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Across the globe, we are witnessing a historic surge in defense spending. In the United States, the 2025 defense budget climbed to over $895 billionone of the largest increases in peacetime history. Europe is following suit. NATO countries, long reluctant to meet their 2% GDP defense target, are not only catching upsome are even surpassing it. Chinas defense budget, too, has grown steadily, now exceeding $240 billion. The logic is simple but sobering: the world feels less secure, and the response has been to armfaster and broader than at any time since the Cold War. Some of this acceleration is driven by real and growing threatsRussias aggression, instability in the Middle East, and rising tensions in the Indo-Pacific. But much of it reflects a self-reinforcing spiral: nations are investing in weapons because others are. In this climate of fear, alliances are being redefined. The transatlantic relationship, once centered on cooperative security, is now being recalibrated around hard power and deterrence. What is peacetech? This shift has also reshaped the technology landscape. Private and public investment is pouring into so-called “dual-use technologies“AI, data infrastructure, robotics, cyber tools, space assetsthat can serve both civilian and military purposes. Palantir, Anduril, Helsing, and others are becoming the darlings of venture capital and defense procurement alike. And yet, amidst this frenzy, a crucial question is being left unasked: Can technology also be used not just to win wars, but to prevent them and save peoples lives? There is an emerging field that dares to pose this questionPeaceTech. It is the use of technology to save human lives, prevent conflict, de-escalate violence, rebuild fractured communities, and secure fragile peace in post-conflict environments. From early warning systems that predict outbreaks of violence, to platforms ensuring aid transparency, to mobile tools connecting refugees to services: PeaceTech is real, it worksand it is radically underfunded. Unlike the vast sums pouring into defense startups, peace building efforts, including PeaceTech organizations and ventures, struggle for scraps. The United Nations Secretary General released in 2020 its ambitious goal to fundraise $1.5 billion in peacebuilding support over a total of seven years. In contrast, private investment in defense tech crossed $34 billion in 2023 alone. Why is PeaceTech so neglected? One reason is cultural: in the tech world, peace can seem abstract or idealisticsoft power in a world of hard tech. In reality, peace is not soft; it is among the hardest, most complex challenges of our time. Peace requires systemic thinking, early intervention, global coordination, and a massive infrastructure of care, trust, and monitoring. Maintaining peace in a hyper-polarized, technologically complex world is a feat of engineering, diplomacy, and foresight. And its a business opportunity. According to the Institute for Economics and Peace, violence costs the global economy over $17 trillion per yearabout 13% of global GDP. Even modest improvements in peace would unlock billions in economic value. Consider the peace dividend from predictive analytics that can help governments or international organizations intervene or mediate before conflict breaks out, or AI-powered verification tools to enforce ceasefires and disinformation controls. PeaceTech, if scaled, could become a multi-billion dollar marketand a critical piece of the security architecture of the future. From dual-use to triple-use So whats the path forward? We need to expand the current dual-use framing of technologycivilian and militaryto a triple-use paradigm that includes peace as a third pillar. This would mean structuring investments in a way that not only supports battlefield advantage and economic competitiveness, but also actively contributes to conflict prevention, mediation and resolution. Venture capital firms, for instance, could allocate 510% of their dual-use investment portfolios to PeaceTech driven ventures. Governments, too, could dedicate slices of their expanded defense budgets to peace building innovation funds. Security alliances like NATO could adopt PeaceTech as part of their doctrinedeveloping and deploying technologies that de-escalate tensions supported by real solutions rather than just deter or defeat enemies. This is not nave idealism. It is a pragmatic innovation. During the COVID-19 pandemic, we saw how governments and technologists could come together to build contact tracing apps, accelerate vaccine development, and respond to a global crisis in real time. Why should we not mobilize with the same urgency and ambition to respond to the epidemic of conflict and instability? What is innovation for? Technology is not truly neutralit is a tool and reflects the priorities of those who fund and deploy it. Right now, our investments signal a belief that conflict is inevitable and peace is accidental. We can and must reverse that logic. In the age of AI and digital dominance, Pax Technica is emergingnot as utopia, but as a strategy: peace through technological strength. PeaceTech and defense must work hand in hand to develop the most effective technologiesnot just to prevent conflict, but to build stability and save lives. Without speed, seamless integration, and real-time adaptability, even the most advanced PeaceTech and defense systems will fail in critical missions. The future depends on the rapid mobilization of technological innovationto respond to threats, protect civilians, and secure peace before violence erupts. We are already building the tools that will shape the future of security. The question is whether well use them only to wage waror also to build peace and save millions peoples lives.
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E-Commerce
If you’re a designer looking for work, where should you live? That depends entirely on the kind of designer you are. Fast Company crunched the data to show you where the opportunities really are.
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E-Commerce
One stock recently impacted by a whirlwind of volatility is Blockthe fintech powerhouse behind Square, Cash App, Tidal Music, and more. The companys COO and CFO, Amrita Ahuja, shares how her team is using new AI tools to find opportunity amid disruption and reach customers left behind by traditional financial systems. Ahuja also shares lessons from the video game industry and discusses Gen Zs surprising approach to money management. This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response, hosted by Robert Safian, former editor-in-chief of Fast Company. From the team behind the Masters of Scale podcast, Rapid Response features candid conversations with todays top business leaders navigating real-time challenges. Subscribe to Rapid Response wherever you get your podcasts to ensure you never miss an episode. As a leader, when youre looking at all of this volatilitythe tariffs, consumer sentiment’s been unclear, the stock market’s been all over the place. You guys had a huge one-day drop in early May, and it quickly bounced back. How do you make sense of all these external factors? Yeah, our focus is on what we can control. And ultimately, the thing that we are laser-focused on for our business is product velocity. How quickly can we start small with something, launch something for our customers, and then test and iterate and learn so that ultimately, that something that we’ve launched scales into an important product? I’ll give you an example. Cash App Borrow, which is a product where our customers can get access to a line of credit, often $100, $200, that bridges them from paycheck to paycheck. We know so many Americans are living paycheck to paycheck. That’s a product that we launched about three years ago and have now scaled to serve 9 million actives with $15 billion in credit supply to our customers in a span of a couple short years. The more we can be out testing and launching product at a pace, the more we know we are ultimately delivering value to our customers, and the right things will happen from a stock perspective. Block is a financial services provider. You have Square, the point-of-sale system; the digital wallet Cash App, which you mentioned, which competes with Venmo and Robinhood; and a bunch of others. Then you’ve got the buy-now, pay-later leader Afterpay. You chair Square Financial Services, which is Block’s chartered bank. But you’ve said that in the fintech world, Block is only a little bit finthat comparatively, it’s more tech. Can you explain what you mean by that? What we think is unique about us is our ability as a technology company to completely change innovation in the space, such that we can help solve systemic issues across credit, payments, commerce, and banking. What that means ultimately is we use technologies like AI and machine learning and data science, and we use these technologies in a unique way, in a way that’s different from a traditional bank. We are able to underwrite those who are often frankly forgotten by the traditional financial ecosystems. Our Square Loans product has almost triple the rate of women-owned businesses that we underwrite. Fifty-eight percent of our loans go to women-owned businesses versus 20% for the industry average. For that Cash App Borrow product I was talking about, 70% of those actives, the 9 million actives that we underwrote, fell below 580 as a FICO score. That’s considered a poor FICO score, and yet 97% of repayments are made on time. And this is because we have unique access to data and these technology and tools which can help us uniquely underwrite this often forgotten customer base. Yeah. I mean, creditsometimes it’s been blamed for financial excesses. But access to credit is also, as you say, an advantage that’s not available to everyone. Do you have a philosophy between those polesbetween risk and opportunity? Or is what you’re saying is that the tech you have allows you to avoid that risk? That’s right. Let’s start with how do the current systems work? It works using inferior data, frankly. It’s more limited data. It’s outdated. Sometimes it’s inaccurate. And it ignores things like someone’s cash flows, the stability of your income, your savings rate, how money moves through your accounts, or how you use alternative forms of creditlike buy now, pay later, which we have in our ecosystem through Afterpay. We have a lot of these signals for our 57 million monthly actives on the Cash App side and for the 4 million small businesses on the Square side, and those, frankly, billions of transaction data points that we have on any given day paired with new technologies. And we intend to continue to be on the forefront of AI, machine learning, and data science to be able to empower more people into the economy. The combination of the superior data and the technologies is what we believe ultimately helps expand access. You have a financial background, but not in the financial services industry. Before Block, you were a video game developer at Activision. Are financial businesses and video games similar? Are there things that are similar about them? There are. There actually are some things that are similar, I will say. There are many things that are unique to each industry. Each industry is incredibly complex. You find that when big technology companies try to do gaming. They’ve taken over the world in many different ways, but they can’t always crack the nut on putting out a great game. Similarly, some of the largest technology companies have dabbled in fintech but haven’t been able to go as deep, so they’re both very nuanced and complex industries. I would say another similarity is that design really matters. Industrial design, the design of products, the interface of products, is absolutely mission-critical to a great game, and it’s absolutely mission-critical to the simplicity and accessibility of our products, be it on Square or Cash App. And then maybe the third thing that I would say is that when I was in gaming, at least the business models were rapidly changing from an intermediary distribution mechanism, like releasing a game once and then selling it through a retailer, to an always-on, direct-to-consumer connection. And similarly with banking, people don’t want to bank from 9 to 5, six days a week. They want 24/7 access to their money and the ability to, again, grow their financial livelihood, move their money around seamlessly. So, some similarities are there in that shift to an intermediary model or a slower model to an always-on, direct-to-consumer connection. Part of your target audience or your target customer base at Block are Gen Z folks. Did you learn things at Activision about Gen Z that has been useful? Are there things that businesses misunderstand about younger generations still? What we’ve learned is that Gen Z, millennial customers, aren’t going to do things the way their parents did. Some of our stats show that 63% of Gen Z customers have moved away from traditional credit cards, and over 80% are skeptical of them. Which means they’re not using a credit card to manage expenses; they’re using a debit card, but then layering on on a trnsaction-by-transaction basis. Or again, using tools like buy now, pay later, or Cash App Borrow, the means in which they’re managing their consistent cash flows. So that’s an example of how things are changing, and you’ve got to get up to speed with how the next generation of customers expects to manage their money.
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E-Commerce
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