She is right that today’s tech bosses are not people you would trust to write the rules for the future of civilisation. But she overestimates the importance of individual billionaires. How AI shapes society will not depend on Mr Musk’s eccentric political views, any more than the effects of cars depended on Henry Ford’s. Rather, it will hinge on the power of the technology itself and the uses to which people put it. That is a question Daron Acemoglu addresses in “What Happened to Liberal Democracy?”. Mr Acemoglu is among the world’s most-cited economists. He is best known for “Why Nations Fail”, a sweeping economic history arguing that the main factor keeping poor countries poor is predatory institutions. His new work focuses on the present day and the interplay between technology and democracy. Liberal democracy has underpinned progress, he argues. It has fostered innovation and economic growth, spread the benefits (through taxes and public services) and protected voters with regulations. For a long time, the system more or less met voters’ expectations. But “then computers happened.” Digital technologies, in Mr Acemoglu’s account, aggravated inequality by raising the demand for brains over brawn. They also boosted the “social power of college graduates”, allowing a new liberal elite to impose its values on a resentful working class, provoking a backlash that led to the election of Donald Trump. And they changed how people interact. In America time spent engaging with friends in person has plunged by two-thirds in the past 20 years. Political debate has grown more extreme and toxic. AI could make everyone much richer by supercharging innovation. But it could also supercharge the harms of digital technology, Mr Acemoglu (rather familiarly) fears. It could lead to widespread joblessness, creating “huge social-status gaps” between “makers” and “takers” and a full-blown crisis of democracy. (It could also accelerate social atomisation by making loverbots and political fakery more seductive.) His proposal is “pro-worker AI”. By this, Mr Acemoglu means finding ways for workers to use AI to make their labour more valuable, like prehistoric hunters combining their spear-making and throwing skills with a dog’s nose
and speed. Maybe AI could enable electricians to troubleshoot increasingly sophisticated grids, spotting problems via sensors and helping humans analyse them with a database of past glitches and solutions. Perhaps AI could improve education: an AI assistant could assess pupils’ answers to quizzes and suggest ways to split the class into smaller groups, who could be offered tailored instruction, thus increasing the demand for human teachers. It is hard to quarrel with this. AI will certainly cause less social turmoil if it complements human labour rather than making it redundant. But Mr Acemoglu leaves unresolved the question of how this is to be accomplished. Ultimately, both books are disappointing. Inadvertently, they illuminate how hard it is to write persuasively about a technology that is changing so fast, and whose future capabilities are so utterly unknown. Politically, AI has become unpopular. Twice as many Americans are pessimistic about its long-term effects on society as are optimistic, and only 2% think it is developing “too slowly”. But one way or another, this new wolf will be invited into the cave. The countries pioneering AI technology, America and China, are rivals. Neither wants to be the second to develop a superintelligent ally, for fear of ending up like those hapless, dogless Neanderthals. ■ This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com/culture/2026/08/17/what-ai-has-in-common-with-dogs
Punctuation matters more than you think A new book offers a dashing history of writers’ marks Aug 20th 2026 “In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God.” Yet in the beginning there was no punctuation. In early Latin manuscripts, the Bible was written in scriptura continua, without spaces or marks between words. This was a problem: pause at the wrong point, and you could sever God from “the word”, throwing Christ’s divinity into doubt. So in the Middle Ages, Christian scholars set about punctuating the holy book, using symbols and sub-clauses as “lanterns to words” to guide preachers. “The history of punctuation is the history of humanity,” argues Florence Hazrat, a researcher, in a rollicking new book. Often dismissed as “the invisible ushers of the sentence”, dots and dashes have shaped religious
texts, legal documents, and literature. “On the Mark”, like punctuation itself, makes readers pause for thought, showing how full stops have displeased and commas caused controversy. This pointed history starts in the ancient world. Cicero, like other Roman scholars, thought punctuation was amateurish. For skilled orators, half the fun was in interpreting obscure writing. Ms Hazrat races across time— offering digressions about how, for instance, Irish monks in the eighth century first put spaces between words—before reaching the “punctuation boom” of the Renaissance. Scholars in Italy invented curved commas, semicolons and (do not forget) parentheses. The printing press helped spread and standardise these signs, and by around 1600 all the major marks were in place. “On the Mark” is crammed with fascinating facts. Take the exclamation mark, about which Ms Hazrat wrote a previous book. Invented by an Italian poet in the 1360s to signal “admiration and wonder”, by the 19th century it had become a sign of emotion and even hysteria. Editors added them to old texts, including Shakespeare’s “Antony and Cleopatra”. (In the First Folio, the play had only 16 exclamation marks, but modern versions contain about 200, most of them clustered in Cleopatra’s shouty-sounding speeches.) In the 20th century the exclamation mark fell into “soundless cymbal-crashing”, as Theodor Adorno, a German philosopher, put it. Nazi propagandists aggressively attached clusters of them to the end of assertions!!! Writers have long squabbled over scribbles. Emily Dickinson felt “defeated” when an editor cut a dash; Charles Baudelaire told his proofreader “I absolutely want to keep this comma.” Mark Twain even threatened to have a proofreader shot who dared change his punctuation. This is a delightful tale of marks’ evolution, even if Ms Hazrat’s own attempts to use them inventively fall a dash flat. ■ This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com/culture/2026/08/20/punctuation-matters-more-than-you- think
Money, sex and bigotry: what one painting reveals about France “The Renoir Girls” uses a bright canvas to sketch a sombre history Aug 20th 2026 IT WAS CALLED “the capital of the 19th century” and “modern Babylon”. To those living during the Belle Époque, which stretched from the 1870s to the onset of the first world war, Paris felt like the centre of the world. And at the very centre of Parisian life were the Cahen d’Anvers, a Jewish banking family. They held salons, threw lavish parties and counted celebrated writers, including Marcel Proust and Guy de Maupassant, as friends. The childhoods of the three Cahen d’Anvers daughters were immortalised by Pierre-Auguste Renoir in commissioned portraits. One, of Alice and Elisabeth holding hands (see picture), hangs in the Museu de Arte de São Paulo. It looks as though everything about the girls’ lives, save their ruffled
dresses, was smooth. In fact, the painting “reminds us that nothing and no one is quite safe from the hands of time or the evil within humanity, apart, sometimes, from art itself”, writes Catherine Ostler, a historian, in a new book. When you gaze at Renoir’s pretty paintings, several things are obscured from view. One is paternity. Rumours abounded that Louise, the matriarch of the Cahen d’Anvers family, was the paramour of Charles Ephrussi, an art- loving critic and collector. It was a time of “rebellious, emancipated, intellectual feminism”, when wealthy women were free to hold salons and live more independent lives. There were whispers that Alice might be Ephrussi’s daughter. Ms Ostler uses a DNA test of a descendant to show that she probably was (the same may have been true of her brother, who was named Charles). This is not, then, your average portrait. The painting also masks the antisemitism that would change the girls’ lives. When it was painted in 1881, France was ostensibly in a tolerant period (though after receiving a late payment, Renoir wrote to a friend complaining that the payment was “stingy” and declaring that “I really give up on the Jews”). Then the Dreyfus affair—in which a Jewish army officer was falsely accused and convicted of passing secrets to Germany—laid bare people’s prejudices and jealousy. Between 1807 and 1914 some 880 Jews in Paris converted to Catholicism; about a quarter of them did so in just three years, 1895-97, when the Dreyfus affair was most heated. One of them was Elisabeth (in blue), who chose to be baptised at the age of 20. Spending most of her life as a Christian, however, did not protect her. The collaborationist Vichy regime began to rule France, and a mayor whose family had mingled with the Cahen d’Anvers for generations certified that Elisabeth, then 69 years old, was Jewish. Suffering from severe arthritis and unable to walk without help, she was arrested by the Nazis, who sent her to Auschwitz, where she was probably murdered on arrival, if she had survived the 55-hour train journey. Ms Ostler focuses on the many betrayals that facilitated this fate. The Cahen d’Anvers had fought in the first world war and been generous patrons of France, including donating their chateau to the state. And yet the country turned on them.
Ms Ostler came upon the Cahen d’Anvers while reading “The Hare with Amber Eyes”, which masterfully traces art through time (the author, Edmund de Waal, inherited sculptures bought by Ephrussi). She has doggedly dug up clips and correspondence that evoke the Belle Époque. Sometimes, though, “The Renoir Girls” gets too bogged down in social minutiae that must have preoccupied the Cahen d’Anvers. Few really want to know which Rothschilds were at weddings, what colour the bridesmaids wore and whether the press preferred Louise’s previous hairstyle. But the broader themes—about the hidden history of objects, and what art captures and obscures—are heart-rending and memorable. You will not look at another 19th-century portrait the same way again. ■ This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com/culture/2026/08/20/money-sex-and-bigotry-what-one- painting-reveals-about-france