Andrew Yang today announced the creation of Humanity First, an organization that will fund programs for universal basic income and data as a property right.
Before the outbreak, China’s tech industry was already under pressure from the ongoing trade war with the US, which has seen expansion plans crimped by a tighter funding environment and macro economic slowdown. A rapid rise in the number of unemployed could pose a big challenge for the world’s second-largest economy which has seen growth rates already slow to near three-decade lows.
A growing number of Chinese tech-related companies have adopted ‘self-rescue’ plans as the coronavirus epidemic disrupts their business operations.
Another important question is the extent to which continued increases in computational capacity are economically viable. The Stanford Index reports a 300,000-fold increase in capacity since 2012. But in the same month that the Report was issued, Jerome Pesenti, Facebook’s AI head, warned that “The rate of progress is not sustainable…If you look at top experiments, each year the cost is going up 10-fold. Right now, an experiment might be in seven figures but it’s not going to go to nine or 10 figures, it’s not possible, nobody can afford that.”
AI has feasted on low-hanging fruit, like search engines and board games. Now comes the hard part — distinguishing causal relationships from coincidences, making high-level decisions in the face of unfamiliar ambiguity, and matching the wisdom and commonsense that humans acquire by living in the real world. These are the capabilities that are needed in complex applications such as driverless vehicles, health care, accounting, law, and engineering.
Despite the hype, AI has had very little measurable effect on the economy. Yes, people spend a lot of time on social media and playing ultra-realistic video games. But does that boost or diminish productivity? Technology in general and AI in particular are supposed to be creating a new New Economy, where algorithms and robots do all our work for us, increasing productivity by unheard-of amounts. The reality has been the opposite. For decades, U.S. productivity grew by about 3% a year. Then, after 1970, it slowed to 1.5% a year, then 1%, now about 0.5%. Perhaps we are spending too much time on our smartphones.
Elon Musk and the late Stephen Hawking are not alone in their calls for humanity to become a multi-planetary species. But they certainly are the most visible advocates for space colonization. And while the moon might be the most obvious jumping off point to the solar system and beyond, nothing stands out as a potential site for long term settlement more than Mars.
But just how realistic is sending astronauts to the Red Planet anytime soon–let alone colonizing it permanently? The obstacles are many, and aerospace engineering may well be the least of them. The human biological, psychological tolss and survival strategies–radiation, low gravity, isolation and the marshalling air, water, and food resources–all stand in the way. And then there is the economic cost and the political and public will. In this edition of Seeking Delphi,™ I talk to former NASA Mars mission navigator, Moriba Jah, about the many challenges of leaving of our home planet.
As coronavirus outbreaks have become more threatening outside China in recent days, attention has turned to the likely damage to global output and to the possible reaction of macroeconomic policymakers. This has become urgent with the catastrophic decline in China’s PMI business surveys yesterday. The question now is whether a global recession can be avoided.
The global economy faces a demand shock focused on services and consumer spending.
Ogba Educational Clinic
Theoretically, workers have been on the fast track to obsolescence since the Luddites took sledgehammers to industrial looms in the early 1800s.
In 1790, 90 percent of all Americans made their living as farmers; today it’s less than 2 percent. Did those jobs disappear? Not exactly. The agrarian economy morphed, first into the industrial economy, next into the service economy, now into the information economy.
Continue reading “For a Bright Future of Work, We Must Get Better at Collaborating With Machines” »
In the next decade, designers and consumers will need to radically shift their perspectives on value and commit to a circular economy based on recycling, upcycling, and repurposing what already exists.
But in recent years, Americans — Silicon Valley leaders included — have put too much faith in the private sector to ensure U.S. global leadership in new technology. Now we are in a technology competition with China that has profound ramifications for our economy and defense — a reality I have come to appreciate as chairman of two government panels on innovation and national security. The government needs to get back in the game in a serious way.
We can’t win the technology wars without the federal government’s help.
While robotics and automation create a plethora of opportunities for skilled labor, they substitute many jobs of unskilled labor. Philips’ automated shaver factory in the Netherlands employs one-tenth of the workforce of its factory in China that makes the same shavers. Such developments accentuate inequality and pose severe social pressure in developed countries, which would need to be addressed by government in the years to come.
Technology can complement humans but it can also eliminate their jobs.
Lilac Nachum
Continue reading “Asia’s economies must learn to accommodate rise of robots” »
This is a guest post by Mohammed Murad, vice president, global sales and business development, Iris ID.
The world is in the grip of a coronavirus epidemic the impact of which extends well beyond people’s health, including more than 1,300 reported deaths. The fear of this recently identified disease has closed businesses and grounded thousands of flights. The impacts have led to estimates of reduced economic growth in many countries.
While the virus that was first discovered in a Chinese province has killed far fewer people than influenza this year, the fatality rate has people worried. Influenza reportedly kills between 10 to 20 people per 100,000 infections each year. The death rate from the coronavirus tops 2,300 deaths per 100,000 cases. Those latter statistics change virtually daily as more cases of the virus are reported.
