This week Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan revealed their plans to dedicate $3 billion to leverage artificial intelligence and other disruptive technologies to solve a seemingly impossible challenge. ‘Can we cure, prevent or manage all disease by the end of this century?’ asked Zuckerberg. He is not the first billionaire to wonder whether technology can extend and preserve life, but maybe one of the few willing to undertake it on behalf of others.

It is fashionable these days to speculate about robots taking jobs. Less well-observed, is the fact that seemingly great companies are being built today with far less jobs to start with. What if you only needed a small number of people to do extraordinary things?

The tragic shootings in Dallas ended dramatically with the unprecedented use of a robotic device to kill Micah Xavier Johnson, a suspect involved in the incident. Although far from sophisticated, the improvised use of a bomb-disposal unit in this way raises an important question: how far should society go in permitting the use of lethal robotics and drones by the police?

Britain’s fateful decision to leave the EU has been cast as a bitter split between young and old. It’s an old tune: selfish baby boomers squatting on the future, at the expense of the millennials. But what if the real conflict were not between generations but rather between the city and the countryside?