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Real-estate transactions in the metaverse are reaching record highs. We spoke with companies investing in digital real estate to understand the economic model, and why investors are spending millions on virtual property. Photo: Republic Realm.

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This article was contributed by Valerias Bangert, strategy and innovation consultant, founder of three media outlets, and published author.

AI job automation: The debate

The debate around whether AI will automate jobs away is heating up. AI critics claim that these statistical models lack the creativity and intuition of human workers and that they are thus doomed to specific, repetitive tasks. However, this pessimism fundamentally underestimates the power of AI. While AI job automation has already replaced around 400,000 factory jobs in the U.S. from 1990 to 2007, with another 2 million on the way, AI today is automating the economy in a much more subtle way.

Virginia mom April Stringfield is now the owner of Habitat for Humanity’s first 3D-printed home — built in record time, thanks to new construction tech.

The massive time and money savings from 3D printing means the nonprofit is very likely to print more in the future.

Continue reading “3D-printed home cuts construction time from 4 weeks to 28 hours, says Habitat for Humanity” »

We’re moving past the bottleneck of available space launches.

The bottleneck nature of space launches is beginning to change.

Continue reading “A New Wave of Space Companies Is Coming. Can It Help Life on Earth?” »

New anti-corrosion coating increases the economic life and durability of steel machinery.

Bad Neuenahr-Ahrweiler 21/12/2021. The power plant of technical service providers Faber Infrastructure and YESSS Elektro illuminates St. Pius Church and supplies two construction planning office containers with environment-friendly solar power. This is where the consulting engineers of the Ahr Valley Cooperation prepare their damage surveys for the residents affected by the flood disaster in Rhineland-Palatinate’s Ahr Valley – strictly on a cost-covering basis and not for profit.

See also: Economic losses from weather extremes amplify each other.

Blockchain Technology on Mars.

Can a Mars economy be established on top of Blockchain Technologies?

Continue reading “Blockchain Technologies on Mars — Building a cryptocurrencies economy on another planet” »

Some of the churn is transitory. It was hard to act on pent-up job dissatisfaction while economies were in free fall, so there is a post-pandemic backlog of job switches to clear. And more quitting now is not the same as sustained job-hopping later. As Melissa Swift of Mercer, a consultancy, notes, white-collar workers in search of higher purpose will choose a new employer carefully and stay longer.

But there is also reason to believe that higher rates of churn are here to stay. The prevalence of remote working means that more roles are plausible options for more jobseekers. And the pandemic has driven home the precariousness of life at the bottom of the income ladder. Resignation rates are highest in industries, like hospitality, that are full of low-wage workers who have lots of potentially risky face-to-face contact with colleagues and customers.

One conventional solution—identifying a few star performers and bunging them extra money—is not a retention strategy if large chunks of the workforce are thinking differently about their jobs. What should managers be doing?

Tang Jie, the Tsinghua University professor leading the Wu Dao project, said in a recent interview that the group built an even bigger, 100 trillion-parameter model in June, though it has not trained it to “convergence,” the point at which the model stops improving. “We just wanted to prove that we have the ability to do that,” Tang said.

Ironically, China is a competitor that the United States abetted. It’s well known that the U.S. consumer market fed China’s export engine, itself outfitted with U.S. machines, and led to the fastest-growing economy in the world since the 1980s. What’s less well-known is how a handful of technology companies transferred the know-how and trained the experts now giving the United States a run for its money in AI.

Blame Bill Gates, for one. In 1992, Gates led Microsoft into China’s fledgling software market. Six years later, he established Microsoft Research Asia, the company’s largest basic and applied computer-research institute outside the United States. People from that organization have gone on to found or lead many of China’s top technology institutions.

Continue reading “U.S. vs. China Rivalry Boosts Tech—and Tensions” »