Admired for his reformist approach to the NHS, Wes Streeting is generally seen as the most market-friendly figure on the British Left. Yet his call for social media companies to be treated like tobacco businesses reminds us that even the best of a bad bunch can still be pretty awful. After resigning as Health Secretary, […]
I walked the dog recently along the Thames Path, around the source (or one of the sources, so as not to cause a fight) of the River Thames. This time of year, much of it is all dried up, and you can walk along the bed of what in the winter is full-flowing river. Wondering […]
Britain stands at a rare strategic inflection point, embrace AI or continue on a path of sluggish economic growth for the foreseeable future. The International Monetary Fund recently forecasted that the energy shocks from the Iran war will hit the UK the hardest of the world’s advanced economies, cutting its estimates for UK growth this […]
Can a robot write a symphony? Can it turn a canvas into a beautiful masterpiece?” Can you? This exchange from the film ‘I, Robot’ (and later parodied in a million memes) captures human fears and concerns about coexisting with robots, and what it means to be human. Fast forward 20 years, and artificial intelligence is […]
You will all know this experience. Sitting in a job interview, you are asked your biggest weakness. Desperate to impress, you used a humble brag; I’m a bit of a perfectionist, I get so invested in success. Something similar may have happened in the world of artificial intelligence. Anthropic, the company behind the large language […]
This short story is a product of the Creative Futures Research Project, a partnership between Coventry University and the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory, the MoD’s research arm at Porton Down. The aim of Creative Futures is to explore how emerging technologies might impact society and geopolitics. Discussions between science fiction writers and defence experts […]
If you’re under the age of 53, no human being has ever left low Earth orbit in your lifetime. Just nine spaceflights, all under the Apollo Program, took human beings beyond Earth orbit at all. And they all took place in a four-year burst between December 1968 and December 1972. Tonight, NASA attempts to change […]
‘How good is our military?’ Donald Trump asked rhetorically when he addressed a group of Republican members of Congress recently. The answer – judging from the first 10 days of Operation Epic Fury – is, in many ways, exceptionally good. The joint American and Israeli air and missile strikes which began on 28 February have […]
Earlier this year, I left London, for all the reasons you’d imagine an evil right-winger like me would. One of the few (and there are only a few) pangs of regret I had was when I was driving my wife and dog out along the Westway for the final time. Coming the other way was […]
Despite reviving economic growth being an avowed priority for every government since the Covid-19 era, the record has been lacklustre. The obvious question is why? What are the constraints that hold back ministers who want to support investment, innovation and growth? Of course, there are some fundamental limitations that any government has to operate within. […]
Christmas may now be a distant memory, but I finally got to watch Frank Capra’s classic ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’. It really is a wondrous film, and not even my tipsy uncle talking all the way through it could dent it. One lovely line came back to me this week, where James Stewart’s George Bailey […]
Adam Smith attributed the ability of one man to do the work of many to the ‘invention of a great number of machines which facilitate and abridge labour’. Writing at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, Smith witnessed one of the most profound reorganisations of human capital in history: the transition to mechanised production. The […]
In 2018, with ‘The Coddling of the American Mind’, Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt launched a sustained attack on what they called the culture of ‘safetyism’ in American parenting and on university campuses. Their target was the belief that children and young adults are fragile beings who must be protected from uncomfortable ideas and the […]
In this edition of Nimby Watch, we’re going everywhere and nowhere – we’re on the information superhighway, in cyberspace! Hang on, I was about to ask you where we were going this week, but I’ve read the intro and it sounds like we’re on a 1990s episode of Tomorrow’s World. In a way we are! […]
Keir Starmer’s proposed digital ID scheme is misguided – yet even its fiercest critics should not be opposed to digital ID in principle. When done right, digital ID can make government more efficient, services faster and citizens’ lives easier. The problem lies not in digital ID, but in the British state’s attempt to control it. […]
The last Conservative government turned Britain into a startup nation. Over 14 years, the UK became home to more billion-dollar tech startups (‘unicorns’) than France and Germany combined; we fostered the world’s third largest AI ecosystem; and in our last year of government, business investment into R&D increased by 30%, to £49 billion. When it […]
When you think of the jobs most likely to be automated away, which do you think of? Those most at threat are those that are repetitive and rule-based, require minimal social or emotional intelligence – and don’t rely heavily on creativity or complex judgement. Customer service work is often being quoted as at threat, as […]
Marx was wrong, Burnham was right: capitalism wasn’t replaced by communism, but by managerialism. In ‘The Managerial Revolution’ (1941), James Burnham wrote that the bourgeoisie weren’t sinking into the proletariat – they were being replaced by ‘administrators, technicians, managers’. If, like me, you love Edmund Burke, this might remind you of his mournful line: ‘The […]
Last week, NHS GPs began prescribing Mounjaro for weight loss for the first time. But for many people reaching out to their doctor, the response is likely to be disappointing – the NHS has made it clear that the drug will only be available to those who meet a strict set of criteria. The public […]
Little unites Rachel Reeves, the Centre for Policy Studies and the Tony Blair Institute. But a shared desire for more robots in Britain somehow has. In 2019, Reeves stated: ‘The real danger for the UK economy and for future jobs growth is not that we have too many robots in the workplace but that we have […]
The £1 trillion British tech sector is displaying its wares at London Tech Week. As President of The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD), I’m thrilled we’re gathering in the same week for our flagship Festival of Work. With my rare background having headed both the labour market and technology departments of a G7 […]
People say nothing works in Britain. That we cannot build anything any more. We hear about a decade of form filling before a spade is in the ground. Then, when we finally get going, only our grandchildren have a hope of seeing it actually built. But that’s not true everywhere. On March 14, digging started […]
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