Technology

Britain’s skills crisis was addressed by the country’s leading educationalists today at The Spectator’s half-day conference, Giving Britain the skills it needs. Matthew Hancock, Minister for Skills and Enterprise, delivered the key note speech. In it he outlined his plans for better preparing young people for employment. ‘I’m determined that apprenticeships  become the established route for all school-leavers who don’t go to university; not as a second option,’ he said, before adding that ‘demanding higher standards of people isn’t setting them up for failure, as we’ve often heard from the left.’ Hancock’s speech focussed on the need to establish how technology must be used to ‘spread opportunity.

Black cab drivers are striking in London today because they are angry that Uber – a rival taxi service supported by Google – is undercutting their market. They will argue that Uber’s drivers are using a smartphone app to calculate fares, despite it being illegal for private vehicles to be fitted with taximeters. I couldn’t care less about the intricacies of this argument (the High Court can figure that one out). All I care about is getting home safely and it not costing too much. Uber offers me that. I’m wary of jumping into unlicensed minicabs. As those spooky tube adverts remind you, ‘If your minicab's not booked, it's just a stranger's car’. But with Uber, they are booked.

[audioplayer src="http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_8_May_2014_v4.mp3" title="James Delingpole and Daniel Knowles discuss the gilded generation" startat=42] Listen [/audioplayer]No one likes being told they’ve never had it so good. When Lord Young of Graffham tried it three years ago, he was quickly forced out of his job as David Cameron’s enterprise adviser. And rightly so, you might think, for it was an affront both to the evidence before our eyes and to our most basic human instinct: that the past was golden and ahead of us lies only misery, penury, falling standards, overcrowding and the on-going destruction of our once green and pleasant land.

If you’re reading this on Firefox, you can rest assured that your custom is not going towards any hateful, disgusting, evil people who might disagree with you on something. Not now that Mozilla boss Brendan Eich has been forced to quit for supporting Proposition 8, the Californian bill opposing gay marriage. According to the BBC: ‘Mozilla's executive chairwoman Mitchell Baker announced the decision in a blog post. "Mozilla prides itself on being held to a different standard and, this past week, we didn't live up to it," she wrote. "We know why people are hurt and angry, and they are right: it's because we haven't stayed true to ourselves. "We didn't act like you'd expect Mozilla to act. We didn't move fast enough to engage with people once the controversy started.

Can we protect children from the darker aspects of the internet? That was the question put to the panel last night, when the Spectator hosted a feisty discussion about the effects of technology on childhood. Child abuse, pornography and online dating were discussed, as was the idea that children have become self-centered and socially inept. Andrew Neil chaired the event, and was joined by culture minister Ed Vaizey, psychologist Oliver James, The Spectator’s Rory Sutherland and Microsoft’s Jacqueline Beauchere. Each panelist presented a different angle on the subject of The ‘Always On’ Generation, but all agreed that technology had created new opportunities and challenges.

Are children utterly obsessed with technology? Yes, is the obvious answer to that question, but debate about whether is it a good or bad thing rages around forums such as Mumsnet. Many believe the innocence of childhood has been ruined by unfettered access to the Internet, videos, games and goodness knows what else. Others instead think that every generation of children is different and parents have to move with the times instead of yearning for their own past. I have to admit I’m a little biased. I built my first computer when I was six and spent most of my teenage years faffing around with websites and attempting to code. No doubt I missed out on the joyful pursuits of kicking a football but I loved every minute of it.

Imagine if the BBC’s excitable commentators had been asked to cover the building of Sochi’s facilities, rather than the Winter Olympics themselves. ‘Yeesss!!’ Ed Leigh might have yelled, ‘That’s the 21st construction contract for the big lad from St Petersburg, Arkady Rotenberg. Seven point four billion dollars’ worth, a new Olympic record — more than the entire cost of the 2010 Vancouver Games! How cool is that for the 62-year-old who was Vladimir Putin’s boyhood judo partner? Up next, the $9.

Vodafone, which has just collected an £84 billion windfall from the sale of its 45 per cent stake in Verizon Wireless of the US, is either a hero or an anti-hero of British capitalism, according to taste. To me, the world’s second-largest mobile phone business is heroic because it achieved that position from a standing start just 30 years ago, when poker-playing Ernie Harrison, chief executive of a military radio manufacturer called Racal, bet everything he had on the future of mobile telephony.