Science and Technology

James Farrar, chair of the United Private Hire Drivers’ branch of the IWGB union, spoke to Solidarity about working for Uber and the cancellation of their licence. I am a founder as well as the chair of the United Private Hire Drivers’ (UPHD) branch of the IWGB union. We came into being because there was no dedicated organisation for minicab drivers in London. All the other trade unions also represent taxi drivers and operators. Some refuse membership to private hire drivers. The industry has been rife with labour abuse for decades. Uber has taken that to an industrial scale. For our members...

Even those outside the tech space would struggle to have missed the recent hype around automation and artificial intelligence (AI). Fuelled by rapid developments in technological innovation hyped in the last two years, although mostly developed over the last two decades, many cerebral types suggest we may be at the start of be some significant changes in capitalist production. They even gave it a grandiose name: “The Fourth Industrial Revolution”. Socialists, marxists, progressives have a history of taking technology and advocating its use for more than just the most efficient exploitation...

Life expectancy in England, which has been steadily rising for more than 100 years, has stalled. Government and World Health Organisation advisor Sir Michael Marmot looked at Office for National Statistics data showing that the rate of increase in life expectancy had nearly halved since 2010. Before 2010 life expectancy at birth had been increasing by one year every five years for women and by one year every 3.5 years for men. After 2010 that rate fell to an increase of one year for every 10 years for women and one year for every six years for men. Marmot described this slow in growth as...

The debate in Solidarity on nuclear power is in danger of missing three points. The first is that all forms of energy production carry risks; the second is that some risks are more visible than others; the third is that some risks are exaggerated while others are ignored or minimised. Laker and Zubrowski ( Solidarity 431) warn that the left should not support nuclear power because of “its radioactive byproduct, unique [but unspecified] risk” and contribution to carbon emissions. Nuclear’s carbon emissions (due to mining, its use of concrete and steel) are essentially one-off and minimal: they...

In 2008, the International Commission on Stratigraphy created a Working Group on the Anthropocene (WGA) to examine the addition of a new epoch to the geological time scale. In August 2016, all but one of the WGA’s 35 members agreed that the Anthropocene is “stratigraphically real”, and 30 agreed that the new epoch should be formally added to the time scale. Majority opinion also indicated in favour of the view that globally synchronous changes to the Earth System most clearly intensified in the “Great Acceleration” of the mid-20th century.1 While recognition of recent transformations to the...

The 2016 World Congress on Pain, meeting in Yokohama in late September, held a packed Special Session on Opioids. The theme was their role in pain medicine. This might seem fairly settled since the analgesic properties of opium have been known for at least 3,000 years. Not so! The scene was set by eminent US pain specialist Jane Ballantyne, president of Physicians for Responsible Opioid Prescribing and adviser to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). She described how over the last 25 years sales of prescription opioids have soared, as have emergency admissions and deaths...

“Against stupidity, the gods themselves struggle in vain”, Goethe. Towards the end of January, “mostly supine” MPs passed a bill after a “clueless debate”. The Psychoactive Substances Act which is intended to ban “legal highs” (novel psychoactive substances — NPSs) is “one of the stupidest, most dangerous and unscientific pieces of drugs legislation ever conceived." “Watching MPs debate...it was clear most didn’t have a clue. They misunderstood medical evidence, mispronounced drug names, and generally floundered. It would have been funny except lives and liberty were on the line.” Not my words...

Women are notoriously under-represented in science, but the situation seems worse because such women scientists as there are tend to be misunderstood, misinterpreted, under-rated or ignored. Out of the 52 in Rachel Swaby’s book, the general reader might only have heard of Mary Anning (fossil hunter), Rachel Carson (author of Silent Spring), Rosalind Franklin (the “dark lady of DNA,” played by Nicole Kidman in the West End play, Photograph 51), Ada Lovelace (Byron’s daughter and pioneer of computing), Florence Nightingale (famed for nursing in the Crimean war), and Hedy Lamarr (celebrated...

Homoeopathic medicines do nothing that a placebo does not do. This is because they contain no active ingredient... like a placebo. But the NHS spends our money on them. The “rationale” behind homoeopathy is that “like cures like”. This idea had been around at least since the time of Hippocrates (about 400 BC) but was formulated as the basis of a “natural” system of medicine by Samuel Hahnemann, a doctor in Germany in the 1780s. He rightly objected to medical practices of the time, such as bloodletting, which did more harm than good, and soon gave up his practice, fearing being “a murderer or...

Bruce Robinson replies to me on automation ( Solidarity 372) that he opposes, not all automation or sidelining of traditional skills, but automation of complex and skilled processes (as in the chemical industry) and driverless vehicles. I’ve spent most of the last week or so at a picket line outside a container terminal in the port of Brisbane. The terminal we’ve been picketing has driverless vehicles (automated stacking cranes) which run on rails; the next-door terminal, just over a fence, has driverless vehicles without rails (automated straddle carriers). I’ve heard from miners on the...