New towns

In all the tributes to Her late Majesty’s constancy, dignity, wisdom and devotion to duty, not enough has been said about her political cunning. But BBC1’s The Longest Reign: The Queen and Her People made a compelling case that Elizabeth II knew just how to tilt the balance. When she toured the new towns of the 1950s (see image), waving at the crowds with their little Union Flags and taking tea with the young families on the just-built housing estates, she was giving her wordless blessing to the welfare state. When she wanted to bolster the No side in the 2014 Scottish independence referendum, her intervention – commenting to a

Since technology is developing at such light-speed pace, why does it feel so strangely slow? There is a sense that driverless cars, green energy and of course certain vaccines are, for all their breakneck pace, still taking for ever to arrive. Watching the future emerge is like watching slow-motion footage of a high-speed train. We know it’s going quickly — but can we not just fast-forward? Perhaps it’s merely our heightened expectations, our diminished boredom thresholds. Some of our most distinguished thinkers and entrepreneurs have warned that an all-powerful artificial intelligence, badly calibrated, might represent the greatest threat to the long-term survival of humanity. That they’ve been warning this for