What’s not to like? Uber has a current market cap of $70bn and countless happy passengers who know why taking a cab is better than taking a car – or a bus. We get to ride at rates so low they hardly cover the cost of fuel. Uber drivers get to be their own boss and choose the hours they want to drive. ‘Low-cost is king’ and everyone is happy. What is there to like? Uber is riddled with sexual harassment, a toxic workplace culture, exploitation of its drivers and serious ethical issues. Its affordability has reasons other than ingenuity and scale. Rich with investor cash from platform capital (from Google, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Goldman Sachs), Uber burns their money with permission, for now, as a big sprat to catch a bigger mackerel – to capture all future demand by knocking out every competitor, whether taxi companies or alternative civic startups. Meanwhile our public infrastructure withers, not least because of the inability of government to tax the profits of hi-tech and financial giants. If Uber raises fares, it loses customers. If it lowers fares, it loses drivers – or relies on drivers with increasingly questionable backgrounds. If they are reclassified as employees, Uber may as well close its doors tomorrow. But if unregulated and uncontrolled, it can exploit its drivers now and its customers later. Uber is at a crisis point, currently locked in check or stalemate with government – in Denmark, Hungary, Bulgaria, Italy, Canada. And now London. Will it be able to turn the story around? And can corporate responsibility be reconciled with ‘the sharing economy’, or has our everyday life become a playground for predatory entrepreneurship driven by the internet? These issues are the invisible passengers in every taxi-ride you take. Join us on 24th October. Read more.

In this must-attend talk, the world’s leading expert on the unconscious mind, the Yale University Professor of Psychology, John Bargh, whose research has underpinned Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink and is referenced in Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow, will reveal the hidden mental processes that secretly govern every aspect of our behaviour. For more than three decades, Dr John Bargh has been conducting revolutionary research into the unconscious part of the mind that we can access and understand through experimental science. He will explain how the unconscious guides our behaviour, goals and motivations in areas like race relations, parenting, business, consumer behaviour and addiction. He will show the pervasive influence of the unconscious mind in who we choose to date or vote for, what we buy, where we live, how we perform on tests and in job interviews, and take us on a tour of the influential psychological forces that are at work as we go about our daily lives – checking a dating app, holding a cup of hot coffee, or getting a flu shot. Drawing on his new book, Before You Know It, this talk will profoundly change the way you understand yourself by introducing you to a fascinating world only recently discovered, the world that exists below the surface of your awareness and yet is the key to unlocking new ways of thinking, feeling and behaving. Reviews: ‘Professor John Bargh has been a consistently and systematically amazing social scientist for decades with his insights, observations, studies, and perhaps most important – their implications for the way we live and the aspects of our life that we take for granted.’ DAN ARIELY , PhD, Duke University, author of New York Times bestseller ‘Predictably Irrational‘ ‘John Bargh’s Before You Know It moves our understanding of the mysteries of human behaviour one giant step forward. A brilliant and convincing book.’ MALCOLM GLADWELL, author of Blink and David and Goliath Read more.