James Adams

After the helicopter crash that killed basketball star Kobe Bryant, his daughter and seven others, there has been a rash of speculation on social media that helicopters are inherently unsafe to fly. Perhaps the most extreme example is British businessman, Lord Alan Sugar, an experienced pilot, who says he will no longer fly in helicopters because they defy physics. He should know better. After a number of high-profile accidents, it might seem that helicopters have a poor safety record. In 2018, five people died when a helicopter giving a sightseeing tour of New York City crashed into the Hudson river. In the past two years there have been other deaths in Hawaii, the Grand Canyon and Manhattan.

A revolution is under way that will fundamentally change the way humans relate to their cars, so that the vehicle more closely resembles the living room with all the stress of driving removed and all the possibilities of distracting entertainment.Cars will soon become an extension of movie theater, concert venue and 3D videogame as the full potential of 5G communication is unleashed, along with a business imperative of advertisers wishing to monetize the opportunity of drivers being a captive audience for hours at a time.A taste of the future was glimpsed at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas earlier this month.

Ransomware, the locking up of large networks through hacking until payment is made, is exploding. Recent attacks have crippled more than 200 city and local government networks in Baltimore, Albany and Atlanta, while specific hacking tools have been successfully used against mortgage companies, universities, hospitals, banks and consulting firms. A report this month from the cybersecurity firm, Emsisoft, reveals that the cost of ransomware in the US last year was over $7.5 billion, involving 113 state and local governments, 764 health care providers and 1,233 schools. In 2018, the FBI received reports of 1,500 ransomware attacks (the latest available FBI figures) which does not include hundreds of attacks that were never reported with ransoms secretly paid.

There is an epic moment in the latest Gerard Butler movie Angel Has Fallen where he gets to save the life of the US president (again). The bad guys launch a swarm of dozens of micro drones able to detect and kill dozens of Secret Service agents, destroying anything and anyone that might get in the way of their mission to kill the president.It’s a chilling moment in the movie that clearly demonstrates just how powerless mere mortals will be in the face of superior technology that can operate independently of any direct human control.As with so much in Hollywood these days, movie truth is remarkably close to a reality that has been prefaced since 1984 when the first Terminator movie appeared and suggested the idea of autonomous robots as terrifying killing machines.

Coming soon to as neighborhood near you: cameras everywhere. On every traffic light, intersection, telephone pole and storefront, with tracking software that uses facial, gesture and heartbeat recognition. That identity data is combined with web search history, conversations with Alexa and Siri, Amazon purchases and Twitter. A complete individual profile, with a score measuring social reliability, can be constructed and shared with law enforcement and intelligence agencies.This might sound too dystopian to be true.

Households in America produce 254 tons of trash annually and only 34 percent is recycled. Every person creates 1,316 pounds of trash destined the landfill, about the weight of a grizzly bear. America represents 4 percent of the world’s population yet produces 12 percent of the world’s waste and Germany recycles around twice as much as the US. The statistics tell one story. A different tale is that recycling programs across the country are failing as companies struggle to make money and the amount of waste that ends up as landfill is growing every year. It’s a depressing story of failed ambition confronted by market realities that has left the mountains of trash growing as a monument to American excess and unchecked environmental pollution.

To those who understand it, 5G is the next exciting piece of technology and it is coming to your neighborhood soon. For the rest of us, it is a number and letter that mean almost nothing, but we talk about it as if we really do understand our future and how great it's going to be.The theory goes that 5G is a game-changing new generation of wireless technology, a little like the iPhone of today compared with the old rotary telephone. The scientists behind 5G believe it will, at last, deliver very high data speeds to every connected device and do so with extraordinary reliability.Today, 5G has been deployed in 20 American cities from New York to Atlanta with a further 10 coming online before the end of the year.

It seems like the perfect socialist ideal: massive unemployment, inequality in income and jobs along with growing class divisions can all be met by a common income that keeps every family fed, housed and healthy. Such is the current debate that is engaging every country that fears the fallout from the Artificial Intelligence revolution that is likely to eliminate tens of millions of jobs – up to 33 percent of all jobs in the US according to a McKinsey study. At the same time, many students leaving high school or graduating from college may face the reality of never being able to work. With social tensions across America already high, the idea of a Universal Basic Income for all seems like an attractive solution.

This article is in The Spectator’s inaugural US edition. Subscribe here to get yours. You have no phone service, no television, no GPS for the car and no road atlas because you threw it out in 2009. Planes aren’t flying, and that spinning sound you can’t hear is the sound of space hardware floating out of our control. So dependent have we become on satellites for everything from communications to traffic control that a day without them would mean catastrophe. In the new space race, victory won’t mean landing on the moon or sending a rocket to Mars, but developing a new arsenal to wage and win war in space.

The attack on Saudi Arabia’s oil facilities by Houthi rebels using a fleet of 10 drones loaded with explosives has caused serious damage and will result in a global production cut of around five percent. The Houthi strike was the second aimed at Saudis oil facilities after a previous effort last month resulted in minimal damage. The Houthi drones were likely supplied by Iran, which has a large drone fleet and has been arming the rebel group in Yemen for years. Saudi Arabia is likely to launch retaliatory strikes against both the Houthis and Iran. Drones have become a new frontier in warfare allowing activist groups and nations access to a potent weapon that can be used for surveillance or as a remotely piloted bomb.

The Climate Apocalypse is upon us. More carbon monoxide has been discharged into the atmosphere in the last 50 years than in the whole of human history that went before. Carbon traps heat and the world is getting hotter. Heat holds water vapor and so rainfall is getting more frequent while heat waves last longer. Ice at the poles melts and coastal cities face inundation as sea levels rise. But the doom confidently predicted by many climate scientists around the world is being met by optimism among other scientists who are employing innovative technologies that may transform the debate and offer hope for us all. These technological breakthroughs will impact all aspects of climate change from carbon emissions to food production and all forms of energy.

America is at war in cyberspace and is losing badly. The US has some of the world’s most advanced cyber weapons, but no political will or a coherent national strategy. As a result, America’s enemies see a fatal weakness, and are exploiting it every day. In July, the Senate Intelligence Committee reported that Russia hacked into the electoral systems of all 50 US states. The committee did not find that the Russians directly interfered with the voting, but is clear that they have developed that capability. 'While the Committee does not know with confidence what Moscow’s intentions were, Russia may have been probing vulnerabilities in voting systems to exploit later,’ the report said.

The decision by Microsoft to invest $1 billion in OpenAI, a company jointly founded by Elon Musk, brings closer the time when machines threaten to replace humans in any tasks that humans do today. OpenAI, which was founded just four years ago, has pioneered a range of technologies which have pushed the frontiers of massive data processing in defiance of the physical and computer capabilities that governed such developments for generations. Now, with the investment from Microsoft, the pace of technological change is likely to accelerate rapidly. Today, Artificial Intelligence is at a level of what is known as 'weak AI’ and relies on humans to create the algorithms which allow for the crunching of massive amounts of data to produce new and often predictive results.