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The Self Is a Coincidence: Personal Identity in Speculative Fiction

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Editorial image generated by the author. Most of us have remarkably little difficulty deciding who we are. The person who wakes up this morning is the same person who went to sleep last night. The child in an old photograph is somehow the same person as the adult looking at it. Bodies change, opinions shift, memories fade, cells die and are replaced, yet the underlying continuity feels obvious. Philosophers usually discuss this as the problem of personal identity : what makes a person at one time the same person at another? Speculative fiction has a habit of making the question much harder. Put someone through a teleporter. Copy their mind into two bodies. Remove their memories, or implant someone else’s. Upload their brain. Let another consciousness control their body. Merge them into a hive mind. The apparently simple question — is this still the same person? — begins producing incompatible intuitions. The problem may be that ordinary life hides several different ...
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Post-Quantum Cryptography: Why the Real Challenge Is Migration

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Editorial image generated by the author. Quantum computers are often described as machines that will eventually break encryption. The more precise threat is narrower and, in some ways, more consequential. Shor’s algorithm threatens RSA, Diffie-Hellman and elliptic-curve cryptography, while much of the symmetric encryption protecting the actual contents of our communications remains far more resilient. The first post-quantum replacements are already standardised and beginning to be deployed; the difficult part is replacing the old systems everywhere they have become infrastructure. That changes the nature of the quantum-security problem. It is not primarily a race to invent new encryption after quantum computers arrive. It is a migration that has to begin before anyone knows exactly when a cryptanalytically relevant quantum computer will exist. What Quantum Computers Actually Break Modern public-key cryptography frequently exploits mathematical operations that are e...
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Neuralink's Most Important Contribution May Not Be Its Implant

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Could the neural data collected by brain-computer interfaces eventually help artificial intelligence discover how the human brain works? Neuralink has accumulated more than 50,000 hours of human brain recordings. The immediate purpose is practical: improving the software that allows people with severe paralysis to control computers through neural activity. But the recordings also present a scientific opportunity. For the first time, companies developing implanted brain-computer interfaces are accumulating extensive datasets of neural activity from people using the technology over months and years. Editorial image generated by the author. In an announcement on October 1, 2026 , Neuralink described how it had begun using this information to train artificial intelligence models without requiring every recording to be labelled with the participant's intended action. According to the company, the approach has already improved the reliability of its brain-computer int...
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OpenAI’s New Mathematical Proofs: Has AI Crossed a Scientific Frontier?

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From the Exponential Time Hypothesis to quantum chromodynamics, three remarkable claims test both the mathematical capabilities of AI and the scientific community’s ability to evaluate them. Editorial image generated by the author. In theoretical computer science, some problems are believed to demand exponentially growing computation even from the best algorithms. In quantum physics, theories that explain experiments with extraordinary accuracy still lack fully rigorous mathematical foundations. And in harmonic analysis, seemingly simple questions about how waves behave have occupied leading mathematicians for decades. On October 26, 2026, OpenAI announced that its AI models had made major breakthroughs in all three areas: a claimed refutation of the Exponential Time Hypothesis, existence proofs for important four-dimensional quantum field theories, and a proof of the local smoothing conjecture with consequences for several other longstanding mathematical problem...
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Poland's Constitutional Crisis: When Checks and Balances Protect the Status Quo

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Editorial image generated by the author. Poland’s struggle over its Constitutional Tribunal reveals a troubling possibility: safeguards that make political abuse difficult can also make institutional repair difficult. Does dividing political power actually protect democracy, or sometimes just protect the status quo? On 30 October 2026, Polish President Karol Nawrocki turned his plane around while travelling to Senegal. In Warsaw, riot police stood outside the Constitutional Tribunal, protesters gathered, and Judge Anna Korwin-Piotrowska had issued orders purporting to suspend the court’s president and vice-president for a month. Nawrocki returned overnight and entered the court building as rival groups disputed who was entitled to run it. Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s government defended the intervention as part of its effort to restore judicial independence after eight years of government by the conservative Law and Justice party (PiS). Nawrocki, elected in 2025 with PiS support, c...
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