Author: The Conversation

READER QUESTION: I am 59 years old, and in reasonably good health. Is it possible that I will live long enough to put my brain into a computer? Richard Dixon. We often imagine that human consciousness is as simple as input and output of electrical signals within a network of processing units – therefore comparable to a computer. Reality, however, is much more complicated. For starters, we don’t actually know how much information the human brain can hold. Two years ago, a team at the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle, US, mapped the 3D structure of all the…

Narrative frames are fundamental to unifying ideologies. They frame what is possible and impossible, which ideas can be accepted and which must be rejected. In her book, Digital Democracy, Analogue Politics, storyteller and political analyst Nanjala Nyabola examines the framing of the Fourth Industrial Revolution narrative in this light. She argues that it is being used by global elites to deflect from the drivers of inequality and enable ongoing processes of expropriation, exploitation and exclusion. During a recent policy dialogue on the Future of Work(ers) she commented: The real seduction of this idea is that it’s apolitical. We can talk…

Apple has joined the thriving “buy now, pay later” industry, with a customised service called Apple Pay Later. The service was announced earlier this week at the 2022 Worldwide Developers Conference, and will initially be launched in the United States later this year. Pay Later will be built into the Apple Wallet and eligible for use on any purchase made through Apple Pay. Customers will be able to split the cost of a purchase into four equal payments, with zero interest and fees, spread over a period of four months. To qualify, however, Apple will first do a soft credit…

Economists are growing increasingly concerned about South Africa’s economy. This is because the country’s three major macroeconomic problems – lacklustre economic growth, growing inflation and very high unemployment – have been exacerbated by a series of major disruptions. These include the COVID pandemic that started as a health crisis but escalated quickly to an economic crisis. Millions of people lost their jobs as economic activity came to a halt under lockdown. In the middle of the pandemic violence that lasted for eight days erupted in Kwa-Zulu Natal and Gauteng. Further pressure has been piled on by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine…

The chief operating officer of South Africa’s electricity utility, Eskom, warned in May that the government should urgently start building new generating capacity. He was referring to a new build programme which has existed for at least a decade. The country’s Integrated Resource Plan of 2019, a cabinet approved document, sets out the timelines for decommissioning coal-fired power stations and adding 44GW of new capacity, including 18GW of wind energy and 8GW of solar (photovoltaic). The country is already way behind on this programme, limping along with antique power stations and regular power cuts. Outages are a regular ocurrence which…

It may seem strange to look to the discipline of quantum physics for lessons that will help to create future-fit leaders. But science has a lot to offer us. Like scientists, business leaders need to be able to manage rapid change and ambiguity in a non-linear, multi-disciplinary and networked environment. But, for the most part, businesses find themselves trapped in processes that draw on the paradigm of certainty and predictability. This approach is analogous to the Newtonian physics developed in the 1600’s. The ambiguity that business leaders operate in is encapsulated in mathematical models developed by the advances in Quantum…

Voyager 1 is the farthest human-made object from Earth. After sweeping by Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, it is now almost 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) from Earth in interstellar space. Both Voyager 1 and its twin, Voyager 2, carry little pieces of humanity in the form of their Golden Records. These messages in a bottle include spoken greetings in 55 languages, sounds and images from nature, an album of recordings and images from numerous cultures, and a written message of welcome from Jimmy Carter, who was U.S. president when the spacecraft left Earth in 1977. Each Voyager spacecraft…

Mastercard’s “smile to pay” system, announced last week, is supposed to save time for customers at checkouts. It is being trialled in Brazil, with future pilots planned for the Middle East and Asia. The company argues touch-less technology will help speed up transaction times, shorten lines in shops, heighten security and improve hygiene in businesses. But it raises concerns relating to customer privacy, data storage, crime risk and bias. How will it work? Mastercard’s biometric checkout system will provide customers facial recognition-based payments, by linking the biometric authentication systems of a number of third-party companies with Mastercard’s own payment systems.…

Sub-Saharan African countries are the most ethnically diverse in the world. Within each African country there are more ethnic groups than there are in most of the world’s countries. In fact, the world’s 20 most ethnically diverse countries are all African. An ethnic group is a social group that shares a common and distinctive history, culture, region, religion or language. The reason for this diversity in sub-Saharan African countries is chiefly that almost all of them were carved into colonial territories without regard to ethnic boundaries. The region also accounts for 40% of the world’s extremely poor (around 276 million…

Twitter reports that fewer than 5% of accounts are fakes or spammers, commonly referred to as “bots.” Since his offer to buy Twitter was accepted, Elon Musk has repeatedly questioned these estimates, even dismissing Chief Executive Officer Parag Agrawal’s public response. Later, Musk put the deal on hold and demanded more proof. So why are people arguing about the percentage of bot accounts on Twitter? As the creators of Botometer, a widely used bot detection tool, our group at the Indiana University Observatory on Social Media has been studying inauthentic accounts and manipulation on social media for over a decade.…