'Hidden numbers' have a profound effect on our lives - from online dating and falling in love to manipulating our decisions through targeted advertising and fake news. In this year's Royal Institution Christmas Lectures, Mathematician and author Hannah Fry will explore how maths, numbers and data patterns can help explain make sense of life's human experiences. She will also be asking the big ethical questions about the data (and trust) that we gift companies such as Netflix and Amazon and how they use this information to develop new unprecedented levels of control. 'I'd argue that maths is the most important idea that humans have ever had. It's the foundation of science,' said Dr Fry.

The behavioral revolution in economics was triggered by a simple, haunting question: what if people don't act rationally? In the online world, once expected to be a place of ready information and easy collaboration, lies and hate can spread faster than truth and kindness. For example, when predicting sales, employees often hide bad deals and selectively report the good ones. AI stands at the crossroads of the behavioral question, with the potential to make matters worse or to elicit better outcomes from us. The key to better outcomes is to boost AI's emotional quotient -- its EQ.

Before any technology is widely adopted and becomes ubiquitous in our daily lives, there is a protracted period of unfamiliarity, confusion, and even great fear in the layperson. Many of us watched family members of the Greatest Generation greet the answering machine, CD player, and home computer with varying amounts of trepidation and even antipathy. Many Boomers treated the dawn of the internet age and smartphones in kind. And while many Flower Children are tech savvy and not running in horror from the inevitable future to come, they are nonetheless reluctant to embrace the arrival of the latest and ever evolving classifications of technologies that innovate, disrupt, and bring radical and revolutionary change to the status quo of our daily lives. Of course this latest cluster of technologies is arriving a bit too late for the Boomers to broadly adopt them as it pertains to their retirements and financial futures, though we should encourage them to do so. Cryptocurrencies, AI, and Machine Learning, however, make their auspicious arrival just as GenX and their younger Millennial and GenZ counterparts are faced with an uncertain and changing economic landscape of massive personal and national debt, economic globalization, and displacement due to automation.