Love lessons from aid workers’ downtime. For humanitarians, finding love and sustaining a relationship can add a new set of challenges to the ones they already face in the field. This week, an aid worker stationed in the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo writes about how she navigated love in a city where humanitarians would spend time to rest and recover from their work on the ground – and what she learned.

Iraqi Popular Mobilization Forces' code of conduct, developed with Geneva Call and rolled out for 300,000 fighters (left), and the code of the warriors of the light, developed with Ukrainian militias. (Geneva Solutions)

As states trample on the rules of war, armed groups take note. Three quarters of a century after the adoption of the Geneva Conventions, states' disregard for the laws of war is emboldening armed groups to do the same, Geneva Call’s Atif Hameed warns.

Engraving of Charles Bonnet. (Design by Geneva Solutions)

Charles Bonnet imagined machines could be made to think. Bonnet was an exceptional polymath – a man of many trades, from naturalist to botanist to lawyer and philosopher to psychologist and politician. Born in 1720 in Geneva, Bonnet’s far-reaching ideas were far ahead of his times.

In his Essai de Psychologie, he proposed that our thinking results from motions in our brain. Medical studies of networks connecting neurons and synapsis in our brain confirmed this later on. In artificial intelligence, neural networks are used in platforms such as ChatGPT to identify patterns within data to generate new content.

Jorge Luis Borges at his office, Argentine National Library, 1973. (Design by Geneva Solutions)

Jorge Luis Borges, the quest for truth amid the digital cacophony. As one of the prominent writers of the 20th century, Jorge Luis Borges was a master in exploring paradoxes and the irreconcilable contradictions of human existence. The Argentine, who grew up in Geneva and chose it as his final resting place, rarely provided definitive answers in his works. Instead, he took readers on a journey, revealing how every certainty breeds a new uncertainty.

Borges’s fiction offers a sobering look at the human condition and exposes the limits of reason in solving personal and social problems. His insights into the inherent uncertainty of the human condition were based on research into mathematics and logic. His writings include hundreds of mathematical references, with his book Mathematics and the Imagination addressing probability theories that underpin the AI era.