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This book explores how a range of innovative disruptive technologies is about to combine to transform the insurance industry, the products it produces, and the way the industry is managed. It argues that unless current insurance providers react to these waves of disruption they will be swept away by new innovators. The book describes what insurers need to do to survive. The main aim is to get insurers to reimagine their industry away from the sale of a one-off product, into the sale of a series of real-time, data-based risk services. While parts of these disruptions have been discussed, this book is the first to bring all the issues together and unites them using a theoretical framework. This book is essential reading for insurance industry participants as well as to academics interested in insurance and understanding the key issues the industry currently faces.

This book explores how a range of innovative disruptive technologies is about to combine to transform the insurance industry, the products it produces, and the way the industry is managed. It argues that unless current insurance providers react to these waves of disruption they will be swept away by new innovators. The book describes what insurers need to do to survive. The main aim is to get insurers to reimagine their industry away from the sale of a one-off product, into the sale of a series of real-time, data-based risk services. While parts of these disruptions have been discussed, this book is the first to bring all the issues together and unites them using a theoretical framework. This book is essential reading for insurance industry participants as well as to academics interested in insurance and understanding the key issues the industry currently faces

"This interdisciplinary collection studies the Internet's effects on traditional media. Part 1 deals with the breakdown of trust in the media; Part 2 outlines the changing law of defamation and privacy; Part 3 analyzes the challenge of online content moderation; and Part 4 considers the financial challenges facing journalistic enterprises"--

SummaryIn 2019, sociologist Manuel Castells categorically stated that liberal democracy has exhausted its historical trajectory and, quoting some verses by Octavio Paz, expressed: "Not what it could have been:/it is what it was./And what it was is dead." In this paper, we will reflect on this diagnosis based on five interrelated questions. To what extent is liberal democracy being affected by the current informational technological acceleration? Is there really a democratic crisis? What lessons can be learned from the Cambridge Analytica event? Will it be possible to manipulate feelings: hacking humans? What are the paths available for the future?

Introducing the notion of "digital expulsions", this paper argues that digital technologies in refugee humanitarianism are mainly used for hampering migrants from becoming asylum seekers and getting access to rights. Focusing on Greece, it explores which carceral mechanisms are enforced and sustained through the incorporation of digital technologies in refugee governmentality: it contends that it is key to investigate the specific harms that digital technologies generate on asylum seekers. The article intertwines scholarship on digital technologies in migration governance with carceral geography literature and shows that carceral mechanisms are enacted also through digital technologies. The paper draws attention to how in Greece asylum seekers' access to the asylum procedure and to financial and humanitarian support is further obstructed due to forced technological intermediations. In the second part, it investigates refugees' carcerality considering the increasing use of technology in refugee camps and in the asylum procedures: it contends that carceral mechanisms are enforced beyond detention and shows that these work by debilitating and choking refugees' lives and stealing their lifetime.

Until recently the regulation, ownership and governance of the electricity sector was subject to long-standing debates between those advocating for a state-owned monopoly at one end and those for market liberalisation at the other. However, this debate has now been disrupted by dramatic developments in low-carbon technologies which pose a potentially radical challenge to the centralised system of electricity and have huge implications for the nature of electricity markets, policy and planning. Within this dynamic we explore how rapid technological shifts and processes of electricity governance and procurement are interacting over time, across scales, across technologies and within the different national political economies of Germany and South Africa. We find that while the nature of Germany's regulatory framework introduced in the early 1990s prioritised decentralised renewable energy systems with a strong role for community ownership, the design of South Africa's national programme for the procurement of renewable electricity two decades later has privileged generation projects at the utility-scale, and in turn the large-scale corporate and financial actors that operate and own them. Yet as such dynamics have continued to evolve, more recent policies in Germany have given greater encouragement to large-scale projects built by corporate actors, while in South Africa, small-scale distributed generation has been installed by wealthy consumers in the absence of appropriate legislation rather than because of it. In exposing these complexities, we challenge the assumption that radical low-carbon technological change will automatically result in a reconfiguration of political, economic and social power structures.

There has always existed an interplay between humankind and technology's promise to improve our lives. Seldom, and certainly not in modern times, has the adoption of technology accelerated as quickly as it has with the Covid-19 pandemic. In the past year, the Lion's share of work and social interactions has gone digital and thus technologies have permeated the fabric of everyday life. This has created both immense opportunities and complex challenges. On one hand, citizens are now able to engage with the world from their living rooms and have access to an unprecedented breadth of knowledge. Technology is revolutionizing healthcare in areas such as diagnosis and vaccine production. In the case of tedious and dangerous tasks, we have been able to substitute humans with robots, and algorithms for our advanced computation. On the other hand, there has been a decline in trust of democracy and an increase in political polarization. Europeans are increasingly seeing that this is made worse by social media and are, in general, feeling more negatively towards the Big Tech companies. This is in part because geopolitical conflict accompanied our migration to the digital domain. It now threatens to splinter the internet, and to disrupt supply chains and companies. Whilst the relevance of technology and the digital domain is increasing at an exponential rate, much remains unregulated. The digital economy relies on the wholesale of private data; the digital discussion is filtered through algorithms that do not favor veracity and reason; and the geopolitical conflict is lacking new governance solution. We have before us a unique opportunity, thanks to technological development, to improve our lives, societies, and the international system. The question is: what should be done? This is the key motivation behind our annual report, European Tech Insights, which investigates how citizens see their relationship with technology and how we can actively shape the future accordingly. Indeed, this was the catalyst for the creation of ...