June 2025

How to make digital technology an educational force for good

Sal Khan tightly controls his children’s screen time and their access to social media, but the founder and chief executive of the Khan Academy, an online education organisation, is a big believer in the power of the digital world and artificial intelligence to help students get ahead. Like many executives in Silicon Valley, he is well aware of the dangers of technology and how far apps have been designed to drive usage and harvest personal information.

The Latin American Country That Told Elon Musk ‘No’

Web pages load at a crawling pace. Video streams glitch and freeze. Outside Bolivia’s biggest cities, the nearest internet signal is sometimes hours away over treacherous mountain roads. So when Elon Musk’s Starlink offered Bolivia fast, affordable internet beamed from space, many expected the Andean nation of 12 million to celebrate.