Your phone isn’t really spying on your conversations—the truth might be even creepier
By: Corinne Purtill January 5, 2019 If you have a smartphone, you have had this unnerving experience at some point: After having a face-to-face conversation with a friend or a partner in a private setting, you pick up your phone and see ads on social media that echo the details of your chat to an […]
Robots Aren’t Yet Killing Off All Our Jobs, World Bank Says
By: Natalia Drozdiak January 3, 2019 The rise of automation has so far had a negligible impact on jobs at a global scale, the World Bank chief economist said, despite common gloomy predictions that humans are set to be replaced by machines. While advanced economies have shed industrial jobs over the last two decades, the […]
How robots change the world Oxford Economics
By: Oxford Economics June 2019 The robotics revolution is rapidly accelerating, as fast-paced technological advances in automation, engineering, energy storage, artificial intelligence and machine learning converge. The far-reaching results will transform the capabilities of robots and their ability to take over tasks once carried out by humans. Already, the number of robots in use worldwide […]
The Guardian view on the gig economy: rights need enforcing
By: The Guardian Editorial December 30, 2018 The increased level of intervention by the government in the labour market since Theresa May became prime minister is both rational and humane. The UK economy is too reliant on low-wage, low-skilled jobs, many of which are also insecure. While unemployment remains low, and in-work poverty is a […]
‘It’s essential to life’: Ofwat’s Rachel Fletcher sets a new course for water
By: Will Hutton December 15, 2018 When a regulator looks at you unblinkingly and says she wants the companies she regulates to understand they are part of a social contract, you catch your breath. Yes, replies Rachel Fletcher, chief executive of water regulator Ofwat, as I press her about the term “social contract”. The news […]
How the 0.001% invest
By: The Economist December 15, 2018 THINK OF THE upper echelons of the money-management business, and the image that springs to mind is of fusty private banks in Geneva or London’s Mayfair, with marble lobbies and fake country-house meeting-rooms designed to make their super-rich clients feel at home. But that picture is out of date. […]
‘Creative’ AlphaZero leads way for chess computers and, maybe, science
By: Sean Ingle December 11, 2018 Garry Kasparov is not only humanity’s greatest ever chess player but its highest-profile victim of artificial intelligence. His loss to IBM’s super computer Deep Blue in 1997 made global headlines and left him feeling bitter and, well, blue. Yet there is a warm glint in his eye when he […]
City investors call on listed companies to pay living wage
By: The Guardian December 10, 2018 A group of City investors with assets worth more than £180bn has written to listed firms including Vodafone, Balfour Beatty and Severn Trent urging them to pay all employees a living wage. The chief executives of the utilities firms Severn Trent and United Utilities, homeware retailer Dunelm Group and […]
Group led by Thomas Piketty presents plan for ‘a fairer Europe’
By: Jennifer Rankin December 09, 2918 A group of progressive Europeans led by the economist and author Thomas Piketty has drawn up a bold new blueprint for a fairer Europe to address the division, disenchantment, inequality and rightwing populism sweeping the continent. The plan, crafted by more than 50 economists, historians and former politicians from […]