Author: The Conversation

Around the world, countries are having to strike a balance between COVID-19 cases and restrictions. In the UK and the US, daily new cases number in the thousands, but restrictions and limitations are being lifted. In contrast, New Zealand has started a short national lockdown to contain just a handful of cases. For the past 20 months, New Zealand, Australia and several other east Asian countries have pursued tough policies aiming to completely eradicate COVID-19. The hallmarks of these “zero COVID” approaches are strict border controls and quarantine arrangements as well as the early introduction of lockdowns when discovering cases.…

South Africa has among the highest recorded levels of social protest of any country in the world. The reasons behind this are more complex than often assumed. The scale and severity of the looting and sabotage in KwaZulu-Natal and parts of Gauteng in July, following the jailing of former president Jacob Zuma, has brought social protest and civil unrest into the popular discourse. But much of the commentary on the July riot – which cost over 300 lives and billions of rands in damage to the economy – has neglected the long history of violent protest in the country. The…

Imagine you’re having friends over for lunch and plan to order a pepperoni pizza. You recall Amy mentioning that Susie had stopped eating meat. You try calling Susie, but when she doesn’t pick up, you decide to play it safe and just order a margherita pizza instead. People take for granted the ability to deal with situations like these on a regular basis. In reality, in accomplishing these feats, humans are relying on not one but a powerful set of universal abilities known as common sense. As an artificial intelligence researcher, my work is part of a broad effort to…

Warren Buffett, who turns 91 on Aug. 30, 2021, is a billionaire at a time when outrage over the excesses of extreme wealth is growing in tandem with billionaires’ fortunes. But based on what I learned about him while becoming a scholar of finance and a portfolio manager, I see Buffett as a model for his ultrarich peers. He has given half of his vast fortune to charity and plans to unload the most of the rest during his lifetime or upon his death. Buffett also largely lives a modest lifestyle by billionaire standards; he still resides in the spacious…

In recent months, the question of mandatory COVID-19 vaccination or limitations on those who choose not to be vaccinated has become a hot topic. In many countries, healthcare professionals and care home workers in facilities for the aged or disabled must be vaccinated as an occupational requirement. They are duty bound to accept a vaccine because of their non-negotiable pledge to avoid harm to patients, colleagues and their own families. Other occupational groups who work in proximity to the public or in large indoor venues also have a responsibility to adhere to a mandatory vaccine policy. Likewise, barring medical contra-indications,…

Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg recently announced the tech giant will shift from being a social media company to becoming “a metaverse company”, functioning in an “embodied internet” that blends real and virtual worlds more than ever before. So what is “the metaverse”? It sounds like the kind of thing billionaires talk about to earn headlines, like Tesla chief Elon Musk spruiking “pizza joints” on Mars. Yet given almost three billion people use Facebook each month, Zuckerberg’s suggestion of a change of direction is worth some attention. Read more: Mark Zuckerberg wants to turn Facebook into a ‘metaverse company’ – what…

End-to-end encryption is technology that scrambles messages on your phone and unscrambles them only on the recipients’ phones, which means anyone who intercepts the messages in between can’t read them. Dropbox, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Twitter and Yahoo are among the companies whose apps and services use end-to-end encryption. This kind of encryption is good for protecting your privacy, but governments don’t like it because it makes it difficult for them to spy on people, whether tracking criminals and terrorists or, as some governments have been known to do, snooping on dissidents, protesters and journalists. Enter an Israeli technology firm, NSO…

At first glance, a recently granted South African patent relating to a “food container based on fractal geometry” seems fairly mundane. The innovation in question involves interlocking food containers that are easy for robots to grasp and stack. On closer inspection, the patent is anything but mundane. That’s because the inventor is not a human being – it is an artificial intelligence (AI) system called DABUS. DABUS (which stands for “device for the autonomous bootstrapping of unified sentience”) is an AI system created by Stephen Thaler, a pioneer in the field of AI and programming. The system simulates human brainstorming…

In the preface to his great book, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, written in the 1930s at the height of the Great Depression, the renowned economist John Maynard Keynes suggested that the obstacle to decisive change lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones. In this moment of crisis, South Africa urgently needs decisive action. But all too often South Africans of all political stripes seem trapped in stale discourses. These are not anchored in South Africa’s political, economic and social realities. Nor do they offer any practical, timely strategy for…

The typical Australian will change careers five to seven times during their professional lifetime, by some estimates. And this is likely to increase as new technologies automate labour, production is moved abroad, and economic crises unfold. Jobs disappearing is not a new phenomenon – have you seen an elevator operator recently? – but the pace of change is picking up, threatening to leave large numbers of workers unemployed and unemployable. New technologies also create new jobs, but the skills they require do not always match the old jobs. Successfully moving between jobs requires making the most of your current skills…