Artificial intelligence already plays a major role in human economies and societies, and it will play an even bigger role in the coming years. To ponder the future of AI is thus to acknowledge that the future is AI. This will be partly owing to advances in “deep learning”, which uses multi-layer neural networks that […]
In almost every sector of society, technology has delivered revolutionary improvements in efficiency over our lifetimes – even just over the past decade. Yet there is one glaring technophobic outlier. Education. For all the hype around online courses, or computers in the classrooms, the basic model is the same as it ever was: children sit […]
Imagine that you didn’t have a bank account. Imagine how hard it would be to get through your life without being able to pay for goods with a tap or swipe of a card. Without your rent payments or Netflix subscription coming out of your account all by themselves, or your salary dropping into it […]
It’s not just astronomers and research scientists who will have been cheering the discovery of seven new worlds this week. Mrs May and her government will be pretty excited too. For they too have been keeping a keen eye on celestial goings on. Since she became Prime Minister, Mrs May has, with her Government been busily […]
It’s been 10 years since the iPhone was launched. At that time, the digital revolution was in its infancy and the iPad, Kindle, 4G, Airbnb, Twitter, Android, Oculus, Spotify, Instagram, Snapchat, WhatsApp & Uber were the unknown future. These are now the dominant technologies of our time. They are disrupting every industry and changing every aspect of […]
It’s perhaps not the catchiest name, but it is one worth remembering: CRISPR-Cas9. Only discovered in 2012, this powerful genome editing technique has rapidly become a widespread and indispensable tool for research, and today is used in labs across the world to study human development, fertility and disease. The technology is progressing at such speed, […]
Early in 2006, I decided that what The Guardian‘s technology section really needed was a campaign. Campaigns energise readers. But a campaign about what? I’ve always liked statistics. So obviously it had to be about data. I already felt that the UK government’s mapping data should be available to us all for free, as it […]
The United Nations forecasts global population to rise to more than 9 billion people by 2050. Climate change may mean that the crops we depend on now may no longer be suited to the areas where they are currently cultivated and may increasingly be threatened by droughts, floods and the spread of plant diseases due […]
For anyone worried that 2017 is going to be as volatile as the year before, there is a new concern to throw into the mix. According to this article on Business Insider, some of the tech world’s best minds believe this could be the year that hackers succeed in taking down the internet entirely. “In 2017 […]
Have you ever wanted jeans that also give you directions? Or a bidet that uses nanotechnology? Or a games console for your dog? If so, there’s only one place to go: the world’s largest gadget fair, the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, which celebrated its 50th birthday at the weekend. CES is the place where […]
Over the Christmas week, CapX is republishing its favourite pieces from the past year. You can find the full list here. The battle of genetically modified foods is being waged in a mire of confusion and bad science. Scare stories over “frankenfoods” and “mutant crops” have insidiously manipulated the framing of the debate into a […]
Over the Christmas week, CapX is republishing its favourite pieces from the past year. You can find the full list here. It was hard not to detect a defensive, even plaintive, tone in Mark Zuckerberg’s open letter to Facebook users this weekend. “After the election, many people are asking whether fake news contributed to the […]
One of the big themes of 2016 has been an increasing concern about automation – the idea that robots are going to steal all our jobs. So to put minds to rest this festive season, let me say that, yes, robots are indeed going to steal all our jobs. And it’s going to be absolutely […]
Slowly, but inexorably, one of the most important competition cases on the planet is drawing to a close. The confrontation between Google and the European Commission – in the form of Margrethe Verstager, the Competition Commissioner – does not just threaten the Silicon Valley giant with the loss of 10 per cent of its revenues […]
Furrowed brows and hand-wringing have greeted news of the sale of Skyscanner to Chinese buyers. But there is a hidden gain for Scotland’s fledgling businesses aiming to copy Skyscanner’s achievement. As an example of Scottish entrepreneurial flair and ‘new economy’ success, Skyscanner was the name that sprang immediately to the lips. The Edinburgh-based company has […]
We are now in the midst of a “golden age” in relations between the UK and China. That at least has been the prevailing narrative since late 2015, when President Xi Jinping of the People’s Republic visited the UK. Since then, we have seen a more aggressively transactional, economics-based relationship prevail over the previous, more […]
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