Our list of Top Thinkers is intended to spotlight people whose ideas are shaping the world in which we live—and many of this year’s nominations tick that box
Twelve months ago, we published our shortlist of Top Thinkers for 2024—and you, Prospect readers, chose well. You picked Daron Acemoglu as the winner, and in October he received a second accolade: the Nobel Prize for Economics, for his studies (together with co-authors) of how political systems impact economic growth. Who can say which victory was sweeter?
A year on, what has changed? Ukraine is still fighting its Russian invaders, and Israel’s war in Gaza continues. Civil war in Sudan has killed tens of thousands and displaced millions. The climate threshold of 1.5°C is slipping away. Across the world, voters have ousted incumbents, bringing Labour into office in the UK but boosting the far right in many other places. As we end the year, Donald Trump is readying himself for his second inauguration.
Our list of Top Thinkers is intended to spotlight people whose ideas are shaping the world in which we live—and many of this year’s nominations tick that box. As the Prospect editorial team (and some of our regular writers and contributors) compiled a longlist of names, it became clear that there are some Thinkers who also deserve a place on it for aiding us in understanding how our world is changing and how we should respond.
Eliane Brum
One of Brazil’s best-known journalists, Eliane Brum has relentlessly chronicled the story of the Amazon rainforest for a quarter of a century. Already established as a newspaper columnist, documentary filmmaker and author, she moved in 2017 to Altamira, in the Pará state of Brazil’s interior, where the destruction of the rainforest is most fierce. A few years later, in September 2022, she founded Sumaúma, an innovative platform dedicated to telling stories from the Amazon in Portuguese, Spanish and English.
The Amazon has for decades been at the centre of the environmental movement, but Brum argues in her recent book Banzeiro Òkòtó that it is also the centre of the world. “The centre of our world is where life is, not where the markets are,” she said in an interview with Latin American Bureau. Although western thought places humans apart from nature, Brum commends the Indigenous peoples of the Amazon, who imagine themselves as part of the forest, another species within the constellation of fauna, flora and funghi.
In her journalism, Brum bravely tackles the long history of violent corruption in the Amazon—and she has earned many awards for doing so—but she earns a place on this list for the ideas underpinning her work. She draws an indelible line between nature destruction and capitalist exploitation of the Amazon, and argues that if we are to succeed, we must put the values and languages of those who have remained as nature at the heart of climate action.
KlimaSeniorinnen
In 2024, the Verein KlimaSeniorinnen Schweiz—a collective of 2,000 women with an average age of 73—and four other individuals won a historic ruling from the European Court of Human Rights. It was the first climate case to be decided by an international human rights court anywhere in the world.
The court found that Switzerland had violated two articles of the European Convention on Human Rights by failing to mitigate the impacts of climate change on the women’s “life, health, wellbeing and quality of life”, and by failing to examine in domestic courts the merits of their complaints. It said that each state must act to counter global heating, rejecting the idea that one state’s actions were a “drop in the ocean”, and stressed the obligations that current generations have to those still to come, who are not able to take part in current political action. Being signed up to the Paris agreement isn’t enough for states to dispense with human rights obligations, it added. The judgment is binding for the 46 member states of the Council of Europe and could have wider implications, but a struggle is ongoing about whether it will be implemented.
Switzerland, like most countries, is likely to miss its Paris agreement goals. In 2024, it even had to redraw its borders with Italy because of glacier melt. But the country rejected the court’s findings and has indicated that it won’t implement all of the ruling’s elements. The Council of Europe’s committee of ministers—which represent the 46 member states—must now oversee Switzerland’s next steps. It will be an important test for the difference citizens can make to climate action through the law.
Akshat Rathi
While some in the climate space point to the incompatibilities of capitalism with the climate, Rathi instead argues that capitalism can be reformed to meet climate and ecological goals. His 2024 book Climate Capitalism takes the era-defining challenge of the climate emergency as its starting point, but counters what has become known as the “doomer” narrative. The situation is immensely serious, but “the world has already begun deploying the solutions needed to deal with it,” Rathi writes—before setting out examples of people and projects doing just that.
Rathi is a scientist as well as a storyteller. His day job is with Bloomberg News in London, where he is responsible for an emissions-focused newsletter and podcast, both called “Zero”, and he has also edited a book of essays from young climate leaders. But before entering journalism, he earned a PhD in organic chemistry from the University of Oxford and a bachelor’s in chemical engineering from the Institute of Chemical Technology in Mumbai.
Rathi earns a place on this list because his work addresses one of the most damaging narratives in climate action. Sceptical voices not long ago denied that climate change was real; today the question is one of delay. How quickly can we transition our economies away from fossil fuels? How much will it cost—and who will pay? Rathi makes a convincing case that transitioning economies is not only possible but makes good business sense too. If the world is to meet global emissions goals, we need CEOs to be listening.
Hannah Ritchie
Another researcher working to convince us that we really can tackle climate change is Hannah Ritchie, a data scientist at the University of Oxford and the deputy editor of Our World in Data. Ritchie, who has a PhD in geoscience, is inspired by the Swedish physician Hans Rosling, who showed that poverty was declining and global health improving.
Applying a Rosling-esque approach to environmental sustainability, Ritchie examines how we might solve the biggest problems we collectively face. Her book, Not the End of the World, which was published in 2024, sets out to transform how we look at environmental challenges and methodically argues that climate action can proceed hand-in-hand with socioeconomic development.
Our current position is undeniably bleak. This past year is set to be the hottest on record, and it has become clear that we are going to break the 1.5°C warming threshold that nations pledged to respect in the Paris agreement. The key to Ritchie’s optimism is not focusing on where we are today but on the rate of change. Countries have been amping up their commitments, she notes. Incremental changes can make a big difference—and if every country was to follow through on their pledges, we could still do a lot of good.
The past is not always the best predictor of the future. We are approaching tipping points, and moments of political will may not endure. Indeed, the easy decisions may have already been made. But Ritchie’s data-based analysis has helped counter defeatism, boosting informed and engaged debate.
Rebecca Solnit
Twenty years ago, in A Field Guide to Getting Lost, the writer Rebecca Solnit explored both the challenges and beauty of living with uncertainty. One of the signposts she has planted throughout her work since has been an embrace of the unknown—which she calls hope.
Solnit thinks of climate change as violence on a global scale, not just against other species but against human beings too. Increasing numbers of us experience this violence directly, through extreme weather, pollution or climate-linked diseases. The World Health Organization estimates that between 2030 and 2050, climate change will cause approximately 250,000 additional deaths each year from undernutrition, malaria, diarrhoea and heat stress alone. When faced with this violence, many of us feel despair. But Solnit argues that despair is both a luxury and a gift to those who profit from the continued extraction and burning of fossil fuels. We must never believe it is too late; there is always so much that can be saved.
In this, Solnit’s thinking applies not only to the climate but to struggles against the powerful and corrupt and in defence of freedoms and rights. In 2025, she will publish No Straight Road Takes You There, a new book of essays on climate change as well as feminism, democracy, power and, again, how we respond to the unpredictability of the world. At a time when so much is dark and overwhelming, Solnit remains the best possible guide.
David Autor
In a timely antidote to the apocalyptic speculations around generative AI—according to Elon Musk, AI is “the most disruptive force in history,” and will lead to a time “where no job is needed”—the MIT professor and labour economist David Autor argues that this technology could actually help rebuild the “middle-skill, middle-class heart of the US labour market that has been hollowed out by automation and globalization”. His thesis—“not a forecast but a claim about what is attainable”—sits within a body of work that has explored the impact of technological change on skill demands, earnings levels, inequality and electoral outcomes. Autor says that the advent of AI conforms to a historical pattern in which expertise in the labour market is transformed by historical and technological forces. “Many of the most highly paid jobs in industrialized economies—oncologists, software engineers, patent lawyers, therapists, movie stars—did not exist until specific technological or social innovations created a need for them,” he writes. AI, through its ability to “weave information and rules with acquired experience to support decision-making”, could extend expertise to a larger set of workers who, with training, could perform “tasks currently arrogated to elite experts, such as doctors, lawyers, software engineers and college professors.”
Autor, whom the Economist has labelled “the academic voice of the American worker”, is a co-director of the Labour Studies Programme at the National Bureau of Economic Research and has received numerous awards for his scholarship, including an Andrew Carnegie Fellowship in 2019. In 2023, he was one of two researchers across all scientific fields selected as a NOMIS Distinguished Scientist.
Paul Collier
In Left Behind: A New Economics for Neglected Places (2024), the development economist Paul Collier asks how, in terms of life chances, the UK became one of the most unequal countries in the world—a place where a young man from an affluent part of London is six times likelier to join the top 40 per cent of earners than a young woman from a poor council estate in Collier’s home city of Sheffield. His latest work reflects a career informed by a strong sense of moral purpose and spent ranging across the planet to analyse and understand the economic and political factors that cause poverty and inequality and their opposites—why some places rise while others stagnate or decline.
Collier is a professor of economics and public policy at the Blavatnik School of Government and a director of the Centre for the Study of African Economies, both at the University of Oxford, as well as a former director of the World Bank’s Research Development Department. His work has also examined the causes and consequences of civil war, the effects of aid and problems with democracy in low-income and natural-resource-rich societies, urbanisation in low-income countries and private investment in African infrastructure. Crucially, his work emphasises hope: that poverty and inequality aren’t intractable and that, even in straitened and difficult circumstances, radical change is possible.
Diane Coyle
The wide-ranging work of Diane Coyle, the co-director of the Bennett Institute for Public Policy at the University of Cambridge, has produced critical insights into how we shape and measure the modern economy, reimagining the data that underpins economic analysis and policy. She leads research on progress and productivity, and her core interests include the economics of new technologies and globalisation, productivity growth and the sustainability of industrial strategy. Her work demonstrates that future prosperity depends on the stewardship of all of society’s resources: physical, human, social and environmental. These efforts to measure and value such resources—particularly the digital economy and “free digital goods”—have influenced policy development in the UK, the US and at the United Nations, where she serves on the High-Level Advisory Board on Economic and Social Affairs.
Coyle’s broad perspectives on productivity—which determines real wage growth, living standards and potential growth in tax revenues for public spending—are redefining what counts as investment. And she has pioneered the idea of a universal basic infrastructure, demonstrating that a lack of basic public services—transport, medical care, post offices, banks—restricts growth. Coyle is also a director of the Productivity Institute, a fellow of the Office for National Statistics and an expert adviser to the National Infrastructure Commission. She was awarded a DBE in 2023 for her contributions to economic policy and practice and her commitment to public service.
Daniela Gabor
With a new Labour government planning, in her own words, to “get BlackRock to rebuild Britain”, Daniela Gabor’s work on how public-private partnerships enable global finance organisations to capture state power, security and resources seems especially urgent. Gabor, who recently became a professor of economics and macrofinance at SOAS, University of London, is also compelling in her explanation of how Joe Biden’s $2 trillion big-government agenda and the messaging behind it were hijacked in the lead-up to the 2024 US presidential election, as an initially radical programme ultimately “failed its ambitions to roll back the power of capital”. Her delineation of the complex relationships between finance, government spending and the shadow banking sector—non-bank institutions, such as hedge funds and private equity funds, that engage in bank-like activities—helps bring an opaque world to wider public notice and understanding. This theme will be further explored in her forthcoming book, The Wall Street Consensus, along with the (partial) return of the transformative state.
Gabor has served as an expert adviser for the European parliament, the G20 under the Brazil presidency and the United Nations 4th Financing for Development Agenda. The multinational reach of her work is exemplified by two of her current funded projects: one about “Rethinking Developmentalism for Climate and Social Justice”, with Ndongo Samba Sylla, Ideas Network Africa, and another focused on “Redesigning Finance for Climate Justice”.
Gabriel Zucman
A professor of economics at both the Paris School of Economics and the École Normale Supérieure, and a founding director of the EU Tax Observatory, Gabriel Zucman was once best known for his work with Thomas Piketty, the author of the landmark book Capital in the Twenty-First Century. But he has stepped increasingly into the limelight over the past year with a proposal for a global wealth tax focused on the world’s 3,000 billionaires, which he was invited to develop on behalf of Brazil for the country’s G20 presidency, and which was discussed at a meeting of the group in July.
Although the idea of multilateral action to effectively tax very wealthy individuals and corporations is gaining in currency, Zucman has been cultivating his expertise in this area since 2008, when he finished his master’s thesis, supervised by Piketty, on flight from French wealth taxes. Through works such as The Hidden Wealth of Nations (2015) and The Triumph of Injustice: How the Rich Dodge Taxes and How to Make Them Pay (2019)—the latter co-authored with Berkeley professor and frequent collaborator Emmanuel Saez—Zucman has become a world authority on measuring incomes and wealth and on the offshore ecosystem. He has developed methods to measure the wealth held in tax havens: about 8 per cent of the world’s household financial wealth, along with close to 40 per cent of multinational corporate profits. In 2023, he received the John Bates Clark Medal.
María Corina Machado
In 2024, which was dubbed the “mega-election” year, some 2bn people went to the polls in 70 countries. In the vast majority, the mechanisms of democracy showed resilience, though liberal democracy has taken a kicking. But in Venezuela, where citizens voted on 28th July, the government’s autocracy was plain to see: incumbent president Nicolás Maduro has refused to accept that the opposition won the most votes.
María Corina Machado, the co-leader of Venezuela’s opposition coalition alongside presidential candidate Edmundo González, knew that the Maduro regime would put up a fight, so they collected tally sheets from 83 per cent of Venezuela’s electronic voting machines and published them online. The National Electoral Council, loyal to Maduro, had declared him the winner mere hours after polls closed. But Machado and González had the receipts: the opposition had won by a landslide.
For years, Machado has challenged Venezuelan autocracy. As deputy for Miranda State, she was critical of Hugo Chávez. After a run for president in 2012, she led protests against Maduro’s government. Last year, after Venezuela’s top court banned her from running in this year’s elections, she campaigned for González. Officials from the country’s socialist ruling party have described Machado, the daughter of a wealthy businessman, as a “fascist oligarch”. In November, the government announced it was investigating her for treason after she expressed support for US legislation that would ban Washington DC from working with companies who do business with Venezuela.
Now in hiding, like González, Machado continues to fight for freedom in her home country. Earlier this year she told Prospect: “This is an existential struggle. Even a spiritual one. And we are not going back.”
Renee DiResta
In 2019, the Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO) started looking into the misinformation that so proliferates online. But in June 2024, it was reported that the research institute had started to wind down following pressure from Republicans. The previous year, Stanford was one of the universities targeted by the US House Judiciary Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, chaired by Republican Representative Jim Jordan, over allegedly colluding with the federal government to censor conservatives. The observatory and its staff were sued by conservative groups three times. Founding director Alex Samos left the organisation, and other staff were reportedly told to start looking for new jobs. Renée DiResta, the SIO’s research director, left in June after her contract was not renewed.
In the face of such intimidation, DiResta led pioneering research at SIO, investigating Russian efforts to manipulate the US electorate and spread misinformation during the 2016 election. She also led work on child online safety, internet scams and vaccine misinformation. The observatory was described as “a research powerhouse”.
This year, DiResta published Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies Into Reality, a book investigating the interplay between influencers, algorithms and online crowds. She argued that this machinery is deliberately undermining the legitimacy of the institutions of democracy. DiResta was awarded the 2024 Carl Sagan Prize for Science Popularization and, despite the SIO’s end, will continue her vital work as associate research professor at the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University.
Alon-Lee Green and Rula Daood
At a time of polarisation and despair in (and about) Israel and Palestine, Alon-Lee Green and Rula Daood represent vital new ways of thinking. Green, a Jewish Israeli, and Daood, a Palestinian citizen of Israel, are national co-directors of Standing Together, a grassroots Jewish-Arab movement that has shown that it is possible, with nuance and compassion for both sides of this decades-long conflict, to call for peace, justice and equality, actively opposing the war and Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories. Standing Together excels both online and in real life. The group protected aid convoys going into Gaza as settlers tried to obstruct them, and collected aid for Palestinians under bombardment in the Strip. In June, its volunteers stood in solidarity with Palestinians in the Old City of Jerusalem during the right-wing nationalist Jerusalem Day flag march.
And Standing Together has mobilised people both in Israel and abroad to speak out against the war. UK Friends of Standing Together has held regular vigils and rallies since 7th October 2023. In November, the Jewish Labour Movement (JLM), which is affiliated with the Labour party, passed a resolution supporting the group. “Standing Together provides a beacon of light and hope at a time when the Israeli government and the Knesset are dominated by the parties of the Right and Far Right, offering Israelis an alternative vision of peace and independence for Israelis and Palestinians, full equality for everyone in the land, and true social, economic, and environmental justice,” the JLM said. Green and Daood were recognised by Time magazine in the Time100 Next list of rising stars.
Darren McGarvey
In his work, the Scottish musician, writer and social commentator Darren McGarvey reflects the realities of life in a crumbling UK ripped apart by austerity, with a perspective that is sorely missing from much of the mainstream media.
His journalism, music and activism have focused on social deprivation. McGarvey, who is also known by his stage name, Loki, draws on his own experiences. In 2018, he won the Orwell Prize for Poverty Safari: Understanding the Anger of Britain’s Underclass, his memoir of growing up in a tough part of Glasgow with a mother struggling with addiction. In 2022, he published The Social Distance Between Us: How Remote Politics Wrecked Britain. That same year, he gave one of the BBC Reith Lectures on “freedom from want”. He was made a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2023.
In 2024, McGarvey focused his sharp, critical eye on our courts, prisons and police. His BBC Scotland series The State We’re In looked at the UK’s crumbling criminal justice system through the perspective of those working in it or affected by it. With prisons overcrowded and courts backlogged with cases, McGarvey asked why the judiciary isn’t working for victims, staff or criminals. A system that rehabilitates, he argues, will cause recidivism to drop and will help to break dangerous, ubiquitous cycles of poverty, addiction and abuse.
Elif Shafak
Elif Shafak, the Turkish-British author of 21 books, has boldly addressed, through storytelling, the big problems of our era, from climate change to inequality to violations of human rights. After writing The Bastard of Istanbul (2006), her novel that deals with the Armenian genocide, Shafak was prosecuted for “insulting Turkishness”. Investigated for obscenity over two other novels, she went into voluntary exile.
Having faced persecution in her homeland, Shafak gives space—and voice—to people and stories who may not have it. In her latest book and 13th novel, There Are Rivers in the Sky, published in 2024, Shafak follows a single drop of rain through millenia, starting in Nineveh in the 7th century BC and ending up in a bottle of water carried by Yazidis fleeing slaughter in the 21st century. Through this theme, the book discusses the climate crisis as “a crisis of fresh water”, as Shafak told the Guardian in August. In September, she was awarded the British Academy’s President’s Medal for storytelling that “bravely tackles sensitive topics such as conflict, gender equality, human rights, ecology and the environmental crisis, with scholarly rigour and intellectual force”.
But most of all, Shafak believes in fiction as a sacred space of democratic debate in our fraught age. Addressing the Cambridge Literary Festival, in the inaugural A Room of One’s Own Lecture, she described literature as “the great synthesiser, the antidote to the age of hyper-information.
Anne Applebaum
Anne Applebaum won a Pulitzer prize for Gulag, her 2003 narrative history of the origins and development of Soviet concentration camps, and in the two decades since she has consistently been one of the most authoritative voices on Russia, eastern Europe and authoritarianism. She is now a staff writer at the Atlantic, and her most recent book, Autocracy, Inc, argues that autocracies are underpinned by networks of anti-democratic forces, from surveillance tech to professional propagandists. It’s a compelling tale of the ways in which autocrats connect with one another and distort reality. It’s also a clarion call for the defence of liberal democracy at a time when democratic norms face severe challenges.
With Donald Trump back in the White House from January, Russian president Vladimir Putin will likely feel less constrained by the west in the war in Ukraine. And with far-right politicians and parties doing so well electorally, Applebaum’s analysis of how autocracies develop and how autocrats themselves work will be invaluable in the years to come.
A historian by training, Applebaum is a senior fellow at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies and SNF Agora Institute. She was a Washington Post columnist and has worked at the Spectator, Slate and the Telegraph. Her other books cover subjects including Stalin’s famine and totalitarianism in eastern Europe. More recently, she has written extensively on the need to regulate social media to protect democracy, in response to the upswing in disinformation and propaganda.
Fiona Hill
The foreign affairs expert Fiona Hill astonished Washington DC with her testimony during Donald Trump’s first impeachment inquiry in 2019. Russia had “systematically attacked” the US’s democratic institutions during elections three years earlier, she told Congress: external forces were working to “divide us against each other, degrade our institutions, and destroy the faith of the American people in our democracy.” Russian security services would try again, she warned—“and we are running out of time to stop them.”
Hill, who served as a senior official advising the Trump administration from 2017 to 2019, has a deep understanding of Russia and its tactics—and her thinking will now inform how the UK positions itself in the evolving landscape of defence and security. Although she spent many years in the US—and is still a senior fellow at the foreign policy thinktank Brookings and a member of Harvard University’s Board of Overseers—Hill is British, and her expertise is now being leveraged for the UK’s Strategic Defence Review, a critical document that will shape the country’s policy in the coming years. This review, led by former Nato secretary general George Robertson, aims to determine the necessary roles, capabilities and reforms of the UK’s defence apparatus to respond to 21st century challenges. The review’s goal is to ensure the UK is equipped to handle future threats within its available resources, aiming for defence spending of 2.5 per cent of GDP.
Hill’s extensive knowledge of Russia, gained through her academic work and experience in government, will no doubt be invaluable to this strategic assessment—and will help determine the UK’s position in a world of rapidly crumbling security.
Brian Klaas
The human instinct to look for clear narratives and explanations is a fool’s errand, writes Brian Klaas, a political scientist, in his 2024 book Fluke. Sometimes, there isn’t a clear story about X causing Y. The tiniest twist of fate can change everything. Think of the bullet nicking Donald Trump’s ear and how, if he had turned his head or if the assassin had been allowed into his school’s shooting club, the outcome might have been very different. In a sense, everything is chaos.
This is an important reminder for policymakers and researchers who make decisions based on causal links. Forgetting that randomness—from the cellular level to the geopolitical one—is an ever-present driver of change, leads to wrong and sometimes dangerous conclusions. But perhaps more consequential is Klaas’s point about the risks of interconnection. Our political and financial systems are now so enmeshed and without slack that every action and event has wide, rippling ramifications. We are more vulnerable than ever before. In July 2024, for instance, one faulty Crowdstrike software update crashed 8.5m Windows devices, impacting airlines, hospitals and financial systems around the world.
In the face of fast, sometimes frightening change, we long for a narrative that explains what’s happening. Realising that we can never predict exactly what’s coming could feel disempowering but, when we’re faced with challenges from climate change to conflict to AI, it should instead spur leaders to construct more resilient systems. It also reminds us that each of our acts does make a difference in this world—we just don’t know what that impact will be.
Nesrine Malik
Nesrine Malik, a Sudanese-British columnist for the Guardian, writes with great clarity and some courage. She uses her platform within the mainstream media to critique dominant political and social structures as well as the narratives that underpin them. Her work spans topics from colonialism and its legacies, to Islamophobia and feminism—and her 2019 book, We Need New Stories: Challenging the Toxic Myths Behind Our Age of Discontent, tears down the myths and fallacies within our politics.
Malik amplifies voices that are typically marginalised, and is adept at exposing cultural myths that, for example, lead to the demonisation of migrants. She deserves particular recognition for being one of the few voices in the mainstream media who has consistently drawn attention to the civil war in Sudan, which is being driven by a power struggle between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces. According to some estimates, the conflict, which is now far into its second year, may have killed up to 150,000 people through violence, disease and starvation. A recent report by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine’s Sudan Research Group said that more than 61,000 people have died in Khartoum State alone, 26,000 of them as a direct result of the violence. In covering such stories, Malik’s work is indispensable for understanding the contemporary geopolitical landscape. She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and in 2021 she received the Robert B. Silvers Prize for Journalism.
Ehud Olmert, Nasser Al-Kidwa, Gershon Baskin and Samer Sinijlawi
Even before the horrors of the war in Gaza, there had been years of impasse between Palestinians and Israelis. Instead of trying to restart negotiations, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu famously kicked this particular can down the road, bolstering Hamas and weakening president Mahmoud Abbas’s Palestinian Authority in order to “manage” the status quo. The last time a meaningful peace deal was on the table was in 2008, when former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert presented an offer to Abbas, who refused it.
Since 7th October 2023, relations between the two sides in this conflict have reached their nadir. But it is precisely at this time that an initiative to revive Israeli-Palestinian dialogue has been gaining momentum. In July—not long after Prospect hosted a conversation between them—Olmert and Nasser Alkidwa, a former Palestinian foreign minister (who also happens to be Yasser Arafat’s nephew) signed a letter agreeing to work together for peace. They listed joint positions on Gaza’s postwar future and called for land swaps and Palestinian elections. The initiative was the combined effort of Olmert and Alkidwa; Gershon Baskin, a veteran Israeli negotiator who helped secure the release of captured Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit from Hamas; and Samer Sinijlawi, chair of the Jerusalem Development Fund. Baskin had originally approached Olmert before 7th October. The whole point of the exercise, Baskin told Prospect, “is to build hope”.
At a time when it is needed more than ever, the project has shown that it is possible for Israelis and Palestinians to negotiate in good faith. The group has since taken the initiative global, meeting with senior diplomats and foreign ministers. As Olmert told CNN’s Fareed Zakaria when they first went public, the conflict is at an inflection point: “It’s time to change direction.”
Rumman Chowdhury
After Elon Musk bought Twitter (now X) in 2022, he reduced the company’s headcount by about 80 per cent. And although thousands of lost jobs is rarely anything to cheer about, perhaps we can be glad that Rumman Chowdhury was forced to leave the building. She was axed as director of Twitter’s machine learning ethics, transparency and accountability team, a job that made her the most significant canary in its algorithmic coalmine. One of her findings was that Twitter’s AI systems boosted right-wing news sources during the 2020 US elections.
Chowdhury has now taken her aptitude for policing AI out into the world, not least by co-founding the non-profit organisation Humane Intelligence. Much of her work is aimed at counteracting “moral outsourcing”—a term she coined for a Ted talk in 2018—by which technological innovators pass the buck for machines’ “choices” to the machines themselves. “You would never say ‘my racist toaster’ or ‘my sexist laptop’,” she explained in the talk, “yet we use these modifiers in our language about artificial intelligence. And in doing so, we’re not taking responsibility for the products that we build.”
In practice, this means that Chowdhury does what she can to expose—and eradicate—the failings of AI systems. For example, in 2023, she convened an event in which 4,000 hackers competed to crack open various chatbots; one bot even coaxed into revealing secret credit card details. But Chowdhury’s aim is ultimately constructive, not destructive. She shares her findings and expertise with governments and businesses, hoping to make AI great again.
The Four Thieves Vinegar Collective
This group of self-declared anarchist biohackers is not uncontroversial. The Four Thieves Vinegar Collective—founded in 2015 by a doctor of mathematics and physics, Michael Laufer—makes pharmaceutical products in its garage laboratories and publishes instructions online for others to do the same. In the highly regulated world of medicine, there are, understandably, claims that this could be dangerous.
The collective’s response would surely be that it is dangerous for them not to experiment. The commercial imperatives of the pharmaceutical market mean that life-saving drugs are often prohibitively expensive for those who need them—and subject to terrible price rises. The Four Thieves Vinegar Collective’s first major success, in 2016, was a $30 DIY EpiPen, used in the treatment of severe allergic reactions. They were spurred into action after the manufacturers of the official EpiPen raised the price from $57 per pen to $318.
Their work has since become more ambitious, and includes the creation of what they call a “Microlab” for helping with the home-production of medicinal drugs. They have even handed out abortion pills at conferences (reportedly manufactured for $0.89, rather than the recommended retail price of $160), at a time when such abortion pills are increasingly hard to come by in certain American states.
Writing in September 2024, the chemist Derek Lowe suggested that the Four Thieves Vinegar Collective isn’t as revolutionary as it appears. “How many people have been saved from a life-threatening allergic reaction by a homemade EpiPen?” he asked, wisely. But, at the very least, the collective offers a lesson to stretched healthcare systems around the world: there ought to be a better, cheaper way.
Ray Kurzweil
The 76-year-old Ray Kurzweil is regarded as one of the founding fathers of the modern age of AI. The computer scientist’s 1990 book The Age of Intelligent Machines famously forecast that a computer would win the “world chess championship” within a decade— before IBM’s Deep Blue managed to beat Garry Kasparov, then the world champion, in 1997. His 2005 book The Singularity Is Near drew on the thinking of Gordon Moore and John von Neumann to predict that various exponential advances in computing, AI, genetics and other areas would soon blur the borders between humans and machines.
These works—and others—have made Kurzweil an in-demand figure in Silicon Valley. In 2012, Google’s co-founder Larry Page hired him to the company after agreeing to a one-sentence job description: “to bring natural language understanding to Google”. Kurzweil is still working at Google as one of its principal researchers and greatest proponents of AI.
Kurzweil’s influence remains incredibly powerful. Not only is “natural language understanding” embedding itself in our everyday lives, as various tech companies—including Google—release and refine their own chatbots and AI interfaces, but he also published The Singularity is Nearer, a sequel to his earlier book, in June 2024. Its predictions include AI reaching human-level intelligence by 2029, and the merger of people and machines by 2045. Kurzweil sees these as mostly positive developments—but whether or not you share his optimism, we should surely all be paying attention to what he says.
Sasha Luccioni
The research scientist Sasha Luccioni has spent much of her career focusing on how machine learning—and AI in general—can be a force for good, particularly when it comes to the environment. In 2023, for instance, she co-organised a major workshop on “Tackling Climate Change with Machine Learning”, which included sessions on how clever computers could be used to assess damages after natural disasters and reduce methane emissions.
But, more than most in her line of work, Luccioni also appreciates that machine learning and AI are part of the problem. In the same year as the workshop, she gave a Ted talk entitled “AI Is Dangerous, but Not for the Reasons You Think”; her point was that, rather than worrying unduly about the prospect of machines taking over the world, we should pay more attention to the real-world effects they have now—including on the climate. “That ‘cloud’ that AI models live on”, she observed, “is actually made out of metal, plastic, and powered by vast amounts of energy.”
This is not just a talking point for Luccioni, but a basis for action. She has helped to develop software that estimates how much carbon dioxide is emitted during the execution of computer codes; has deployed that software to measure the environmental impact of large language models; and now, via the tech organisation Hugging Face, has set out to develop a star-rating system for AI models’ energy usage. Look out for that rating system in 2025.
Marietje Schaake
The tech giants need to be regulated, but it’s often very difficult to do that satisfactorily. After all, their products are constantly moving and shifting; they operate above and around borders; and they have near-bottomless budgets for lobbyists and lawyers. Besides, not many politicians are truly knowledgeable about the subject at hand—technology.
Enter Marietje Schaake. During her time as a member of the European parliament for the Netherlands’ Democrats 66 party, between 2009 and 2019, she led on everything from cybersecurity to digital rights, from net neutrality to press freedom—and gained a reputation as, “Europe’s most wired politician”, in the words of the Wall Street Journal. She deserves more credit than almost anyone else for Europe having some of the most watertight tech regulations in the world.
Schaake left politics in 2019 and is now, among numerous other roles, a non-resident fellow at Stanford University’s Cyber Policy Center. Her book The Tech Coup was published in September 2024 and provides an insider’s account of how Big Tech and democratic politics intersect, as well as a blueprint for how the latter can control the excesses of the former. Which ought to cheer anyone who wishes that Schaake were still in the European parliament: now there is someone in the world of tech academia who understands politics.