve passed on part of that burden to consumers. As a result, prices are rising much faster in the United States than they otherwise would be, according to a recent report from the Dallas Federal Reserve. 

In that analysis, the bank plots America’s core inflation rate over time and compares this to what that rate would have been in the absence of all tariff impacts. The two lines diverge sharply after “Liberation Day,” when the president slapped large tariffs on virtually all of America’s trading partners (these rates were later pared back by both the administration and a Supreme Court ruling, but most remain far above their pre-Trump levels). 

Judging by the Fed’s calculations, as of this March, America’s core inflation rate would have been just 2.3 percent — instead of 3.2 percent — in the absence of Trump’s tariffs. 

And this does not account for the Iran War’s price impacts. A separate paper from Federal Reserve economists estimates that a three-month closure to the Strait of Hormuz would add 0.35 points to headline inflation. If that waterway remains shuttered for six months, that figure jumps to 0.79 points. After 9 months, it hits 1.47 points. 

In other words, without Trump’s tariffs and warmaking, America’s inflation rate would likely be more than one point lower today (and not that far off the Fed’s 2 percent target).

What’s more, in that alternate-universe United States, Americans would not just enjoy lower prices but also lower borrowing costs. As is, persistent inflation has constrained the Fed’s willingness to lower benchmark interest rates while motivating private lenders to offer less generous terms. Since the War with Iran started in late February, mortgage rates have climbed.

We had a good thing

For all this, America’s economy is still growing. And inflation isn’t exceptionally high by historic standards, though it remains elevated. 

Yet, the economy’s resilience is largely attributable to tailwinds disconnected from Trump’s trade, immigration, and foreign policies. The AI boom is catalyzing massive investment in data centers, software, and information processing technologies, while also lifting stock values — and, thus, the consumer spending of rich and upper middle-class households. At the same time, inflation was likely poised to decline when Trump took office, as supply chains continued normalizing after post-COVID shocks. 

In short, as he once did earlier in life, Trump has squandered a fortuitous inheritance.

As AI continues to encroach on every aspect of our lives, there is a persistent fear or hope, depending on your angle: AI will someday take over art. The internet is full of quizzes showing that most lay people cannot tell the difference between AI-generated art (digital pictures of paintings, prose) and the real thing. Multiple studies have shown that when people are shown AI-generated art and human-made art, but are not told which is which, they tend to prefer the AI-generated art, whether it be images, poetry, or prose. 

Yet what’s striking is that despite this disparity, people still consistently say that human-made art is what they want. 

In one study published in 2023, participants were shown a series of images, each randomly labeled “AI-made” or “human-made.” Participants rated the images they thought were machine made as worse than the images they thought had been created by a human artist — even when those were actually human-made. 

One conclusion you might draw here is that the widespread disdain for AI-generated art is empty snobbery. If human-made art were so much better, the argument goes, then people would be able to see a real difference. 

This line of thinking relies on the belief that “good” art is something that many people find appealing, at least in a vacuum. At this point, AI has automated that generation fairly successfully. At some point, it may get even better at it. 

But I don’t think those study participants were lying when they said they wanted human-made art, even if they couldn’t tell the difference. Even if we get to a future in which AI’s persistent glitches are ironed out, so that there are no more missing fingers and garbled sentences, and AI-generated images and music and poetry and prose and film are completely indistinguishable from the best a human can produce, even to highly trained experts — even then, I think people would still keep saying they would rather experience art made by humans. And even in such a world, I don’t think they would be lying. 

The pleasure of art is specifically related to the human mind on the other side of the product. When we’re told that the mind on the other side is a machine, many of us don’t want to engage anymore.

That loss of interest matters. It is consistent. It has happened before in the history of art. 

Two hundred years ago, another new technology emerged that was capable of automating the technical skills many people at the time would have considered one of art’s fundamental functions: the camera. It could capture a likeness perfectly and very quickly, in a moment when almost all of visual arts were organized around capturing a likeness. 

The camera changed the way paintings were produced and ultimately valued, but it did not replace the medium entirely — and the reasons why can help explain why AI-generated art won’t replace human-made art, either. 

“Art’s most mortal enemy”

In 19th-century Europe, one of the major ways people decided whether a painting was good was by asking the question, “How closely does this match what I can see with my eyes?” It was important for painters to be able to create something that we would now describe as photorealistic.

What people wanted from art at the time, says Richard Meyer, a professor of art history and director of American studies at Stanford University, was what people expect from a good Hollywood movie now: “You suspend your disbelief that you’re looking at a flat surface with pigment built up on it, and you fall into the fiction of, here are these beautiful bodies before you, or here is this landscape, or here’s this bowl of fruit.”

An artist’s skill was in large part defined by how faithfully they were able to recreate reality. Many artists were able to make a living painting relatively affordable portraits, which allowed people who weren’t aristocrats or nobility to commission a permanent record of their appearance, says Anju Lukose-Scott, a curator and master’s student at the University of Chicago. 

As inventors began to develop early versions of photography in the middle of the 19th century, it started to seem like artists might become redundant. A camera can create an exact record of the way the world looks far faster and more easily than any painter can, no matter how skilled they are with their brush. The new technology, French poet Charles Baudelaire wrote darkly in 1859, was “art’s most mortal enemy.” By the 20th century, as it became possible to reproduce an old masterpiece on a postcard, philosopher Walter Benjamin feared that original works of art had lost their unique aura.

The immediate implications for a large class of skilled craftspeople were catastrophic. “Portraiture was a huge commercial business,” Lukose-Scott says. The camera made such work nearly obsolete. Some artists went out of business; others pivoted to making daguerreotypes for their clients instead of paintings. 

But the effect on painting as a fine art form was different, Meyer says. Painters began to focus on what they could accomplish with their brushes that a camera could not. Instead of trying to capture reality, they began to use colors and textures to convey emotions.

Artists in the new impressionist movement would deliberately show their brushstrokes in their paintings, making the texture of the paint and canvas part of the artistic effect they were developing. Since photography was still a black-and-white medium, the impressionists made vivid colors more and more central to their work. They moved away from trying to duplicate the shapes and lines that cameras could record so well, and instead began to explore the way unnatural shapes and lines could provoke a visceral response from a viewer. 

To the modern eye, it’s these discrepancies between paintings and reality that make these impressionist paintings so exciting and pleasurable to look at. They show us a way of perceiving the world that photography cannot. 

As painting evolved, photography took over where trade portraiture left off: It was considered a craft, not an art. When people began to take photography seriously as its own medium in the 20th century, it wasn’t because of photography’s exceptional ability to capture a likeness, Meyer says. The ability to do that could now be taken for granted. Instead, the art of photography was about the choices made by the human using the camera: what to shoot, how to frame the subject, how to light it, how to edit it. 

Today, almost all of us carry cameras around in our pockets. But most of us would not describe the quick, functional photographs we take with our smartphones as art, no matter how accurately they capture the world around us. People can and do make art with their phones, but doing so requires a human mind working with intention and craft behind the machine of the camera.

We no longer consider the ability to create a perfect replica of reality to be the main prerequisite to making a piece of visual art. Technology has made it easy enough to do that the skill has lost value. People still care about visual art, but we use different criteria to evaluate it than we did in 1800. 

AI’s arrival may very well devalue the ability to create smoothly readable text and pleasant visual compositions, and that could mean bad things for a lot of industries, including journalism. But that doesn’t mean we’ll stop caring about whether or not a human being made a piece of art. 

“Art offers us a way of looking”

I keep thinking about something Meyer told me about what happened to the 19th-century portrait painters who lost their jobs to daguerreotypists. Meyer argues that there was something about the nature of middle-class portraiture that made people willing to cede it to cameras, in a way that they didn’t feel happy to do with the types of paintings that live on in museums.

In portraiture, Meyer says, “you’re going not so much for the individual expressive perspective of the artist but for a likeness. It’s really about oneself, the person portrayed, rather than the person portraying.” In contrast, Meyer says, fine art is about the artist, and the way that the artist sees the world.

It’s worth spending a bit of time on the distinction Meyer is drawing. One thing that people who love playing with AI sometimes say is that the pleasure of prompting comes from watching a stray thought become concrete in the blink of an eye: It is a piece of your mind made external, so that you can look at it. An AI prompt is about the person prompting, in much the same way that the average hired portrait was about the person being painted. 

If I consider an image or a piece of text to be a reflection of myself, I might not mind using soulless technology to create it — it’s already interesting to me, because it’s about me and for me. But when an image or a piece of text is about something else, I feel differently. I want to connect with another person, not something mechanical.

That seems to be the thing that most humans crave from art: an encounter with another human mind. Someone expresses how it feels to be alive in a human body, with a human soul, and another one sees it, reads it, hears it, and grasps at it. That is the experience that moves us. 

“It’s about wanting to understand how an individual sees the world differently from how we can see it on our own,” Meyer says. “Art offers us a way of looking.”

So when we think about whether AI-generated content has the potential to be art, to replace art, the question that matters is not whether it can create entertaining or realistic images and text out of nothing. The question is whether the machine allows us to experience the way a different person lives in the world. 

For Lukose-Scott, the possibility is unlikely, because today’s LLMs are trained on a corpus of existing art. ”What’s retained in the invention of photography is a kind of artistic identity. People are using the technology through their own artistic voice, which from my perspective is lacking in AI,” Lukose-Scott says. “My perception of AI art is that it’s just a self-gratifying loop, because it’s taking from what we already know, and it’s putting it back in the world.”

When a person uses ChatGPT to spit out a Studio Gibliflied replication of their family snapshots, they are not showing us a new form of subjectivity. They are mimicking the subjectivity of Hayao Miyazaki, without bringing Miyazaki’s intention or skill to bear on the finished product — and they’re able to do so because OpenAI trained its model on Miyazaki’s work without his permission. Unlike the camera, AI is built on a foundation of what is arguably intellectual theft.

This is not to say that it would be impossible for an artist to use AI as a tool to produce new artistic ideas, just as it is not impossible for an artist to use an iPhone camera as a tool to make art. But it would look different from slapping a prompt into Midjourney, for the same reason that most people’s iPhone selfies are not very artistically interesting: Because they are about and for you, not about sharing your embodied experience with the world. 

The context matters enormously. The context is what tells me that when I reach out to art with my human mind — my human soul — another mind is on the other side, reaching back.