Being future-forward leaders means we don’t just want to keep on top of the stories that affect our industry, we also want to understand how tech talks to the universe around us. So we decided to bring you ‘Intercity’s Tech5’: our top 5 tech stories from the last fortnight.
We know that when man meets machine, there’s a tech-tale to be told…
1 - 5G Internet set to make a big impact in the UK?
Today, bidding began for the UK’s airwaves, and it has nothing to do with radio. It’s all about improving our mobile broadband use from 4G to 5G and the big players are going head-to-head to get a slice of the action.
O2, Three, EE, and Vodafone are joined by Connexin Limited and Airspan Spectrum Holdings to compete for spectrum. For those of us paying for iPhone X contracts with the promise of super-fast 4G speeds and still having to use 3G to load a YouTube video in city centres across the UK, should we really be getting excited about the prospect of 5G?
With the first commercial 5G services being expected in 2020, it’s hoped that with 5G mobile broadband, bandwidth will be freed up for existing phones and tablets.
2 - Are we being replaced by robots?
This week, Uber halted its driverless car testing in North America after a woman was hit and killed as she crossed the street in Arizona. Whilst self-driving cars are being heralded as the future of the automobile industry, it does raise the question of are we being replaced by robots?
It has also been reported this week that in less than two decades, it’ll be more cost-effective to operate robots in factories than to hire workers. Technology is giving medics the ability to remotely diagnose strokes, to allow us to do our 9-5 jobs without setting foot inside the office, and to arrange travel with a few taps in an app.
But would you ever want to take a backseat in a driverless taxi? Maybe it’s about the amount of control we’re comfortable with relinquishing to machines and whether we want to let them be in the driver’s seat.
3 - Was Professor Stephen Hawking right when he predicted that artificial intelligence would spell the end for mankind?
The late great Professor Stephen Hawking was able to communicate with the world around him using a basic form of Artificial Intelligence (‘AI’) developed by Intel in conjunction with the British company Swiftkey that allowed him to speak. But he warned that we might start to create something that could be more intelligent than human beings with the ability to re-design itself more quickly than humans can.
Professor Stephen Hawking’s voice is not alone one in the debate around the benefits vs the threats of AI, with Elon Musk, Chief Executive of Space X believing it to be ‘our biggest existential threat’. Whether we will end up marginalised by our own creation remains to be seen in the years to come…
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4 - When the world of tech meets the world of Trump…
Never has technology played such a pivotal role in the world of politics. With news of military coups and anti-establishment protests spreading through Twitter and accusations of election-tampering being levelled at some of the most powerful nations in the world, technology has changed the political game.
We’ve all been reading reports that Moscow attempted to influence the 2016 US Presidential Election by hacking and manipulating social media to their own end. With stories circulating this week that Russian cyber efforts have managed to interfere with power supply in America, this is a level of threat that we’ve never seen or experienced before. Are our nations doing enough to protect themselves and us as their citizens from the threat of state-sponsored or individual cyber-attacks?
5 - How much does Facebook know about you?
You might have had a conversation with your friend over an artisan cup of coffee over the weekend, crunching numbers, working out who will get you the best deal when you switch energy providers, only to find that Facebook starts strategically advertising new suppliers to you the very same day.
Users have complained about how apps like Instagram and platforms like Facebook seem to know about your un-Googled plans and priorities. But now, the dialogue has regained momentum when last weekend it was revealed that a data firm called Cambridge Analytica had been gathering information about users without their knowledge.
You know those harmless quizzes that tell you which Friends character you are or what your spirit animal is? Well imagine that a subsidiary of Cambridge Analytica acquired data more valuable than that, sold it on, and it was used for Donald Trump’s political gain. Here, privacy meets politics, and it’s technology that’s brought us to this juncture.
Mark Zuckerberg is facing some tough questions from top politicians both on his side of the Atlantic and beyond, but to minimise the chance of your data being used for other purposes, keep a watchful eye on which apps you allow to access your information, use ad blockers, and check your Facebook security settings.
