Using simple hand gestures during video calls seems to improve people's experience of such interactions. Paul Hills at University College London (UCL) came up with a set of gestures after many video calls during covid-19 lockdowns. "It was born out of my frustration with [online] meetings," says Hills – who also works as a management consultant – during a video call with New Scientist in which he uses the hand actions. In online meetings, he began informally testing a range of gestures, including ones borrowed from his work as a volunteer lifeguard and as a mentor to an addiction support group. Initial positive feedback prompted him to team up with Daniel Richardson at UCL and other colleagues to more formally test the signals.

In 1900 many people worked in dreadful conditions, doing repetitive and tedious jobs. The streets were full of horses and carts. Life expectancy for someone born that year was just 41. Wind forward to 1962 and working conditions had greatly improved. The streets were full of cars and trucks and the jet age had begun. Life expectancy had nearly doubled, to 71.

The expectation that artificial intelligence and automation will replace a significant number of human workers in the next decade is undisputed. What kinds of jobs and how soon, however, is still being worked out. In 2015, a CEDA report suggested 40 per cent of jobs in Australia were highly "susceptible to computerisation" in the next 15 years. Last year consultancy AlphaBeta said three million Australian jobs (around a third of all jobs) were at risk by 2030. The issue is a global one.

Hundreds of AI researchers have taken a glimpse into their crystal balls to try to determine when machines will finally exceed human capabilities. A survey run by the Future of Humanity Institute, a research center that studies existential risks at the University of Oxford in the UK and Yale University in the US, asked 352 machine learning researchers to predict how AI will progress. "Researchers believe there is a 50 per cent chance of AI outperforming humans in all tasks in 45 years and of automating all human jobs in 120 years," according to the results published on arXiv. It's a tricky question and opinions vary wildly. Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking have been vocal about humanity's doom at AI takeover, whereas researchers like Andrew Ng, former chief scientist at Baidu, and Oren Etzioni, CEO of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, have a more conservative attitude. The survey asks the question: "When will AI exceed human performance?"

For thousands of years humans believed that authority came from the gods. Then, during the modern era, humanism gradually shifted authority from deities to people. Jean-Jacques Rousseau summed up this revolution in Emile, his 1762 treatise on education. When looking for the rules of conduct in life, Rousseau found them "in the depths of my heart, traced by nature in characters which nothing can efface. I need only consult myself with regard to what I wish to do; what I feel to be good is good, what I feel to be bad is bad." Humanist thinkers such as Rousseau convinced us that our own feelings and desires were the ultimate source of meaning, and that our free will was, therefore, the highest authority of all.