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s American voters lash out against artificial intelligence and the influence of Big Tech, proponents of AI development fear the United States could lose its technological edge to China. Gina Raimondo is worried about losing more than that. Raimondo — the former Commerce secretary, Rhode Island governor and sometime patron saint of pro-business Democrats — warns that leaders in Washington and Silicon Valley need to show American workers they can win in an AI economy or risk crippling political instability and a crackdown on innovation. “If we rush ahead with blinders on to lead the world in tech, but leave the American people behind, we will not beat China,” Raimondo says. “We will have automated our decline. We will have weakened our democracy. And ultimately you will have federal legislation that stops AI development.” Make no mistake — Raimondo wants to win the contest for technological supremacy. But, she says, “You’re not beating China if you have a terrible domestic economy, politics and society.” That’s why this month Raimondo ruled out running for president in 2028 and teamed up with Eric Holcomb, the former Republican governor of Indiana, to launch a massively funded nonprofit to help workers meet the age of AI. The organization, RAISE US, has drawn support from a roster of enormous private companies (Amazon, OpenAI, Anthropic and Microsoft, to name a few) and a bipartisan group of governors. It is experimenting with workforce resiliency initiatives in several states, from blue Maryland to deep-MAGA Arkansas. The policy vision is decidedly more delicate than the blunt-force populist prescriptions gaining popularity, like moratoriums on data center construction. Calling the companies backing RAISE US a “coalition of the willing,” Raimondo said industry and government have a lot to prove to American workers. Some CEOs grasp that better than others, she said, without naming names. In a joint interview with POLITICO Magazine, Raimondo and Holcomb said they would step away from frontline politics to build RAISE US. Yet if they succeed, they could soon wield a different kind of power in the 2028 battle of ideas. That is in part because they are collaborating with potential presidential candidates, including Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders and Maryland Gov. Wes Moore — rising stars on the right and left who could have an outsized impact on how voters view AI. That work begins, Holcomb said, with visible impact helping workers navigate a new world of technology. “We’re going to expect to see results on a daily basis.” This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Secretary Raimondo, you told my colleague Christine Mui that one of the reasons you’re working at the state level is because governors can move faster. What needs to happen before the end of 2026 to build the momentum you need? GR: You’re talking to two former governors, so we’re a little biased — but it’s just a fact, in today’s political world, governors can be bipartisan. Governors have to deliver, and therefore they just tend to be a little bit more practical. We want to take advantage of that. I think we already have quite a bit of momentum. We’ve come out of the gate with half a billion dollars and dozens of big companies supporting us. We already have four governors signed up with specific projects. In fact, we had a team yesterday in Maryland all day working on the ground with the folks in Maryland on the Service Year initiative [a paid opportunity to boost civic engagement among young people]. We want to start showing results right away in Maryland, Arkansas, Utah and Connecticut, and grow from there. EH: Not to be hyperbolic or exaggerate, but speed kills — slow speed kills. We don’t have time to wait or dither or experience paralysis by analysis. Governors are wired to track trajectories and trends, and make sure that you’re moving in the right direction on a daily basis, not annually. We’ll be tracking our projects. Gina mentioned Maryland. I’ve also been in Arkansas, in Little Rock, and we’re looking to accelerate a launch program that will better connect employers and employees with the throughline around obtaining the skillsets necessary for the jobs of today and tomorrow. We’re going to expect to see results on a daily basis, and then the trends that come from that. But we’re not waiting for the end of the year to report on the State of the State. When you say tracking on a daily basis, what does that tracking look like? What are you looking at on your phone? How are you receiving that data, and what are the metrics? EH: I’m a bit of a homer from Indiana, and we had some workforce development programs that were very successful in regards to apprenticeships, employer training grants, skilling up incumbent workers. Workforce readiness grants had 63,000-plus Hoosiers sign up for the program to get credentialed and connected to a better job. We were tracking it on a real-time basis. You have support from some of the biggest companies in America. There are also some big names in the tech space not on the list. What should we read into that? You see Amazon, OpenAI, Anthropic — there are a couple really big ones not on there. GR: This is the coalition of the willing. I hope and expect others will join, but these are the leaders. The people who have stepped up, Amazon, Microsoft, Open AI, Anthropic, they jumped at this opportunity right away — knowing it was a startup, knowing we’d have to figure things out together, because there’s a collective action issue here. No one company is going to be able to solve this on its own. These are the folks who stepped up to lead, to take a bit of a risk on a startup. How much have you found people at the leadership level of either AI companies or AI-forward companies open to self-criticism and constructive feedback on the way they engage with the public sphere? GR: It’s a mix. CEOs are like anyone else. Some of them are just intensely focused on their business and their profit and their product. And others are that, plus they feel like it’s their job to see the big picture and do what’s right for America, American workers, the American economy in the long run. I’m reminded of efforts over the last decade to build bipartisan, cross-industry support for solutions around the energy transition or climate change. It’s one thing to get big companies and big political figures on board on day one, and it’s another thing to sustain that over time. Have you looked at some of those past examples for mistakes not to repeat? EH: Yes. And we’re not trying to overcomplicate this. We’re going to lead by example, and I think our past work in public service has demonstrated that — and why folks on both sides of the political aisle trust us to continue with that demeanor and upholding our end of the bargain. I sincerely believe that for America to be successful and victorious, it’s going to be — as it always has been — on the backs of the American worker. Does that mean that the two of you stay out of partisan politics while you’re running this? EH: It does not mean, for me, to stay out of it. But I’m focused on the job I’ve got right now. I’m not going to engage in front and center-stage politics. GR: I agree with that. I’m doing this full-time. You asked about recent examples. When people ask what the analogy is for RAISE US, the closest analogy I can really think of is the Council on Economic Development. It was created in the 1940s, as World War II was ending. Business leaders and CEOs were nervous that millions of GIs were coming back to America and needed jobs, and at the same time the war demand was dwindling. Where were all the GIs going to work? It was employer-led, with some of the companies — Studebaker, GE, Dow, the big companies of that time — it was very hands-on, on the ground, tactical, just like Eric said a few minutes ago. And it was quite successful. There was no spike in unemployment when the war ended, like everybody thought there would be. They wound up creating a movement around the country, which is what we hope to create: a movement to define what it means to be a good employer in the age of AI. I have no doubt we will make mistakes. But I also think we will show, over the next however many years, actual, practical, on-the-ground incentives for companies, new ways to support people as they’re transitioning from jobs, hopefully a service model, because we all think that AI is squeezing entry-level people. Finally, hopefully, we can have an at-scale, “earn while you learn” apprenticeship initiative for manufacturing. At some point in time when Congress decides to act in a bipartisan way, there will be national AI legislation. And I hope they’ll look into the work we’ve done and take the things that worked and put it into federal legislation. It’s hard to imagine now, but could you envision a world where there’s a real AI optimist on a presidential ticket in 2028? GR: Gosh, that feels so far away. I don’t know. EH: It’s the last thing on my priority list to spend time thinking about, when we are so knee-deep in what we’re doing. Hopefully what may drive that optimism is when we flip the script and start to use AI to help an individual progress and improve and have more options and more affordability. When that starts to happen, then the mood may change for the better. Secretary, I noticed that you, a few weeks ago, said explicitly that you’re not going to run for president in 2028. Was that in preparation for this announcement? GR: Yes. I want people to know this is what I’m doing. It’s outside of politics, but also working with the government. Job training isn’t enough to solve this problem, if it’s going to be as big as I think it is. Just saying, “Oh, we’re going to skill up a bunch of construction workers to build data centers” — that’s good, but that is not nearly enough to get ready. I didn’t want anyone to think, “Oh, she’s just doing this to run for office.” That’s not what this is about. EH: What drives me is simply — good policy makes good politics. We’re focused on the policy execution, and we’ll leave it to others to, hopefully, point to the good news that comes from it. There’s so much rhetoric about beating China on AI, and I’m not sure that your average worker is all that concerned about beating China on a geo-strategic level, if they’re not really feeling a benefit to themselves in whatever beating China means. GR: I’ll tell you what beating China means — and what it doesn’t mean. Beating China means staying ahead in the technology, having the best chips and the best models. It also means having a stable political picture in the United States, a strong economy in the United States, a population that is broadly prosperous and employed, a functioning democracy. That’s how you beat China. I can promise you, if we rush ahead with blinders on to lead the world in tech, but leave the American people behind, we will not beat China. We will have automated our decline. We will have weakened our democracy. And ultimately you will have federal legislation that stops AI development. I want to beat China, too. I want to be crystal clear about that. You’re not beating China if you have a terrible domestic economy, politics and society. You have to find a way to do both. And I believe that we can. EH: No pressure.

Earth may survive the fiery death of the sun, even as our star engulfs the innermost planets, a new study using state-of-the-art models suggests.The findings offer a potential alternative fate for our planet, which was thought to face certain death as the sun engulfs it in a thermonuclear inferno billions of years from now. As a yellow dwarf star, the sun is expected to have a relatively calm, 10 billion-year life. But in about 5 billion years, it will run out of hydrogen to fuse in its core and begin fusing hydrogen in its shell, causing it to expand enormously into a red giant star and then an even larger "AGB star," before it ultimately dies as a white dwarf. Now, in a Letter to the Editor published June 19 in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, astronomers used stellar evolution models and observed a nearby dying star to reassess Earth's ultimate, potentially fiery fate. Solar tug of warWhen the sun enters its later life stages, Earth will be at the mercy of two competing forces — a fate shared by countless worlds throughout the unimaginably immense span of cosmic time.As the sun expands to potentially hundreds of times its current size, the increased tidal forces will pull Earth toward our rapidly ballooning, sputtering star. Yet the surging sun will also lose its puffed-up outer layers into space through stellar wind. As it sheds much of its mass and becomes lighter, its gravitational grip will weaken, allowing our planet to escape outward into the depths of the solar system, the models show. "The fate of Earth depends on a delicate balance between these two effects," Mats Esseldeurs, a doctoral candidate at KU Leuven's Institute of Astronomy in Belgium and first author of the study, said in a statement. "If tidal interactions dominate, Earth is engulfed. If mass loss dominates, Earth escapes to a wider orbit." Previous research only muddies the issue. Studies have made different assumptions about solar mass loss, tidal forces and planetary interactions that may occur as the inner solar system evolves. As a result, it's uncertain if Earth will survive both of the sun's giant phases before our star shrivels into a tiny-but-dense stellar corpse called a white dwarf. In a glimmer of hope, astronomers have discovered intact worlds around white dwarfs. On the other hand, some white dwarf systems are littered with the rocky remnants of their destroyed planetary children. So the researchers observed the formerly sunlike, dying giant star L2 Puppis, located 200 light-years away in the "poop deck" constellation Puppis, to glimpse our solar future. L2 Puppis may be losing up to one-millionth of a solar mass per year, according to previous estimates, expelling a dusty disk that's thought to harbor a planet 12 to 16 times the mass of Jupiter.A view of L2 Puppis, a dying star. (Image credit: ESO)Additionally, the researchers performed state-of-the-art gravitational calculations "based on the internal structure and dynamics of evolved stars," modeling the orbital evolution of the inner solar system and the sun's lifespan from its infancy to its final phase as a "burned out" white dwarf.So long, Mercury and VenusBased on observations of L2 Puppis' mass loss, combined with the updated stellar evolution models, the researchers projected that Earth will survive as it shifts to just outside the expanding sun's radius."The largest uncertainty no longer comes from the tidal calculations, but from how much mass the future sun will lose," Esseldeurs said in the statement. "Observations of sun-like giant stars currently point towards Earth's survival, but we need better observations before we can be certain." A schematic illustration showing the late stages of the sun, approximately 5 billion years from now, as it exhausts the hydrogen supply in its core and expands to potentially hundreds of times its current size. Simulations suggest Mercury and Venus will be engulfed, but Earth may escape to a safe orbit. (Image credit: KU Leuven)Related storiesHow long does it take the sun to rotate?Is the sun really a dwarf star?Scientists discover the possible origin of the sun's magnetic field, and it's not where they thought it wasBut even if Earth survives, our solar system siblings will not be spared; the simulations suggest Mercury and Venus will be engulfed by the hellish blaze of our dying star. Additional stellar observations and improved models will help elucidate our planet's fate. For example, the European Space Agency's PLATO mission, a space telescope that aims to search for Earth-like planets around sunlike stars, will launch next year. It will likely detect planets around aging stars, thus providing a more accurate account of this potentially doomed population.See how much you know about the sun with our sun quiz!

Everyone who has played Destiny will tell you a story about it. They'll probably have a few, actually, but ask them to pick their most memorable and it will likely be the tale of how they got their first Gjallarhorn, the all-conquering rocket launcher that made mincemeat of just about everything during Destiny's first year. We doubt many can beat the story of the member of our raid team who got theirs by stopping on the approach to a loot chest deep in the Vault Of Glass, and firing their entire supply of rockets at it. Stepping up to open it, out popped Gjallarhorn. For weeks afterwards, the other five raiders would unleash rocket after rocket at the luckily impervious chest in the hope of seeing it spit out Destiny's most prized reward. Such were the lengths we went to, in those early days, to tip the odds in our favour. Destiny launched in September 2014, and within days it had become starkly apparent that this was not the game we had dreamed of, or the one Bungie had promised it would be. Its story, if you could call it that, was over in a flash. Our character hit the level cap of 20 within days, and it seemed there was nothing left to do. A pop-up window that appeared after we hit level 20 hinted at a new purpose – the pursuit of Light, the true measure of a Destiny Guardian's power – but the only way to raise it was to play, again and again, levels and missions that we felt we had already picked clean. (Image credit: Bungie)In the absence of anything new to do, Bungie gave us punishing difficulty and a miserly random loot system. The weekly Nightfall Strike, for instance – a ramped-up version of an existing mission with tougher enemies and a selection of cruel gameplay modifiers – offered up one of the best loot tables in the game, with a reasonable chance of dropping legendary and exotic gear upon completion. Yet enemies would frequently appear at a level or two higher than you could ever reach, and if all three team members died, they'd be kicked to orbit, and would have to start over from scratch. Faced with those odds, it's little surprise that players did what they could to cheat the system. One Nightfall boss could be killed by hiding beneath a raised platform, shooting through a small gap that enemy ordnance couldn't fit through, using Ice Breaker, a sniper rifle whose ammo replenished automatically over time. It worked, but playing Destiny this way was slow, boring, and not in the spirit of the game, so Bungie patched it. It did likewise for the infamous loot cave, a small opening in a rockface in Old Russia's Skywatch zone from which enemies constantly spawned, and into which players would empty clip after clip, standing stock still until their supplies ran dry. Destiny was the first game in Bungie's 10-year deal with Activision, but the game would likely have died, and the contract been ripped up, within weeks of launch were it not for the Vault Of Glass. VOG, to use the Destiny community's affectionate shorthand for the game's first raid, launched a week after the base game – just long enough for the committed player to reach the recommended level 26. Even now, four expansions and three more raids later, VOG is held up as the best Destiny – and co-op console gaming in general – has to offer. Vault of Glass(Image credit: Bungie)It was clear from the start that this was different to everything else in Destiny, whose missions until now had been linear excursions between objective markers, with variously sized gunfights building to a battle against a bullet-sponge boss. Yet VOG opened by asking a six-strong team to split up and hold three capture points from incessantly spawning enemies. Inside there were boss fights, yes, but they were no mere shootouts. Each had a set of exacting mechanics to learn, to devise a solution to, and to conquer. In between there was light relief – a frequently hilarious platforming puzzle with disappearing scenery, which even now is all too easy to mess up – and a marvellously fraught stealth maze whose patrolling Gorgon enemies would instakill anyone they laid eyes on. VOG was difficult, yes: the first team in the world to clear it took over 10 hours. But it was the most rewarding activity Destiny had to offer, both figuratively – the sense of satisfaction after you and five friends finally clear a difficult section is part of what makes Destiny so special – and literally, as some of the best loot in the game flooded into your inventory after each boss was vanquished. And what loot it was. The armour on offer was, at the time, the only route to the true level cap of 30. And the guns were, aside from the more widely available Gjallarhorn, the best available. There's never been a hand cannon like Fatebringer: it had the Firefly perk, which caused enemies killed by headshots to explode, dealing heavy damage to those around it, and Outlaw, which greatly increased reload speed after a precision kill. It was more than a gun: it was a game in itself, training you to pick your shots, and rewarding you for doing so by killing four other enemies in the vicinity, then refilling your clip in a split second. It's simply one of those guns – Doom 2's super shotgun, Titanfall's smart pistol, and so on – that will be talked about for years. (Image credit: Bungie)Yet for all that VOG was a masterclass in design, and the gear that dropped from it a delight, it also exposed two of Destiny's greatest problems. The first is that a handful of guns were overpowered, to the extent that anything else was considered a waste. When the hard-mode version of Crota's End, the second Destiny raid, launched, it was widely accepted that the final boss fight was as good as impossible without a full team of Gjallarhorn owners. Matchmaking websites, created to help players assemble raid teams – there was no such facility in the game itself – hosted listings with strict team requirements, almost all of which insisted on applicants being max-level and with Gjallarhorn in their inventory. The second problem was, inevitably, RNG. Since VOG was, for a spell, the gatekeeper to the level cap, you were reliant on the game granting you a full set of raid armour. Many were left looking for just one piece (for most, weirdly, it was a pair of boots). The hunt spawned a meme, 'Forever 29' – one drop short of the maximum level of 30. A wounded Bungie has been working to make amends ever since. (Image credit: Bungie)Indeed, the studio has worked tirelessly on these two distinct problems, struggling to balance a set of weapons that must fulfil two very different needs – in PVE, being overpowered is fun, but in PVP, it's ruinous – while reducing Destiny's reliance on a random-number generator. It's been largely successful: in its final form, Destiny is the fairest it's ever been. Guns are finely balanced. Loot still drops randomly, but the most powerful gear is available through fixed, clearly explained (though typically long-winded) means. Everyone can reach the level cap by simply playing what is now a very generous, accommodating game. There's little to complain about in Destiny today. But it's missing something, too. Randomness is a powerful thing. And for the first 12 months Destiny was defined by RNG – powered by it, propped up by it, the reason we loved it and hated it and kept on playing it anyway, going into work the next day bleary-eyed, disappointed and itching to get back to it. The weeks or months of waiting for your raid boots, or Gjallarhorn, made the eventual payoff all the sweeter. Better Together(Image credit: Bungie)The pain may have stopped, but we didn't. Once you'd got all the gear you really needed you carried on anyway, playing and replaying the same old missions. Routes and enemy patterns had long been committed to memory, your god-tier weapons making mincemeat of them all. Luke Smith – the Bungie staffer who designed VOG, Destiny's first and best raid, directed The Taken King, its best expansion, and went on to lead development of Destiny 2 – once described Destiny as "the bar I can go to in my pyjamas", and it remains the most succinct explanation of the game's appeal. A few sphincter-clenching raid sections aside, it's the most laid-back game about shooting alien monsters you could possibly imagine. The advantage to having so little content was that, if you played it enough times, you could do it without thinking about it. It's a highly social game, with a largely friendly community – the kind that forms when players come together to see off some of the toughest challenges in video games, then spend a couple of hours popping Cabal heads, farming upgrade materials and talking about their days to wind down. None of this would have happened had Destiny not been one of the best FPS games around. Not even the magic of VOG would've saved Destiny had there not, beneath the miserly loot system, the wet fart of a story and the content drought, been a rock-solid FPS. We expected great gunplay from the maker of Halo, but Destiny's true mechanical magic lies in the way it borrows from the best MMOs – with its cooldowns and super moves, its deeply customisable subclasses – and uses them to create something that subverts, and elevates, our expectations of the FPS. That foundation carried the game through three years of peaks and troughs. And as we finally close the book on Destiny, the lingering impression is not one of a shooter, or even an RPG – but a game that somehow managed to be the best when it was, by any objective standard, its absolute worst. This article was first published in 2017, in issue 308 of Edge Magazine. If you're interested in receiving more stories just like this one, subscribe to Edge Magazine.