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Smartphone ownership is predicted to hit 2.5 billion by 2019 and 60 per cent of internet traffic now comes through our mobile devices. But does the world becoming more reliant on handheld gadgets to guide us in day-to-day life come at a price? In her cover piece this week, Lara Prendergast claims that we are outsourcing our brains to the internet and that technology is taking over our minds. On this week’s Spectator podcast, Lara is joined by Isabel Hardman, Charlotte Jee, Editor of Techworld, and Professor Martin Conway, head of psychology at City University. On the podcast, Lara tells Isabel: ‘I do think it’s having an effect on me

A first last week: a Google driverless car in autonomous mode was partly at fault in a collision, interestingly one involving a bus. The car was merging into a lane of faster-moving traffic to dodge a pile of sandbags in a collapsed drain and nudged in ahead of the bus on the assumption that its driver would give way. He didn’t. I suspect this may be a failure of social intelligence. Human drivers, for all their faults, can intuitively read the behaviour of other road users very well. We instinctively know that bus drivers are less likely to give way than car drivers. Understanding humans is always going to be

It was a bad day in front of the Public Accounts Committee for Dame Lin Homer. Despite being the outgoing boss of HMRC, Homer admitted she was no tax expert: Meanwhile, Google boss Matt Brittin also had a miserable time in front of the committee. He was laughed at during the hearing after appearing to forget how much he earned: Met Police chief Bernard Hogan-Howe went on the defensive as he came up against John Humphrys on the Today programme. He dismissed Humphrys’s claim about the police publicizing specific details of their investigation into Lord Bramall as ‘nonsense’: Jeremy Hunt vowed to impose new contracts on doctors following yesterday’s strike.

Home Donald Tusk, the president of the European Council, prepared a paper on the four areas of concern between Britain and the European Union, as formulated by David Cameron, the British Prime Minister, for the EU to chew on at a summit in February. Nicola Sturgeon, the leader of the Scottish National Party, said that to hold a referendum on the EU in June would be ‘disrespectful’ to elections being held in Scotland. Tony Blair, the former prime minister, said he thought Scotland would leave the Union if the United Kingdom voted to leave the EU. Lord Parkinson, who as Cecil Parkinson was party chairman when the Conservatives won a

If Google hoped for some good PR in offering £130 million to settle UK tax claims dating back to the Labour years, it was a miscalculation: Labour regards the offer as “derisory” and the BBC is leading its news bulletins the better to sock it to its rival. Why did Google bother? It has run up against the standard anti-business narrative: that the social worth of businesses can be measured only by how much cash they give to the government. In fact, Google provides its services to millions of Britons (worth at least £11 billion, by some estimates) at no cost at all: this is its contribution to society. As for its contribution to the

Numerous commentators have noted how the Irish marriage referendum was influenced by big business, especially Californian-based companies like Google. It’s one of the curious trends of recent years that big business, once considered the enemy of ‘the Left’, is now its greatest proponent; or at least the dominant strain of Leftism, social justice liberalism. Silicon Valley is the most extreme example of this, an industry that is young, dynamic and universally socially liberal; but elsewhere most politically interested billionaires in the West tend to be more liberal than the population, whether it’s George Soros funding various social justice causes or other Democrat-supporting moguls. In contrast, with the exception of the Bangladeshi

What are newspapers for? The answer, of course, is not just to tell us what’s going on and explain the implications, but also to select the most important items from the background noise. Over the last few years, though, we’ve started to get our news in a different way: through Google, where selections are made on the basis of a constantly evolving algorithm, and through social media sites where news stories are recommended by friends. Throughout this change, Google has argued vociferously that it is not a publisher. Particularly in Europe, issues such as privacy, copyright and the right to be forgotten have led it to claim that it’s simply a

Yesterday at SXSW, the world’s grooviest ‘interactive festival’, the head of Google X – the company’s mysterious research lab – finally admitted it. Google Glass was one gigantic embarrassment. Or, as Astro Teller put it, ‘We allowed and sometimes even encouraged too much attention for the programme’. You don’t say. For a glimpse of the sort of attention Google didn’t want, just look at the photograph above – some poor sap on the subway using Google Glass and a smartphone. It went viral on Twitter. The guy was dubbed ‘the glasshole’, a pun that works in both American and English accents. Google Glass has given wearable tech a bad name: it’s raw

One of the questions I most often get asked is: ‘What can I do?’  If you agree that actual liberals are the only palatable future in authoritarian societies and also recognise that they are a beleaguered minority, is there anything you can meaningfully do to help? Western governments are generally too busy doing business with authoritarian governments to focus on actual human rights abuses.  Meanwhile many groups at home which claim to care about human rights around the world are too busy attacking the world’s only democracies or defending extremists to have much time left for the real fight. But I have recently been introduced to an initiative which stands