Amazon and Uber are held up as shining examples of businesses that have succeeded by putting technology at their core. But while tech has delivered the innovation, sharper business practices, such as tax avoidance and precarious employment conditions, have played a role in delivering the profits

Ireland and Apple appeared to win an overwhelming victory at The General Court of the European Union, but if the basis for winning was that the tech giant did not get any special treatment, it suggests the Irish people may have lost a lot more than €13bn if the government has allowed multinationals to get out of paying the 12.5% corporation tax.

Living through lockdown was, for nearly all of us, a life-changing experience, something never to be forgotten. From the oldest to the youngest, all were affected at some level. Schools, pubs, clubs, sports, shops, offices were closed down, stringent restrictions were imposed on how we lived our daily lives and socialised with each other.

Ideas come in many shapes and sizes, great and small, good and bad, priceless and worthless, powerful and pitiful, rare and plentiful. But whatever they are, they all emerge from the same source: us. They are given form by you and me, by people down the road or on the other side of the world.

For all the work taking place in the development of artificial intelligence (AI) there seems to be an air of pervasive pessimism over what it will mean for the future of the human race. You don’t have to think of the Terminator films or Blade Runner as documentaries to be wary of the dangers AI poses. It wouldn’t be unfair to suggest that fears of human kind being superseded by machines of our own creation probably first emerged about two minutes after we dreamed up the notion of robots.