General

Humanoid robots are not the end of human purpose My contribution to the Formiche magazine feature on the age of humanoid robots. A version was published in the February 2026 issue. The headlines write themselves: humanoid robots will steal our jobs. Warehouses, factories, maintenance — first the repetitive tasks, then the rest. If machines do […]

The school of the future, beyond the factory-school My contribution to Il Sole 24 Ore’s feature on the macro-trends of the future. The questions were posed by Francesca Barbieri; below are my answers, in the complete version I wrote. Let’s project ourselves 160 years ahead… How might we imagine a typical day for a student

Pope Leo XIV has written an encyclical about artificial intelligence. “Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence” is a work of moral reasoning that places AI inside a tradition reaching back to 1891, when Leo XIII published Rerum Novarum, the first encyclical on economic justice. And as someone who

In 2015, I finished writing a book about artificial intelligence that almost no one asked for. At the time, AI was still primarily a research story. Deep learning was advancing, but foundation models did not exist. There were no systems embedded in everyday workflows, no AI‑generated text saturating the internet, no sustained policy debates about

Value exchange has always rested on a simple principle: voluntary participation creates positive-sum outcomes. That was true in ancient barter and remains true in today’s digital networks. What has changed is our capacity to coordinate these win–win interactions.  This is an edited transcript of my remarks at Token Talks & Tastes 2.0 for the panel

For the past 30 years I have been building companies across multiple geographies. Creating plans, founding teams, joining opportunities, raising capital, investing: the full spectrum of entrepreneurial activity, unconstrained by a single location. Ten years ago Network Society Labs, a global network of blockchain consulting groups, operated offices in San Francisco, Buenos Aires, London, Malta,

The following is an edited transcript of my keynote presentation at The Futurists X Summit held in Dubai in September 2025. Humanity can flourish in the age of AI and robots: I believe that through them we will gain new degrees of freedom, and it will enable us to decide and design our future. My

When xAI launched Grokipedia in October 2025, claiming it would be a “massive improvement over Wikipedia,” I was curious, and decided to compare them scientifically on topics where I have expertise. (Read the full report online at pedia.davidorban.com) Why This Comparison Matters Grokipedia is explicitly in early beta and doesn’t yet have universal coverage. So instead of focusing

My live conversation with Tony Seba and James Arbib about their book Stellar has provoked a lot of questions from the audience on the various platforms, and since the platforms cannot be trusted, I chose to collect both the questions and my answers and reorganized them thematically in order to preserve them. I reorganized the