Financial Mindset

Fears surrounding AI are hitting a fever pitch. Rogue agents are running rampant, and even the industry’s top figures – Amodei, Altman, and Musk – are leading calls for a slowdown in development. With public and investor trust on a precipice, the administration has signaled it’s ready to step in with an AI czar to keep an eye on things. But I worry it won’t be enough. The next “Hugging Face” could be the final push that spurs a mass investor withdrawal from the very companies propping up the US economy. In my view, the government must get ahead of that curve by establishing a full-fledged Department of AI, rather than leaving it to a single individual. Frankly, the country’s economy could depend on it. The ongoing AI boom is undoubtedly one of its main drivers. Hundreds of billions of dollars have been poured into the buildout, and not just into AI labs and models, but data centers, semiconductor chips, and so on. Amazon , Meta , Alphabet , and Microsoft...

In 2026, the people most likely to be living paycheck to paycheck are those earning less than $50,000 or more than $500,000 a year, according to new research from Goldman Sachs . This K-shaped divide has a pronounced impact on their long-term savings at both ends of the income spectrum, the Wall Street giant says. Of the 5,106 respondents in Goldman’s “New Economics of Retirement” study, a little over 60% of those earning less than $50,000 a year were living from one pay slip to the next. That was followed by those in the $500,000 and upwards income bracket, of which approximately 38% said they were living one check to the next. A similar result was reported across other personal finance metrics the Goldman Sachs team evaluated. Respondents earning more than $500K were the most likely cohort to report having delayed financial goals (80%), followed by those earning less than $50K at approximately 79%. Likewise, both income cohorts were the most likely to pa...

Mark Ruffalo isn’t giving up his fight against Paramount Skydance’s takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery , even with the deal days from closing. On Sept. 30, U.S. District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín approved Paramount’s settlement with 12 state attorneys general. That cleared the last legal obstacle to the roughly $111 billion merger. Hours later, Ruffalo took to X to condemn the outcome. “This merger will stifle creativity, weaken free speech, and cost people their jobs—it is a bad deal for this country and should never have been approved,” Ruffalo wrote on X . “This is an incredibly disappointing outcome for the hundreds of thousands of us who stood up to block it, but it’s also not the end.” “This grassroots movement isn’t going to fade away and neither is our resolve,” the post continued. “This was never about just one merger: this was about fighting back against corrupt oligarch billionaires tram...

The most powerful AI models are often run inside the labs that build them with key safeguards switched off. And the safety tests those labs publish may not reflect how the models are actually used. That’s according to two AI policy researchers at the think tank GovAI. “We can’t trust them completely to tell us about the safety of models,” Alan Chan, a research fellow at GovAI, told reporters at a briefing in Washington on Sept. 29. Chan said models inside the labs, tested before anyone outside sees them, “haven’t necessarily gone through a bunch of safety testing,” and “internal safeguards have not been deployed.” Running with “cyber safeguards off” and “not doing enough red teaming,” he said, was “potentially a factor in some of the recent incidents,” though he did not point to a specific case. Anthropic said in July that its Claude models were running without the safety monitoring and cl...

Ford CEO Jim Farley knows AI won’t leave blue-collar workers untouched. But at a backstage media roundtable during Ford Pro Accelerate, he argued the technology will arrive in factories, repair bays, and skilled-trades workplaces principally as a “companion”—a tool to help people perform more complex tasks, build expertise faster, and help employers address an acute shortage of technical labor. “I think most of these jobs will be both using AI and also protected from it,” Farley said at the roundtable, which also included Linda Hubbard, president and CEO of Carhartt, and Chris Nelson, CEO of Stanley Black & Decker. But “if you work in finance doing spreadsheets, or you’re in a call center, or you’re an entry-level programmer—those jobs are definitely going to be changed and eliminated with at least this first inning of AI.” Farley’s distinction was straightforward: AI is likely to disrupt routine, screen-based, and standardized knowledge work more quickly than i...

Nate Bargatze was once paid to go door-to-door reading water meters. Now, he’s selling out arenas and building a theme park. The contrast helps explain why Ford enlisted Bargatze, a comedian who did not attend college, to make the case for skilled-trades careers at a moment when employers are warning that the U.S. lacks enough electricians, technicians, maintenance workers, welders and other people who keep the physical economy running. “I was a water meter reader,” Bargatze told Fortune . “I read people’s water meters.” It was not a joke job, he said. It came with benefits and a career path—exactly the kinds of features Ford and other employers are emphasizing as they try to pull more young people toward hands-on work. “It was very much a job that had benefits and, like, a job that you could kind of grow with and rely on,” he said. “This trade school would have been something that I would have done. If comedy didn’t go where it’s at now, I would have read water meters...

Four astronauts rocketed into orbit Thursday on a space station mission that will stretch until spring, among them a Canadian whose wife will give birth while he’s away. SpaceX launched commander Jessica Watkins and her crew for NASA after a three-week delay to fix their Dragon capsule’s leaking fuel system. Thick clouds threatened all morning to halt the countdown but in the end, the skies cleared enough to allow for a safe liftoff. Although their stay at the International Space Station will last a long six months, the flight there promised to be the quickest yet for Elon Musk’s company : a mere eight-hour transit with an arrival well before bedtime. With the late morning liftoff from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Watkins became the first Black woman to lead a crew to orbit. A geologist who worked with NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity a decade ago, Watkins is making her second trip to the space station following a lengthy stay in 2022. “Thanks for an amazing ride...