Air taxis: we have lift-off…
By: Ian Tucker March 4, 2018 Airbus Vahana Last month Airbus released a video of the first successful test flight of its electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) autonomous drone. Although it only hovered in the air for 53 seconds, the fact that its eight rotors were powered entirely by electricity was a landmark for […]
The fall of ‘don’t be evil’ in tech
By: February 26, 2018 Major tech companies like Google, Twitter and Facebook are increasingly under scrutiny for their role in spreading misinformation during the 2016 election. Facebook and Google recently admitted that Kremlin-linked agents bought thousands of dollars worth of targeted ads to provoke social tensions and distort reality during the campaign. The episode is […]
A universal basic income could be a price worth paying to cut regulations
By: Ryan Bourne February 24, 2018 Suppose the government redistributed to every adult Briton a basic, unconditional income of £10,000 from tax revenues. Would aggregate employment levels a) rise, b) fall, or c) stay the same? This is the blue-sky policy question that former Labour leader Ed Miliband has been toying with. He’s not alone. […]
Vehicle data is more profitable than the car itself
By: CNN February 7, 2017 Forget the engine. Or the shiny rims. The money is in vehicles’ data. People have made fortunes selling cars and trucks. For many of us, a car is the second most expensive thing we’ll ever buy. (A home being Number 1.) But experts say the value of vehicles will likely […]
Poverty is now so visible that even the richest can see it
By: The Guardian February 17, 2018 Officially, it’s not a guilt tax. Westminster council prefers the term “community contribution” to describe the idea that its millionaire residents might like to make a voluntary donation on top of council tax. It is, they say, merely a chance for the wealthiest to “invest in their neighbourhood”. Perish […]
Fake news sharing in US is a rightwing thing, says study
By: Alex Hern February 06, 2018 Low-quality, extremist, sensationalist and conspiratorial news published in the US was overwhelmingly consumed and shared by rightwing social network users, according to a new study from the University of Oxford. The study, from the university’s “computational propaganda project”, looked at the most significant sources of “junk news” shared in […]
Nearly half of current jobs could be automated by 2055, according to a new report
By: Patrick Caughill February 03, 2018 According to a new report from the McKinsey Global Institute, nearly half of all the work we do will be able to be automated by the year 2055. However, a variety of factors, including politics and public sentiment toward the technology, could push that back by as many as […]
The two big uncertainties shaping our future
By: Olivier Woeffray January 18, 2018 When we think about the future, most of us try to predict it by extrapolating from a wide range of assumptions that we make about today. But most predictions tend to be wrong, from the automobile being written off as a “fad” in 1903 to a 1977 article querying […]
A Blueprint for Integrating ESG into Equity Portfolios
By: Jennifer Bender, Todd Arthur Bridges, Chen He, Anna Lester, Xiaole Sun January 16, 2018 Environmental, social and governance (ESG) offers a source of new and potentially valuable information for investors, impacting both potential returns and risk. Growing data availability has created the opportunity to integrate ESG into equity portfolios for a variety of investment […]