Category: The Conversation

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Lucy Gill-Simmen, Associate Dean (Education & Student Experience) Faculty of Business & Law, Royal Holloway, University of London

The UK’s proposed post-16 education and skills policy promises a nation “where nobody is left behind”. The country’s modern industrial strategy 2025 talks of a workforce ready for a decade of growth, green jobs and artificial intelligence. It is the language of momentum and modernity, but beneath the optimism of these papers and policies lies unease.

We have a plan for skills, but do we still have a philosophy of education? The refrain that “nobody gets left behind” only holds meaning if we first know where we are going.

Education is not merely about producing employable subjects, but cultivating human beings capable of judgement, imagination and democratic participation. Without that moral compass, our forward motion risks becoming little more than acceleration without direction.

In 1949, Albert Einstein lamented: “It is nothing short of a miracle that modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry.”

More than seven decades later, it feels prophetic. Across higher education in the UK, a quiet malaise has taken hold. Universities have become fluent in the language of metrics, policies and dashboards, while students have become fluent in anxiety and debt.

We speak earnestly of agility and alignment, yet without clear direction. Once the moral and intellectual conscience of society, the British university risks becoming something far more ordinary: an institution of conformity, competing for the same diminishing pool of students and, in doing so, becoming indistinguishable from its peers.

This creeping homogenisation reflects the global commercialisation of higher education, where institutions mirror market logics (such as supply and demand) rather than challenge them, often at the expense of curiosity, critical thinking and imagination.

US educational reformer John Dewey described education as “life itself”. Brazilian educator Paulo Freire warned that schooling without liberation (meaning here agency and active learning rather than passively absorbing information) becomes “the banking of facts”, while the feminist author and academic known as bell hooks viewed education as “the practice of freedom”.

These were not romantic slogans; they were blueprints for survival. These people understood that education is not training – it is a process of becoming. Yet today, the language of learning has been colonised by a language of logistics.

Students are “learners”, teachers “deliverers”, and curiosity has no place in key performance indicators. The university system is increasingly one of transaction and we are building a system that can measure everything except meaning.

Opportunity in a crisis

The world is moving faster than the curriculum. Recently leaked documents suggest Amazon could replace up to 600,000 workers with robots – a glimpse of a labour market where efficiency outruns employment. If automation can transform one of the world’s largest employers, then the question for higher education is urgent: what are we preparing young people for?

The answer cannot be “the jobs of tomorrow”, because those jobs may not exist. The task now is to educate for adaptability, imagination and moral judgment, the qualities no algorithm can replace. As the historian and philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote in 1961: “Education is the point at which we decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it.” This is the work before us.

The government has correctly diagnosed a skills shortage. But its policy misses a meaning shortage. We need not only employable graduates but capable citizens – people able to reason ethically, collaborate across cultures and invent purpose where automation erases routine.

Higher education must recover its voice as the space where society asks its most difficult questions. What is progress for? What is prosperity without dignity? What does it mean to flourish or even to matter in an age of intelligent machines? These are not rhetorical questions – they are the foundation of survival strategies for a civilisation on the cusp of reinvention.

The courage to begin again

Universities across the world are banging the drum of transformation, insisting that doing things differently is the way forward. But how many actually are doung things differently? For all the rhetoric of innovation, much of the sector remains bound by inherited models of teaching and governance.

Into this inertia steps a new generation of institutions reimagining what a university can be. The “challenger university” model exemplified by Minerva University in the US and the London Interdisciplinary School in the UK, has begun to disrupt long-held assumptions about place, teaching and purpose.

These universities treat the world itself as a campus, fusing digital delivery, experiential learning and global immersion to craft education around curiosity rather than compliance.

Traditional universities are slowly following suit, rolling out accelerated degrees and hybrid formats with experiential learning embedded in their cities. At Royal Holloway Business School, the BSc Business and Management (London Accelerated) degree was built from this conviction. It is faster – two years all in instead of three – but not shallower.

London itself becomes the campus as students collaborate with businesses and design projects that connect innovation to ethics. They learn to work with artificial intelligence as a creative partner, not a threat.

This is not a course in survival; it is a course in significance. It teaches that employability follows from imagination, and that imagination begins with purpose. At its heart lies the courage of moral imagination: the willingness to envision not only alternative futures, but better ones.

Higher education stands at a fork in the road. One path leads deeper into optimisation: faster courses, tighter metrics, closer alignment to industry. The other path leads back to truth, curiosity and moral imagination. The first path is safe but soulless. The second is uncertain but alive.

And perhaps that is what this moment demands: to make education full of wonder again. When acceleration becomes an end in itself, education becomes soulless; when it is used to support inquiry, reflection and ethical engagement, it can do the opposite.

Universities must not only expand access but redefine ambition. They must teach not just for the labour market but for the human market – the realm of creativity, empathy and responsibility that automation cannot touch.

So yes, let us commit to no one being left behind. But let us also dare to ask: towards what? Towards compliance or consciousness? Towards growth or grace and fulfilment? If we want education to matter again, we must stop treating it as the servant of policy and start recognising it as the architect of possibility.

Lucy Gill-Simmen does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. The big higher education question in 2026 ought to be: what are we preparing young people for? – https://theconversation.com/the-big-higher-education-question-in-2026-ought-to-be-what-are-we-preparing-young-people-for-270208

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Kate Kane, PhD Candidate in Scottish Literature, University of Glasgow

Internationally synonymous with Scottish identity, Robert Burns is Scotland’s national bard, a status he has achieved through his popularity since his death in 1796. He wrote some of the country’s most famous poems, including the satirical ode, Address to a Haggis and the rousing Scots Wha Hae. His most well-known work, the emotive Auld Lang Syne, is belted out the world over every New Year’s Eve.

On the 25th of January each year, Scots celebrate his life with good food (including the haggis he declared “Chieftain o’ the Puddin-race”) and recitations of his poetry. This Burns Night, I urge you to read one of the Bard’s lesser-known works from 1790, Lament of Mary, Queen of Scots, on the Approach of Spring.

A figure who also looms large in the Scottish cultural imagination, Mary, Queen of Scots was executed in 1587 for plotting against her cousin, the English queen, Elizabeth I. Following her execution and the death of Elizabeth, Mary’s son James was crowned king of both countries in 1603, meaning Mary is often viewed as the last distinctively Scottish monarch.

Mary’s legacy has long been contested. In her lifetime, she was depicted as either a papist jezebel, a “monstrous” female ruler, or a Catholic martyr.

Since her death, a slew of writers, including Burns, have written fictional versions of the Queen of Scots according to their own beliefs about her cultural significance. However, Burns’ poem, written 200 years after her execution, played a large part in shaping her legacy.

Mary was the subject of heated debate among Scottish men in the 18th century. Figures such as the philosopher David Hume labelled Mary “a whore” who had “murdered her husband”.

Hume was using the same smears weaponised by Mary’s contemporary political enemies to control her public reputation. The Scottish lords at the time implicated the queen in the murder of her second husband, Lord Darnley. Her marriage to the man accused of Darnely’s killing just months after his death seemed to support perceptions of her guilt. They denounced her as a murderer and adulteress, and she was forced to abdicate in 1567.

Burns’ representation of the “amiable but unfortunate” Mary is, by contrast, sympathetic. His lament first appeared in a letter in 1790 to his friend the heiress Francis Dunlop. He went on to describe the work, in another letter, this time to Lady Winifred Maxwell Constable in 1791, as “a tribute to the memory of our greatly injured, lovely Scottish Queen”.

Burns’ sympathy for the queen was probably influenced by the popular defence of her written by his friend William Tytler. Challenging accounts from the likes of Hume, Tytler critically re-examined the evidence used to condemn Mary for her second husband’s death.

Burns’s portrayal of Mary was also influenced by his Jacobite sympathies – he believed that the exiled Stuart dynasty, represented by Mary, should be restored to the British throne. A burgeoning romantic literary tradition, oriented around natural imagery and individualistic emotional expression, also informed his representation of the Queen.

Written in Mary’s voice as she awaits execution, Burns’ Mary contrasts her youthful happiness as “the Queen o’ bonie France” (she became Queen of France through her first marriage in 1558 to the French dauphin, Francis II) with her current imprisonment in “foreign bands” in England. She decries “mony [many] a traitor” in Scotland and wishes “kinder stars” for her son James.

The Lamentation of Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots by the female poet Anne Hunter (1742-1821) may also have influenced Burns’ depiction of the queen. Published around 1780, it bears marked similarities to Burns’ later lament.

Hunter and Burns both write as Mary in the first-person, describe Elizabeth I as a “false woman”, use nature-based imagery, and conclude with Mary’s defiant belief that she will live on after her death. Unfortunately, the likely influence of Hunter’s work on the bard has largely been forgotten, as her poem was often published anonymously.

With his lament, Burns cemented Mary’s status as a tragic figure ripe for romantic literary representation. Burns’ work inspired the romantic poet William Wordsworth to write three poems about the queen of “weeping captivity” in the early 1800s – one remarkably similar lament and two works that also appropriated her voice.

With Burns’s Mary declaring Elizabeth to be a lesser woman as “the weeping blood in woman’s breast / Was never known to thee”, he also helped to create an enduring trope that presents womanly, incompetent Mary as having been the victim and opposite of cold and shrewd (unwomanly) Elizabeth.

This idea has been perpetuated in works from Walter Scott’s The Abbot (1820) to Phillipa Gregory’s The Other Queen (2008). Liz Lochhead’s 1987 play Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off is the most significant work to date to take issue with this portrayal of the queens as two “mean girls locked in a catfight to the death”.

Both Mary and Burns were poets, both of their corpses were exhumed in attempts to redefine their cultural reputations, and both are now profitable attractions for Scotland’s tourism and heritage industries.

As Burns Night comes around again and Mary’s last letter goes on display for the first time in Perth, now is the time to read Lament of Mary, Queen of Scots, on the Approach of Spring and remember two figures whose lives and mythologies have shaped Scotland greatly.

This article features references to books that have been included for editorial reasons, and may contain links to bookshop.org. If you click on one of the links and go on to buy something from bookshop.org The Conversation UK may earn a commission.

Looking for something good? Cut through the noise with a carefully curated selection of the latest releases, live events and exhibitions, straight to your inbox every fortnight, on Fridays. Sign up here.

Kate Kane receives funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council via the Scottish Graduate School for Arts and Humanities.

– ref. Robert Burns and Mary, Queen of Scots: how the poet shaped the enduring cultural legacy of the executed monarch – https://theconversation.com/robert-burns-and-mary-queen-of-scots-how-the-poet-shaped-the-enduring-cultural-legacy-of-the-executed-monarch-273950

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Will de Freitas, Environment + Energy Editor, The Conversation

This roundup of The Conversation’s climate coverage was first published in our award-winning weekly climate action newsletter, Imagine.

“Observing Greenland from a helicopter,” one scientist wrote last year, “the main problem is one of comprehending scale. I thought we were skimming low over the waves of a fjord, before … realising what I suspected were floating shards of ice were in fact icebergs the size of office blocks. I thought we were hovering high in the sky over a featureless icy plane below, before bumping down gently onto ice only a few metres below us.”

This is the view described by Durham glaciologist Tom Chudley, when writing about his research showing the Greenland ice sheet isn’t just melting – it’s falling apart. Chudley and his colleagues found crevasses are growing fast, channelling meltwater deep into the ice sheet, accelerating its slide into the ocean.

And as the ice cracks, so does the geopolitical status quo.

Many world maps make Greenland seem even bigger than it actually is. The “Mercator projection” implies it’s almost the size of Africa, when in reality it is “only” about as big as the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Over my time in this job, I have noticed Greenland having a similarly outsized role in climate science. In recent years, The Conversation has published stories, among many others, on melting ice, climate-changing microbes, fast-adapting polar bears, Chudley’s creaking crevasses, the race to map the world’s most spectacular and remote fjords, and a skyscraper-sized tsunami that vibrated through the entire planet and no one saw. All relied on scientists – often in big international teams – having access to Greenland.

Read more:
The Greenland ice sheet is falling apart – new study

Access denied?

But the political stability that allows these scientists to work there is also under threat. In a piece explaining why Greenland is indispensable to global climate science, Martin Siegert, a glaciologist who heads the University of Exeter’s Cornwall campus, points out that Antarctica has been governed for decades by an international treaty that ensures it remains a place of peace and science. Greenland has no such protection.

“Its openness to research”, writes Siegert, “therefore depends not on international law, but on Greenland’s continued political stability and openness – all of which may be threatened by US control.”

The stakes are high: if Greenland’s colossal ice sheet fully melted, it would “raise sea level globally by about seven metres (the height of a two storey house)”.

Read more:
Why Greenland is indispensable to global climate science

Why the sudden urge to take over Greenland, anyway?

Many assume America’s ambitions are ultimately about oil or other minerals. But Lukas Slothuus, who researches fossil fuel production at the University of Sussex, takes a more sceptical view on the supposed economic jackpot.

Logistical nightmares

Greenland does have vast natural resources, he says, but they won’t necessarily translate into huge profits. That’s because the logistics are so tough. Slothuus notes that: “Outside its capital Nuuk, there is almost no road infrastructure in Greenland and limited deep-water ports for large tankers and container ships.”

He contrasts this with other potential mining operations around the world, which can “exploit public infrastructure such as roads, ports, power generation, housing and specialist workers to make their operations profitable”. Greenland has none of this. That means “huge capital investment would be required to extract the first truckload of minerals and the first barrel of oil”.

This is one reason why Siegert believes “economics dictates” Greenland’s resources will “most likely be used to power the green transition rather than prolong the fossil fuel era”. The sheer cost of extraction means the commercial focus is on “critical minerals”: high-value materials used in renewable technologies from wind turbines to electric car batteries.

As Slothuus puts it, oil from Greenland is “implausible even in the event of a full US takeover”.

“There are many reasons why the Trump administration might want to dominate the Arctic, not least to gain relative power over Russia and China. But natural resource extraction is unlikely to feature centrally.”

Read more:
Why Greenland’s vast natural resources won’t necessarily translate into huge profits

This hasn’t stopped the superpowers, of course. And in the medium-term, Greenland looks set to host a massive military build up – whether or not the US takes over.

That’s according to Caroline Kennedy-Pipe, a professor of war studies at Loughborough University. She says Greenland is in a strategic position that will only become more important as climate change opens up new shipping lanes, enabling further conflict in the far north. “The Arctic in general,” she writes, “will become a showcase for the latest military technology the US has in its armouries.”

Read more:
Whether or not US acquires Greenland, the island will be at the centre of a massive military build-up in the Arctic

I’m not aware of any research on the climate impact of a military showcase on or around a pristine ice sheet. But as our glaciologist in the helicopter warned us, the ice is already fragile enough.

To contact The Conversation’s environment team, please email imagine@theconversation.com. We’d love to hear your feedback, ideas and suggestions and we read every email, thank you.

Don’t have time to read about climate change as much as you’d like?

Get a weekly roundup in your inbox instead. Every Wednesday, The Conversation’s environment editor writes Imagine, a short email that goes a little deeper into just one climate issue. Join the 45,000+ readers who’ve subscribed so far.

– ref. Why Greenland plays an outsized role in climate change science – https://theconversation.com/why-greenland-plays-an-outsized-role-in-climate-change-science-274053

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Jonathan Este, Senior International Affairs Editor, Associate Editor, The Conversation

This newsletter was first published in The Conversation UK’s World Affairs Briefing email. Sign up to receive weekly analysis of the latest developments in international relations, direct to your inbox.

Fears that Donald Trump’s newly minted “Board of Peace” might supplant the United Nations appear to have been premature. The US president has touted his brainchild as “an international organization” that aims to “secure enduring peace in areas affected or threatened by conflict”. This, of course, is a mission that is central to the UN’s raison d’etre.

But António Guterres, the UN’s secretary-general, is unlikely to lose much sleep over Trump’s new vehicle for global governance. Just 19 countries have signed up of the 60 invited, ranging from Argentina to Uzbekistan. From Europe, just Hungary and Bulgaria have joined. None of the major European powers were represented, neither were Russia or China.

The board’s charter amounts to what must be one of the more bizarre documents doing the diplomatic round at the moment. Despite being set up and given a mandate by the UN security council as a vehicle to oversee the future governance and rebuilding of Gaza, you’d search in vain in the charter for mentions of the embattled Palestinian territory.

Instead it confers on the US president some extraordinary powers as chairman of the board. He can dictate who is eligible to join (just not, as we have seen, who actually joins). He will occupy the chair for as long as he wishes and has the power to choose his successor. He will choose when to meet and what to discuss. In the event of a decision before member states being tied, he gets a casting vote.

Membership is for three years, and can be turned into a permanent seat for a fee of US$1 billion (£740 million). Funds will be controlled by the executive board, selected by the chairman, with a chief executive officer, nominated by the chairman. The chairman also has the power to remove or renew the tenure of members of the executive board.

It is, writes Stefan Wolff, like a “privatised UN with one shareholder: the US president”. And it comes a week after Trump pulled the US out of 31 UN organisations, including the peace-building commission and the peace-building fund, as well as office of the special representative for children in armed conflict. Perhaps we’ll see the Board of
Peace taking these roles on?

More likely, it would seem, is that the transactional ethos which appears to run through Trump’s foreign policy endeavours will persist in the Board of Peace’s efforts to solve today’s international crises. Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff have both been appointed to the executive board (alongside, among others, Tony Blair). Kushner presented the plan for the next phase of the Gaza plan, which will focus on decommissioning Hamas.

Read more:
Donald Trump’s ‘board of peace’ looks like a privatised UN with one shareholder: the US president

The launch of the Board of Peace took place on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum at Davos, a gathering which had appeared to have lost traction in recent years, but which has this week been the epicentre of global diplomacy. This has largely been thanks to Trump’s threat to acquire Greenland from Denmark by fair means or foul. Given that Denmark (and the Greenlanders themselves) have resolutely insisted that the island is not for sale, fair means appear to have been ruled out and there was much consternation about what foul might mean and whether it would involve military action.

Trump addressed the gathering on Wednesday, rowing back on his earlier threat to take Greenland by force. But it what was still clear that most leaders are coming to terms with the disintegration of the world order put in place in the aftermath of the second world war and the dawn of a new era dominated by great powers acting purely in their own interests. Or as Stephen Miller, Trump’s ideologue in chief puts it, a world “that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power”.

It’s hard to see how America’s erstwhile close allies can resist this, writes Robert Dover. Dover, an expert in international affairs at the University of Hull, with a focus on security and intelligence, sees just how intimately entwined the US and the rest of Nato are, particularly in terms of intelligence sharing and military cooperation.

Still, he writes: “There is a dawning realisation that the US might be Europe’s adversary, not ally.” Or, as Canadian prime minister Mark Carney put it in his speech on January 20: “We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition.” It’s up to the rest of the world to decide how to face up to the new reality.

Read more:
Trump at Davos marks the start of a new era in world affairs

Carney’s speech, with its quotations from Václav Havel and Thucydides, has been much praised. (Take a look at this piece from Thucydides expert Neville Morley for a detailed look on what the ancient historian really meant by the line referenced by Carney.) One journalist even put it up there with Churchill’s iron curtain speech after the second world war.

There was, writes Mark Shanahan, professor of political engagement at the University of Surrey, one venue and two speeches but Carney’s “left Donald Trump in the dust”. It was clear-sighted, determined, reasonable and fact-based. Trump, meanwhile, served up 70 minutes that had it not been for the teleprompter you could have taken for stream of consciousness, including the usual jibes against friend and foe alike and a medley of his own greatest hits, many of them imaginary.

Shanahan contrasts the style and substance of the two leaders, concluding that: “One leader donned the cloak of statesmanship at Davos this week. It wasn’t Donald Trump.”

Read more:
One venue, two speeches – how Mark Carney left Donald Trump in the dust in Davos

Trump 2.0: one year in

So busy a week has it been that we’ve hardly had time to stop and notice that it marked a year since Donald Trump was inaugurated for his second term, promising to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States”.

He rode to victory in November 2024 thanks to a broad coalition with its core comprising what have become known as Maga voters – for his slogan that he will “make America great again”. Prominent among those voters were farmers and small business owners in rural communities across the heartland of America: rust-belt and rural communities drawn to his promise of economic regeneration.

But a year own there are signs that these people are becoming increasingly disillusioned, writes Inderjeet Parmar, an expert in US politics at City St George’s, University of London. The mass deportations of migrants has deprived farmers of vital labour while Trump’s regime of tariffs has increased costs for struggling families. With the midterms looming this November, the Republican party will be anxious that these crucial votes might not materialise.

Read more:
Signs that Trump’s economic policies are alienating his rural Maga base

Tariffs have been at the heart of Trumpian economic policy over the first year of his second term. Economists Prachi Agarwal, Jodie Keane and Maximiliano Mendez-Parra of independent research organisation ODI Global assess who are the winners from Trump’s tariff regime and who have lost out.

Read more:
After a year of Trump, who are the winners and losers from US tariffs?

Sign up to receive our weekly World Affairs Briefing newsletter from The Conversation UK. Every Thursday we’ll bring you expert analysis of the big stories in international relations.

– ref. Trump’s Board of Peace launches into a warring world – https://theconversation.com/trumps-board-of-peace-launches-into-a-warring-world-274147

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Thusha Rajendran, Professor of Psychology, The National Robotarium, Heriot-Watt University

On the arm of Swiss tennis player Stan Wawrinka is tattooed a quote by Samuel Beckett: “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”

This excerpt from novella Worstward Ho seems motivational and suggests that perseverance is needed for success. However, the word failure carries a weight with it, especially if used as a label, as if it were an essential part of someone.

Yet, in evolution, the creative arts, engineering and education, failure is a process – without which success is not achievable.

“Error” might actually be a better term than failure, because error generates variation. And this variation is important in understanding the uniqueness of human creativity.

Generative AI can create fashion models, award-winning art and actors. But generative AI lacks the artist’s drive, their ability to reflect and know the significance about why and for whom the art is being created.

If we consider creativity as a process, then in order to create new and novel art, errors, mistakes, dead ends are required. In short, failure.

Generative AI also cannot understanding concepts such as aesthetic failure (when musicians use failure as a catalyst for improvisation), or have the desire to connect with an audience in a live performance. Creation can be outsourced but human creativity and the impulse to connect cannot.

Perfectionism is an illusion

Learning from mistakes in not a new idea in teaching, but with the rise of generative AI the temptation for both students and educators might to see generative AI as a way to eradicate failure, a guarantee of high grades at school and university.

However, this risks not providing students with the experiences they will need to be lifelong learners. British psychiatrist and cyberneticist W. Ross Ashby wrote: “The whole function of the brain is summed up in: error correction.”

Here, the key to understanding the brain is not in the error, but the process of correcting the error. Similarly, in his book To Engineer Is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design, the engineer Henry Petroski argues that failure is vital to the advancement of engineering and design, because it drives process.

Not that anyone deliberately designs bridges to collapse, but the knowledge of how to put things right comes from understanding why things went wrong. Petroski also argues that prolonged success leads to failure, but this is because of complacency.

In deciding what we want from AI, complacency (not failure) is our biggest enemy. Across many domains failure is not just necessary, but vital for success.

For example, a research study has found that both AI models and human dermatologists perform worse on images of dark skin tones and uncommon diseases when presented with a set of diverse skin images. This highlights the problems of a lack of exposure to variations in skin types and rare skin diseases in both AI trained datasets and humans.

Driverless vehicles have issues with merging into traffic and halting because they do not have a mental representation of the intentions of other road users.

By contrast, humans understand driving as a social, interactional and transactional endeavour – as much as a technical one – and, so, find ways to negotiate, to yield and say thank you.

Appreciating this a powerful counter narrative to perfectionism in all its guises. The most seductive of which is perhaps the promise of an AI-created utopia.

The question is whose vision of paradise is this and what are we forsaking by not questioning it. What we do risk losing by not striving, by not making (or accepting mistakes), of seeing beauty in imperfection?

The fallacy is that we have no agency, that technology cannot be imbued with moral ambition. However, history shows us that humans can and do shape technologies. For example, the printing press was repurposed from publishing books to printing newspapers – thereby creating the means and a mechanism for a free press.

So, there is no such thing as technological inevitability. We can decide what the relationship between humans and AI will look like – through consumer choice, the ballot box and legislation – and with it all the groundbreaking, creative and beautiful mistakes it will bring.

Thusha Rajendran does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Why failure is a necessary ingredient for success – especially in the era of AI – https://theconversation.com/why-failure-is-a-necessary-ingredient-for-success-especially-in-the-era-of-ai-272820

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Yasemin Kor, Beckwith Professor of Management Studies, Cambridge Judge Business School

Consumers are surrounded by food that is highly conducive to weight gain. No one likes dieting and very few have lasting success. But now weight-loss injections are seen as gamechangers, yielding results that seem miraculous for people who have struggled with their weight.

Around the world, obesity, high blood pressure, and abnormal blood sugar and lipid levels (so-called “metabolic syndrome”) have now been shown to affect 31% of women and 26% of men. The same study estimated that globally 1.54 billion adults had metabolic syndrome in 2023.

The new genre of weight loss injections (GLP-1 agonists) have been shown to reduce weight by 16-23% in roughly one year. These drugs are expensive, but some healthcare programmes cover the cost for those who need them the most.

In the UK, they are covered by the NHS for patients who are both severely obese and also suffer from specific weight-related health problems such as cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes. Some who can afford to pay may be able to get a prescription with less-pressing health conditions.

In the meantime, prices of the drugs are starting to come down thanks to commercial competition and patents expiring. And a more convenient pill form is now available in the US and likely to become available in some other markets in the near future, meaning the overall uptake of these drugs could grow exponentially.

This might all seem like bad news for the food industry. After all, the people who are taking these drugs, often for at least a year, have significantly reduced appetite. This will amount to a sizeable drop in demand for food products. So it’s interesting to consider how the food industry might react to this – with an aggressive response that revamps food product lines to promote better nutrition and health? Or with a wait-and-see approach to determine the long-term future of the drugs?

People taking weight-loss drugs still need to get enough protein, fibre and other nutrients to prevent muscle loss and to keep their digestive systems functioning. It takes tricky calculations and consistent planning to figure out how to obtain all essential nutrients in small plates day after day. This can be a new business opportunity for food companies.

Companies in the sector have introduced product lines with meals designed specifically for those on weight-loss medications – M&S (Nutrient Dense), Morrisons (Small & Balanced) and Nestle (Vital Pursuit). There are also smaller entrepreneurial companies in the mix – BistroMD, Field Doctor, Jane Plan and MealPro, for example. These specialise in meal preparation and delivery based on customers’ needs (for example, GLP-1-optimised, heart-healthy or diabetes-friendly) or taste preferences.

Others will no doubt follow – but companies like M&S and small specialised firms are the ones showing more agility and capability in this space right now.

The shadow of ultra-processed foods

However, beyond GLP-friendly ready meals, food companies must confront a major problem: they are a significant contributor to the global epidemic of metabolic syndrome due to their promotion of the ultra-processed and highly processed foods found everywhere – from supermarkets, to workplace cafeterias and food outlets.

It is not only consumers who rely on these products; food companies earn significant profits from them. GLP-1 drugs may help reduce consumers’ dependence on such foods, but could they also encourage companies to adjust their product ranges and offer more space for healthier options on shelves and menus?

And even though recent research has shown that people who stop taking the drugs often gain back the weight they lost very rapidly, these drugs will not go away. They will most probably be carefully combined with other tools for effective long-term weight and metabolic syndrome management.

Customers can expect to spot more GLP-1-friendly food products in all supermarkets this year. But unfortunately, with some exceptions, it is unlikely that consumers will see a significant reduction in highly processed or ultra-processed foods – or a big increase in the amount of healthier food on sale.

Food companies are likely to continue generating revenue from less healthy products for as long as demand remains strong. That’s the usual response of established firms that are disrupted by technology, competition and new business models. Most prefer to take a wait-and-see approach, keeping their bigger portfolio and overall business strategy intact, and plan to calibrate a response based on the perceived urgency and size of the threat.

But, in this case, that could be a big mistake. A tentative approach reinforces the already negative image of large food firms when it comes to public health. Introducing a limited range while failing to act on the damaging effects of their other product lines could further erode consumer trust.

It could also open the door to competition from pharmaceutical companies, technology startups, and speciality food firms that take alternative approaches to food and health. These could involve even more sophisticated prepared-meal options, supplements and customised meal kits. The wait-and-see approach, however, delays the development of new products and business strategy.

Ultimately, customer choices matter – and increasingly shoppers have more options. People with metabolic syndrome are more than likely to try weight-loss medications that may reverse their health problems. They are also likely to invest in approaches that will help them maintain their weight loss. Food and health companies that make it their mission to promote wellbeing are going to be tomorrow’s winners.

Yasemin Kor does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. How will weight-loss jabs change the food industry? – https://theconversation.com/how-will-weight-loss-jabs-change-the-food-industry-273849