The Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs of the European Parliament spent an hour and a half discussing bitcoin and virtual currencies on Monday, although more questions were asked than answered.
#cryptocurrency #Bitcoin #blockchain
Category: economics
World Economic Forum Report: Existing Workforce Must Prepare, Re-Skill & Up-Skill for Impending Fourth Industrial Revolution
Posted in 3D printing, business, computing, economics, employment, engineering, habitats, quantum physics, robotics/AI, space | Leave a Comment on World Economic Forum Report: Existing Workforce Must Prepare, Re-Skill & Up-Skill for Impending Fourth Industrial Revolution
Finally, folks are getting the real picture around re-tooling and retraining folks for new jobs in an oncoming AI future. In my posts; I have highlighted the need for governments and businesses to retrain people as well as ensure that their is some level of funding established to assist displaced workers, and especially as we see the maturity of Quantum in the AI space this will definitely be a must.
“If every tool, when ordered, or even of its own accord, could do the work that befits it… then there would be no need either of apprentices for the master workers or of slaves for the lords.” – Aristotle.
Humans have such a love/hate relationship with technology that it’s almost comical. All of our own creation, once we’ve perfected amazing innovations, we often turn on them–when convenient. As the PC became common and marketed toward the masses in the 80s, a new world of automation, both good and bad, was predicted. As mad scientists tucked away in secret, underground labs began creating evil robots in a slew of sci-fi movies that we consumed greedily, along with becoming affectionate toward machines like C-3P0 and R2-D2 just birthed in what would be a continuing pop subculture with a momentum of its own, our imaginations ran wild. Fearmongers cited that automation would make many jobs obsolete; robots would begin doing what was left as an economic apocalypse ensued for the human race.
In truth, the birth of the computer created a huge industry of jobs, from manufacturing and maintenance to advanced software engineering and entire IT departments. And although it’s been predicted through the ages that robots would begin doing all of our tasks, how many of us are actually employing robots in the home or office–and how many people do you know who lost their jobs because it was given to a humanoid instead? Probably none. But still, yes, there are whispers saying that may change one day soon. And while we’ve all heard that talk for decades past, it is undeniable that innovation on nearly every level has been accelerated recently, and is predicted to continue as 3D printing, artificial intelligence, and robotics evolve–just as a few examples.
Our economy will be severely impacted as millions of lorry drivers, cabbies and delivery people are put out of work. In this era of endless innovation, humanity’s century-long relationship with the automobile is about to be permanently disrupted. The reason has nothing to do with millennials, Uber or improvements in mass transport. Driving should and will be made illegal because we now have the technology to prevent deadly traffic accidents, one of the greatest causes of premature deaths.
More than 1.2 million people are killed in car accidents each year. Last year, more than 275,000 Chinese, 238,000 Indians and 36,000 Americans died in preventable traffic accidents. Since Ralph Nader first took on the car industry by publishing Unsafe at Any Speed in 1965, auto-mobile manufacturers have radically improved the safety and reliability of their vehicles. Seatbelts, airbags, anti-lock brakes, as well as tyre-pressure-monitoring, have all reduced traffic deaths. But, until now, makers were unable to deal with the single biggest cause of fatalities: human error. We now have the technology to save millions of lives, but does society have the willpower to mandate its use?
Google’s autonomous vehicles have logged 1.5 million kilometres on roads dominated by human-driven cars. Subjected to the same real-world conditions as us mere mortals, self-driving cars have been through rain, sleet and snow. These vehicles have driven the equivalent of circumnavigating the globe 40 times, without incident. In July, Google reported 14 minor road accidents in total — but in all of the cases blamed human error. According to the data, human-driver error is responsible for 94 per cent of all crashes.
Space is not a government program; it’s the rest of the Universe. Private space business is now a major factor, bent on finding investors interested in generating profits by making space more accessible to more people. Space business pays taxes to governments; it does not consume tax revenues. Further, space business can offer launch services to government agencies at highly competitive rates, thus saving taxpayer dollars. How can they do this, competing with government-funded boosters with a 50-year track record? Simple: governments have no incentive to cut costs. Traditional aerospace industry giants have a huge vested interest in boosters that were developed to military and NASA standards, among which economy was not even an issue. But innovative, competitive companies such as XCOR Aerospace and Mojave Aerospace, without such baggage (and overhead) can drive costs down dramatically. This is a proven principle: notice that we are no longer buying IBM PCs with 64 k of RAM for $5000 a unit.
Even more important in the long view, space is a literally astronomical reservoir of material and energy resources. The profit potential of even a single such resource, such as solar power collectors in space beaming microwave power to Earth, is in the trillions of dollars. What would it be worth to the world to reduce fossil fuel consumption by a factor of 20 or 100 while lowering energy costs? Can we afford to continue pretending that Earth is a closed system, doomed to eke out finite resources into a cold, dark future?
Can we afford space? Wrong question. Can businesses afford space? Yes. We get to reap the benefits of their innovative ideas and free competition without footing the bill.
Creative way to treat Cataracts.
What affects 20 million people, robs the global economy of billions of dollars and can be fixed with a five-minute procedure?
The answer is cataract blindness. The disease, which begins with clouding of the eyes and can lead to loss of vision without treatment, will probably afflict 12 million more people by 2020, as a shortage of skilled doctors limits access to care in developing nations, according to the Rand Corporation.
Jim Ueltschi wants to change that. Through his nonprofit HelpMeSee, he wants to train 30,000 people for a procedure to remove the impairment using a virtual-reality simulator that replicates the human eye and feel of live surgery. Restoring vision to the “avoidably blind,” as the afflicted are often described, could inject $517 billion into the world’s poor economies over a decade at a cost of $128 billion, according to reports by PricewaterhouseCoopers commissioned by the Fred Hollows Foundation.
“According to many industry observers, we are today on the cusp of a Fourth Industrial Revolution. Developments in previously disjointed fields such as artificial intelligence and machine learning, robotics, nanotechnology, 3D printing and genetics and biotechnology are all building on and amplifying one another…”
The World Economic Forum (WEF) published an analysis today on the technological and sociological drivers of employment.
The report, titled The Future of Jobs, validates the accelerating impact of technology on global employment trends, and also highlights serious concerns that job growth in certain industries is still very much outpaced by large scale declines in other industries.
The report surveyed senior executives and chief human resources officers of various companies “representing more than 13 million employees across 9 broad industry sectors in 15 major developed and emerging economies and regional economic areas.”
Essentially, the jobs being replaced will give rise to new roles that people can take up.
“There are new classes of jobs that we haven’t thought of yet. Those who can curate and manage the full rich data lifecycle will be a new class of professional,” Shadbolt added.
Whether you like it or not, artificial intelligence (AI) and robots are going to be a big part of the future workforce.
Amid warnings about “killer robots” from the likes of Tesla boss Elon Musk and the way in which they could take over your job, businesses are bracing for changes to the workforce over the next few years.
In a report published Monday, the World Economic Forum estimated that up to 5.1 million jobs could be lost over the next five years in the 15 global leading economies from disruptive labor market changes such as robots and artificial intelligence.
Kudos to Manpower’s CEO Jonas Prising — with the possibility on the horizon of a world wide loss of 5 million jobs; we need to make sure we a structure in place to absorb that hit with needs to include education & retraining and a financial support structure to help those laid off and their immediate family members (namely children). And, the earlier we can train folks; the less costly it will be for governments and countries in the long run.
ManpowerJonas Prising, CEO and Executive Chairman of Manpower, spoke to Business Insider in Davos for the WEF meeting.
Over 2,500 of the world’s most powerful people have talked about the risks and opportunities surrounding “The Fourth Industrial Revolution” this week at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
The biggest risk that has been pointed out time and time again when Business Insider spoke to the bosses of the largest corporations in the world is two pronged.
Robots ‘will be able to read your thoughts within a generation’ — and hackers could steal your innermost secrets
Posted in computing, economics, neuroscience, quantum physics, robotics/AI | Leave a Comment on Robots ‘will be able to read your thoughts within a generation’ — and hackers could steal your innermost secrets
This all sounds extremely familiar to me for some reason. And, really ties in well with my recent articles on “AI holding your data hostage” and “Quantum Computing — things that need to be considered” — glad more folks are speaking up.
Speaking at the World Economic Forum in the Swiss Alps, Nita Farahany, a professor of law and philosophy, said the device reading brain activity could be accessed by ‘not good Samaritans’.
Go Hubo
The so-called ‘fourth industrial revolution’ will bring ever faster cycles of innovation, posing huge challenges to companies, workers, governments and societies alike Implantable mobile phones. 3D-printed organs for transplant. Clothes and reading-glasses connected to the Internet.
Such things may be science fiction today but they will be scientific fact by 2025 as the world enters an era of advanced robotics, artificial intelligence and gene editing, according to executives surveyed by the World Economic Forum (WEF).
Nearly half of those questioned also expect an artificial intelligence machine to be sitting on a corporate board of directors within the next decade.