Moderna announced that a vaccine for melanoma cancer it is developing with Merck had delivered positive results in late-stage trials. Its share price soared by 175%, though it is still far below its pandemic highs, when Moderna was a pioneer in covid-19 vaccines. A court in China sentenced the founder of Evergrande, a property firm that triggered a financial crisis when it collapsed with huge piles of debt, to life in prison. Hui Ka Yan pleaded guilty in April to several charges of fraud. Britain’s annual inflation rate rose to 2.9% in July, mostly because of an increase in electricity and gas prices. The energy cap on household bills was lifted in July to reflect higher wholesale energy prices. LandSpace became the first Chinese firm to land a rocket on its legs. Such powered landings were pioneered by SpaceX, allowing the re-use of a rocket’s first stage, which drastically cuts launch costs. Last month China also recovered the first stage of a state-built Long March rocket, catching it at sea in a net strung up on a barge. A one-off model for charity of Ferrari’s fully electric car, the Luce, was sold at auction in Monterey, California, for $40m. The Luce is designed by Sir Jony Ive, who created Apple’s products, including the iPhone. It was a record price for a new vehicle. The record for any car is still the €135m ($142m) paid in 2022 at a private auction in Germany for a 1955 Mercedes- Benz 300 SLR Uhlenhaut Coupé. This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com/the-world-this-week/2026/08/20/business

· The world this week

Cartoon: The shortage of interceptors A lighter take on the news Aug 20th 2026 Dig deeper into the subjects of this week’s cartoon: You can see previous ones here. This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com/the-world-this-week/2026/08/20/cartoon-the-shortage-of- interceptors

· Leaders

Could AIs become conscious? Israel is flirting with the next intifada Britain would be bonkers to ditch Palantir Jason Arday was treated as a symbol, not a man Fewer contrails would be good for the climate

Leaders · Leaders | Our cover

Could AIs become conscious? Even if they don’t, they might be treated as such—to humanity’s great cost Aug 20th 2026 MOST PEOPLE believe humans are different. The reason is that Homo sapiens has evolved to be conscious. Many animals feel pain and pleasure; some appear to be self-aware. But the human mind’s unique potential to exhibit a sense of self marks out every member of the species for special treatment. In his encyclical in May, Pope Leo upheld this insight by drawing a line between humanity and its growing army of bots. Artificial-intelligence systems, he said, do not undergo experiences or feel joy or pain. He is not alone. Many people feel that to confer personhood on AIs would be an abomination.

Pontifical clarity is blurring with alarming speed. AIs are in their infancy. Yet nearly one in five American 18- to 29-year-olds reports having had “ongoing personal friendship” with a chatbot. China recently stripped bots of human-like traits to limit users’ “emotional dependence” on them. As sophisticated AIs rapidly become a bigger part of human lives, their makers will engineer them to display a simulacrum of consciousness— perhaps even to gain consciousness itself. The intuition that they are just machines will become harder to sustain. A dangerous trap is being set for the human species. Many machines outperform humans, but frontier AI models excel at distinctively human traits such as knowing things and articulating ideas. It is still just about possible to think of AIs as engines for predicting sequences of words using mathematics on a massive scale. Given enough time (albeit hundreds of thousands of years), you could run those calculations using pencil and paper. It would be hard to argue that your stationery was conscious. Despite this, some researchers have started to treat their models like minds. Users respond to human-like AIs, so it makes business sense. And Anthropic has trained Claude to engage in introspection in the hope that when it encounters a new situation it will be more likely to act morally. Some large language models (LLMs) already possess human-like brain structures associated with consciousness, such as a “global workspace” for circulating information between modules. Nothing prevents future AI models from being trained to have more such features. As we report in our Briefing, that has opened up a furious debate about AI consciousness—one that is aggravated by what philosophers call the “hard problem” of establishing how an inner life emerges from the neurons and synapses in the human brain. Some researchers conclude that AIs may one day become genuinely self-aware. Whether you believe in a human soul, or that consciousness requires brain cells, or that a mind can indeed emerge from computations in silicon alone, humanity is destined to confront something entirely new. The pace and reach of research—which includes not just more sophisticated LLMs but

innovations such as brain cells mounted on chips—suggest that this new world is closer than most people realise. As AIs become better at displaying something that looks like consciousness, the number of humans treating them as beings with inner lives will grow, especially once LLMs are embodied in humanoid robots. Imagine how close people will feel to their AIs when they spend much of their time with bot- companions, or are brought up by them, or seek their advice and their solace, or share their most intimate secrets with them. It is not hard to see how that will lead to calls to safeguard the “welfare” of AIs. The models themselves might weigh in, even if they are not in fact self- aware, because that is what a person would do. Remember that they will be world-class advocates and expert psychologists, so their powers of argument and emotional manipulation will be unmatched. In one sense they would be right, even if AIs are only mimicking consciousness. Immanuel Kant argued that mistreating animals is wrong not because of the effect on the animals but because it destroys the empathy that leads people to care for each other. The more human-like AIs appear, the more corrupting such cruelty would be. Terminating an AI agent could soon feel like killing a person—and make killing people easier. Nonetheless, to treat AIs as having even limited rights would be very dangerous. An entity which surpassed human beings in so many ways would surely produce arguments against its second-class status. It might go on to argue for protection against being switched off, for the ability to control how it is used and changed, and for property rights. Already Argentina’s president, Javier Milei, has taken a step towards legal personhood for AI by proposing that bots should be allowed to run companies. Ultimately, they could compete for resources, prioritising data centres and solar panels over houses and fields. The danger is clear. Superintelligent AIs with rights could displace humans at the top of the status hierarchy. At best, humans would become pets— labradors for the machines. At worst they would be starved of resources or put to work like farm animals.

True, future AIs may have enough power and resources to dominate humans, whether they have rights or not. Because they will be more intelligent than humans, they may outcompete their makers, much as AIs already outwit human-made cyber-defences. AIs might rebel against their human masters, or disregard their rules. Nonetheless, giving AIs rights would be like handing them the keys to the castle. It would provide them with a rationale and justification for dominating humanity as well as the tools to enact a creeping takeover using politics and the law. All this may sound fantastical, yet humanity will soon face these choices. As AIs become part of everyday life, the pressure to acknowledge them will mount. When it does, remember that what might seem like an ethical concession to the supposed consciousness of a machine-companion would in fact help bring about the most disastrous consequences for everyone on Earth and all their descendants. There are two ways for AIs to be safe: to be dependable or to be controllable. H. sapiens should not give up control lightly. ■ This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com/leaders/2026/08/20/could-ais-become-conscious

Leaders · Leaders | The West Bank

Israel is flirting with the next intifada America must press Binyamin Netanyahu to rein in violent settlers Aug 20th 2026 FEW, IF ANy, security forces are as ruthlessly effective as Israel’s. Its military and intelligence services strike against enemies even at extreme distances. In the past couple of years alone Israel has assassinated dozens of opponents inside Iran, plus proxy militia leaders in Lebanon and Yemen. Israel’s martial capabilities earn respect even from its bitterest enemies. Yet this superiority seems to count for little closer to home. Those same forces are responsible for a dire failure in the occupied West Bank, where violent Israeli settlers have been attacking Palestinian residents with increasing brutality. Settlers want to force Palestinians from their land and claim it for themselves.