Here’s a short video and story from CCTV America (China’s Public TV in America) from my interview at the Augmented World Expo. I discuss robots, the Immortality Bus, and a Universal Basic Income:
CCTV America’s Mark Niu interviewed Zoltan Istvan, the founder of the Transhumanist Party and a 2016 candidate for the U.S. presidency. He asked Istvan one more question about his “immortality bus” and whether robots will take over our jobs.
Interesting twist; wonder how many tax dollars paid for the experts?
There is a bitter truth for economists, as well as professionals in other areas. Non-experts are typically better at forecasting future trends than experts.
It has been argued that economists should be historians rather than meteorologists and many years before the recent economic crash, John Kenneth Galbraith, the late Harvard economist, joked: “The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable.”
Justin Wolfers, an economist, wrote last Friday in the New York Times on the May US jobs report which showed job creation falling to a net 38,000 in the month:
“Seven out of 10 voters fully expect another referendum in Switzerland, and the beginning of a necessary national conversation.”
A new wave of Chinese outbound investment has arrived in Israel, led by a younger generation of Chinese investors and entrepreneurs. This generation is more technology savvy than its predecessors, more focused on innovation, and will have a deep and lasting impact on Israel’s startup ecosystem.
Earlier waves of Chinese international investment were focused on manufacturing, natural resources and infrastructure. They were dominated by state-backed enterprises targeting large-scale projects and companies, often in Africa and frontier economies. Now, with outbound investment led by entrepreneurial investors who are digital natives, the emphasis is changing, and that is where Israel stands to benefit.
This generation is characterized by technology pioneers such as Alibaba, Baidu, Huawei, Kuang-Chi and Xiaomi, among the world’s most successful tech companies, on par with Western counterparts such as Amazon, Cisco and Samsung. What they see in Israel is an unmatched opportunity to learn and benefit from the unique Israeli technology ecosystem that is fast, dynamic, and lean.
On May 11, 2016, the Berggruen Philosophy and Culture Center invited Yuval Noah Harari, a professor of history at Hebrew University of Jerusalem and author of the international bestseller “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind,” to deliver a talk on “The New Inequalities” at Tsinghua University in Beijing. Prior to the talk, Harari was interviewed by BPPC director Daniel A. Bell. This is an edited transcript of the interview.
You argue in your book that material progress, for example in the agriculture revolution and industrial capitalism doesn’t necessarily contribute to human happiness. In fact, it may lead to the opposite. Can you elaborate on that?
Until the middle of the 19th century there was a complete lack of correlation between material progress and the well-being of individual humans. For thousands of years until about 1850 you see humans accumulating more and more power by the invention of new technologies and by new systems of organization in the economy and in politics, but you don’t see any real improvement in the well-being of the average person. If you are the emperor of China, then obviously you’re much better off. But if you’re an average Chinese peasant in 1850, it’s very, very hard to say that your life is any better than the life of hunter-gatherers in the Yangtze Valley 20,000 years ago. You work much harder than them, your diet is worse, you suffer far more from infectious diseases, and you suffer far more from social inequality and economic exploitation.
Today is the day Switzerland voted on the idea of an unconditional basic income. It is a first. It is historic. It is direct democracy in action.
As I write this here from inside the campaign headquarters in Basel, Switzerland, the polls are still open and people are still voting, but as soon as they close, I will publish this and update it throughout the day with results as they come in and also the results of a representative survey that questioned Swiss voters in detail about how they feel about basic income now.
For those who wish to follow what’s going on throughout the day on video, here is the livestream. Yes, it’s in German. No, there is not an alternate version where they’re all speaking English.
Market forces often produce strange quirks in the economic system, like the one we’re seeing in Chile this year: the country is producing so much solar power that it’s being sold for… nothing at all.
While it’s incredibly encouraging to see so much expansion in the country’s renewable energy output, this huge amount of supply does actually cause problems for the companies looking to invest in solar energy.
Solar capacity on Chile’s central power grid (called SIC or Sistema Interconectado Central) has more than quadrupled over the past three years to 770 megawatts – good news for the environment and customers paying their electricity bills.
“Supporters point to the fact that 21st-Century work is increasingly automated, with more and more traditional jobs, in factories, retail and even in finance and accounting, being done by machines. And they do not need salaries.”
(I highly recommend this article, with all kinds of pros and cons, spare a couple of minutes and read it)
Switzerland is holding a landmark vote on whether to give each citizen a guaranteed basic income, the BBC’s Imogen Foulkes reports.
Following a controversial top-secret meeting last month, a group of scientists have announced that they’re working on synthesizing human genes from scratch. The project, currently titled HGP-Write, has the stated aim of reducing the cost of gene synthesis to “address a number of human health challenges.” As the group explains, that includes growing replacement organs, engineering cancer resistance and building new vaccinations using human cells. But in order for all of that to happen, the scientists may have to also work on developing a blueprint for what a perfect human would look like.
In some ways, the concept is just an extension of current gene editing (CRISPR) techniques that are proving their worth by saving lives. CRISPR has already been used to save the life of a one-year-old girl with a terminal case of drug-resistant leukemia. Other initiatives using the system involve curing hemophilia and HIV, although the latter has proven capable of fighting back against attempts to kill it. This new project, meanwhile, will devote time and resources to examining the ethics and economics of how far we should go with gene editing.
HGP-Write is being led by DNA pioneer George Church, a Harvard biologist who is already working on various projects to tweak humanity. In a profile, Stat revealed that the scientist published a paper in 2014 pushing “de novo synthesis,” the concept of creating perfect genes from scratch. In early 2015, he used CRISPR to implant wooly mammoth DNA into a living Asian elephant as the first step toward bringing extinct animals back from the dead. Which, when you write it down like that, makes him sound like a less plausible version of John Hammond, the fictional creator of Jurassic Park.
