What pet owner hasn’t at some point looked into the face of their little furry chum and wondered what it’s thinking? Wouldn’t it be great to be like Dr Doolittle, to imagine “chatting to a chimp” and being able to…
“Have you had a productive day?” someone recently asked me, and for some reason it suddenly struck me just how embedded into our lives the notion of productivity is. What am I? A dairy cow? As if a day that…
Your dad is a Luddite, perhaps, or maybe your mum; your gran, almost certainly. Like the sweet old Italian Nonna bewildered and amazed by Google’s home assistant, older generations often show less facility and more reluctance when adopting technology into…
I read the other day that Microsoft has plans to “resurrect” people from their “social data”. This resurrection would draw on such things as “images, voice data, social media posts, electronic messages, and written letters”, which would all be used…
There is an interesting little connection between the Greek philosopher Aristotle’s account of the various reasons for immoral behaviour, and the Christian notion of Hell. Firstly, according to Aristotle, a moral action must be deliberately chosen, involving conscious knowledge of…
One of my favourite novels is Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. It is a real doorstop of a tome – some 800 pages, though somehow it actually feels longer. If you don’t know it, it can perhaps best…