Technology

Time was when 'to boldly go where no man has gone before' was not just a line from Star Trek. It was a national dream. Space exploration transcended political divisions. When Nasa pulled off the first moon landing, the world watched in awe. Last week, the Star Trek actor William Shatner was blasted into space on one of Jeff Bezos’s rockets. Yet there was no shared wonder. Instead, there was criticism. Scientists have more pressing problems to solve, argued detractors. In a rebuke to Bezos, who is pouring his fortune into space travel, Prince William told the BBC: 'We need some of the world’s greatest brains… trying to repair the planet, not trying to find the next place to go and live.' Such arguments miss three key points.

Trends in New York City tend to foretell trends in London, whose fashions in turn set the pace for smaller British cities. After a summer in the Apple, I can therefore provide British urbanites with a glimpse of their future. I get around on what I newly perceive as a dumpy, sluggish pushbike. Mayor Bill de Blasio has invested extensively in the city’s cycling infrastructure — much to the resentment of motorists, and often for good reason. As London drivers will also attest, removing whole lanes from congested thoroughfares is rarely justified by the modest number of car trips that cyclists obviate. Still, given the soaring popularity of two-wheeled transport, when chugging against a headwind alongside the Hudson I ought to have plenty of company. Indeed, I do.

Two years ago, Lauren Goode, a senior writer at Wired magazine, cancelled her wedding and it was awkward. These things always are, but you get over it because the brain slowly learns how to skip over painful memories. Or it did, before social media. Goode has made a career out of wittily stripping away the pretensions of consumer tech, and when her wedding plans blew up consumer tech had its revenge. She ended her eight-year relationship in 2019 — but the internet didn’t get the message and kept confronting her with ‘a cyborg version of me, a digital ghost, that is still getting married’.

I often argue that, in theory at least, well-made cocktails are indisputably better than wines costing 20 times more. My argument runs as follows. In making a cocktail, you can mix, in any combination you wish, any of the liquids known to humanity. In making a wine, you are stuck with using grape juice harvested by grumpy Frenchmen from scrubland east of the Gironde. Mathematically, the odds that the best drink you can generate derives only from a few bunches of such grapes is so small as to be infinitesimal. Besides, almost no one drinks grape juice, and nobody has ever seriously tried to sell non-alcoholic wine. If it really tasted all that good, these things would have taken off by now. Yet one reason people like wine is because our judgment is highly relative.

In April, the Harris network of London schools was held to ransom by hackers. ‘The first thing I did was panic,’ said Sir Dan Moynihan, the chief executive. It wasn’t simply that their computers didn’t work; many of the 50 schools couldn’t function. Some couldn’t open because their internet-controlled doors were jammed shut. A demand for £3 million arrived. Moynihan pointed out this was a ‘completely insane’ amount for an educational charity to pay — but his pleas through an intermediary were ignored. The hackers insisted that unless Harris paid up, the schools would continue to be locked out of their networks, and sensitive data would be leaked online too.