Stephen Barber

Western populations are aging. Medical advances and lifestyles have extended lives while fertility rates have declined. That is, the elderly of today are living longer than their parents but had fewer children themselves. The result is that the fastest-growing demographic is the retired, with fewer younger people in work as a proportion to support them through their taxes. Meanwhile that aging population demands more and more medical and social care. Our demand for healthcare can be thought of as a U-shaped chart

Short of resources with stretched staff, the problem in many homes is that with all the routine tasks of changing sheets, clearing up, tidying, bringing food and the like, staff simply do not have time to talk to those they care for. And yet that essentially human interaction is so desperately needed by many elderly; it is what caring is about. And it is all the more important when one considers that rates of depression and suicide are relatively prevalent amongst those residents in care homes. While still rare to completion, a systematic review conducted in 2014 showed just how common suicidal thoughts in care residents are and the suggestive evidence of the importance of the care environment including staffing has on this.3

The world’s first public telegraph company was founded in 1846 by the inventor William Fothergill Cooke and financier John Lewis Ricardo.

For most of human existence (let us say three million years since Palaeolithic age or when modern homo sapiens emerged 300,000 years ago or 50,000 years since behavioural modernity or even 10,000 years since we began sedentary agriculture), for most human beings, the world they died in had not changed fundamentally from the one into which they had been born.

the nineteenth century many offices had a ‘computer’, often a young woman, employed to do calculations.

Indeed, in February 2020, Reuters used an AI prototype to deliver an automated, presenter-led sports report. It offered the potential for fast, efficient reporting and personalisation of news.

And it learned by examining huge historic data from resumes submitted over a ten-year period. It was able to use a star system to rank applicants in a way familiar to those who buy products from Amazon’s website and review just how good it was. But the recruitment engine taught itself something that would ultimately be unpalatable to bosses at Amazon and lead to the pro

But the recruitment engine taught itself something that would ultimately be unpalatable to bosses at Amazon and lead to the programme being closed down. It learned (wrongly) that men were more successful than women. It discovered that most applicants were men and that most job offers were made to men. It became biased against women. The experience was no more objective than when Marianne Bertrand responded to Help Wanted ads in Chicago and Boston a decade earlier using African American names. Only this technology was even better at discriminating.

Individual freedom of thought and action means the possibility of creativity and innovation. And this is the essence of capitalism: good and bad.

But it could just be that these early experiments in offering a basic income, in New Zealand, the Netherlands as well as Finland and now even Wales,