A piece by Yuval Noah Harari in the Financial Times this weekend delves into our fascination with Big Data. The tech industry has made so many billions of dollars being able to track, quantify and insert itself into our behavior  that many have signed on as adherents to the Church of Big Data. Just as divine authority was legitimised by religious mythologies, and human authority was legitimised … [Read more...]

Driverless cars are here and they work and by all accounts they make driving safer than when humans are piloting. So why aren't they already in showrooms? Not so fast. It's not just about whether they can be made and work and are safe. It's about a cultural shift that will have to take place before they are successfully sold. Like anything that's a significant part of our lives, there's a … [Read more...]

Dance is the most physical art. Bodies moving, yes, but physical also because of how bodies relate to the spaces they're in. Much of the energy in tech innovation right now is directed to exploring the edges between physical and virtual worlds, and how we perceive spaces and interact with them. Much of the work is in new interfaces for our machines - voice control, facial recognition, biometrics, … [Read more...]

One of the biggest comforts of fast food is its familiarity. Generic from location to location, you know not only what the food will be and how it will taste, but that the ritual of the experience will be familiar too. It isn't that fast food people are necessarily unadventurous; but at least some of the time, they're drawn to the familiar. There's a parallel on the internet. Remember the sense … [Read more...]