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For the last few years, we’ve been asking Future Perfect newsletter readers what their biggest questions are. And while we usually answer privately, we figured we’d try something new: a reader mailbag!

This week, we’ve answered questions from three readers on classic FP issues: artificial intelligence, animal welfare coverage, and, of course, altruistic kidney donations. We’d like to do more of these, so if your question wasn’t featured — or privately answered — please stay in touch for a chance to be included in the future.

Sign up here to explore the big, complicated problems the world faces and the most efficient ways to solve them. Sent twice a week.

We’re also kicking off the process for our annual Future Perfect list of changemakers. We’re looking for experts, humanitarians, activists, movers, and shakers in global health, broadly speaking.

If there is someone you want to nominate, a topic you want explained, or a question you want us to answer in the future, fill out this form or email us at futureperfect@vox.com. — Izzie Ramirez, deputy editor

By which methods can one ascertain that whatever is produced by AI is exact and truthful?

For any question you’re considering asking an AI model, the first thing you need to do is think about its epistemic nature: Is the answer knowable in an objective way? Or is it subjective?

The best use case is a situation where it’s hard for you to come up with the answer, but once you get an answer from the AI, you can easily check to see if it’s correct. I find chatbots particularly helpful for semantic search — that is, cases where I say, “There’s some psychology theory or idea in philosophy that basically says XYZ, but I can’t remember what it’s called or who said it, help!” The chatbot will give its best guess, and then I can just fact-check that.

A person works at a computer with an illustrative image generated by artificial intelligence on the screen, showing code from various programming languages and a neural network diagram.

ILLUSTRATION – 17 May 2024, North Rhine-Westphalia, Cologne: A person works at a computer with an illustrative image generated by artificial intelligence on the screen, showing code from various programming languages and a neural network diagram. At the meeting of telecommunications ministers on May 21, the EU countries are expected to finally adopt the AI law in the EU. The European Parliament had already given the green light for the project beforehand. Photo: Oliver Berg/dpa (Photo by Oliver Berg/picture alliance via Getty Images)

Oliver Berg/picture alliance via Getty Images

Same with other empirical facts that are verifiable through observation or data — anything from “What’s the boiling temperature for water?” to “Is it true that humans share 98.8 percent of their DNA with chimpanzees?” While you can easily verify the first by yourself through observation, you’ll need to rely on experts’ data for the second. In that case, you need to feel confident that what’s produced by your fellow humans is exact and truthful. We’ve developed tools that increase our confidence, like the scientific method, so if you’re consulting scientific experts, you can at least have some degree of confidence that they’re reporting observable and repeatable facts.

Then there are domains that are inherently subjective. If you’ve got the type of question for which there is no One True Answer, you’ll want to be more hesitant about using AI. I think ethical dilemmas fall into this category; no matter how much OpenAI tries to create a “universal verifier,” AI will always be limited in its ability to advise you on how to handle an ethical dilemma, because there’s no One True Ethics. So, you might see what thoughts an AI model provokes in you, but don’t trust it as giving you the final answer, especially if what it’s saying seems off to you. In other words, you can use it as a thought partner, but don’t treat it like an oracle.

— Sigal Samuel, senior reporter

Ok, after more than five years as a vegan and 73 years on the planet, I want to know why the great majority of journalists consistently abandon everything they learned about objectivity when it comes to a multitude of issues with the monster industry known as “animal agriculture?” And I want to know how to combat that bias effectively.

It is a huge blind spot for most of them. My best guess is the conditioning is so strong. It starts as a toddler, is reinforced by the parental relationship, expands to extended family, friends, reinforced again by all types of advertising media, entertainment, etc. Then they go to journalism school and are taught by instructors who also have this blind spot.

So later a reporter will go to a “chicken farm” and empathize with them when they tell their story about losing thousands of birds to avian flu — their sense of loss is not about the birds; it’s about the money. The reporter presents the story without questioning the basics. Things like “where are all the male birds?” [and] “how is it possible for anyone to think that 35,000 birds could be forced to live together in a building without reasonable access to the outdoors?” and “why does it smell so bad?” and “why do you have permission to confine animals without their permission?”

I think the reason is pretty simple: Journalists are people with their own biases, just like everyone else. That’s evident in how little coverage factory farming receives in the first place — it involves the abuse of billions of animals and hundreds of thousands of workers, and is a leading cause of many of our environmental problems, yet only a handful of US journalists write about it full-time (including yours truly). Most news outlets and editors don’t take factory farming seriously, which is why I’m proud to work at Vox, where we do.

That’s the most fundamental problem. But secondarily, while there is plenty of fantastic coverage of factory farming, more often than not, I find I’m disappointed with a lot of it, too. I see a few recurring issues:

Animal welfare is overlooked or entirely ignored. For example, it’s not uncommon for news stories about barn fires that kill thousands of animals to conclude that “no one was hurt,” or for a story about hundreds of thousands of egg-laying hens killed to slow the spread of bird flu to gloss over the brutal nature of that killing.
Deference to meat producers and companies, or scientists employed by or affiliated with industry, including misleading comments that go unchallenged.
“Agriculture” is often cited as a major source of environmental pollution, when animal agriculture is disproportionately responsible.
Uncritical stories about proposed solutions to animal agriculture’s impact on the climate, like methane-reducing feed additives or manure biodigesters. Or uncritical coverage of companies that claim to treat their animals better than the competition (see our recent story on Fairlife milk).

I’ve written one story about how the media could cover these issues better, and I hope to keep covering that in the future.

— Kenny Torrella, senior reporter

Stories like Dylan Matthews’s years ago led me to investigate donating a kidney to a stranger. I asked my doctor about it, and surprisingly, instead of encouraging me to save a life, he tried to talk me out of it.

He told me that it is illegal to donate a kidney to a stranger! I live in Hong Kong, and maybe the reason for prohibiting even the donation of a kidney to a stranger is the fear that people would secretly accept payment from the kidney recipient. But I don’t know why. Anyway, I thought about donating while on a vacation in the US, but it would require too much time, so I gave up.

Unfortunately, my second kidney will probably die with me in old age, and someone with kidney failure will needlessly die. Anyway, maybe another story idea would be about paying kidney providers in countries other than the US?

Most people aren’t as generous as you!

In the US, only a sliver of living donations go to strangers. Meanwhile, over 100,000 people sit on kidney waitlists. And, as you indicate, the need for kidneys is a global problem, too.

Many places only allow donations to relatives or known recipients (or require tough ethics reviews for unrelated donors), while a minority — like the US, UK, Canada, and Australia — offer a formal pathway for anonymous “good Samaritan” donors. In Hong Kong, where you’re based, you can donate to a family member easily, but unrelated donations need official approval, and there’s no standard program for that. (That’s probably why you were discouraged.)

This patchwork exists for a reason.

In the 1990s and 2000s, there was a serious trafficking and transplant tourism problem. In 2007, the WHO estimated that about 5–10 percent of kidney transplants involved trafficking, and countries like the Philippines and Pakistan became hubs for foreign patients buying organs from desperate locals.
Transplant experts met in Istanbul in 2008 and wrote what became the worldwide rulebook. The Istanbul Declaration pushed countries to crack down on coercive sales of organs. Every country had its own laws, but began incorporating the declaration’s recommendations. As a result, transplant tourism dropped sharply in Israel and the Philippines once new rules kicked in, and tighter oversight became the norm across Europe.

A sign on the back of a vehicle pleading for someone to donate a kidney to a sick man in Ontario, Canada.

Creative Touch Imaging Ltd./NurPhoto via Getty Images

But, in its efforts to shut down trafficking, the declaration argued that compensating donors at all “leads inexorably to inequity and injustice.” There was little empirical data to back that claim, but because it came from a major international statement it hardened into gospel: organ donation must be “financially neutral.”

But neutrality isn’t actually neutral in practice. Living donors lose wages, take time off work, take medical risk, and sometimes even face higher insurance premiums after donating. We don’t call that exploitation — but it is a penalty for doing the right thing.

And it’s inconsistent with how we treat other socially valuable, risky, or unpleasant work. We pay people to do jury duty. We pay clinical trial participants. In many places, we even pay plasma donors.

There is one striking exception: Iran.

It’s the only country with a regulated system that pays kidney donors. Iran established this system in 1988, and today performs about 2,500-2,700 kidney transplants annually, and it claims to have essentially eliminated its waiting list. It’s a proof-of-concept that incentives can be structured.

The US debate is inching in that direction. Congress’s End Kidney Deaths Act would offer a federal tax credit to people who donate a kidney to a stranger. Donors would receive a $10,000 tax credit annually for five years, so not quite direct payment, but certainly a help. The act, which has not been voted on yet, acknowledges that donation involves real costs: time off work, medical risks, recovery time.
The path forward globally isn’t throwing out Istanbul’s anti-trafficking work, but to build on it with smart incentives and guardrails so people can donate altruistically if they want to. That means actually testing new approaches, but doing it carefully. Give donors independent advocates, make sure there’s time to think it over, and guarantee lifelong follow-up care.

In the meantime, you might not be able to easily donate your kidney to a stranger right now in Hong Kong, but the needle is moving in the right direction.

— Pratik Pawar, Future Perfect fellow

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Generative AI is the transformative technology of the moment. Tools like ChatGPT are helping people realize the power of AI by automating tasks such as writing and proofreading text, creating images and videos, and even solving complex problems–or, at least, providing insight toward solving a problem.

AI is also changing another routine task: browsing the web. Companies like Opera and Perplexity have been working on AI-based tools called agentic browsers. Agentic browsers are capable of understanding the content of a web page in real time and also using AI to interact with the page and run workflows for you.

Agentic browsers promise to change the way people interact with the web. Instead of having to worry about finding things on your own, agentic browsers take control of everything so you can focus on other tasks. The promise sounds too good to be true, but do these browsers work in real life?

I’m a long-time Safari user. It’s not the best web browser in the world, but it’s undeniably the one that has the nicest integration with Apple platforms. While Apple has been struggling to deliver AI capabilities, I dove into testing two different agentic browsers to find out if they’re really game changers and if they can convince me to switch.

Opera Neon and Perplexity Comet: Two agentic browsers

I was invited to try out two different agentic browsers: Opera Neon and Perplexity Comet. Both are currently available in a very limited beta.

When you think of a web browser, there’s usually a common interface that comes to mind. At first glance, both Opera Neon and Perplexity Comet look like something you’d expect from a browser, but with a touch of an AI assistant. Both have a ChatGPT-like interface where users can ask anything.

Foundry

Here’s where they differ. Instead of searching on a conventional search engine like Google or DuckDuckGo, these browsers use their own AI chatbot to answer your questions, so you don’t have to go to websites to find something.

Instead of navigating to Google or a website to start your browsing session, you ask the AI agent a question. It’s not a button like Copilot in Microsoft Edge—the browser is completely built around interacting with the AI engine to conduct searches, fill out forms, book trips, and create web apps.

Opera Neon and Perplexity Comet: What it’s like to use them

To see what each browser responds to a query, I asked both browsers for the “latest iPhone 17 rumors.” Opera Neon generated a text about the main rumors, while Perplexity Comet went a bit further and combined both AI results with some links to articles on the web about what I asked.

Foundry

However, there’s a lot more you can do with these browsers than just ask questions. Imagine, for example, that you need to buy flight tickets, but you’re not in the mood to open the airline’s website and find the flights on your own. An agentic browser can take care of that.

I asked both Perplexity Comet and Opera Neon to book tickets for a specific route in September. I made it clear that I wanted the cheapest tickets possible. They both opened the airline’s website and selected the cheapest fare. Impressive, although Perplexity Comet didn’t proceed to checkout until I gave it another command; Opera Neon did.

Opera Neon can also generate webpages and mini web apps for you. I asked it to make a page comparing all the rumored iPhone 17 models, and it built one in less than five minutes.

Foundry

One thing I’ve learned from these AI-based browsers is that you can get better results by being incredibly specific. When want them to buy something with Safari, for example, you can type exactly what product or service you want (iPhone 16 Pro Max) to closer to what you want,rather than typing, “I want to buy a new iPhone.”

It’s a little different when using AI agents. When I asked the browser to find me a hotel in São Paulo, Brazil, that’s what it did. But when I asked it to “book me a good hotel in São Paulo for September 17-18 and make sure you find hotels around the Jardins neighbourhood”, it took me straight to the checkout page based on what I requested.

Is booking a ticket on your own still faster? Probably. Both AI browsers took several minutes to complete the most complex tasks, during which time I could have searched on my own. But again, the main point is to let the computer do the hard work for you while you do something else. This is probably one of the best showcases of the usefulness of AI in our lives.

Foundry

Where does Apple stand?

Compared to companies like Opera and Perplexity, Apple is noticeably behind when it comes to fully agentic AI experiences. While macOS 26 and iOS 26 bring improvements to Apple Intelligence, the features announced thus far are more limited than what agentic browsers are already capable of.

Unlike Perplexity Comet or Opera Neon, Safari hasn’t integrated any agentic capabilities (at least not yet). Apple Intelligence focuses on personal context with things like rewriting emails and summarizing notifications. It’s an impressive first step, especially given Apple’s emphasis on privacy and on-device processing. But Apple Intelligence, for now, isn’t really trying to change how you use the web.

Right now, I still feel more comfortable using the web the traditional way, but it’s undeniable that having a browser that does things for me sounds quite appealing in certain situations, and I’d love to see Apple working on something similar.

That might happen. Reports suggest that Apple has internally discussed the idea of acquiring Perplexity, the startup behind the Comet browser. Valued at around $14 billion, Perplexity could help Apple catch up in the AI race, especially in areas like web search and agentic browsing, where Safari still lags.

It’s unclear whether Apple will go ahead with its acquisition plans, but with the billion-dollar deal between Apple and Google under threat due to antitrust laws, the company would have a good reason to invest in its own AI-powered browser and search engine.

The future of web browsing

Agentic browsers like Opera Neon and Perplexity Comet are not perfect and often painfully slow, but they offer a glimpse of what the future of web browsing looks like. While I’m not ready to give up Safari just yet, I can see the appeal of letting an AI assistant do the boring stuff. As the technology evolves and gets quicker, I can see it replacing Safari for some tasks, especially if Apple doesn’t make an effort to catch up.

Whether Apple builds something like this itself or ends up acquiring a company like Perplexity, it’s clear that the web as we know it is going through a major transformation. And this time, AI isn’t just enhancing the browser. It’s becoming the browser.

Features	USDC	USDT
Transparency	High	Low
Institutional adoption	Higher adoption	Lower adoption
Application	Reserve management, Adherence with rules	High liquidity and trading options

Mow’s Indictment of Developer Conduct

The Technical Catalyst

Opera Neon and Perplexity Comet: Two agentic browsers

Opera Neon and Perplexity Comet: What it’s like to use them

Where does Apple stand?

The future of web browsing

August 26th Is tokenization the future of private wealth?

What does it actually mean?

Increased access to real-world recruitment and investment opportunities

Built-in compliance, not adjustment loopholes

Looking ahead

Bitcoin treasury companies: history’s most obvious abritrage

Market sentiment remains cautious

An Insight into USDT

An Insight into USDC

Impact of regulations on USDT and USDC

Higher transparency in USDT

Expansion of USDT at the global level

Regulatory investigations for Tether

Regulatory alignment for USDC

Higher institutional adoption

Concerns relating to freezing

Understanding USDT vs USDC

Final Words