Life in the UK will undergo "radical" change in the 2020s due to Brexit, population changes and jobs being taken by robots, a think tank has predicted. The Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) said there would be a Brexit "aftershock" and that the UK's exit from the EU would be "the firing gun on a decade of disruption". It identified wide-ranging factors that would "reshape how we live and work". The government has promised to "forge a new role" for the UK in the world. In its report, the IPPR, a centre-left think tank, said Brexit would be one of the major "disruptive forces" in the years ahead, saying the vote had delivered a "profound shock" to the UK's political and economic order which was likely to set the country on a path of permanently lower growth and living standards.

Apple has been doomed for decades, if the steady stream of headlines about the company, its stock price, and its product lineup are to be believed. If The Macalope has taught us anything, it's that the Apple deathwatch business is a brisk (and bizarre) one. The truth is much more complex. But by any measure, 2016 was a particularly tough year for Apple. The company endured a bitter legal fight with the FBI, saw its first revenue decline in more than a decade, and faced backlash over hardware tweaks in its upgraded flagship products: the iPhone 7's lack of a 3.5mm audio jack and the overhauled MacBook Pro's less-than-pro specs for a decidedly pro price.

You're sitting at home minding your own business when you get a call from your credit card's fraud detection unit asking if you've just made a purchase at a department store in your city. It wasn't you who bought expensive electronics using your credit card – in fact, it's been in your pocket all afternoon. So how did the bank know to flag this single purchase as most likely fraudulent? Credit card companies have a vested interest in identifying financial transactions that are illegitimate and criminal in nature. According to the Federal Reserve Payments Study, Americans used credit cards to pay for 26.2 billion purchases in 2012.

Kengo Kyogoku borrows about ¥122,000 ($1,035) per month in addition to a scholarship and a part-time job, because his mother can't afford to pay his college fees at the prestigious Waseda University in Tokyo. "The amount is huge," said Kyogoku, a sophomore of communications and computer engineering. "I get depressed when I think about it. I wonder if I will have to pay it back forever. But I have no choice."

President-elect Donald Trump on Wednesday showed no inclination toward sanctioning Russia, despite President Barack Obama's push for the country to take steps against Russia over its alleged interference in the election that saw Trump emerge victorious. "I think we ought to get on with our lives. I think that computers have complicated lives very greatly. The whole age of computer has made it where nobody knows exactly what's going on," Trump told reporters at his Florida resort, Mar-a-Lago. "We have speed, we have a lot of other things, but I'm not sure we have the kind of security that we need," he added.

Asked whether the U.S. should sanction Russia over computer hacking on Wednesday, President-elect Donald Trump cast doubt on the findings of U.S. intelligence agencies and said, "We ought to get on with our lives." But it was his next lines that had an oddly familiar ring to them: "I think that computers have complicated lives very greatly," Trump told reporters in Florida, according to multiple media reports. "The whole age of [the] computer has made it where nobody knows exactly what's going on." It isn't the first time a U.S. leader has appeared uncomfortable with technology. When George W. Bush discussed "the Internets" in a 2000 presidential debate against democratic opponent Al Gore, it quickly became a "Bushism" -- a neologism for folksy colloquialisms attributed to the then President. And Bush was still at it in 2006, as evidenced by this CNBC interview in which he famously talked about using "the Google" to view his ranch.

This year has been tough-going in more ways than one and, by most accounts, Singapore's economy is expected to be heading for rougher seas in 2017. According to a survey by the Singapore Business Federation, 63 percent of local companies said the economic climate worsened in 2016 and 48 percent believed the downward spiral would continue in the new year. The Monetary Authority of Singapore also warned that the bleak economic landscape was not expected to clear up next year, which would see trade-related sectors continue to struggle and demands. External demand also would continue to be uneven across the country's key export markets, the central bank said. The tech industry, however, could provide some light amid the economic overcast.

As seen in Part 1 and Part 2 of this series, it is hard not to feel excited about machine learning. First, it empowers machines to teach themselves the tasks that humans can perform but find difficult to "teach" a computer via conventional coding (e.g. Secondly, it enables computers to perform tasks that far exceed human abilities, like analysing terabytes of data at lightning speed to unearth hidden patterns and make sense of them. But it is also hard not to feel some unease about the prospect of self-improving computer systems with increasingly human-like and super-human aptitudes, whether it is the threat of mass unemployment, the erosion of privacy, or simply the inability to understand, validate and trust the technologies that will increasingly impact our lives. These problems that artificial intelligence (AI) is throwing back at us are complex and multifaceted, and to tackle them requires concerted endeavours by our technologists, entrepreneurs, lawmakers and thinkers from all fields and walks of life. It will be a test of humankind's collective wisdom to ensure that our social institutions keep up with our technological progress. The advent of autonomous vehicles (AVs) illustrates the wide-ranging economic, legal and ethical questions that new technologies raise. AVs are already roaming the streets and conveying passengers in parts of the world, and many more are expected to hit the roads over the next five years as tech companies like Google, Baidu and Lyft race against incumbent automakers to make reliable and affordable self-driving cars. This is likely to dramatically alter the economics of transportation, from ownership rate to utilisation rate. It is estimated that in the US and the UK our cars on average are being driven just 5% of the time and they spend the remaining 95% in a garage or a car park.[1] That ratio may well be reversed if the availability of door-to-door transport is no longer linked to the availability of human drivers.

The Machine Intelligence 3.0 landscape above was created by Shivon Zilis and James Cham. This is Part 5 of a 5-part series on 5 Disruptions to Marketing (you can start with Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4 if you haven't already): Because I'm allergic to hype, I expected to be itching incessantly while writing this. "Artificial intelligence" (AI) is one of those overly broad terms that has rocketed to buzzword mania in marketing circles this year. Whatever problem you need to solve or marketing fantasy you'd like to indulge, there's someone telling (selling) you that the answer is AI. It's bigger than big data was at this stage of its hype cycle (although, as we'll see, the two are closely related). But the truth is that AI is already having a significant impact on marketing.

Donald Trump's election as president has made many small-business owners more upbeat about 2017. Dean Bingham says he's cautiously optimistic because business picked up at his auto repair shop after the election -- people who had put off fixing their cars have decided it was time to get them serviced. "Over the last month, customers have been coming in with optimism that they didn't have the last few years," said Bingham, owner of a Mr. Transmission/Milex franchise in Greenville, S.C. The shop has been so busy, Bingham is looking to hire a seventh employee to help out in the front while he works on cars. Although many business owners are more confident because their revenue looks likely to increase in 2017 due to the overall improving economy, they're also optimistic because they expect Trump to deliver on promises to lower taxes and roll back regulations, including parts of the healthcare law.