The four-year university degree has functioned, imperfectly but durably, as the mechanism by which Western societies decide in significant part upon the allocation of opportunity. Generative AI has broken the link between earning that credential and demonstrating the competence it claims to certify. Employers already knew the signal was degrading. Now they have reason to stop trusting it entirely.

When credentialing fails, hiring reverts to who you know. This is a reversion to pre-meritocratic allocation, and it compounds every existing inequality in the system. The democratic consequences of a less transparent, less meritocratic, less contestable sorting mechanism are serious, and almost entirely absent from the current policy debate.

Democratic societies run on a set of human capacities that no industrial taxonomy has ever named accurately: Judgement, empathy, critical reasoning; the willingness to be persuaded by evidence and the courage to refuse to be persuaded by power. We have called these capacities 'soft' for fifty years, systematically underpriced and underrepresented them, and built institutions on the assumption that they can be added back in later if we need them.

AI adoption inside public institutions is now accelerating that error - removing human judgement from the front line of courts, benefits agencies, schools, and regulatory bodies, and calling the result an efficiency gain. The consequences are not merely labour-market consequences; there are dire ramifications for the stability and health of our democratic societies, and the policy response currently being constructed across the OECD is asking the wrong question.

Mapping is a political act. From the earliest cadastral surveys to modern navigation platforms, to map is to govern: Determining what is visible, what is counted and addressed, and what is not. Control over spatial data has always carried political consequence. What has changed is the scale, the granularity, and the speed at which that data now moves through systems that most citizens do not see and most governments do not adequately regulate. The same location data that underpins navigation, urban planning, and emergency response also flows through broker markets to advertisers, hedge funds, and state agencies, with minimal legal constraint in much of the world, and none at all in a substantial part of it.

AI and big data analytics have made that data exponentially more legible and exploitable than it was even a decade ago, and the technology is accelerating faster than the governance response. Decentralised mapping offers new possibilities for citizen participation and democratic ownership of spatial infrastructure, but only under governance conditions that do not yet widely exist. But without them, decentralisation risks producing a more complete surveillance architecture than older state systems ever possessed. Data sovereignty over spatial data is one of the most important and overlooked mechanisms by which we protect our democracies in the age of ubiquitous connectivity.

AI-generated audio and video are now cheap, fast, and increasingly indistinguishable from reality. The immediate harms - fraud, manipulation, harassment - are already visible. Deepfakes and other generative content are already influencing the outcomes of elections, the fluctuations of markets, and the course of society. This is dire. But the deeper risk still is the erosion of trust in evidence itself. As synthetic media proliferates, our institutions are losing their ability to anchor a shared reality, and our democratic capacity will degrade.

Transparency standards - provenance, watermarking, and verification systems - are a serious part of the infrastructure needed to stabilize the information environment. Adoption, interoperability, and enforcement will determine whether they have any meaningful effect on institutional resilience, and ultimately, if we can use these tools to protect our democracies.

Human fertility is falling more widely and faster than previously recognized. Sustained demographic decline has the potential to destabilize the foundations on which modern democracies are built. Pension systems, urban planning, fiscal structures, labor markets, and innovation ecosystems all rely on stable or growing cohorts. When each generation is smaller than the last, age structures distort and dependency ratios rise, and geographic, wealth, innovation and economic imbalances will intensify. These pressures will strain the social contract and institutional legitimacy. Treating demographic decline as a secondary or distant issue risks embedding structural fragility into democratic systems. Governments and the UN should recognize sustained below-replacement fertility as a long-term stability challenge and respond with the same seriousness accorded to other global catastrophic risks.

Democratic capacity determines whether societies withstand shocks or fracture under them. Systems with accountable leadership, strong legitimate institutional capacity, and real public participation objectively plan better, respond faster, and avoid the worst disaster outcomes. Where these foundations erode, crises escalate, recovery can falter, and instability ultimately compounds. In an era of catastrophic risks, democratic backsliding is a direct driver of societal fragility, and our democracies may not be able to adequately face the challenges of the 21st century without strengthening our democratic systems themselves.

European cities are more advanced compared with North American ones in reconciling the automobile with sustainable, liveable urban areas. But on both sides of the Atlantic there is more to do to address the high costs of mass automobile parking and over-reliance on private vehicles for urban journeys.

Outdated diplomatic orthodoxy is blocking Somaliland’s role in stabilizing the Horn of Africa. A pragmatic shift is urgently needed to reflect the territory’s de facto governance and relieve mounting displacement pressures. Recognition or functional inclusion would unlock access to aid, security cooperation, and climate finance, tools Somaliland already has the capacity to use. Failing to act leaves migration unmanaged, maritime routes exposed, and one of the most stable actors in the region excluded from solutions.

Outdated and over-precautionary safety regulation is holding back nuclear power. A bold rethink is urgently needed to enable capacity expansion at lower cost. This is vital to unlock nuclear’s unique potential to meet fast-rising demand for reliable, affordable electricity while also driving down greenhouse gas emissions.

A century ago, amid famine and revolution, the US mounted a huge humanitarian relief mission, feeding millions in Soviet Russia. As the war in Ukraine drags on, this forgotten act reminds us that compassion is not weakness but geopolitical wisdom.

Large-language models are being used intensively by both sides in the Ukraine war, demonstrating their potential for offensive propaganda, but also how far they can help defend against political disinformation. Can AI help democracies win the information war?