Dilemmas

The current wave of AI investment began with the release of OpenAI‘s ChatGPT, a direct-to-consumer application based on the GPT language model. Critics see this type of artificial intelligence as little more than “stochastic parrots” that put together words and sentences according to statistical probabilities. AI evangelists, on the other hand, champion ChatGPT as the first big step towards a ...

Bringing in AI to re-structure organisations can be a positive or a negative influence depending on the attitudes of employers. For instance it makes sense to establish a programme of familiarisation with AI tools among staff so that they can deal with more complex issues leaving their more mundane tasks to automation. This could work in two ways: Positively to ...

Aging populations, rapidly changing technological demands and, in some cases, the inability of education institutions to keep up have led to staff shortages felt by companies all over the world. Staffing firm Manpower published its latest Global Talent Shortage report earlier this year and compared with an edition covering the year 2017, it shows that the problem has only become ...

The EU Commission’s Joint Research Center sounded the alarm earlier this year over how prolonged drought events have affected Europe for more than two years already and northern Africa for as many as six, which is “causing water shortages and hampering vegetation growth.” Spain’s northeast Catalonia region is currently suffering its worst drought on record. According to a survey by ...

If the US has debt of $34 trillion, China has debt of $13 trillion Japan has debt of $9 trillion,  and Germany and the UK each have debt of $2.7 trillion, you would think that somewhere, someone must be the biggest humungeous creditor of all time. But no one seems to know who the creditor is. Or whether, indeed there ...

According to conventional wisdom, how conservative or liberal someone is would largely be determined by their age. However, a major shift has taken place in the US. Now, gender is a better indicator of U.S. political leanings – as seen in data collected by Gallup. As of last year, 18 to 29-year-old men as well as women over the age ...

Greece, which has a classical tradition of homosexual love, didn’t  legalise same-sex marriage  until last month, Same-sex marriage has advanced in countries and regions where acceptance of homosexuality is high and globally, half of countries that allow it are in Western Europe. More recently, countries in Latin America have also seen advances, with Cuba and Mexico legalising same sex marriage ...

The Chinese self-driving car aspirants appear to be losing their enthusiasm for being tested by the California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV). In 2023  the distance travelled  by Chinese self-drive cars in road tests in California was 70% less than it was in 2022.  The brands which put in most test miles were US brands – Waymo, Cruise snd Zoox. ...

The only answer to what is the value of  a tech asset these days  is how long is a piece of string. It is whatever someone says it is. The ideas of raising Arabian trillions for fab-building, of paying a CEO $55 billion for a year’s work, of claiming that the stagnant $8 billion programmable logic market could be a ...

Survey data released by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology shows that while almost 70% of Ukrainians said shortly after the beginning of the war that their country was moving in the right direction, this was now diminished to just 44%. The share of respondents saying the country was going the wrong way increased in the same time frame from ...