It’s time to reduce our working week, and we can achieve it by better directing our technology to benefit society. Pioneering economist, John Maynard Keynes,…
George Orwell wrote about the “proles” in 1984 being kept placated and distracted by automated writing machines which churned out mediocre novels. It’s possible that…
During my last trip on the London Underground, I was struck by the remarkable achievement of the nineteenth-century engineers who built its first Metropolitan Railway…
This month I had the privilege of delivering a keynote speech to open the Earth Digital Twin Workshop organised by JAXA (Japan’s national space agency)…
Public transport is both essential and too hard to use, which makes it ripe for disruption! Most of us are reluctant to use it when…
Over the last two decades, the expanding use of data across society has profoundly transformed our world. From the ads we see to the movies…
Readers of this blog who are under 30 may not even know what a cassette tape is! But when they appeared in the 1970s, they…
Last month I talked about what artificial intelligence needed to be useful. I also talked about AI being smart, but I should also have qualified…
Dolphins and whales are smart, maybe even smarter than us. But without opposable thumbs, they can’t express their intelligence in technology or in ways that…
The great attraction of fossil fuels is their huge energy density. Burning a kilogram of oil can produce 40 to 50 megajoules of energy to propel…