What Happens When Paid Work Disappears?

Posted on January 25, 2026January 24, 2026 by Digital Editor

What we typically refer to as “artificial intelligence” is, in practice, a set of data-based systems (DS). These technologies are already transforming nearly every aspect of human life, giving rise to innovative business models and reordering entire economies.

Over time, AI promises to create new jobs, boost productivity, and provide tools that extend cognitive capabilities, ultimately redefining the meaning of work itself. But alongside these undeniable benefits, the digital revolution and rapid spread of DS are disrupting labour markets, education, and professional training. The consequences are increasingly evident. Precarious working conditions determined by algorithm-driven platforms, sustained downward pressure on wages, and a structural mismatch between what economies need and what workers are trained to do.

This raises a critical question.

Will the growing use of DS render paid professional work obsolete?

Every technological leap, we are often reminded, has sparked fears of mass unemployment, and each time those fears have proven unfounded. But the historical pattern may no longer hold. Past transformative technologies were largely designed to make human labour more efficient or less physically demanding. DS, by contrast, are often built explicitly to remove humans from the value chain altogether.

And unlike earlier technological revolutions, these systems are not confined to routine or low-skilled work. They are moving into areas once viewed as exclusive to humans, such as medical diagnosis and surgery, legal analysis, and cultural production.

The breadth and speed of today’s DS call into question the familiar reassurance that technological innovation has always created more jobs than it destroyed. In reality, no historical law guarantees that technological change must always generate more paid work for humans. On the contrary, the emerging evidence suggests that data-based systems (DS) are eliminating entire professions faster than new ones can emerge.

To be sure, fewer working hours and more free time are not necessarily a bad thing. A society liberated from excessive labour could, in fact, be more humane. The danger lies not in the loss of work itself, but in what disappears along with it. Wages, the tax base that supports public goods, and the non-economic roles that paid employment plays in people’s lives, such as providing a source of purpose, identity, and camaraderie.

As fewer people are needed to generate economic value, policymakers should acknowledge the labour-market impact of DS. At stake is nothing less than countries’ longstanding commitment to maximising employment. Urging workers to retrain and upskill for a job market that may no longer exist holds individuals responsible for changes they cannot control, when what is needed is a policy framework that matches the scale of the disruption.

In a new book, I propose a concrete framework for realising the ethical opportunities of the current technological transformation while limiting its risks. At its core, the Society-, Entrepreneurship-, and Research-Time (SERT) model seeks to decouple income from work without making that separation unconditional. The SERT model rests on five pillars.

A basic income financed by taxes, designed to meet the requirements of physical survival while preserving a dignified life and respect for human rights.

Another pillar is a conditional decoupling of income from work. In exchange for a basic income, each person would contribute a set amount of “society time” or socially valuable work. Much like the Swiss Civilian Service, which has operated successfully for nearly three decades as an alternative to military service, individuals would be free to choose from a wide range of activities. The administration of SERT would be largely digital, drawing on DS and, where appropriate, blockchain technology, to document each person’s engagement in society time.

During their society time, individuals should be able to experience some or all of the non-economic functions provided by paid work, such as social recognition, daily structure, and a sense of purpose.

The SERT model creates strong incentives for education, research, innovation, and entrepreneurship. Commitments in these areas would reduce the time required from society or, in some cases, exempt individuals from it altogether.

Lastly, as value creation becomes more efficient and produces growing wealth, the central issue becomes how those gains are shared. Securing dignity for all depends not on overcoming scarcity, but on distributing resources fairly. This would require coordinated global taxation that shifts the burden from labour to capital by taxing data flows, data volume, and the use of DS.

Allowing DS to displace human workers without a collective response would exacerbate inequality and entrench injustice, risking political unrest and undermining social cohesion. SERT, if adopted, offers a path toward shared prosperity and a more stable, peaceful future.

From Tax Holidays to Hard Targets, Policymakers Rewrite Investment Rules for Incentives

Posted on January 25, 2026January 28, 2026 by Digital Editor

Policymakers have made a decisive break from the past investment incentive regime, charting a new policy trajectory that emphasises performance accountability, sector-specific competitiveness, and fiscal prudence.

Approved by the Council of Ministers in January, 20 this year, a regulation marks a fundamental shift from a broad and indiscriminate incentive framework to a model built on capital-linked allowances and verifiable investor performance, with the horticulture and floriculture sub-sectors positioned as early beneficiaries. Anchored in the 2012 investment laws and related statutes, the new regulation represents a notable shift in policy, moving away from the broad-brush approach of previous frameworks toward a performance-based model.

The regulation comes at a critical time for Ethiopia as policymakers seek to boost foreign direct investment (FDI), particularly in capital-intensive sectors such as agriculture and mining. These sectors are considered essential engines of economic diversification and job creation.

Policymakers have signalled that the revised incentives fill longstanding gaps in the previous regime, putting Ethiopia in a stronger competitive position compared to regional peers like Kenya and laying the groundwork for sustainable economic growth.

A key pillar of the regulation is its transition toward a model that ties incentives directly to measurable performance. Rather than granting blanket benefits, the policy introduces investment capital allowances, a one-time deductible expense for capital assets, calculated on a set schedule, to reward large-scale and productivity-enhancing investments. These are paired with incentives such as reduced income tax rates, exemptions from the alternative taxes, including minimum, dividend, and capital gains, as well as waivers of customs duties and taxes on capital goods, construction materials, and vehicles.

However, access to these benefits is conditional on meeting performance targets, with agreements specifying outcomes for job creation, technology transfer, and environmental compliance.

The regulation’s architects have emphasised mechanisms intended to promote transparency and accountability. Notably, incentives are now revocable if misused. Regulatory bodies, mainly the Ethiopian Investment Commission and Ministry of Finance, are tasked with monitoring compliance and reporting annually on foregone revenue and the broader economic impact of the incentive program. This reflects a sharper focus on ensuring that incentives drive genuine returns, not only increased investment on paper.

The latest regulation departs sharply from its predecessor, issued in 2014, which was a regime that offered income tax holidays of between two and seven years in the agricultural sector, with extensions in remote areas, and allowed for broad exemptions on imported capital goods. The new policy replaces those generalised benefits with a system rooted in capital-based allowances and mandatory performance agreements.

For example, while the previous regulation permitted unlimited duty-free import of capital goods for horticulture, it imposed few requirements on investors to deliver tangible results. That approach encouraged inefficiency and opened the door to potential abuse of fiscal concessions.

The latest regulation directly addresses those concerns. Incentives are now more precisely calibrated, with a strong emphasis on capital scale and verifiable results. This change is particularly relevant for capital-intensive sub-sectors like horticulture and floriculture, where the cost of modern farm development can reach millions of dollars. Upfront capital allowances, rather than multi-year tax holidays, are likely to provide more immediate and effective relief to genuine investors.

The regulation also spells out transitional provisions, giving existing investors the option to join the new system while safeguarding their existing rights.

What sets the new policy apart is its insistence on transparency. Authorities have adopted fenced accounting systems, and revocation clauses are embedded in the incentive agreements, empowering regulators to withdraw benefits in cases of non-compliance. These measures respond directly to earlier criticisms that the old regime was prone to abuse and lacked effective oversight.

This evolving framework is seen as particularly attractive to horticulture and floriculture investors, who typically face high upfront costs for infrastructure such as irrigation, greenhouses, and cold-chain facilities. The regulation’s drafters note that incentives are now time-bound and non-transferable, except as specified, and non-cumulative, aiming to limit fiscal risks while maximising impact. For these sub-sectors, classified as agricultural investments eligible for incentives, the new rules pledge to catalyse exports of high-value crops, leveraging Ethiopia’s favourable climate and geographic proximity to European markets.

The policy encourages the establishment of a “smart ecosystem” for investment, aligning incentives with national priorities such as balanced regional development and efficient resource use. Performance agreements are intended to ensure that public concessions translate into tangible economic outcomes, such as export growth, job creation, and technology transfer. These requirements are not mere aspirations but are embedded in the contracts and subject to independent verification.

Comparisons with Kenya, East Africa’s horticulture leader, are inevitable.

Kenya’s flower industry, centred around Lake Naivasha and other regions, generates more than 800 million dollars in annual export revenue and supports hundreds of thousands of jobs. Kenya’s incentives, implemented mainly through the Export Processing Zones Act and Special Economic Zones regime, include 10-year corporate tax holidays (with rates rising to 20pc and 25pc thereafter), duty-free import of capital goods and raw materials, and VAT exemptions on exports.

Other perks include streamlined export procedures, infrastructure support, and access to carbon credit markets for sustainability initiatives. The government has made efforts to encourage value addition and to expand cold-chain logistics to cut post-harvest losses.

However, Kenya’s system is not without its critics. Investors cite burdensome levies, inconsistent tax policies, and recurring water shortages as ongoing challenges. Notably, Kenya’s model does not require explicit performance agreements, which has sometimes resulted in the withdrawal of incentives (notably from EPZs) in response to fiscal pressures. While Kenyan floriculture exporters enjoy preferential EU market access, they contend with higher costs and less aggressive capital relief compared with Ethiopia’s proposed allowances.

Ethiopia’s new regulatory regime holds a competitive edge. By tying incentives to capital employed and verifiable performance, such as job creation and environmental safeguards, it offers a more predictable and accountable environment for FDI. For horticulture investors, Ethiopia’s lower land and labour costs, coupled with duty-free import privileges and a range of tax exemptions, could surpass what Kenya currently offers, especially as firms seek to scale up operations.

The policy’s focus on import substitution and technology transfer is also seen as better aligned with the needs of sectors like floriculture, where innovation is key to maintaining global competitiveness. These changes could further accelerate the rapid growth seen in Ethiopia’s floriculture exports, positioning the country as a serious contender in the international market.

The success of any incentive regime depends on practical implementation and on regulatory authorities’ ability to adapt to rapidly changing sectoral dynamics. Flexibility is essential, particularly in the horticulture export sector, which is characterised by volatility and shifting global demand. Regulatory agencies should have the authority to provide exceptional support to high-performing sub-sectors, such as floriculture, which have demonstrated unique contributions to job creation, foreign currency generation, and technological advancement.

The Global Order Slips into Power and Extraction

Posted on January 25, 2026January 24, 2026 by Digital Editor

Ahead of the World Economic Forum convened in Davos, Switzerland, under the banner “A Spirit of Dialogue,” the United States has seized control of Venezuela’s oil infrastructure, installing what President Donald Trump called an “indefinite” American Administration of the country’s petroleum reserves, while blackmailing European countries over his demand for Greenland.

The disconnect between the Forum’s call for dialogue and America’s unilateral aggression, between the denizens of Davos and today’s emerging global disorder, is jarring, to say the least.

The United States’ intervention in Latin America may be taking new forms, but the seizure of oil infrastructure echoes past resource grabs. While Davos attendees parsed the nuances of stakeholder capitalism, the old rules of power politics and resource extraction are being unleashed anew.

In 2019, the Dutch historian Rutger Bregman cut through the Davos spectacle with surgical precision: “Taxes, taxes, taxes. All the rest is bullshit.” With those eight words, he exposed the gap between rhetoric and reality, between the language of shared prosperity and the practice of wealth concentration.

Of course, companies should pay their fair tax bill. But beyond this, we also need to look at how value is created in the first place, not only “redistribution” but also “predistribution.” The latter is about restructuring how value is created and shared from the outset, not merely redistributing crumbs after value is extracted, and requires forging new social contracts with concrete conditions and accountability. That is why modern industrial strategy should be organised around missions. Specific and measurable goals that address societal challenges while catalysing innovation and investment across sectors.

Growth is not a mission. It is an outcome of investing in solutions to real problems. A mission to decarbonise the economy, for example, would transform energy, transport, food, and digital technology simultaneously. A mission to achieve “health for all” could advance public health outcomes by driving innovation across sectors, including the life sciences. It is not about favouring a particular sector but about asking what a sector’s role is in accomplishing a mission.

This requires leadership, confidence, and attention to detail. Collaborative innovation initiatives can be structured to prevent publicly funded research from being privatised through patents that are overly broad and difficult to license, and to prohibit excessive pricing that ignores the source of the value.

The United Kingdom (UK) offers a masterclass in how not to structure public-private partnerships, and the “unreservedly pro-business” Labour government risks repeating expensive mistakes. Consider the US data and analytics company Palantir’s expanding grip on UK public services. During the pandemic, the company offered its services to the National Health Service free of charge, a gesture its UK chief later compared to a magazine’s trial subscription.

Today, Palantir holds contracts worth over 443 million dollars with the NHS, plus a new 240 million pound sterling defence contract awarded without competition.

The Swiss army rejected Palantir after a seven-year courtship, following warnings that its US ownership posed intelligence access risks and that dependence on Palantir specialists could “limit the army’s ability to act in crisis situations.” Yet, the UK’s new contract with Palantir represents a tripling of spending on the firm since 2022, with the Defence Ministry admitting that changing suppliers would require rebuilding the entire data architecture at “significant cost.”

Preventing vendor lock-in and the likelihood of spiralling costs to the public requires contracts that embed conditions on developing state capability.

Thames Water, where the Australian asset manager Macquarie loaded the utility with two billion pounds sterling in debt while extracting profits, offers another sorry example.

With major UK infrastructure funding coming from firms like Blackstone and Macquarie, a clear pattern emerges. Socialised risks, privatised rewards, and essential services compromised by financial engineering. Last week’s Clean Industry Bonus for offshore wind, requiring investment in British supply chains, suggests that the government is learning some lessons, though time will tell whether such conditions are strong enough to prevent parasitism.

Effective public-private partnerships include conditionalities that ensure public support generates public value. The US CHIPS & Science Act made funding for firms conditional on their limiting stock buybacks, investing in workforce development, and providing childcare. Germany’s public bank KfW ties low-interest loans to decarbonisation targets. Chile’s lithium strategy ensures that mining companies invest in domestic value-added activities and meet sustainability standards, while the state secures a substantial share of profits.

These are not anti-business measures. They are pro-reciprocity frameworks that align private incentives with public goals. When the UK provided 65.5 million pounds sterling to support the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine, it required the company to operate on a not-for-profit basis during the pandemic. This is what genuine partnership looks like. Shared risks, shared rewards, and shared purpose.

Implementation matters as much as design. Building state capacity means resisting the temptation to outsource core functions to consultants. It requires cross-ministerial coordination, meaningful partnerships with labour and business, and investment in civil-service capabilities to design, implement, and adapt tools, from procurement to digital public infrastructure.

Sweden’s innovation agency Vinnova demonstrates this approach, using the procurement of “healthy, sustainable, tasty, and accessible” school meals as a lever to transform the entire food system. To achieve this goal, Vinnova brings together government agencies, municipalities, and private actors in different sectors around the shared objectives of health, sustainability, and local development.

Last week, Davos featured the usual pledges about stakeholder capitalism, purpose-driven business, and sustainable development. But without concrete mechanisms, binding conditionalities, accountability frameworks, and equitable risk-sharing that distinguish genuine value creators from rent extractors, it remains theatre. As another chapter in the long history of resource extraction unfolds in Latin America, Davos attendees should ask themselves whether we are building genuine partnerships or sophisticated extraction mechanisms.

The answer seems clear as tech titans line up to pledge fealty to Trump, with Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg ending fact-checking and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos killing the Washington Post’s editorial independence, genuflecting to power in exchange for free rein in using their platforms to extract value through algorithmic rents. Meanwhile, oil executives openly discuss carving up Venezuela’s reserves, with Trump promising them “total safety, total security” to extract wealth from a country in chaos.

Because traditional multilateral institutions appear ineffective, we need coalitions of the willing to forge new frameworks for global governance. Countries serious about sustainable development should work together to embed mechanisms for consensus-building and develop the state capacity needed to deliver green growth. This means moving from voluntary pledges to binding agreements on technology transfers, green finance, and shared innovation frameworks, the building blocks of a new economic order that serves people and planet.

The spirit of dialogue is meaningless unless it is accompanied by fundamentally new ways to create value. True reciprocity requires new contracts that reflect a more symbiotic public-private relationship, with conditions that have teeth and share both risks and rewards.

Otherwise, we will end up repeating the mistakes of the past. As Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa famously out ut: “Everything must change so that everything can stay the same.”

Is There Life After the Dollar?

Posted on January 25, 2026January 24, 2026 by Digital Editor

President Donald Trump’s relentless attacks on Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, together with his destabilising foreign policy, notably the seizure of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and subsequent threats to bomb Iran and invade Greenland, have called into question the entire postwar international order, including the dominance of the dollar.

There has never been a more appropriate moment to reflect on the dynamics that have kept the international monetary system relatively stable over the past half-century.

Stability has persisted despite a fundamental asymmetry inherent in the Dollar’s role as a global reserve currency. To supply the world with Dollar liquidity, the United States must run a current-account deficit, buying more from abroad than it sells. At the same time, it issues debt that foreign governments and investors are willing to use as a reserve asset. As a result, US borrowing costs have remained consistently low, enabling the federal government to expand its fiscal space on the back of foreign savings.

This is what France’s then-Finance Minister Valéry Giscard d’Estaing had in mind when he famously complained in the 1960s about the Dollar’s “exorbitant privilege.” He was not wrong.

As former People’s Bank of China Governor Zhou Xiaochuan observed in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, global monetary stability depends on a currency issued by a sovereign state whose policies are ultimately driven by domestic priorities. The spillovers from Trump’s “America First” policies illustrate what happens when those priorities diverge from the interests of the rest of the world.

In 2009, Zhou proposed exploring a global currency decoupled from the domestic concerns of any single issuer. At the same time, he began promoting the internationalisation of the Renminbi. Until then, China, the world’s largest exporter, had relied almost entirely on the Dollar to invoice and settle its external trade. That dependence led to a massive buildup of Dollar reserves, which peaked at 3.8 trillion dollars in 2014.

Reducing reliance on the Dollar and diversifying away from a single reserve asset made sense for China then, and it still does. As a large, export-driven economy, China assumes persistent risks by effectively outsourcing its payments system and savings to the US. That helps explain why Chinese holdings of US federal debt have fallen to about 700 billion dollars from roughly 1.3 trillion dollars in 2015.

Concerns about global imbalance, now back on the G7’s agenda under France’s leadership, are hardly new. They featured prominently in G20 discussions in the early 2010s, when Chinese policymakers saw a more balanced international monetary system as one that would spread adjustment burdens more evenly, reduce China’s reliance on the Dollar, and offer greater choice in payments and investments, thereby enhancing stability.

The underlying rationale was straightforward. A systemically important economy like China should have a genuinely international currency.

Crucially, this vision rested on post-crisis policy cooperation through the G20. It was supported by multilateral financial institutions, particularly the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which encouraged the Renminbi’s internationalisation as a way to integrate China more fully into the global economy.

The 2016 addition of the Renminbi to the basket of currencies that comprise special drawing rights (the IMF’s reserve asset) was seen as a step toward a multicurrency monetary system. During China’s G20 presidency in 2016, such a shift was widely regarded as beneficial not only for China but also for global stability.

Over the next decade, however, that consensus largely unravelled amid rising geopolitical tensions. The prevailing view, reflected in the Centre for Economic & Policy Research’s latest Geneva report, is that a multicurrency system under such conditions could deepen fragmentation and exacerbate systemic risks. Without robust coordination mechanisms, currency competition can prove destabilising.

But heavy dependence on the Dollar carries its own risks, especially given Trump’s erratic, and often transactional policymaking. With global financial stability effectively held hostage by US domestic policies, China is developing an international currency commensurate with its growing economic footprint. The case for an international monetary system that does not hinge on a single dominant currency remains as compelling today as it was a decade ago.

The path forward lies in a carefully coordinated transition toward such a system. But without policy cooperation to hold it together, instability and further fragmentation are likely to follow.

To be sure, as the current G20 Chair and the principal shareholder of the IMF and the World Bank, the US should continue to play a leadership role. But under Trump, the G20 risks devolving into a forum for transactional politics and division rather than multilateral cooperation, leaving it ill-equipped to manage, let alone prevent, global crises. Such an outcome would mark the end of the rules-based international economic order as we know it.

While the US retains outsize influence over international finance, that concentration of power is itself a vulnerability, as global stability depends on a single player setting the rules and upholding them. Given the Trump Administration’s growing willingness to flout those rules whenever they constrain its immediate interests, this arrangement can no longer be taken for granted.

That said, credible alternatives have yet to emerge. Absent a change in American policy or the emergence of a viable form of multilateralism that can function without the US, the global economy will remain plagued by uncertainty and instability.

AI Is Unlike Previous Tech Booms

Posted on January 25, 2026January 29, 2026 by Digital Editor

Concerns about an artificial intelligence (AI) bubble have intensified since the start of 2026, as investors and policymakers focus on whether, and when, it might burst. But the real question is not whether current valuations are inflated. It is whether AI’s emerging business model differs from those of earlier technological revolutions.

For decades, scale has been the primary driver of tech companies’ performance and valuations. As apps, websites, online retailers, and social media platforms expanded their user bases, marginal costs fell, network effects took hold, and pricing power increased. Valuations came to reflect long-term growth potential rather than short-term profitability.

The forces that defined past tech winners are unlikely to dominate AI’s rollout, because the competitive dynamics differ across six critical dimensions.

Capital expenditure is no longer a shallow moat. It is a formidable barrier. In earlier technological waves, capital requirements were largely confined to the startup phase and relatively modest. Facebook, for example, initially raised only half a million dollars in seed funding. But those earlier innovations were built on top of existing infrastructure such as Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP (the LAMP stack), which dramatically lowered upfront costs.

AI, by contrast, is extraordinarily capital-intensive. Industry-wide capital investment is projected to exceed seven trillion dollars by 2030 as companies build data centres, expand computing capacity, and invest in specialised hardware. Unlike previous tech cycles, these investment requirements will not fade as the industry matures and may even intensify.

Those costs may never decline meaningfully, since the lifespan of data centres is often measured in years, not decades. While cloud computing also required massive investment in general-purpose servers, AI demands entirely new infrastructure, including graphics processing units and tensor processing units (TPUs), to handle the vast number of simultaneous calculations involved in training and running AI models.

Such systems are expensive and energy-intensive. A single large-scale AI training run is expected to cost over one billion dollars by 2027. Only firms that can afford the entry price will survive, giving today’s tech giants, with their enormous cash flows, robust balance sheets, and access to capital markets, a decisive advantage.

Another is AI’s operating-cost structure undermines traditional economies of scale. In earlier tech cycles, marginal costs per user collapsed as platforms grew. Whether it was social media, software, or ride-sharing apps like Uber, costs were spread across an expanding customer base, enabling platforms to sustain high margins as they scaled up.

Those models were also marked by low operating expenses. Once Facebook reached sufficient scale, the marginal cost of adding users became negligible. As a result, companies paid little attention to the cost of serving each user, as it rarely threatened financial viability.

AI flips these dynamics. Controlling marginal costs is no longer optional, since large language models and other AI systems incur high costs with every interaction, which requires billions of calculations. This is why AI firms focus on reducing per-query costs through custom hardware like TPUs and by developing leaner, more efficient models such as China’s DeepSeek.

The third area where AI departs from previous tech revolutions is in the weakness and fragility of network effects. Legacy tech platforms benefited from self-reinforcing growth. Buyers and sellers were drawn to Amazon’s marketplace precisely because activity was already concentrated there.

AI users can switch easily between models, use several at once – one for text, another for images, a third for coding – or even build their own. Switching costs are low, and loyalty is weak, making network effects far less influential in determining long-term winners.

For legacy tech companies, the combination of falling marginal costs and network effects amplified the benefits of scale, fueling a race to capture as many eyeballs as possible. That strategy made sense for companies like Facebook, which created value by monetising consumer attention through advertising.

AI companies confront a different cost structure. Each new iteration of their product requires additional capital investment. Every additional user increases costs, particularly inference costs. While training expenses can be amortised across a larger user base and some economies of scale may emerge, usage growth still leads to higher operating costs.

The fourth difference lies in the shift from market fragmentation to instant saturation. Earlier tech platforms grew within largely siloed markets: Google dominated search; Amazon focused on retail. By seeking distinct niches like college students (Facebook) and professionals (LinkedIn), companies had time to mature before competition intensified.

AI, by contrast, is a general-purpose technology that cuts across industries. With users able to gain access to it instantly through apps or application programming interfaces, companies no longer have the luxury of reaching maturity before competitors emerge. This dynamic gives AI the potential to disrupt not only individual sectors but every existing technology business model.

Political influence now matters as much as market power. Earlier innovation waves did not require companies to engage with governments and regulators to the extent AI must. While social media platforms eventually faced scrutiny over their addictive effects, the perceived risks posed by today’s emerging technologies are deeper, and, in many ways, existential, given AI’s potential to cause job displacement, exacerbate inequality, and undermine democratic governance.

With AI companies confronting both market forces and political pressures, firms that can shape regulation, influence public opinion, and absorb reputational risk are better positioned to succeed.

Microsoft is a prime example of such a firm. In a clear effort to gain political and social legitimacy, the company recently pledged to cover the electricity costs of its data centres, so that higher prices would not be passed on to consumers.

Lastly, AI may be less susceptible to winner-take-all dynamics. Scale, near-zero marginal costs, and strong network effects enabled companies like Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Apple to dominate social media, search, e-commerce, and smartphones, respectively. The AI sector, at least initially, is unlikely to follow that pattern. Rather than converging on a single monopolistic winner, it could support multiple dominant players, each controlling its own niche.

To be sure, an AI company could reach a point at which its technological lead becomes self-reinforcing and effectively insurmountable. Through continuous self-improvement and overwhelming product superiority, or even the development of artificial general intelligence, such a firm could achieve lasting market power, allowing it to dominate the field.

Until then, investors should recognise that AI follows a new strategic logic. Applying legacy technology metrics to this rapidly evolving landscape is not only counterproductive but potentially costly. Investors who rely on past playbooks risk becoming the losers in today’s AI-driven market.

Consider stock-based compensation. Historically, equity incentives enabled tech companies to hire and retain talent, acquire intellectual property, and expand through mergers and acquisitions. But stock options cannot pay for data centres, computing power, or energy infrastructure. To meet these needs, AI companies require real investment, established cash flows, and reliable access to capital markets.

Similarly, investors once tolerated negative margins so long as user growth was robust and advertising revenues were growing. But the uncertainty surrounding AI and the scale of required capital expenditure limit their ability to assess when these investments will break even or how AI-driven transformations will ultimately increase margins. The result is a growing emphasis on strong balance sheets and demonstrable financial resilience.

The race for AI leadership will not be won by the companies with the most users or fastest growth rates. Instead, the victors will be firms that can combine superior products with financial strength and political influence. In this sense, AI more closely resembles the capital-intensive industries of the mid-20th century than the asset-light tech models of recent years.

With operating costs rising and consumers moving easily between models, profitability will depend on capturing elastic demand while translating political capital and regulatory influence into lasting competitive advantage.

The Day the Divide Took a Break

Posted on January 25, 2026January 28, 2026 by Digital Editor

On Monday morning, something quietly remarkable happened just outside our neighborhood compound. Beyond the gates of our cobblestone streets and towering houses, several families live in small mud homes without access to water or electricity.

Longtime residents say these families were once daily laborers during the construction of the estate, workers who stayed behind after the cranes left and the houses were sold.

Over time, invisible but rigid lines formed. Guards learned who belonged and who did not. Proximity did not mean connection. Wealth and poverty existed side by side, separated by gates, rules, and habit.

That morning, those lines blurred. Neighbors from inside the compound and families from the mud houses gathered together, brooms in hand, preparing the streets for Timket. The cobblestones were swept clean by people who, on most days, barely acknowledge one another’s existence.

There was laughter, casual conversation, and shared effort. Children ran between adults. Bread and water passed from hand to hand. I watched from my living room window, surprised by how natural it all looked. When I stepped outside and greeted everyone, it felt like stepping into a version of the neighborhood that had always been possible but rarely allowed to exist.

For a few hours, status appeared to lose its importance. People worked side by side, focused on a shared task with a common purpose. Social scientists have long examined such moments. The sociologist Émile Durkheim used the term “collective effervescence” to describe the heightened sense of unity that can arise when people participate together in rituals or collective activities, particularly religious ones.

Researches shows that shared rituals and public celebrations can strengthen feelings of social connection and group belonging. These moments do not erase inequality, but they can temporarily reduce social distance by encouraging people to relate to one another as participants in the same event rather than as members of separate social categories.

Studies noted that festivals allow marginalized groups to be visible in public spaces where they are otherwise excluded, fostering short-lived but meaningful interactions across class lines. Monday morning felt like a living example of that research, playing out on our own street.

Yet by evening, the gates were closed again. Invitations for dinner were extended only to those of us considered “equals.” The laughter faded, the shared work ended, and the families from the mud houses returned to the edges of the neighborhood.

The same guards who had watched the morning’s unity without protest resumed their roles. What had felt like a small breakthrough dissolved in a matter of hours. The contrast was jarring. How could a community that swept streets together forget one another so quickly?

This pattern is not unique to our neighborhood. Sociological research shows that while moments of shared celebration or cooperation can reduce social distance, these effects are often temporary. Studies on inequality consistently find that interpersonal goodwill alone does not dismantle systems shaped by unequal access to resources.

Physical barriers, economic arrangements, and long-standing social norms tend to reassert themselves once collective moments pass. In this sense, the evening gates functioned not only as security measures, but as reminders of a broader structure that maintains separation.

Psychologists describe a phenomenon known as “moral licensing,” in which people who see themselves as having acted morally may later feel less pressure to maintain the same standards. Experimental studies have shown that after engaging in behavior perceived as ethical or inclusive, individuals can become more tolerant of actions that would otherwise conflict with those values.

It shows how a single act of cooperation may feel sufficient, even when broader patterns of exclusion remain unchanged.

Urban studies research adds another layer to this story. Studies of gated communities and spatial segregation show that physical separation often reinforces social distance, even when different income groups live close to one another.

Researchers consistently find that proximity alone does not lead to understanding or solidarity; without meaningful interaction, inequality can become normalized rather than challenged. Brief moments of shared activity can interrupt these patterns, but they rarely last once everyday boundaries and routines return.

Studies on community cohesion and social capital emphasizes the importance of shared participation. It suggests that trust is more likely to develop when people work alongside one another rather than interact through clearly unequal roles.

Development research has also shown that inclusion in collective activities plays a key role in building social trust, sometimes independent of differences in material resources. On Monday morning, everyone held a broom. That shared role shaped the interaction.

The sadness of the evening was not only that the moment ended, but that it highlighted how easily it could exist again. The joy on people’s faces was real. The cooperation was effortless. It exposed the artificial nature of many of our divisions.

When children can play together without asking who belongs where, the barriers we enforce among adults start to look especially fragile. The fact that we rebuild those barriers every evening is a choice, even when it feels like a tradition or a necessity.

The image that lingers is not the closed gate, but the swept street. Clean, shared, prepared for celebration by hands that usually remain apart. It raises an uncomfortable question. If unity is possible for a few hours, sustained by nothing more than shared purpose, what prevents it from lasting longer?

Studies suggest that repetition matters. Regular, shared activities can slowly reshape social norms. The challenge is not imagining a different kind of neighborhood, but choosing to practice it beyond special occasions.

Monday morning was a glimpse, not a solution. But glimpses matter. Research on social change shows that people are more likely to support structural reforms after experiencing personal moments of connection across class lines.

Those few hours may quietly influence future decisions, conversations, and acts of courage. Inspiration does not always announce itself loudly. Sometimes it arrives with a broom, lingers in shared laughter, and leaves behind a question that refuses to disappear.

The Illusion of the “Original” Self

Posted on January 25, 2026January 28, 2026 by Digital Editor

I came across a video the other day that has been quietly vibrating in the back of my mind ever since. It was a content creator on TikTok discussing the concept of identity, but not in the way we usually hear it. Usually, we are told to

His point was that we have spent years meticulously building a “brand” of ourselves. We tell ourselves, “I am the kind of person who likes this,” or “I would never be the type of person to do that.” We draw these invisible lines in the sand and then refuse to cross them. Over time, these preferences harden into a rigid shell. We don’t step out of what we think our identity is because we are afraid of the incoherence that comes with change. We become curators of a museum dedicated to a version of ourselves that might already be obsolete.

This resonated with me because I’ve often wondered if a sense of identity is truly as unique as we claim. We like to think of our personalities as “original works,” but if you were to really sit down and dissect what makes you you, the results might be humbling.

If we look closely, we are mostly a mosaic of other people. We are a collection of phrases we heard a favorite teacher use, a temperament inherited from a parent, a fashion sense influenced by a friend we admired in high school, and a set of values shaped by the culture we happened to be born into. How much of a person is genuinely, fundamentally “original”? I’d venture to say it’s less than 10pc.

The rest is a borrowed perception. We are a “remix” of every person we have ever crossed paths with. This isn’t to say we don’t have genuine preferences, we certainly know what we like and dislike, but it raises a deeper question: Do we even know ourselves well enough to stay “faithful” to an identity? And if that identity was mostly built by external influences, why are we so protective of it?

I had a conversation that mirrored this idea a few days later. I was in a cab on the way to visit family, and the driver and I started talking about the burden of knowledge. He proposed a radical idea: that sometimes, knowing something actually keeps you from becoming successful or innovative.

“Look at math,” he said. “Because we are taught from birth that 1+1=2, we never question it. We stick to that knowledge and never look further. But if you found someone who didn’t know the ‘rules,’ they might come up with a completely different way of seeing the relationship between those two units.”

He was talking about the “box.” People who think outside the box are often lauded, but the driver argued that the most creative people are those who aren’t even aware the box exists in the first place.

He used language as the perfect example. Have you ever noticed that people who know absolutely nothing about a language’s grammar are often the ones who learn to speak it the fastest? They are brave enough to stumble, to use broken sentences, and to look “foolish” as long as they are communicating. Meanwhile, the students who know a “thing or two”, those who have studied the rules and the syntax, are often paralyzed. They are so afraid of breaking a rule or looking “wrong” that they stay silent. They wait until they are “perfect,” which is a day that never comes.

In this sense, confidence doesn’t come from “knowing thyself.” Sometimes, confidence comes from a total lack of self-consciousness, a freedom from the identity of being “someone who is correct.”

It makes me wonder: What would happen if we woke up tomorrow with a total “clean slate”?

If you had no memory of your past failures, no concept of your “reputation,” and no social circle expecting you to act a certain way, would you still make the same choices? If you weren’t expected to be “the quiet one,” “the funny one,” or “the reliable one,” who would you choose to be in that vacuum?

I suspect that much of what we call “personality” is actually just us performing a role to meet the expectations of the people around us. Our identity is a social contract we signed years ago and forgot we had the power to renegotiate. It is an illusion, a comfortable, familiar box that keeps us from the terrifying, beautiful risk of true growth.

Of course, there is a reason we cling to these boxes. Experimenting with identity is inherently risky.

There’s a biological safety in the known. If you don’t know you’re incapable of flying, you might jump off a roof. You won’t fly; you’ll likely end up broken or dead. Our identities function as a sort of psychological “gravity.” They keep us grounded and safe, preventing us from making social or professional leaps that could lead to failure.

But there is a difference between a safety net and a cage. When we treat our identities as rigid, unchangeable facts, we stop evolving. We get surprised when we do something “out of character,” feeling a sense of guilt or confusion. But perhaps those “out of character” moments are the only times we are actually growing. They are the moments when the 10pc of our true self pushes through the 90pc of our borrowed perceptions.

Perhaps the goal in life isn’t “finding yourself” at all. Maybe the goal is to be brave enough to keep losing yourself, over and over again, until only the growth remains.

6,560,000,000

Posted on January 25, 2026January 25, 2026 by Digital Editor

The value of claims, in Birr, the state-owned Ethiopian Insurance Corporation (EIC), paid in the financial year 2024/25, 138pc higher than the previous year, from a gross premium of 13.3 billion Br. In the global insurance industry, a doubling of claims normally erodes profitability. EIC’s ability to raise premiums and expand coverage fast enough to offset the spike in claims is, therefore, unusual.

Social Health Insurance Takes Effect for Public Health Sector Employees

Posted on January 25, 2026January 27, 2026 by Digital Editor

The Ethiopian Health Insurance Service (EHIS) has formally launched the implementation of Social Health Insurance (SHI) for government employees in the formal health sector, effective January 22, 2026.

While the official announcement was made last week, the rollout began on January 9 for registered members who received confirmation through SMS. The initial phase is being implemented as a pilot programme targeting health sector staff, with plans to scale up coverage to non-governmental sectors in urban and rural areas through integration with existing community-based health insurance (CBHI) schemes.

So far, about 181,000 staff members have been registered, bringing the total number of digital beneficiaries to 474,958, including family members. The scheme covers medical services across primary, secondary, and tertiary levels within government healthcare institutions, with 65pc of public health centres currently contracted to deliver services.

Under the implementation framework, health sector employees are expected to receive medical care at their respective workplaces, supported by referral systems for services unavailable at their facilities. Other government employees are eligible to access care at registered public health institutions near their locations. Separate arrangements have also been made for World Health Organisation (WHO) staff, who will receive services at seven designated government referral hospitals.

The insurance programme operates under a cost-sharing model, with the government contributing six percent of the premium and employees contributing three percent.

NBE Struggles to Meet Dollar Demand

Posted on January 25, 2026January 27, 2026 by Digital Editor

The National Bank of Ethiopia held its biweekly foreign exchange auction last week to supply commercial banks with U.S. dollars. Twenty-one banks participated, collectively requesting 94.7 million dollars, but the central bank was able to allocate only 70 million, leaving a shortfall of 24.7 million dollars.

Only 15 banks secured currency at a weighted average rate of 154.920 Br per dollar, with bids ranging from 153 to 155 Br. The auction underscores continued pressure on foreign currency availability, as demand outpaces supply and banks compete for limited dollars.

Development Bank Considers Implementing Susuk Bond

Posted on January 25, 2026January 27, 2026 by Digital Editor

Development Bank of Ethiopia and FSD Ethiopia have held discussions on the implementation of Sukuk, Sharia-compliant Islamic bonds aimed at expanding interest-free financial services.

Sukuk involve issuing certificates that grant investors partial ownership in assets financed through the raised funds, in line with Sharia law.

After studying Sukuk for some time, The Bank has completed several preparatory steps, with current talks focused on effective implementation.

The discussions, attended by DBE President Isaias Kassa(PhD) and FSD Ethiopia CEO Hikmet Abdullah, along with representatives from both institutions, covered areas of technical and capacity-building support for the Bank’s interest-free banking services, as well as opportunities for institutional collaboration.

Month: January 2026