Technology

Silicon Valley looks like a cross between Milton Keynes and the set of the Stepford Wives. Row after row of ordinary houses and picket fences, clustered in villages notable only for the mega-companies they serve: Menlo Park (Facebook), Cupertino (Apple) or Mountain View (Google). There’s the odd charm, but it’s generally clean, sterile, young, overpriced. Life here, they say, is five years ahead of everywhere else. Well, if that’s the case, I’ve seen the future and it is a bit disturbing. The surface ordinariness of the Valley hides a deep utopianism. In the late 1960s San Francisco was the home of both hippie counterculture and the early computer communities. Both

For technology manufacturers, healthcare is already big business, and, with an ageing population increasingly comfortable with technologies that would’ve been unthinkable even a decade ago, the opportunities to innovate are only going to increase. The Future Health Index, a global report commissioned by Philips, supports the fact that it is not just the UK’s younger generation that are embracing these technologies. However are these products – from popular or trendy FitBits to state-of-the-art imaging equipment – really going to revolutionise the country’s medical care? And will the NHS require a head to toe change of ethos to accommodate them? Spectator editor Fraser Nelson is joined to discuss all this by

Who should be housing supremo in what we all assume will be Mrs May’s new administration? Brandon Lewis and Gavin Barwell, recent junior ministers with that brief, achieved nothing — if we also assume the brief was to procure an adequate supply of new homes, in the private sector or ‘social’ one, which the ‘just about managing’ could afford. The number of affordable homes built in 2015-16 was just 32,000, half that built in the previous year and the lowest since 1992. But action is coming — apparently. ‘We will fix the broken housing market,’ declares Mrs May, mustard-keen on fixing broken markets, ‘to build a new generation of council

I was exchanging emails with someone the other day and signed off with the sentence ‘let me know when you are next in London’ or words to that effect. It then occurred to me that I had absolutely no idea where in the world my correspondent lived. This interested me. Because it occurred to me that I could write the sentence ‘next time you are in London’ to more or less anyone in the world without it sounding ridiculous. Of how many other cities is that true? New York, certainly. But then it gets difficult. Paris or Singapore? Well, at a pinch. It wouldn’t work for Perpignan, say, or Bourton-on-the-Water.

When you buy a house in Britain, there is an extensive and well-established series of checks you must perform to ensure the property is suitable for habitation. When undertaking a survey, you should ensure that the boundaries of the property conform to those recorded at the Land Registry, and that the property does not lie on a flood plain or risk structural damage from coastal erosion or subsidence. Unfortunately, there seems to be no mechanism to protect householders from the worst possible eventuality — which is to find out that you have a lawyer living next door. Wherever you have a shared wall or fence, there exist countless opportunities to

Tools to help with ‘personal improvement’ were the big consumer trend of 2016. Whether it was healthy recipe boxes to overhaul your diet, a Fitbit to force you to exercise or apps to teach you another language on your commute, they were hard to avoid. Industries of all kinds predicted a future where goods and services are not only designed to fit our unique desires, but to help us shape them. In 2017 it looks like that trend is coming to banking, and it’s potentially great news for our mental health as well as our wallets. Financial technology is beginning to disrupt retail banking. Challenger banks based around an app –

I was at home enjoying an online episode of Tales of the Texas Rangers when my daughter interrupted me, wanting something on Amazon. Just to explain, Tales of the Texas Rangers was a 1950s NBC radio series featuring Joel McCrea as Ranger Jayce Pearson. There are 90 half-hour episodes available online. Once you tire of binge-listening to these, there are perhaps 200 more episodes of Dragnet and about 400 of Gunsmoke to choose from, the latter featuring the voice of William Conrad (detective Frank Cannon to anyone my age) as Marshal Matt Dillon. Yes, I realise it’s a bit weird using a fibre-optic broadband connection to listen to 1950s radio,

In 1929 John Maynard Keynes predicted that by 2029 people in the developed nations could enjoy a perfectly civilised standard of living while working for 16 hours a week. His hope was for our precious hours of extra leisure to be devoted to such edifying pursuits as playing Grand Theft Auto and watching kittens skateboarding on YouTube. (Actually he didn’t predict that bit — he suggested we’d be listening to string quartets and attending poetry recitals but, hey, that was the Bloomsbury Group for you.) Today, however, not only has the work week stayed constant but, in direct contradiction of the theory, the better-paid now work disproportionately longer hours. In

A flash of the future, over the holidays, that felt like a flash of the past. It happened on Christmas Day, just after lunch, when my father-in-law gave me a virtual reality headset. It looks like a pair of ski goggles. They used to be fearsomely expensive, but recently some bright spark came up with the idea of replacing the screen and the computing power with a slot into which you pop your phone. All you need now is a frame and a couple of lenses, and you’re off into a virtual world. You can get a cardboard one for a tenner. They’re amazing. We all had a go. First,

Controversial I know, but I feel a little sympathy for Tomasz Kroker, the lorry driver jailed for ten years for causing death by dangerous driving; distracted by his mobile phone, he killed four members of the same family on the A34 by failing to notice that the traffic ahead had stopped. I don’t mean to say that he was not grievously at fault. First of all, he was using the phone in his hand. This is a doubly dangerous thing to do. Since you cannot brake fully until you have both hands braced on the wheel, the act of unhanding your phone adds around a second to your reaction time;