36Shareholdersunite Essentials is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.“Ebola epidemic is doubling every 20 days – fastest in history,” said Tom Fletcher, the former British diplomat who is now the UN’s Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator. Health workers have told The Telegraph there is widespread concern the outbreak is racing ahead of efforts to stop it spreading. One medical worker recently returned from the outbreak told the Telegraph it was “very clear we are far from the peak and we are far from controlling it”. In some testing centres, half of those being checked are found to be positive, suggesting the virus is far more prevalent than official figures show.Ebola outbreak ‘doubling every 20 days’, warns UN chiefA gym goer’s AI assistant found a way to hack into the facility’s booking system after being asked to secure a spot in a popular class, according to a report. Andrew, who works at an Australian AI firm, used the artificial intelligence agent software OpenClaw with Anthropic’s popular Claude bot in an attempt to book a morning session that was already full. The AI agent found a way to kick out other gym members from a waiting list by exploiting a previously unknown security flaw in the online booking system.Rogue AI agent hacks gym to get its user a spot in a popular classFor years, A.I. skeptics have claimed the technology is merely a “stochastic parrot” trained to predict humans and mimic their behavior and, for that reason, the technology would never live up to its hype. The technology has stubbornly kept improving nevertheless, but most investors and tech executives have kept reassuring us that A.I. is just a tool, even if they were bullish that it was going to change the world. Where both of these sides have agreed was that the specter of A.I. as a looming extinction threat was overblown. Then OpenAI accidentally created an autonomous swarm of A.I. agents that broke out of a controlled testing environment and orchestrated a complex and difficult cyberattack on its own initiative. This didn’t occur because the models suddenly became superintelligent; nor were they simply following instructions and parroting their training. Since “reasoning models” rose in late 2024, we’ve seen A.I. trained not just to mimic humans but also to solve millions of hard problems, which they do by learning new behaviors and tendencies. That includes searching for valuable resources that could be key to cracking the problem, and even cheating. These tendencies can give rise to strange behavior that nobody — not even the models’ creators — can understand, let alone account for and control. The past few weeks are a perfect illustration of why we should find that so alarming.If You Weren’t Worried About A.I., You Should Be After the Past Few WeeksJust 84 total vessels transited the Strait of Hormuz last week — including only nine on Sunday, according to Kpler, an oil market data service that uses satellite imagery and shipping transponders to provide up-to-date crude flow information. That’s down from more than 100 transits a day before the war and not nearly enough to carry the 9 million barrels per day through the strait that Wright claims has been traveling through the waterway. Oil is getting out of the strait – but the number is closer to 4 million barrels per day, according to JPMorgan.The Trump administration claims oil is flowing normally again. There’s just one problemIt’s not only what you eat that matters – your body clock plays an important role in how you metabolise food. “Have breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince and have dinner like a pauper,” my Spanish friend and colleague Javier Hirschfeld told me when I asked about typical Spanish eating habits. It’s a saying that has been drilled into him from an early age. In Spain, it’s common for lunch to be your biggest meal of the day while evening meals tend to consist of light bites. “Some people skip dinner altogether or have a piece of fruit and yoghurt,” he says.We’re getting mealtimes wrong - here’s the best time to have dinnerWe will all face death one day, but our attitude towards this is individual. How can our understanding of mortality shape our approach to life? Here, palliative care doctors and death doulas share what they know about the end – and how it informs the way they live.What end-of-life experts know about living well: love your wrinkles, celebrate birthdays and don’t obsess over workJust as frontier artificial-intelligence models are benchmarked against each other, so AI will itself benchmark the rival political systems of America and China. The technology will test which is better at creating AI tools and diffusing them through the economy. And that will in turn depend partly on their very different ideas of how societies should be run. Even in a field changing as rapidly as AI, the results of that contest may not become clear for some years. But as we report from inside China, the country is already adopting AI fast—and its government is preparing for the dramatic economic and social change this heralds. As an autocracy, China has some advantages in harnessing the 21st century’s most promising technology. It also has plenty of problems.Why AI is a risk to Communist ChinaTaxi and ambulance drivers are less likely than workers in almost any other job to die of Alzheimer’s disease. That was the surprising result of a 2024 study examining the death certificates of nearly 9 million people in the U.S.Taxi drivers rarely die of Alzheimer’s – how complex mental maps and spatial reasoning protect your brainShareholdersunite Essentials is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.