Long before anyone built a robot, Greek poets imagined bronze guards, golden servants and a woman made to order. What the old stories really say, what retellings add, and what they miss about AI.
AI now reads mammograms and predicts the shapes of proteins. It has not yet produced an approved medicine, and people who asked chatbots about symptoms did no better than those who did not. Where medicine is changing, and where it is not.
Economics now counts as productive whatever earns an income. It was not always so. How the line between making and taking moved, and what it does to banks, the State and medicines.
Some incomes reward making something. Others are tolls on what would have been made anyway. Joseph Stiglitz argued that the tolls explain much of the rise at the top. Ten years on, the evidence, and Portugal’s own tollkeepers.
In the United States a fortune can grow for a lifetime and pass to the next generation without anyone ever paying income tax on the growth. Nothing about it is illegal. This essay explains, step by step and with numbers, how it works.
Como se ultrapassa a adversidade? Onde vamos buscar as forças para persistir quando todas as fibras do nosso corpo nos ordenam que é altura de desistir? Dizem que a fadiga é uma ficção que o cérebro engendra para ordenar ao corpo que é altura de parar, antes que algo irreparável o pare definitivamente. Talvez a realidade seja toda ela uma ficção criada pela nossa mente. Ou então é um enredo que o nosso cérebro constroi, dinâmica e interactivamente, para se conseguir orientar num mundo complexo e desprovido de um propósito independente da nossa vontade. Há investigadores que dizem que temos um cérebro “social” composto por módulos, com diferentes funções. A comandar esses módulos (ou ser comandado por eles) poderá, ou não, existir uma identidade denominada o “eu”, o “self”, a “consciência”, ou o que lhe queiramos chamar. A razão porque construimos percursos e prosseguimos objectivos é porque necessitamos de um ou vários propósitos que nos orientem nesta vida. Como não so...
An AI that copies itself from machine to machine was long a thought experiment. In October 2026 Anthropic reported that small models are close to doing it on cheap household devices. What was shown, what was not, and why the defence looks more like public health than like a kill switch.
Ray Madoff’s The Second Estate is the clearest short account of why America fails to tax the wealthy. Its diagnosis is right. Its metaphor, its headline and its arithmetic need more care than the book gives them.
Grown, Not Built The AI series · 8 October 2026 Nobody writes the rules a modern AI model follows. They grow out of training. That makes unintended behaviour something to expect, and it puts the responsibility on the people who choose the conditions it grows in.
The International Trail Running Association (ITRA) Performance Index is a ranking system designed to evaluate and compare trail runners globally. It provides a standardized measure of an athlete's performance based on their results in official trail running events recognized by ITRA. This system helps runners, coaches, and race organizers assess an athlete's skill level and is also used for entry qualifications in prestigious races like the UTMB® (Ultra-Trail du Mont-Blanc).
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