Frank Newman: Disruptive opportunities

Technology based companies are having a significant impact on the way people do business. Companies like Uber and Airbnb are among a new generation of IT based "disrupters" – operations that are so innovative that they seriously threaten the viability of an established industry.

The best example is Uber, which for those that don't know, is a taxi service. It differs from the traditional taxi companies in a number of ways. Most significantly, it is not strictly speaking a taxi company - it is more like a broker that brings together those that want a taxi with those that want to provide a taxi service - like Trademe. They create an online marketplace for buyers and sellers.

Matt Ridley: Artificial Intelligence is not going to cause mass unemployment

The tech industry, headquartered in Silicon Valley, is populated largely by enthusiastic optimists, who want to change the world and think they can. But there is one strand of pessimism that you hear a lot there: that the robots are going to take all our jobs. With artificial intelligence looming, human beings are facing redundancy and obsolescence. I think this neo-Luddite worry is as wrong now as in Ned Ludd’s day.

“Any job that is on some level routine is likely to be automated and if we are to see a future of prosperity rather than catastrophe we must act now,” warns Martin Ford, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, in his book The Rise of the Robots. “With the technology advances that are presently on the horizon, not only low-skilled jobs are at risk; so are the jobs of knowledge workers. Too much is happening too fast,” says another Silicon Valley guru, Vivek Wadhwa.

Matt Ridley: Why Europe cannot grow digital giants

The EU is falling behind and it's not bad luck, it's bad policy

Last week I visited an island and stood among a crowd of puffins. If I turned my head I could see the lighthouse. If I looked up, the arctic terns were above my head. Yet I never left a gallery in Gateshead. How come? I was wearing a virtual-reality mask.

I have tried this “Oculus” technology once before, when visiting Facebook in California (which owns Oculus) and it is truly extraordinary to have an all-round, up-and-down view of the world depending on how you turn your head. All it involves is a special (Samsung) smartphone jammed into a pair of goggles.

Matt Ridley: Technology, consumerism and the pope

Why are people so down on technological progress? Pope Francis complains in his new encyclical about “a blind confidence in technical solutions”, of “irrational confidence in progress” and the drawbacks of the “technocratic paradigm”. He is reflecting a popular view, held across the political spectrum, from the Unabomber to Russell Brand, that technology, consumerism and progress have been bad for people, by making them more selfish and unhappy.

But however thoroughly you search the papal encyclical (a document that does at least pay heed to science, and to evolutionary biology in particular), you will find no data to support the claim that as people have got richer they have got nastier and more miserable.