Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: business – Page 297

Unless It Changes, Capitalism Will Starve Humanity By 2050

The wealth gap worries Forbes, not your usual wide-eyed socialist.

How do we expect to feed that many people while we exhaust the resources that remain?

Human activities are behind the extinction crisis. Commercial agriculture, timber extraction, and infrastructure development are causing habitat loss and our reliance on fossil fuels is a major contributor to climate change.

Public corporations are responding to consumer demand and pressure from Wall Street. Professors Christopher Wright and Daniel Nyberg published Climate Change, Capitalism and Corporations last fall, arguing that businesses are locked in a cycle of exploiting the world’s resources in ever more creative ways.

TedX talk making the case for orbital space colonization and speaker made the most detailed space colony simulator ever

Where will the best real estate outside of Earth be? In this fascinating talk, The building of the most accurate space colony simulator examines the evidence that “we can do better than Mars.”

Joe Strout’s programming career began at a young age, writing articles for “Nibble” magazine in high school. Joe obtained a bachelors in psychology from the University of Miami and a masters in neuroscience from the University of California, San Diego, but couldn’t resist the call of code and became a full-time software developer after graduate school. He now runs a consulting business, crafting unique software solutions to a wide range of problems. Joe and his two sons have been working on High Frontier for almost a year, and ran a successful Kickstarter campaign in November 2015.

High Frontier lets you design, build, and manage space settlements in a realistic simulation game. Create an empire to span the solar system.

No Technology Thrives Alone: Progress Is All About Convergence

15 years ago, Ray Kurzweil published one of the most significant essays in the history of futurism: “The Law of Accelerating Returns.” This piece showcased the immense power of exponential technology versus linear technology and became a pivotal concept for anyone trying to anticipate what the future held.

The essay predicted advances in business and technology with eerie precision, including how exponential growth would ripple through any technology that became an information technology, such as computing, biotechnology, or energy.

[ Go here to learn more about the law of accelerating returns ]

Experts State Robots Will Take Over Additional 850,000 Jobs By 2030

Tough times lay ahead for human workers. With the advent of automation comes a much smaller job market and an ever-shrinking work force. Jobs traditionally held by humans are now being taken over by robots and computer software. Now, another job sector is being threatened by automation: the public sector.

A study conducted by Oxford University and Deloitte, a business advisory firm, found that 850,000 public sector jobs in the UK are at risk of being lost by 2030 due to automation. The report also mentions how more than 1.3 million administrative jobs in the public sector have a 77% probability of being automated. These jobs include highly repetitive jobs like clerical work and transportation work.

–This report comes as good news to fiscal policy makers who wish to cut costs. It shows the government can save up to £12 billion in public sector wages by 2030.

Australian engineer takes out inaugural global prize for quantum computing

Leading Australian engineer and physicist, Professor Andrea Morello, was today named inaugural recipient of the Rolf Landauer and Charles H. Bennett Award in Quantum Computing by the prestigious American Physical Society, the world’s leading organisation of physicists.

Morello, a professor in UNSW’s School of Electrical Engineering & Telecommunications and head of the Quantum Spin Control group at the Centre for Quantum Computation and Communication Technology, was awarded the prize “for remarkable achievements in the experimental development of spin qubits in silicon”.

The prize, endowed by the International Business Machines Corp, is named for two of the founding fathers of modern information science, both classical and quantum.

Rocket Lab Aims to Win Cubesat-Launching Race

Rocket Lab is dedicating itself to launching small satellites cheaply and efficiently — a capability the American company thinks the burgeoning private spaceflight industry desperately needs.

Small satellites, some no bigger than a lunch box, are revolutionizing how people gather data about the Earth, and they might be the future of global communications.

Rocket Lab’s business model is a bit like Henry Ford’s was when he started selling Model T’s: keep the machine simple, produce a lot of them and keep them affordable. Peter Beck, the company’s owner, told Space.com that he’d like to reach a point where Rocket Lab launches one of its custom-made, small-satellite rockets about once per week. And similar to Henry Ford (who didn’t even want to make different colors of the Model T), Beck said that until that basic goal is met, he has no plans to diversify the company’s services. [Satellite Quiz: How Well Do You Know What’s Orbiting Earth?].

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