Around 250 years ago, Britain launched the world’s first Industrial Revolution, powered by steam and innovations like the spinning jenny. This dramatically improved the efficiency of the textiles sector, and started the process of mechanisation and automation that soon attracted opposition from the Luddites, a group of English weavers and textile workers who destroyed machinery […]
Back in 2008, the financial crisis was at its height. The Government was in the process of taking the historic and humiliating decision to nationalise some of the country’s biggest banks in order to save them from destruction. And direct.gov.uk, the closest thing the British state had to a homepage, was leading with an informative […]
Any change can be unsettling, but changes as profound as those being unleashed by the current phase of technological development – known as the Fourth Industrial Revolution – are prone to be particularly destabilising. Technology pulls together the various networks that constitute modern life and fuses them into a complex “system of systems”, in which […]
Despite the word itself having French origins, ask most people and chances are entrepreneurship isn’t something they associate with France. Culture, gastronomy, joie de vivre and existentialism certainly, but economic dynamism and entrepreneurial verve? Those are to be found in Silicon Valley, London and Berlin, not Paris and Marseille. There is much truth to this […]
Two tech companies, two contrasting trajectories. Snap (formerly Snapchat) hit the headlines this week when a post-IPO bidding frenzy saw it soar to a $34 billion valuation. Uber, meanwhile, saw its reputation and potential valuation plummet after a blog about workplace sexism unleashed a firestorm of criticism, culminating in grovelling promises from the CEO to […]
Cambridge Analytica is the company on everybody’s lips right now, and for all the wrong reasons. The data analytics company has been credited with helping Donald Trump win the White House, as well as contributing significantly to the efforts of the Leave.EU campaign. And it’s done it all using your Facebook data. According to its website, Cambridge […]
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 […]
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