Today's Wisdom - From Pit Lanes to Pantheons

Welcome back to A Little Wiser. This edition is a special one.
Today, we’re honored to feature a guest contribution from David Miliband, President of the International Rescue Committee and former UK Foreign Secretary, on one of the most urgent yet under-discussed global crises of our time. In his piece, Reaching Every Child: The Hidden Crisis of Zero-Dose Children, Miliband takes us inside a quiet emergency affecting the world’s most vulnerable communities. As always, grab your coffee — today’s wisdom is one worth slowing down for.

By David Miliband

Fourteen million children worldwide have never received a single vaccine dose. Read that number again. Fourteen million. These are not statistics but infants whose life chances are compromised at birth.

These “zero-dose” children reach their first birthday without even the first dose of basic vaccines like DTP (diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis). They illustrate a stark inequality: global vaccination rates hover around 89%, yet these children are entirely left behind.

Over half live in just nine countries: Nigeria, India, Sudan, Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Yemen, Afghanistan, and Angola. And the inequity runs deeper: a quarter of the world’s infants live in 26 conflict-affected or humanitarian settings, yet they account for half of all unvaccinated children globally. In half of these fragile settings, the number of unvaccinated children has exploded from 3.6 million in 2019 to 5.4 million in 2024.

The causes converge: conflict makes health delivery dangerous; climate-driven disasters displace families and destroy infrastructure; some communities are nomadic or displaced across international borders; others are in areas where governments cannot reach.

The result is communities vulnerable to preventable diseases—measles, polio, tetanus—eliminated elsewhere decades ago. This is not only a human tragedy, but a risk to regional and global health security.

Reaching these children requires a different model: humanitarian negotiation to access conflict zones; geospatial mapping to find zero-dose populations; portable cold chain equipment that works without reliable electricity; and integrating vaccination into humanitarian response rather than treating it as a separate vertical.

The IRC-led REACH consortium - funded by Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance - has shown this can work. When the program began, only 16% of target communities in conflict-affected areas were accessible. Through principled negotiation, IRC and partners are today able to reach all targeted communities. With mobile clinics, local partnerships, and technology to track displacement, REACH has delivered over 24 million vaccine doses, including in some villages that had not seen a vaccinator for over a decade. As we have scaled, delivery costs have fallen to around $2 per dose—proof that reaching zero-dose children in fragile settings is both possible and affordable.

The question is no longer how to reach these children—we know that. It is whether we have the political will and resources to scale these approaches, so that being born in a conflict or climate-affected region does not mean being denied life-saving protection.

Backgammon is one of the oldest continuously played games on Earth, older than chess, cards, or almost any strategy game we know today. Its origins trace back more than 5,000 years to ancient Mesopotamia, where archaeologists uncovered board fragments in the Royal Tombs of Ur. But the game we recognize of two players racing pieces around a board while attacking and defending with dice emerged in Persia. There it was called nard, and it quickly became a favourite pastime of nobles and soldiers alike. Legend tells of a Persian king who presented backgammon to the Indian court as an intellectual challenge. The Indian response was swift and striking: the gift of chess. The implied message, captured by chroniclers, was profound: "Here is a game of chance, and here is a game of pure skill. Master both, and you will understand life itself."

As empires expanded, backgammon travelled with them. The Romans adopted it enthusiastically, renaming it tabula and gambling fortunes on it in taverns and military camps. Emperor Claudius reportedly had a board fitted into his travelling carriage so he could play on the move. Centuries later, Arab traders carried the game westward across North Africa and into Spain where it folded seamlessly into medieval European culture. The rules evolved each time an empire rose or fell: the Byzantines added doubling, the Normans spread it across England, and the Ottoman Empire cemented its popularity from Cairo to Istanbul. For armies marching across continents and merchants riding caravan routes, backgammon was a compact form of entertainment that didn’t need a shared language but dice, strategy, and a willingness to take risks.

 By the 17th century, the game was so widespread that England gave it its modern name of back-gammon, meaning “back game,” a nod to the rule that allows pieces to re-enter the board after being hit. Its global spread is a living map of human interaction: trade, war, migration, and cultural blending. Today it remains one of the few games equally at home in London pubs, Lebanese cafés, and Central Asian tea houses. What kept it alive wasn’t just the strategy or the luck, but the way it captured life’s constant tension between planning and chance. Empires vanished, borders changed, languages evolved and yet the rhythmic clatter of dice on wood carried on.

🚗 How Self-Driving Cars Actually Work

The idea of a car that drives itself is older than most people think. The first serious experiments date back to the 1980s, when German engineers wired cameras to computers that could keep a vehicle roughly in its lane at highway speeds. In the 2000s, the US Defense Department accelerated progress by funding the DARPA Grand Challenge, a series of races where autonomous vehicles attempted to navigate deserts and cities. Most failed spectacularly at first — crashing, freezing, or getting lost — but the competitions created a generation of engineers who would later build today’s systems at companies like Waymo, Tesla, and Baidu. What once looked like science fiction slowly became a software and sensor problem that could be solved with enough data, compute, and patience.

A self-driving car doesn’t “see” the road the way humans do — it builds a constantly updating mathematical model of the world around it. To do this, autonomous vehicles combine multiple sensors, each with strengths and weaknesses. Cameras read lane markings, traffic lights, and signs. Radar measures distance and speed, even through fog or rain. Lidar (a remote sensing method that uses pulsed laser light to measure distances) fires millions of laser pulses per second to create a precise 3D map of nearby objects. Individually these sensors are imperfect; together they form redundancy. If a camera is blinded by glare, radar still detects a car ahead. This sensor fusion is the car’s nervous system, feeding raw data into onboard computers dozens of times per second.Modern self-driving cars rely on a layered perception stack. Cameras read traffic lights and signs, radar measures distance and speed in bad weather, and lidar fires millions of laser pulses per second to build a precise 3D map of the world. These sensors feed into neural networks trained on billions of miles of driving data, learning how pedestrians move, how cyclists behave, and how other drivers make unpredictable decisions. Crucially, autonomy is not one skill but many: perception (what’s around me), prediction (what will it do next), and planning (what should I do now). Even something simple like an unprotected left turn requires the car to estimate intent, timing, and risk in real time. This is why full autonomy took longer than early hype suggested — the edge cases are endless.

Today, self-driving cars are no longer just prototypes. Waymo robotaxis now complete tens of thousands of paid trips every week in cities like Phoenix, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, operating without safety drivers. For many residents, they’ve quietly become part of daily life — summoned like an Uber, but with no one behind the wheel. Analysts estimate the autonomous vehicle market could exceed $1 trillion annually if deployment scales across ride-hailing, freight, and logistics. Still, the road ahead is uneven. Regulatory caution, rare but high-profile accidents, and the sheer complexity of urban environments mean autonomy will spread city by city, not all at once. The destination is clear, but the journey — fittingly — remains carefully navigated.

We’re grateful to David Miliband for sharing his perspective with our readers — and we hope it leaves you, as it did us, both unsettled and convinced that progress is possible.

We hope you enjoyed today’s edition. Thank you to everyone reading, sharing, and helping A Little Wiser reach new people every week. We value every reader so please reply and tell us a lesson you’d love to see soon!

Until next time…. - A Little Wiser Team

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