The Lawyer’s Role in Innovation August 25, 2020 According to the recently published results of the UK Innovation Survey 2019, innovation activities have been on the decline since a peak in 2012-2014, with only 38% of businesses considered “innovation active” in 2016-2018. Notwithstanding this, the phrase “innovation” is near ubiquitously referenced within the legal industry. Which begs the question, how do lawyers actually [...]
DEBATE: Are the life chances of the Covid-19 generation damaged beyond repair? August 24, 2020 Are the life chances of the Covid-19 generation damaged beyond repair? Emma Revell, head of communications at the Institute of Economic Affairs, says YES. Young people have had a rough pandemic. Months of education gone, exam grades tainted by confusion and uncertainty even after the U-turn, the future burden of spiralling public debt against a [...]
A-levels are the tip of the iceberg — biased algorithms are running our lives August 24, 2020 The A-levels debacle has laid bare the stark reality of relying on algorithms to make important decisions. Between the results being announced and the government’s U-turn four days later, public outrage had reached a fever pitch at the idea that an individual could have their life chances limited because of the results other people had [...]
Is facial recognition technology finally being seen for the dystopian threat it is? August 21, 2020 In the end, even Silicon Valley has had to admit that there is something a bit sinister about facial recognition technology. Momentum has been building in recent months. Arvind Krishna of IBM was first. He announced in June that his company would no longer offer automatic facial recognition (AFR) software. He also said it would [...]
Be eco-rational: The world’s environmental problems are too serious for petty political dogma August 19, 2020 On 14 February 1990, a photograph was taken by the Voyager 1 spacecraft from the fringes of the solar system. As it sped further away, engineers spun it around to capture an image of the planet Earth, suspended in space roughly four billion miles away. Taking up only 0.12 of a pixel in the image, [...]
The UK has £10bn skills gap, so investors must back the ‘edtech’ boom August 17, 2020 The “edtech” revolution began long before 2020. The last two decades have seen a surge in demand for skills such as coding and data science, which traditional educational institutions have, as yet, been unable to meet. A recent study by Qlik and Accenture estimates this skills gap, evidenced by the difficulty to fill positions or [...]
Why artificial intelligence needs an open, decentralised platform to serve the world August 14, 2020 On the 15th of May 1911, the US government moved to break the Standard Oil Corporation into what would eventually be 34 different companies. The key resource at question then was oil. A century later, we are at the cusp of wondering whether the organisations of our time hold a similar monopoly on the most [...]
Crypto AM shines its spotlight on Novum Insights August 11, 2020 Staying ahead of the trends in these times of ever-accelerating technology change provides real opportunity but has also never been more challenging. The blockchain and crypto markets are some of the best placed to ride this wave. This is because the real-time data from these markets is being created by networks, which were specifically designed [...]
The UK is falling behind in AI race, warns Microsoft August 11, 2020 The UK risks falling into an artificial intelligence skills gap, Microsoft said today, after it found most businesses in Britain use the technology less frequently and at a less advanced level. The software giant said in its annual report that projects using AI in the UK has a higher failure rate — meaning they generate [...]
DEBATE: Is Elon Musk right to predict that AI will overtake humans within five years? August 6, 2020 Is Elon Musk right to predict that artificial intelligence will overtake humans within five years? Chetan Dube, chief executive of IPsoft, says YES. Elon Musk is right. For the last few years we have been saying that by 2025 we will pass someone in the corridor and not know if they are human or android. [...]