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This summary covers The Economist’s June 13th, 2026 Business article listed in the contents as Rise of the robo-couriers and published under the headline Pavement pioneers.

Delivery robots have long sounded like a city-of-the-future novelty: small machines rolling along pavements, carrying groceries or pizza while pedestrians decide whether to be impressed, annoyed or amused. The article argues that the novelty is becoming a business proposition. In Milton Keynes, a British city better known for roundabouts than futuristic technology, Starship Technologies has built one of the largest markets for autonomous grocery delivery. Its claim is simple and commercially important: small pavement robots can deliver goods more cheaply than human drivers.

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This summary covers The Economist’s June 13th, 2026 Business article listed in the contents as Apple's second bite and published under the headline A second bite.

Apple’s first attempt to add generative AI to the iPhone was a conspicuous failure. Apple Intelligence, announced in 2024, was supposed to turn Siri into a capable personal assistant with access to a user’s messages, apps and other private information. Two years later, many of those promises remain unfulfilled. Apple is now trying again with a strategy that is less technologically ambitious but potentially more commercially effective: let Google supply the underlying AI models while Apple controls how people use them.

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This summary covers The Economist’s June 13th, 2026 Business article listed in the contents as Fear the SaaSpocalypse and published under the headline The four SaaSquatches of the apocalypse.

Software-as-a-Service once appeared to be one of technology’s safest business models. A provider could develop an application once, distribute it cheaply over the internet and collect recurring fees from every employee who used it. Artificial intelligence now threatens that formula from four directions: the largest AI laboratories, AI-native startups, companies building their own software and SaaS incumbents trying to reinvent themselves. The industry is not about to disappear, but its most profitable assumptions are becoming much less secure.

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This summary covers The Economist’s June 13th, 2026 Science & technology column listed in the contents as Well Informed: Anti-ageing balms and published under the headline The chemicals that reduce wrinkles.

The crowded market for anti-ageing skin products borrows heavily from biochemistry, advertising ingredients such as retinoids, antioxidants, peptides and exfoliating acids. Much of the supporting evidence, however, comes from company-funded studies or consumer surveys. Only a smaller group of ingredients has convincing scientific backing, and even those can reduce some visible signs of ageing rather than stop the process.

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This summary covers The Economist’s June 13th, 2026 Science & technology article listed in the contents as Blind spot on Chinese science and published under the headline Doctors with borders.

China has become a scientific superpower, producing as many papers in 2025 as America, Britain, Germany and Japan combined. Yet Western researchers often fail to cite Chinese work. The gap is not easily dismissed as a difference in quality: China also leads the Nature Index, which tracks output in a group of respected journals.

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This summary covers The Economist’s June 13th, 2026 Science & technology article listed in the contents as New test for lung cancer and published under the headline Predict and prevent.

Cancer prevention has usually meant reducing exposure to known risks, such as smoking and air pollution. A new study points toward a more targeted approach: use a blood test to identify people whose biology suggests that lung cancer is beginning to develop, then give them an existing anti-inflammatory drug before a tumour forms.

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This summary covers The Economist’s June 13th, 2026 Science & technology article listed in the contents as When AI builds itself and published under the headline Over and over.

Artificial intelligence is no longer merely helping people use software. It is increasingly helping researchers build better AI. Anthropic says its Claude system wrote more than four-fifths of the code the company published in May, up from a negligible share before Claude Code launched in early 2025. Independent benchmarks also suggest that leading models can now complete software tasks that would occupy a human engineer for more than a working day.

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The article argues that the AI boom has given Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan a deceptive sense of strength. Demand for chips, servers, and memory has lifted exports, profits, and headline growth across north-east Asia. Yet the same boom is narrowing their industrial base and hiding weakness in older manufacturing sectors that once powered the region’s rise.

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This summary covers The Economist’s May 30th, 2026 Europe article listed in the contents as The pope and AI and published under the headline Of God and Claude.

Pope Leo’s first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, is presented as much more than a routine Vatican statement on modern life. The Economist reads it as an attempt to open a major philosophical fight with Silicon Valley’s most expansive vision of artificial intelligence. The document ranges widely, touching journalism, diplomacy, slavery and just-war doctrine. But the article argues that its central target is the unregulated development of AI and, more deeply, the idea that technology should remake or surpass human beings.

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This summary covers The Economist’s May 31st, 2026 Essay article listed in the contents as Modern war and published under the headline The crucible of transparency.

War in the age of exposure

The article argues that modern war is being reshaped by a new, incomplete but powerful form of battlefield visibility. Soldiers, vehicles, aircraft, missile launchers and command posts are harder to hide than before because cheap sensors, satellites, drones, software networks and precision weapons are knitting the battlefield together. The result is not omniscience. Fog, deception, jamming and geography still matter. But armies now fight under more eyes, and those eyes can often be connected quickly to weapons.