Don’t tell the Hatton Garden gang: scientists just unearthed an eye-watering hoard of diamonds, so valuable it would completely destroy the world’s economy.
The scientists reckon there’s a quadrillion tonnes of diamond buried in the ‘cratonic roots’ in continents.
There’s just one, tiny, catch: the treasure trove is buried 100 miles down, deeper than any drill has ever penetrated, according to MIT researchers.
What we need to do, to prevent global wealth inequality and advanced technology from adding up to produce global catastrophe, is increase equitability of opportunity. We need to enable everyone in the world to have the opportunity to really play the modern global economic-social game.
AI scientist BEN GOERTZEL believes that advanced technologies will change the world and transform our species in the process — unless tragedy strikes. Here’s how we ought to save the world if it does …
My debate on #BasicIncome at the FreedomFest against Dr. Barbara Kolm, director at the Austrian Economic Center (debate moderated by syndicated columnist and scholar Veronique de Rugy) got a write-up in Nevada Current (article by journalist Jeniffer Solis). https://www.nevadacurrent.com/…/universal-basic-income-tou…/ #FFest18
Earlier this month, the Vdara Hotel & Spa added two relay robots that deliver snacks, sundries and spa products directly to guest suites. While charmingly decorated as a Golden Retriever and Dalmatian dog with Vdara-themed collars, the new robots — named Fetch and Jett — may be a sign of what’s next for Las Vegas.
In 20 years, about 65 percent of the city’s jobs could be automated, according to a study by the Institute for Spatial Economic Analysis. That projection may be an outlier – the Organization for Economic for Cooperation and Development, for instance, projects only 10 percent of U.S. jobs are vulnerable to automation.
Still, the highest areas of employment in Las Vegas are in low-skilled service positions like office and administrative support, retail sales, food preparation and serving related occupations — repetitive and routine tasks ripe for automation.
This isn’t news to employees. When contracts between the Culinary and Bartenders unions and many large hospitality companies expired earlier this year, protections against automation were among the topics negotiated in the new five-year contracts.
Two weeks ago Abacus examined the extent to which China lags behind the world’s advanced economies in technological innovation, and looked at Beijing’s aim of closing the gap and taking the lead in key emerging technologies.
Some techniques Beijing will use are similar to past episodes of industrial planning. Others are newer, reflecting China’s recently acquired economic strength and confidence.
By Tom Holland
“DATA SLAVERY.” Jennifer Lyn Morone, an American artist, thinks this is the state in which most people now live. To get free online services, she laments, they hand over intimate information to technology firms. “Personal data are much more valuable than you think,” she says. To highlight this sorry state of affairs, Ms Morone has resorted to what she calls “extreme capitalism”: she registered herself as a company in Delaware in an effort to exploit her personal data for financial gain. She created dossiers containing different subsets of data, which she displayed in a London gallery in 2016 and offered for sale, starting at £100 ($135). The entire collection, including her health data and social-security number, can be had for £7,000.
Only a few buyers have taken her up on this offer and she finds “the whole thing really absurd”. Yet if the job of the artist is to anticipate the Zeitgeist, Ms Morone was dead on: this year the world has discovered that something is rotten in the data economy. Since it emerged in March that Cambridge Analytica, a political consultancy, had acquired data on 87m Facebook users in underhand ways, voices calling for a rethink of the handling of online personal data have only grown louder. Even Angela Merkel, Germany’s chancellor, recently called for a price to be put on personal data, asking researchers to come up with solutions.
Bridgewater Associates’ Ray Dalio, the founder of the world’s largest hedge fund, is analyzing the social and financial viability of a widely debated program aimed at reducing the wealth inequality.
Hedge-fund manager Ray Dalio is looking at whether universal basic income can help solve wealth inequality.
Soaring global need for cooling by 2050 could see world energy consumption for cooling increase five times as the number of cooling appliances quadruples to 14 billion—according to a new report by the University of Birmingham, UK.
This new report sets out to provide, for the first time, an indication of the scale of the energy implications of ‘Cooling for All’.
Effective cooling is essential to preserve food and medicine. It underpins industry and economic growth, is key to sustainable urbanisation as well as providing a ladder out of rural poverty. With significant areas of the world projected to experience temperature rises that place them beyond those which humans can survive, cooling will increasingly make much of the world bearable—or even safe—to live in. With populations increasing, expanding urbanisation and climate change impacts leading to more frequent heatwaves and temperature rises, the demand for more cooling will increase in the decades ahead.
It’s amusing that these people know where this is headed, but arent interested enough to stop it.
The co-chief investment officer and co-chairman of Bridgewater Associates shared his thoughts in a Facebook post on Thursday.
Dalio says he was responding to a question about whether machine intelligence would put enough people out of work that the government will have to pay people to live with a cash handout, a concept known as universal basic income.
My view is that algorithmic/automated decision making is a two edged sword that is improving total productivity but is also eliminating jobs, leading to big wealth and opportunity gaps and populism, and creating a national emergency.
RENTON, Wash. — Forecasts that predict the space industry to grow to a trillion dollars by the 2040s will require the development of new markets, even with the modest annual growth rates needed to achieve that goal.
A panel session June 26 at the Space Frontier Foundation’s NewSpace 2018 conference here noted that several reports in the last year by investment banks predicted that the global space economy, currently valued at about $350 billion, could grow to $1 trillion or more in the 2040s.
One report by Goldman Sachs predicted the industry would reach $1 trillion in the 2040s, noted Jeff Matthews, a consultant with Deloitte who moderated the panel discussion. A separate study by Morgan Stanley projected a “most likely outcome” of a $1.1 trillion space economy in the 2040s. A third study by Bank of America Merrill Lynch was the most optimistic, seeing the market growing to $2.7 trillion by the same timeframe.
As we develop robots with increasingly human-like capabilities, we should take a closer look at our own. Only by learning to overcome – or at least evade – our cognitive limitations can we have long and fruitful careers in the new global economy.”
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The Cognitive Limits of Lifelong Learning (Project Syndicate):
“As new technologies continue to upend industries and take over tasks once performed by humans, workers worldwide fear for their futures. But what will really prevent humans from competing effectively in the labor market is not the robots themselves, but rather our own minds, with all their psychological biases and cognitive limitations …