Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: economics

The secrets of the solar system can drive economic return for all.

The launch of NASA’s fifth Mars rover marks a new milestone in the era of space exploration. It puts focus on the need for greater collaboration, equity and inclusion among international partners to ensure the sustainable, peaceful and fair use of resources. Guidelines for interacting and norms of behaviour are as essential to ensure success in space as on Earth.

The Artemis Accords: a framework for cooperation

The Artemis Accords, recently announced by NASA, is a framework to encourage international cooperation and ensure a safe, prosperous and sustainable future for all humankind in space. The Accords are bi-lateral agreements between the United States and other nations who wish to collaborate with NASA on the Artemis program, and they build on existing agreements with countries already involved in NASA-led programs such as the International Space Station.

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In the last few years, countless cyber-attacks were reported globally that were linked to the People’s Republic of China. The Chinese cyber-hackers, who target the foreign networks and websites are sponsored by the Chinese government. They are highly trained and have acquired abilities not only to exploit common vulnerabilities but also to discover and even create new vulnerabilities.

The US National Security Agency’s in-depth report of 23rd October points out that one of the greatest threats to the US National Security Systems, Defence Industrial Base and Department of Defence information networks is the “Chinese state sponsored malicious cyber activity”. The report underlines that the Chinese hackers exploit “computer networks of interest that hold sensitive intellectual property, economic, political, and military information.”

In July 2020, US had ordered the closure of the Chinese consulate in Huston, when it discovered that the Chinese officials there were involved in the intellectual property theft and indicted two Chinese nationals for allegedly hacking hundreds of companies and crucially had attempted to steal coronavirus vaccine research. The United States Department of Justice has charged five Chinese national for their involvement in hacking targets not only in the US governments but also the networks of the Indian and Vietnam government. They also carried out attacks on the UK government network unsuccessfully.

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In the distant past, there was a proverbial “digital divide” that bifurcated workers into those who knew how to use computers and those who didn’t.[1] Young Gen Xers and their later millennial companions grew up with Power Macs and Wintel boxes, and that experience made them native users on how to make these technologies do productive work. Older generations were going to be wiped out by younger workers who were more adaptable to the needs of the modern digital economy, upending our routine notion that professional experience equals value.

Of course, that was just a narrative. Facility with using computers was determined by the ability to turn it on and log in, a bar so low that it can be shocking to the modern reader to think that a “divide” existed at all. Software engineering, computer science and statistics remained quite unpopular compared to other academic programs, even in universities, let alone in primary through secondary schools. Most Gen Xers and millennials never learned to code, or frankly, even to make a pivot table or calculate basic statistical averages.

There’s a sociological change underway though, and it’s going to make the first divide look quaint in hindsight.

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Initial commercial 5G mobile services were rolled out last year in South Korea, the United States, Australia, Britain, Switzerland, Spain and Monaco. Yet the scale of China’s market is likely to dwarf the combined size of those economies, negating any first-mover advantage.

While most people see 5G as a technical upgrade to 4G, the next-generation mobile system is expected to be a major building block of the fourth industrial revolution.

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“There are two critical factors in this world: time and energy. Time is the only limited resource and therefore the most important one in our lives. Energy moves everything — our bodies, our lives and even all the digital revolution that is not physical depends on energy to be shared. We have no more time to cure the world and the Covid-19 is an amazing gift to better understand the important and critical things of our lives. It is a very important wake-up call for everyone.”

As more Israeli companies continue to seek solutions to economic and environmental challenges, we’ll see more local investors deploy capital in this space. Lack of acquisitions in this space – as opposed to a vertical like cybersecurity — are one main reason for the initial hesitancy of Israeli VCs.

Regardless of social impact or double bottom line investing, Israel is poised to lead another vertical impacting our global community. This has life-altering ramifications for future generations.

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The asteroid is believed to be the exposed, dead core from an early planet, that either failed to form, or was the result of many collisions over time.

16 Psyche, which was discovered in 1852, is located in the Solar System’s main asteroid belt between Jupiter and Mars about 370 million kilometres from Earth.

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Madiba & Nature’s ‘ecoboats’ — made out of discarded plastic bottles — are creating jobs, promoting ecotourism and raising awareness of the circular economy.

Africa, like most other parts of the world, is battling a spiraling plastic pollution crisis. In Cameroon, one non-profit company is helping to keep waste plastic out of the ocean while also improving livelihoods and inspiring entrepreneurs in communities across the country.

Madiba & Nature’s ‘ecoboats’ — made out of discarded plastic bottles — are helping fishermen while also creating jobs in the recycling industry, promoting ecotourism and raising awareness of the circular economy.

Earlier this year, the World Economic Forum’s UpLink platform announced that Madiba & Nature was a member of its ‘Ocean Cohort’ — 12 innovations that are tackling the biggest issues facing our seas.

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Three actions policymakers and business leaders can take today.

New developments in AI could spur a massive democratization of access to services and work opportunities, improving the lives of millions of people around the world and creating new commercial opportunities for businesses. Yet they also raise the specter of potential new social divides and biases, sparking a public backlash and regulatory risk for businesses. For the U.S. and other advanced economies, which are increasingly fractured along income, racial, gender, and regional lines, these questions of equality are taking on a new urgency. Will advances in AI usher in an era of greater inclusiveness, increased fairness, and widening access to healthcare, education, and other public services? Or will they instead lead to new inequalities, new biases, and new exclusions?

Three frontier developments stand out in terms of both their promised rewards and their potential risks to equality. These are human augmentation, sensory AI, and geographic AI.

Human Augmentation

Variously described as biohacking or Human 2.0, human augmentation technologies have the potential to enhance human performance for good or ill.

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Featured image: TransAlta / Twitter One of Tesla’s main goals is the deployment of energy generation and storage systems. These microgrids can provide electricity to homes, relieving our dependence on a mine-and-burn hydrocarbon economy. Tesla currently has over 120 operational microgrids around the world, which is an excellent confirmation of the company’s success in achieving its goals.

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Security on the internet is a never-ending cat-and-mouse game. Security specialists constantly come up with new ways of protecting our treasured data, only for cyber criminals to devise new and crafty ways of undermining these defenses. Researchers at TU/e have now found evidence of a highly sophisticated Russian-based online marketplace that trades hundreds of thousands of very detailed user profiles. These personal ‘fingerprints’ allow criminals to circumvent state-of-the-art authentication systems, giving them access to valuable user information, such as credit card details.

Our online economy depends on usernames and passwords to make sure that the person buying stuff or transferring money on the internet, is really the person they are saying. However, this limited way of authentication has proven to be far from secure, as people tend to reuse their passwords across several services and websites. This has led to a massive and highly profitable illegal trade in user credentials: According to a recent estimate (from 2017) some 1.9 billion stolen identities were sold through underground markets in a year’s time.

It will come as no surprise that banks and other have come up with more complex authentication systems, which rely not only on something the users know (their password), but also something they have (e.g. a token). This process, known as multi-factor authentication (MFA), severely limits the potential for cybercrime, but has drawbacks. Because it adds an extra step, many users don’t bother to register for it, which means that only a minority of people use it.

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