A genie offers you three wishes. What do you do? World peace, end poverty, end climate change, infinite wealth, true love, fix the housing crisis. The possible answers and urgent problems are endless. The changes that policymakers will need to make to keep up with the opportunities and challenges of tech is as long as […]
Everybody loves a good bad guy. From Dracula to Darth Vader to Hannibal Lecter, yesterday’s villains are today’s heroes. The twentysomethings and thirtysomethings who grew up on the stories of fairies, princes and princesses now turn on Netflix or visit the West End or the Edinburgh Fringe to see the bad guys taking the centre stage. Sometimes that’s a […]
It’s Valentine’s Day, and a man wakes up to a text saying ‘I love you’, followed by a joke that only his partner would know. Half an hour later, his phone buzzes and lights up with a selfie of her. He smiles. The Black Mirror style twist in this story is that his girlfriend left […]
Taylor Swift has monopolised the hearts and minds of young women for well over a decade, and cemented her status as the preeminent musical icon of our era winning her fourth Best Album Grammy last weekend. But given that competition is just as important in the arts as it is for free markets, how worried […]
In 1999, we were going to colonise Mars, in 2001, we’d be bound for Jupiter, and in 2005, we’d have miners on Mercury. These predictions come from the golden age of science fiction – respectively, Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles, Kubrick’s 2001 A Space Odyssey and Isaac Asimov’s Runaround – but the future ain’t what […]
The UK is a global leader in tech, with London trailing only Silicon Valley as the world’s premier startup ecosystem. This is in large part to the effects of clusters – a phenomenon whereby London has sucked in so many talented founders, developers, coders, PhD students and others that it has become a draw for […]
When William Huskisson became the first person to be hit by a train in 1830 he also became the perfect hook for every op-ed about technological change. As the story goes, Huskisson saw Stephenson’s Rocket coming down the tracks and had time to get out of the way, but he panicked and was, unfortunately, literally […]
Primary school children will join a jobs market unimaginable to many of us today, with 65% of them predicted to have careers that do not yet exist. For those children, technology won’t be a sector of the economy, it will just be ‘the economy’. Yet while our economy looks forward, when it comes to tech […]
Accepted wisdom measures political engagement by membership and turnout – and both are on a downward trend. Compared to 50 years ago turnout fell from average of over 71% up to 1992 to 66% in 2015. The coalition government had a run of asking the electorate questions then finding out that the electorate didn’t care: […]
