COVER STORY This issue: Alphabet, THE CLAIRVOYANT. MANY YEARS AGO, SUNDAR PICHAI WAS SCUBA diving with his family in Hawaii when the weather turned unexpectedly rough. As Pichai entered the water, waves pummeled his lanky frame. He wondered if he should return to safety. Eventually, he kicked downward. Just a few feet below, Pichai found “the calmest place in the world,” he says, and became possessed by a meditative stillness…To understand the world we live in, read TIME.

Life once followed a familiar pattern. You’d go to school, get a job, build a family, and then, sometime in your 60s, retire, enjoying life for a few years until you grew too frail to live on your own. Then you might move in with family or check into a facility where you’d spend your “golden years”. A crucial part of that blueprint was an unsaid but universal assumption: that for the vast majority of people, life would not extend far beyond their 70s. That was based on the average lifespan when this still dominant picture of an American life arc…

HOW HUMANOID ROBOTS COULD TRANSFORM MODERN WARFARE—The Phantom MK-1 looks the part of an ai soldier. Encased in jet black steel with a tinted glass visor, it conjures a visceral dread far beyond what may be evoked by your typical humanoid robot. And on this late February morning, it brandishes assorted high-powered weaponry: a revolver, pistol, shotgun, and replica of an M-16 rifle.“We think there’s a moral imperative to put these robots into war instead of soldiers,”…