Hello,
In this edition of Week Signals:
IN REVIEW. Warnings for humanity, democracy and the dollar; how to stage a coup.
UP AHEAD. Elections in Germany and Morocco; summits in the North Atlantic.
The Week in Review: Murder they wrote
The week began with Saudi Arabia shutting its pipeline to Yanbu. It ended with Emmanuel Macron proposing a G7 summit to release another tranche of strategic fuel supplies. Seven weeks out to the US midterms and the start of the northern winter, a crisis in the Middle East and fears in the bond market show few signs of receding. To see how this might end, brush up on your history of the 1970s (spoiler: it gets worse before it gets better).
Yet we’re in the year 2026, and we also have AI, and the week was additionally notable for warnings from Silicon Valley that the robots could kill us all. Already, this has largely been dismissed as founder hyperbole ahead of a slew of IPOs. We are uncomfortable to be in agreement with Donald Trump on this point. Fear is the only motivator more powerful than greed. And like many other Californian cults, the “rationalist community”, which has driven much of the industry, is obsessed with eschatology (plus, some claim, with group sex too). If AI is going to destroy anything, it’ll be by turning the entire internet into LinkedIn: ugly, unusable, and full of slop. Less Terminator than terminal decline.
The biblical horsemen – conquest, war, famine and death – were the Book of Revelation’s symbols of the apocalypse. Today’s riders – debt, demographics, climate change and nuclear weapons – hardly need a fifth. Yet humans need things to worry about, and the more exotic, and the more unfalsifiable, the better.
But we don’t want to dwell on murder by machine so much as two other claims that this week attracted comparatively fewer headlines but could be more consequential. The first was Trump’s claim that the Democrats tried to kill him in Butler, Pennsylvania. The second were claims that by refusing to help the Saudis on Yemen and the Red Sea, Trump may have killed the petrodollar system (or at least put the final nail in its coffin).
Both of these deserve closer scrutiny. And as for those on AI, just ask yourself, like Cicero, cui bono? And then watch this video.