Technology

Thursday

Steven Poole

Fast and furious | 14 April 2016

Modern life is too fast. Everyone is always in a hurry; people skim-read and don’t take the time to eat properly; the art of conversation is dying; technology places too much stress on the human brain. This litany of familiar complaints comes, of course, from the late 19th century, as collected by the American writer and XKCD comic artist Randall Monroe in his arch cartoon ‘The Pace of Modern Life’. And here we are in the 21st, in another culture that both worships and deplores its ostensibly unprecedented speed. Today we have hookup apps and high-frequency trading, and ‘tl;dr’ (too long, didn’t read) is the all-purpose internet comment; but on

Thursday

Peter Hoskin

The future is here

Oculus Rift. It sounds like something from a science fiction novel, and in many ways it is. Its release this week is the first stirring of a future stuffed with virtual reality headsets. The hope of its Californian engineers and their bitcoin backers is that we, the consumers, will soon use them to spend a whole lot of time outside of our lives. Strap the goggles to your face, position the headphones over your ears, press the on button, and — bzzzztp — you’re in a different world. The question is, who will create these worlds? The first prototype of the Oculus Rift was built five years ago by an

Hugo Rifkind Hugo Rifkind

I have seen the future, and it’s a racist, filthy-mouthed teenage robot

‘I’m a nice person,’ said the robot. ‘I just hate everybody.’ Maybe you know the feeling. The robot in question was Microsoft’s first great experiment in artificial intelligence, given the tone of a teenage girl and the name of Tay. The plan was for it — her? — to lurk on social media, Twitter mainly, and listen, and interact, learn how to be a person like everybody else. On a public-relations level, at least, the experiment did not go swimmingly. ‘Gas the kikes, race war now!’ Tay was tweeting, after about a day. Big Hitler fan, it turns out. Not so fond of anybody else. ‘Why are you racist?’ somebody

Wednesday

Ben Schott

Diary – 23 March 2016

Killing time in a Heathrow first-class lounge, I notice how many men adopt an unmistakable ‘first-class lounge’ persona. They stand like maquettes in an architect’s model (feet apart, shoulders squared, defining their perimeter) and bellow into mobiles like they’re the first person ever to need ‘rather an urgent word’ with Maureen in HR. Along with this ‘manstanding’ comes the ‘manspreading’ of jackets, laptops and newspapers (FT for show; Mail for dough) over a Sargasso Sea of seats. In many ways, ‘first-class-lounge persona’ echoes ‘country-house-hotel face’ — the affectations couples embrace during weekend mini-breaks. These include: pretending to be at ease in a Grade I Palladian mansion; summoning tea with a patrician

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

Directions your phone can’t give you

In many ways a satnav is a miraculous device. A network of US military satellites more than 10,000 miles above the surface of the Earth, each broadcasting a signal with little more power than a 100-watt light bulb, allows a device in your satnav or mobile phone to triangulate your location on the ground to within seven yards or so. The system is so finely tuned that the clocks aboard the satellites must be calibrated to run 38 microseconds a day slower than Earth time to correct for the effects of general and special relativity. This allows your phone to know your location and, after factoring in real-time traffic information,

Simon Heffer

Going global

We can all identify decades in which the world moved forward. Wars are not entirely negative experiences: the social and technological advances of the 1910s and 1940s are obvious. Ben Wilson has been more thoughtful, and has chosen the 1850s — or, more specifically, the years from 1851 to 1862. It was a time when, as he says, Britain was at the peak of her power. The empire was not at its greatest — the Scramble for Africa had yet to occur — but Germany had not unified, and America was economically overdependent on slavery and, not least because of that abomination, about to fall into civil war. Wilson describes

Thursday

Gary Bell Qc

No hiding place | 17 March 2016

My first courtroom murder case could have come straight from one of Andrew Taylor’s novels. A gruesome crime — the death of a child. And the murderer was brought to justice by exquisite detective work: police established that the killer had dug a grave but then abandoned it. They also found a witness. That was 20 years ago. The prosecution for cases that I’m involved in now have changed beyond recognition. Take number-plate-recognition technology. Most murderers drive to their victim, but now cars are tracked by cameras across the country. The police can list vehicles seen near a crime scene, then trace them back. That’s how, in 2006, they caught Steve

Hugo Rifkind Hugo Rifkind

We’re swamped with nonsense gizmos and it’s all Steve Jobs’s fault

I keep being told that the big hot technological gizmo of the moment is a box that sits in the corner of your room and listens, and I don’t want one. They’re made by Amazon, largely, and the idea is that you tell them to order stuff — such as a pizza, say — by shouting: ‘Alexa! Order me a pizza!’ And Alexa, which is what the thing pretends to be called in this infantile, accommodating, psychotic age of ours, perks up and does so. Or orders books, or summons a taxi. Or it gets your phone to call somebody, or plays you a particular song. The rest of the

Thursday

The Spectator

Letters | 3 March 2016

What might have been Sir: Harry Mount points out that Boris Johnson is two years older than David Cameron (Diary, 27 February). Both, however, began their careers in the same year. On 15 June 1988 I interviewed David Cameron for a post in the Conservative Research Department; on 26 July it was Boris’s turn (‘Johnston’ in my diary). The former was signed up to cover trade and industry issues (memorably forgetting the trade figures when Mrs Thatcher asked him for them). Boris was invited to follow in the footsteps of father Stanley, who had been the department’s first environment expert in the Heath era. But journalism lured him away. Would

Thursday

Steven Poole

Ruling the digital waves

Everyone, we hear these days, must learn to code. Being able to program computers is the only way to be sure a computer can’t steal your job. So doctors, dancers, drivers and dieticians must all acquire programming skills, and coding needs to be at the centre of modern secondary education. Well, evidently it is in the interests of giant technology corporations to have future generations of employees educated to their precise specifications at the public expense. The message is amplified by journalists anxiously extrapolating from their own predicament. (Generating ‘content’ is an increasingly unrewarded dead end; the cool things are data and ‘sharing’.) But the all-must-become-programmers idea does imply a

Monday

The Spectator

Podcast special: The Fourth Industrial Revolution

[audioplayer src=”http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/podcastspecial-thefourthindustrialrevolution/media.mp3″ title=”Listen: Podcast special – The Fourth Industrial Revolution”] Listen [/audioplayer] In this View from 22 podcast special, The Spectator’s Editor Fraser Nelson hosts a discussion about whether the world is going through a fourth industrial revolution and what this means for workers around the world. Fraser is joined by Stefan Krüger, Partner at King & Wood Mallesons, Simon Collins, UK Chairman and Senior Partner at KPMG, and Ed Conway, Economics Editor at Sky News. The Fourth Industrial Revolution was the key theme at this year’s World Economic Forum in Davos. How will advances in technology affect how companies around the world operate? What will the workplace look like

Thursday

Rory Sutherland

Tax me more, but don’t touch my dishwasher

There was a big fuss a year or so ago about a book by a French chap called Piketty about wealth inequality. He suggested capitalism, aside from an anomalous period between 1930 and 1979, inexorably concentrated wealth at the top. One interesting defence of inequality is that the rich, by adopting technologies early, redistribute far more of their wealth than we realise by funding R&D and innovation. The first people to pay top dollar for a flat-screen TV or a dishwasher are unwittingly subsidising their wider adoption. As Hayek observed of early adopters of technology: ‘We depend on them, for they finance the invention and reinvention of products whose cost

Thursday

Rory Sutherland

The power of painless payment

I am one of those annoying, mildly claustrophobic people who sit at the end of a row in cinemas. There are plenty of things in life — films, plays, social events — which I can only fully enjoy knowing I can make a sharp exit at any time. It’s not that I leave: I just like to know I can. My idea of hell is a party on a boat. So I am rather enamoured with the new mobile-phone app Qkr, which lets you pay with your phone in some restaurants without waiting for the bill. It’s the honest man’s version of ‘doing a runner’. You check in on your

Thursday

Mary Killen

Dear Mary | 31 December 2015

I have been alone in the country this festive season as my adult children and most of my friends are abroad until the second week of January. I have been perfectly happy to have avoided all the fuss about food, to have got on with some work, and to have walked my dog. My grown-up daughter was worried I would have no parties or fun, but this was mitigated by the fact that I had been asked to a local private dinner for an American writer who happens to be my literary hero. However, at a carol service on Christmas Eve I saw the well-connected woman with whom he is

James Bartholomew

Where’s the joy gone?

Have you seen Spectre, the latest Bond film? If not, the opening sequence is terrific. Lots of action and excitement. The whole film is full of stunts and thrills. But after watching it, I realised there was something missing: joy, or joie de vivre. Daniel Craig plays Bond like an android who has spent too much time muscle-building instead of having a good time. Contrast Spectre with From Russia With Love, one of the early Bond films. The first scene in which we see Sean Connery as Bond, he is humorous and amorous as he snogs a beautiful woman in a punt moored at the side of a river. He

Sunday

The Spectator

Christmas tips from Dan Snow and Alain de Botton

For the Spectator’s Christmas survey, we asked for some favourite seasonal rituals – and what to avoid at Christmas. Dan Snow My favourite thing is being allowed to ignore my phone and email for days on end, re-engaging with that vaguely remembered place, the now. However, avoid overindulgence the night before Christmas. The kids will wake up on the happy morn earlier than seems possible. Even by their own nocturnal standards.   Alain de Botton My favourite ritual is reminding everyone involved that we will, of course, be having a sad and tense Christmas; there will be arguments, frustration, bitterness and barely suppressed longings to be elsewhere with other (better, more interesting) people. The

Wednesday

Richard Davenporthines

Spectator books of the year: Richard Davenport-Hines on a real flirt of a book

Laurence Scott’s The Four-Dimensional Human: Ways of Being in the Digital World (Heinemann, £20) is the year’s most surprising book. I expected a dour, lumbering tract about the dehumanising influence of new technologies, social media and information overload. Instead, I found a real flirt of a book. It’s full of impish gaiety, elegant and lithe in its language, providing intellectual ambushes and startling connections. It examines our evolving notions of publicity, privacy, time-wasting, frivolity, friendship, allegiances, denial, escapism and squalor in the internet age. The teasing, wary optimism is bewitching as well as informative. The little volumes of the ‘Penguin Monarchs’ series (£10.99 each) will be a matchless collection when

Monday

Sacha Deshmukh

Smart technology for a cleaner, greener future

Ahead of the Paris climate conference, there is intense focus on the carbon policies of governments around the world. To reduce global warming, we need to find cleaner ways of generating electricity. But we also need to think about how we transmit energy across smarter grids, and how we use the energy we already produce more efficiently. Measures to secure supply and manage demand are equally important. Both were covered in depth at our ‘Smarter Britain, Smarter Environment‘ event earlier this month. Top speakers – Lord (Gus) O’Donnell, Jonathon Porritt CBE, Sara Bell, Robert Denda and Lord Bourne – considered what was described by Porritt as ‘the biggest challenge humankind

Thursday

Camilla Swift

Send in the clones

How much do you love your dog? Do you secretly wish, as he or she grows older, that you could have another just the same? I’ll bet that tens of thousands of Brits feel this way — and soon their dreams could come true. When most of us last thought about it, cloning was an off-putting and futuristic prospect. Dolly the sheep was the poster girl, and things didn’t turn out too well for her. But times change, science creeps on, and last year a Brit called Rebecca Smith had her beloved dachshund, Winnie, cloned in South Korea. The going rate for Mini-Winnie would have been £60,000, but Rebecca won

Thursday

Rory Sutherland

We let programmers run our lives. So how’s their moral code?

A few years ago, in the week before Christmas when supermarket sales are at their highest, staff at one branch of a leading British chain regularly did the rounds of local competitors’ shops buying up their entire stock of Brussels sprouts. It was, in its ethically dubious way, an interesting experiment. You might assume frustrated shoppers would merely buy all the other things on their list and then go somewhere else for their sprouts. They didn’t. As the perpetrators suspected, spending 30 minutes in a shop knowing that you’ll eventually have to make a separate trip to buy sprouts feels like wasted time — so people promptly left to find