Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: finance

Attention to all fortune tellers, tea leave readers, Shaman/ Shawoman, etc. Wall Street needs a new futurist to predict the 2016 Stock Market.

So far, 2016 has been the worst opening act in the history of the stock markets. The moving parts, and the speed at which they are changing is mind dulling. Predicting what is coming next will take a rare talent – if it does exist, it will likely be fleeting.

Investment success is really a combination of common sense, experience, and to some extent luck. Part of my plan going into the next 10 months is to review my investment thesis. In other words, define what I believed before they year began, so here goes.

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I luv it — India get’s it. You have to make sure that your IT foundation is solid first before unleashing things like AI. Connected AI requires a solid and secured infrastructure foundation 1st. In order for customers to buy into Cloud & the whole IoT, and connected AI set of products and services; the customer must feel that they can trust you fully.

By Jayadev Parida

Take a stock of the past, analyse the present cliché and frame a strategy for future. In the recent years, India’s approach to cyber security has experienced a shift from style to substance. Prime Minister Modi’s foreign policy has made various strong interventions on cyber security matters. Those interventions need to be materialised to manoeuvre the interest. Presumably, the Prime Minister Office (PMO) is likely to invest both political and capital energy to enhance a cautious cyber-strategy. A dedicated Division in the Indian Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) for cyber security is a value addition to that. In 2015, Minister of Communications and Information Technology in a written reply to the Lok Sabha stated that government allocated Rs 755 crore to combat cyber security threats over a period of five years. But, this financial outlay is quite negligible as the nature of threat is quite huge and unpredictable.

Cheer up, the worst is yet to come! One of those famous words penned by noted American author and novelist Mark Twain a long ago. This sentence is a stark reminder of India’s dawdling approach to new threats. India’s cyber sleuth may be holding their nerves for the worst to frame a robust apparatus to secure cyber ecosystem. The Google Trends of 2015 demonstrated that Islamic State (IS) was a buzz word in India while terrorism continued to exist as the area of concern. Nonetheless, interest over the time for IS’ in Indian Cities is increasing significantly.

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Interesting article and does bring into question; what is “Cyberterrorism?” In the definition that I understand “Cyberterrorism” is when a person/s or a group inflict threats or conducts activities to create fear and/ or panic across the population. Therefore, with this definition cyberterrorism donesn’t necessarily be tied to a specific race, religion, political alliances, a gender, etc. It truly is any action or activity that creates fear and panic.

Unfortunately, this article really center on Cyberterrorism tied to certain group namely ISIS. And, only focusing on groups like ISIS is a big mistake; especially when you have hackers attacking hospitals, governments, banks, consumers, etc. and in some cases extorting money from their victims which ultimately has created fear and concerns across the population. Even the US Navy is considering to disconnect some of their own systems from the net. And, 2015 was the worst year ever for cyber attacks.

And, today, China (a country that has been listed as the country where most of the US Cyber attacks are coming from) has announced that they are on verge of providing their country Quantum technology which would mean China (including the hackers) would have an upper hand on protecting their systems and can easily hacked other countries systems including those with sophisticated encryptions.

Personally, if this author wants to play down the cyberterrorism “hysteria” as hype he certainly has that right; however, I highly suggest he rethinks his position especially since in reality cyberterrorism goes beyond ISIS and really does include many hackers that the US and others have been fighting for a while now.

Summary: Cybersecurity expert Emilio Lasiello contrasts the warnings that flood the news about cyberthreats with their mundane reality. Everything’s “Big” When It Comes To Cyberterrorism. It Shouldn’t Be.

By Emilio Iasiello from DarkMatters, 2 December 2015.

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Very concerning news for the US security; we’ll see how the US responds. Remember, our largest hackers in the US is China; so we’ll need to determine what this means as well as how vulnerable we are.

http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/969692.shtml

China’s stock markets have been stabilizing in recent days after the rollercoaster ride at the start of the year. And one bright point has been stocks related to quantum communications, showing renewed investor interest in the new technology, which will play an important role in creating a safety net for the increasingly information technology-savvy economy.

The fact that China has taken an early lead in developing the technology and translating it into real-world quantum communications projects should give added fuel to the market hype about the apparently unfathomable yet promising investment theme.

Thus far, the practical application of the technology has mostly featured quantum key distribution, which uses tricks of quantum mechanics to enable encryption codes or keys shared between two parties that are written upon single photons of light. If an eavesdropper tries to hack the codes, they will immediately be detected because of having caused disturbance to the encoding of the photon.

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Meet the Nikkei Magic Man.

On the 10th day of every month, Junsuke Senoguchi has just one thing on his mind: the closing level of the Nikkei average.

That is because Senoguchi, an unassuming man in his late 40s, has built a machine that has been predicting the direction of Japanese shares, and once a month he gets a progress report on its success. The model makes a simple call — whether the equity index will be higher or lower after 30 days — and over almost four years it has been right 68 percent of the time.

“I’m so happy” when it works, said Senoguchi, a senior equity strategist at Mitsubishi UFJ Morgan Stanley Securities Co. in Tokyo. “It’s because I feel I can predict the future.”

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Why it is important to think like a criminal when developing AI as well as Cyber Defense. Recently, I shared some insights on how AI could be used by Criminals (not just hackers) and making it extremely hard for the existing legal system to catch criminals. Robots (just like drones recently have been used) could be used in many ways by cartels, robbers & burglars, killers, and even worse. This is why we have to have solid cyber defense plus stop gaps in place for the legal system to diffuse dangers that could be implemented.

ThreatMetrix’s new report has come up with several new insights from the last quarter including the evolution of bot tactics to avoid the traditional defences of lenders and banks.

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What will be interesting most about block chaining is when more countries drop their own traditional currency models & move to block chaining like one of the countries in Africa announced 2 weeks ago. I do know that many 2nd & 3rd world countries are finding electronic currency more appealing due to the Central Bank’s policies; however, what will be the impacts at the end of the day felt across the world as more and more 2nd & 3rd world markets switch their models. Immediately, we see risks with central banks; the question is where else (WBO, WTO, US, etc)

Many countries have experimented with price fixing and central planning over the last century. Right now, Venezuela’s government is fixing the prices of many products. This has resulted in widespread shortages of goods which we, as the lucky inhabitants of semi-free economies, take for granted.

Price fixing has failed in every area of the economy in which it has been tried. But while few serious economists would suggest that we have a team of bureaucrats set the price of rubber, wheat or coffee, we do have one sphere of the economy which is still centrally planned – our monetary system. This will fail just like all central planning fails. We are now moving into a dangerous new phase of price fixing by central banks. Having failed to stimulate economies with years of zero per cent interest rates, they are now discussing the prospect of negative interest rates (and some have even introduced them), the reductio ad absurdum of modern monetary economics.

Economist Friedrich von Hayek won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1974 for his exposition of how central banks’ manipulation of money and interest rates causes distortions to the market and generates the boom bust cycle. He also wrote several papers in the 1970s on how allowing companies to issue their own private money would be the only long-term solution. If people could choose which money to use, it is highly unlikely that they would go with that which is routinely debased by the government or used for wild credit expansion by the banking sector.

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I agree; still a lot of work to be done in order for AI to have a huge impact around taking most of the jobs away. Besides, with new technology comes new careers.

India’s finance minister isn’t worried about jobs being lost in the country’s manufacturing sector despite warnings that industrial robots will dramatically reduce the need for factory workers in coming decades.

“I still have faith in human ingenuity, that even when jobs are lost in certain sectors … more jobs will be created because of that increased economic activity in other sectors,” Arun Jaitley told CNN’s Fareed Zakaria on Sunday at the CNN Asia Business Forum in Mumbai.

Economists are increasingly concerned that developments in artificial intelligence and robotics will disrupt the business world in a similar way to previous industrial revolutions, leading to job losses.

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Well, Tech has Ray Kurzweil as the industry’s favorite futurist; and Economists have William White as their goto futurist.

As financial markets reeled last week and fears of a fresh recession or even banking crisis sparked panic, White was more than willing to issue yet another prophecy of doom.

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