HUMAN beings used to be just a part of the natural world of Earth. In quite low numbers. We were a sort of clever chimpanzee – but with more space for reasoning and language. Our numbers grew and we did very well, even if our newly-grown cortex brain was hamstrung by the way evolution kept […]
Disappearing jobs and our ‘lumpy’ future
FOR the last few years all we have heard about is how many jobs are going to disappear as the robots take over. Oxford, Ernst & Young, McKinsey, the World Bank and the rest are all telling us that any repetitive job is vulnerable and about 30% of actual jobs across 60% of fields are […]
Constructing a new future with robot builders
For many years now robots have been deployed in a range of industries, notably in automobile production and the manufacture of consumer goods. However, until recently the use of robots in the construction sector has been quite rare. That is now beginning to change, and already the first construction robots are starting to clock […]
Engage your empathy to succeed in an AI world
You can hear your own heartbeat – if you sit still, in a quiet room, and listen carefully enough. This human capacity is very good news – especially now something like a third or even half of our current jobs will be taken from us by Artificially Intelligent machines sometime in the next two decades. […]
Our World Is Full Of Holes
Don’t look now but the whole world we stand on is full of holes. And that may account for the sinking feeling you get when you look up from your spreadsheet and glimpse the latest news. Politics, technology, the banking system, transport, every kind of business,– all these and more are being disrupted, all the […]
Let’s Use Tech To Prioritise HEALTH – Not Treatment
In the old days, there were two types of medical care: the fast way and the slow way. The fast kind of medical care was based around skills developed on the battlefield and was the province of the barber-surgeons, who were people good with knives, and good at minimising pain by making interventions… very, very […]
Why ‘Mr Robot’ Is Already Knocking At Your Door
When the movie ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ first came out in April 1968, the date in the title was one generation into the future but most of the technical elements would have seemed very plausible to anyone buying a cinema ticket. Sitting at home watching their own TV, Mr and Mrs Jones followed the Apollo […]
Alice still has her part in robot Wonderland, for now…
IMAGINE the scene of a car crash sometime in the future: two shiny saloons have bumped in the city street and, although both vehicles are dented and stationary, the occupants – including one family and one person on their own – are moving around inside, unbuckling themselves, checking. Everyone is a bit shocked. No-one is […]