Insights

AI assistance in learning can undermine long-term skill development when students have unrestricted, on-demand access. A three-month chess study showed that students allowed to request AI help at any time improved less than half as much as those with system-controlled assistance (30% vs. 64%). The key issue is reduced "productive struggle"—students bypass challenging problem-solving essential for deep learning by frequently seeking AI solutions. This shifts tasks outside their optimal learning zone, diminishing engagement and intrinsic motivation. Over-reliance occurs across skill levels, indicating that self-regulation difficulties persist regardless of ability or motivation. Controlled AI support better fosters lasting learning gains.
Education
When Does AI Assistance Undermine Learning?
AI significantly influences daily life by transforming work, thought processes, and decision-making. As reliance on AI tools grows, it raises concerns about changes in human judgment, particularly through the phenomenon of cognitive surrender, where individuals increasingly defer to AI recommendations. This shift has important implications for the future of human intuition and reasoning, highlighting the need to understand and manage how AI shapes our cognitive processes.
How AI Is Reshaping Human Intuition and Reasoning | Gideon Nave and Steven Shaw
Vladimir Putin's 2022 invasion of Ukraine stems from his personal obsession and unresolved trauma over the USSR's collapse, rather than solely NATO expansion concerns. The dissolution of the Soviet Union was initially underestimated by Russian leaders, who expected continued influence over newly independent republics like Ukraine and Belarus. Putin, shaped by Soviet-era mentality, seeks to reverse the post-Soviet order and restore Russian dominance, motivated by earlier military successes and perceived Western weakness. The conflict reflects deep historical grievances and a strategic drive to reassert control over former Soviet territories despite significant human and economic costs.
4 Years Later: The Return of the Soviet Spirit
Friedrich Merz's 2025 ascent to German chancellorship reinvigorated Franco-German strategic dialogue, emphasizing defense cooperation amid the Ukraine war. While France advocates for "European strategic autonomy," Merz promotes a German concept of Verantwortung (responsibility), reflecting a foreign policy constrained by historical moral considerations and emphasizing measured international engagement. Despite symbolic milestones like the 1963 Élysée Treaty and the 2019 Aachen Treaty, deep-seated differences persist between Paris's drive for autonomy and Berlin's prioritization of responsibility, limiting Europe's ability to unify and strengthen its defense capabilities.
Germany
Responsibility vs Autonomy: the Strategic Rift between France and Germany under Merz
A complaint filed with the Singapore Exchange alleges OCBC Bank misled investors about financing Indonesia's Harita Nickel Group, which relies heavily on coal-powered plants for nickel processing. Environmental watchdog Market Forces claims OCBC’s disclosures understate climate risks and may breach SGX sustainability reporting rules. Harita’s coal use and emissions have surged, raising concerns about the bank’s true exposure to fossil fuel-related risks. OCBC maintains its financing aligns with responsible frameworks and acknowledges transition challenges due to Indonesia’s limited renewable energy reliability. The complaint highlights the need for greater transparency on coal-related financing amid global climate goals.
Singapore bank faces complaint to SGX over Indonesian coal-powered nickel financing
The Court of Justice of the European Union, often seen as a unified engine of integration, is in fact politically divided along ideological lines shaped by judges' national appointment backgrounds. This political polarization significantly impacts the Court's function, notably increasing decision-making time by up to 52% in cases involving economic governance disputes, such as competition law and public procurement. Disagreements also extend to contested EU policy areas like environmental regulation and justice. While the Court maintains a unified public voice without dissenting opinions, internal ideological differences influence ruling content, timing, and consensus difficulty.
The EU’s Court of Justice is not just pro-integration – it is politically divided
Conferences, journals, and funding in social and behavioral sciences are increasingly dominated by generative AI, leading many academics to rebrand as AI researchers and frame projects with an AI focus. While this reflects AI's significant impact and the field's relevance, it is causing a convergence in research topics, methods, and evaluations, fostering a scientific monoculture. This homogenization mirrors concerns that AI nudges human thought toward conformity. Recognizing this convergence as a feedback loop suggests the possibility of interventions to preserve diversity in scientific inquiry before this monoculture becomes entrenched.
Education
AI is turning research into a scientific monoculture
AI has become a fundamental social infrastructure embedded in everyday tools, platforms, and institutions such as government, banks, and schools. These systems carry assumptions about identity, ability, and belonging. Mona Sloane's book *Predicted* presents AI as a social arrangement shaped by prediction, classification, and linearity, emphasizing its deeply social and political nature. Drawing on extensive research, the book calls for reclaiming the discourse on AI progress to ensure societies collectively choose their futures.
Education
Predicted: How AI Is Restructuring Social Life
Geospatial AI (GeoAI) holds significant promise for humanitarian efforts by enabling rapid disaster assessment, early warning predictive modeling, population mapping in data-poor areas, and real-time monitoring of displacement and infrastructure damage. These tools can enhance decision-making speed, scale, and accuracy amid increasing time and resource pressures. However, despite technological advances, GeoAI adoption in humanitarian contexts remains limited due to non-technical challenges. A key gap exists between scientific capabilities and operational usability, with humanitarian users needing offline functionality, clear uncertainty communication, workflow integration, and transparency validated in the field.
The GeoAI for Humanitarian
ASEAN's development strategies emphasize both industrial digitalization and digital governance, yet progress has been uneven due to treating these as separate agendas. Industrial digitalization focuses on firm productivity, but adoption is gradual and uneven, hindered by skill gaps and uncertainties. Digital government improves service delivery but often remains fragmented, limiting its impact on state capacity. Effective digital transformation requires integrating these efforts, as coordinated governance—through interoperable systems, clear regulations, and institutional alignment—lowers barriers and fosters broader digital adoption. Indonesia exemplifies this dynamic, showing that alignment between industrial digitalization and digital governance enhances scalability and diffusion of digital technologies across diverse firms and regions.
Angola, Indonesia | Financial services, Health, ICT, Education
From Industrial Digitalization to Digital Governance: Why ASEAN Needs Both
Southeast Asia’s digital transformation efforts require integrating industrial digitalization and digital governance, as they are mutually reinforcing rather than separate agendas. Industrial digitalization alone struggles to scale due to firms' varied digital readiness and uncertainties, while digital government initiatives often fail when fragmented and siloed. Coordinated digital governance—through interoperable systems, common standards, and clear institutional roles—reduces transaction costs and uncertainty, enabling broader private sector digital adoption. Indonesia’s QRIS payment system exemplifies how unified digital infrastructure fosters inclusion and scale. Achieving scalable digital impact demands alignment between firm-level digital adoption and coherent, integrated digital governance frameworks.
Angola, Indonesia | Financial services, Health, Education, ICT
From Industrial Digitalization to Digital Governance: Why Southeast Asia Needs Both
Geopolitical trends are now central to business strategies, marking a shift from the post-Cold War era when globalization allowed focus on domestic operations without much geopolitical concern. Nancy Qian highlights how issues like electric vehicles, agricultural commodities, and even consumer goods are deeply tied to geopolitics today. Key global trends include the decline of American manufacturing as economies transition from agriculture to manufacturing, then to services, driven by rising labor costs in wealthy nations. These shifts, alongside challenges like declining fertility rates and aging populations, will influence economic conditions and business practices going forward.
Poland | Financial services
Podcast: The Global Trends Shaping the Way We Do Business
Concerns about AI replacing jobs are understandable but can be harmful by fostering fear that negatively impacts workers' well-being, morale, and sense of identity. While AI has not caused mass unemployment, its introduction often causes anxiety, especially among those performing repetitive tasks, leading to disengagement and uncertainty. This fear can extend beyond the workplace, contributing to social alienation and destabilization. The key to mitigating these effects lies in transparent integration of AI into jobs, involving workers in decisions about how AI affects their roles, thus preserving dignity and fairness. Addressing fear proactively is crucial to ensuring AI benefits society without eroding trust and security.
Education
Fears about AI taking our jobs are understandable – but harmful
Iran faces an unprecedented structural rupture between a young, educated, pro-democracy society and an ideologically rigid, coercive Islamic Republic. The regime's revolutionary, theocratic ideals starkly contrast with a population seeking secular governance, individual freedoms, and global integration. Recent violent repression has deepened this divide, eroding regime legitimacy. U.S. policy aims to end decades of ambiguous conflict through a strategic deal targeting Iran’s nuclear ambitions and its alliance with China, favoring regime-internal outcomes over fragmented opposition. Europe and France must move beyond security concerns to support credible democratic alternatives reflective of Iranian society's aspirations.
Iran: Facing a Deep Structural Rupture Between Society and the Regime, What Strategy for Europe and France?
The 2025 Consumer Cryptocurrency Confidence Index (c3i) reveals complex trends in consumer trust towards cryptocurrencies, highlighting increased reliance on centralized institutions like the SEC and Federal Reserve amid a decentralized market. The index, based on consumer surveys, tracks perceptions of crypto's short- and long-term value, marketplace use, and trust in information sources. Consumers trust researchers, financial experts, and tech leaders most, while distrusting celebrities and politicians. The c3i provides a more stable measure of sentiment than the Fear & Greed Index, correlating with Bitcoin's long-term trends despite price volatility. Owners show varying trust in institutions over time, reflecting evolving consumer attitudes toward crypto’s economic role.
Financial services
Consumer Cryptocurrency Confidence Report 2025
Trust in politics is generally low and tends to remain stable over time, influenced not only by current political events but also significantly by formative early-life experiences. Research using twins shows that around 40% of political trust can be explained by shared early environments, including factors like parental discussions, economic conditions, and education during childhood. These experiences shape foundational attitudes toward politics, affecting behaviors such as voting and compliance with laws. Consequently, generational differences in trust may stem from socialization in youth, suggesting long-lasting impacts that are challenging to reverse.
Could the experiences of twins help explain why we don’t trust politicians?
New Caledonia, with its strategic exclusive economic zone in the Indo-Pacific, faced a historic armed insurrection in 2024, marking the first high-intensity internal conflict on French sovereign territory. Rooted in the collapse of the Nouméa Accord's institutional framework and a controversial electoral reform that expanded voting rights, the crisis involved organized groups wielding thousands of firearms, including high-powered rifles, against French security forces. The insurrection was fueled by pro-independence factions viewing the reform as a threat to their political influence, and was exacerbated by foreign interference aiming to destabilize French authority. Given New Caledonia’s geopolitical importance, regional partners should aid in bolstering its security and economic development.
Latin America
[Decoding France] - A Stress Test for France's Indo-Pacific Security Strategy
Banks extensively adopt artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance credit assessment, fraud detection, compliance, and risk management, with empirical evidence showing that AI adoption reduces banks' default, credit, and systematic risk. This risk reduction arises from improved real-time monitoring, early detection of loan deterioration, automated compliance, and operational efficiencies that strengthen liquidity and capital. However, these benefits depend critically on strong governance and institutional quality, aligning with Nobel Prize-winning insights on innovation-driven growth. Effective oversight ensures AI integration supports both financial stability and resilience by mitigating potential vulnerabilities such as algorithmic opacity and cyber threats.
Financial services, Education
Does artificial intelligence make banks safer?
Scientists are increasingly engaging in climate activism, balancing their roles as objective researchers with urgent public advocacy. Many start with actions aligned to their scientific identity, such as public communication, before some escalate to civil disobedience out of frustration with political inaction. Visual symbols like lab coats help maintain their scientific legitimacy in protests, though this can sometimes reinforce narrow perceptions of science. Acting collectively supports scientists emotionally and professionally. Despite challenges like public skepticism and scrutiny, scientists carefully manage their activism to uphold credibility while responding to urgent climate issues amidst a politicized and sometimes hostile environment.
How climate scientists balance the tension between research and public protest – new study
Far-right rhetoric, sexism, and Francoist nostalgia are increasingly visible among young men in Spain, particularly evident in Alicante’s annual “Fiestas de las Urbanizaciones.” Incidents include boys forming a sports team named “Machirulos” (sexists) displaying “España con Franco” flags and using sexist, nationalist slogans. This behavior reflects a broader national trend of rising conservatism and misogyny, linked to the growing popularity of the far-right party VOX and its favorable stance toward Franco's legacy. Additionally, allegations of sexual harassment within the Socialist Party have undermined claims of progressive governance, contributing to the normalization of far-right narratives among Spain’s youth.
Latin America
Francoism and fiestas – meet the young Spanish men embracing sexism and the far right

Forum Spaces

© 2026 All rights reserved
Privacy Policy & Terms of Service