Minimum wage increases are sending shock waves across the fast-food industry. On Tuesday, Jack in the Box's CEO said the fast-food chain is considering swapping some cashiers with robots as the minimum wage rises in California. "As we see the rising costs of labor, it just makes sense" to consider adding new automated technology, CEO... Continue Reading →

The University of Everywhere is on the horizon. It’s going to emerge while the current generation of young people mature into adulthood. This is what it will look like and what attending it will mean: Organizations such as edX, Coursera, Udacity, Saylor, OLI and a range of others like the United Kingdom’s long-established Open University... Continue Reading →

Major chains can’t get enough of the sales-boosting devices

The marijuana industry is growing so fast that if the government legalized it nationally it would outsell ice cream. A new report from Marijuana Business Daily estimates that the total demand for marijuana, including the black market, is $45-$50 billion. Annual ice cream sales are only $5.1 billion. Total recreational cannabis sales in the U.S. at... Continue Reading →

The idea of a basic guaranteed income is getting a trial run in a Canadian province for three years. Four thousand randomly selected Ontario residents will get thousands of dollars a year, and in exchange, they give up some social supports, while the government gets back some money. Economics correspondent Paul Solman talks with some... Continue Reading →

The business world, having reinvented itself multiple times, is in the midst of a fourth industrial revolution that features the economic and social fusion of the physical and digital worlds. Industry 4.0 is not a phenomenon limited to technology companies. Businesses in all sectors are, or soon will be, evaluating and adopting new models that... Continue Reading →

A silent revolution is arriving on our streets. Before too long, commuters will use their mobiles to summon fully autonomous robot taxis. These will collect them from home and drive them to the closest metro station, from where they can catch a train to work in the city centre. These zero-emission vehicles will be electric,... Continue Reading →

Researchers at the University of Toronto have developed a handheld 3D skin printer that can apply layers of skin tissue directly onto patients to cover and heal wounds. According to the researchers, the printer is an alternative to a conventional skin graft, but doesn't require healthy skin to be removed from a donor and grafted on to... Continue Reading →

In some ways, Synthego looks like any other Silicon Valleystartup. Inside its beige business park facilities, a five-minute drive from Facebook HQ, rows of nondescript black server racks whir and blink and vent. But inside the metal shelving, the company isn’t pushing around ones and zeros to keep the internet running. It’s making molecules to rewrite the code of life.... Continue Reading →

We are on the verge of transforming one of society’s most fundamental building blocks: manufacturing. As new technologies enable manufacturers to customize everything, these same agents are quickly turning consumers into inventors. Following the agricultural revolution some 5,000 years ago, humanity made a huge breakthrough that allowed complex societies to flourish: we specialized. It made no sense for each... Continue Reading →