The World as You'll Know It
Newsletter / Issue No. 53
Ten Trends to Watch in 2026
AI, AI and more AI will dominate developments in the coming year, turning up in classrooms, war rooms and the edicts of regulators. Medicine will see big changes too. Watch for more —and cheaper -— GLP-1 weight loss drugs, and advancements in personalized gene editing.
Plus
Compute, the processing power that runs AI models, could get its own marketplace. And nuclear fusion could — finally — prove its commercial viability, with companies racing to prove they can create net energy gain from fusion within the next 12 months.
Technology / Feature
How healthy am I? My immunome knows the score.
Groundbreaking new tests reveal patterns in our immune systems that can signal underlying disease and tell us how well we might recover from our next cold. I got my results in a text message.
By David Ewing Duncan
Technology / Feature
A $10-Billion Plan to Sell Africa's Wind and Sun to Countries 7,000 Miles Away
A deep look at how green hydrogen could capitalize on remote areas of renewable resources and redraw the world's energy map.
By Paul Tullis
Podcast / Podcast
A Podcast Series about the Future of Aging
Podcast / Podcast
A Podcast Series about the Future of Aging
Robotics / Feature
Small, Flexible and Sometimes Weird. The Next Generation of Robots is Here.
By Clive Thompson
Robotics / Feature
Small, Flexible and Sometimes Weird. The Next Generation of Robots is Here.
By Clive Thompson
Artificial Intelligence / Feature
One Company's Decision to Put AI Into the Ground
What does it mean to adopt AI? For John Deere it meant hundreds of millions of dollars, a new corporate culture and forever changing the relationship between a farmer and the land.
By Gideon Lewis-Kraus
Robotics / Feature
Robots' final frontier? Taking care of us.
To understand how far robots are from replacing humans, just look at the everyday task of using a fork.
By Clive Thompson