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The rich have grown afraid of screens. They want their children to play with blocks, and tech-free private schools are booming. Humans are more expensive, and rich people are willing and able to pay for them.

classes have been replaced by software, much of the academic day now spent in silence on a laptop. In Utah, thousands of children do a brief, state-provided preschool program at home via laptop.

And children who spent more than two hours a day looking at a screen got lower scores on thinking and language tests,

it will certainly transform our daily routines: imagine driving hands-free while having the luxury of reading a book, taking a nap, or guiltlessly texting on the road. At the same time, something far more interesting - and still unexplored - is the potential transformation of our cities themselves

blurring the distinction between private and public modes of transportation. "Your" car could give you a lift to work in the morning and then, rather than sitting idle in a parking lot, give a lift to someone else in your family - or, for that matter, to anyone else in your neighbourhood, social media circles, or city.

This implies a city in which everyone can travel on demand with just one-fifth of the number of cars in use today

"Since about 1955 ... children's free play has been continually declining, at least partly because adults have exerted ever-increasing control over children's activities,"

It provides critical life experiences without which young children cannot develop into confident and competent adults.

Gray sees the loss of play time as a double whammy: we have not only taken away the joys of free play, we have replaced them with emotionally stressful activities. "[A]s a society, we have come to the conclusion that to protect children from danger and to educate them, we must deprive them of the very activity that makes them happiest and place them for ever more hours in settings where they are more or less continually directed and evaluated by adults, setting almost designed to produce anxiety and depression."

Amazon.com Inc was in talks to launch a free ad-supported music service, which is expected to intensify competition for the music streaming leader.

Amazon would market the free music service through its voice-activated Echo speakers, a Billboard report said on Friday, adding that it could become available as early as this week.

a new kind of Silicon Valley parent. Instead of tricking out their homes with all the latest technology, many of today's parents working or living in the tech world are limiting — and sometimes outright banning — how much screen time their kids get.

short-term consequences among teens and adolescents who are heavy users of tech. These include heightened risks for depression, anxiety, and, in extreme cases, suicide.

parents told Business Insider that it's often hard to strike a balance in limiting tech use, since kids quickly begin to feel left out of their peer group. The longer parents try to impose their restrictions, the more they fear they're essentially raising a well-adjusted outcast.

From staff-free ticket offices to students who can learn online, it seems there is no corner of economic life in which people are not being replaced by machines.

One of the reasons Google is investing so much is that whoever owns the communications system for driverless cars will own the 21st century's equivalent of the telephone network or money clearing system: this will be a licence to print money.

The only new jobs will be in the design and marketing of the cars, and in writing the computer software that will allow them to navigate their journeys, along with the apps for our mobile phones that will help us to use them better

A company in Japan is building an indoor lettuce farm that will be completely tended by robots and computers.

The company, named Spread, expects the factory to open in 2017, and the fully automated farming process could make the lettuce cheaper and better for the environment.

The plants can be grown hydroponically without exhausting soil resources.

Today, as part of its annual Hour of Code event, Code.org is launching a free online tutorial that prompts kids to build their own games, based on characters in the upcoming Star Wars: The Force Awakens.

where they’ll learn to write code to design their own games featuring characters like R2-D2 ad C-3PO.

Of the 5 million students currently registered on Code.org, around 2 million are girls and around 2 million are black or Hispanic.

we have a literal interpretation of free will now in the context of algorithms, which is: Are you making the final choice?

a third of your choices on Amazon are driven by recommendations. Eighty percent of viewing activities on Netflix are driven by algorithmic recommendations. Seventy percent of the time people spend on YouTube is driven by algorithmic recommendations

We might see less than 0.01% of any search results, because rarely do we even cross page one. The algorithm has decided which pages we look at. So yes, they’re making a lot of choices for us.