Science-and-Society

German health insurance will reimburse a mental health app within days but cannot provide a therapist within six months. Last week, psychotherapy fees were cut by 4.5%. Baumol’s cost disease — originally about why string quartets get relatively more expensive — explains why the app gold rush and the collapse of mental health provision are the same phenomenon.

Anthropic has drawn a public line on military use of its models. The physics community spent the better part of the twentieth century working out what it means to draw that line after you have already built the thing. As a physicist watching this unfold, I find the parallels clarifying and the differences more unsettling than the parallels.