Lifeboat Foundation

Data science is increasingly being used to compare products, find deals…

Tesla CEO Elon Musk says that the automaker is working on a new battery pack to come out next year which will last 1 million miles.

When talking about the economics of Tesla’s future fleet of robotaxis at the Tesla Autonomy Event yesterday, Musk emphasized that the vehicles need to be durable in order for the economics to work:

Continue reading “Tesla is working on new battery that lasts 1 million miles to come out next year, says Elon Musk” »

Nevertheless, to date, most of the wealth generated by advances in A.I. and robotics has been acquired by the executives of technology companies. It’s time for the benefits of the A.I. revolution to be broadly distributed through an expanded social safety net.

Unfortunately, members of Congress are taking the opposite path and have proposed cuts to a range of social programs. Several hundred thousand people arrived in Washington on Saturday to protest these cuts. During the demonstration, masked agitators threw rocks at the autonomous drones deployed for crowd control; in response, drones dispensed pepper spray on the protesters below, causing a stampede. More than 20 people were injured and treated at local hospitals; one protester died of his injuries on Monday. The police detained 35 people at the scene; 25 more arrests have been made since then, after authorities used facial recognition technology to identify protesters from surveillance video.

Punishing the poor who were harmed by economic disruptions has been a mistake repeated throughout American history. During the Industrial Revolution, machines displaced many artisans and agricultural workers. To deter these unemployed workers from seeking public relief, local governments set up poorhouses that required residents to perform hard labor. And between 1990 and 2020, the federal government — and some state governments — repeatedly cut social program spending even as middle-class jobs disappeared as a result of outsourcing and automation. Workers who didn’t have the skills to thrive in the knowledge economy were resigned to join the underclass of service workers.

How much would it cost to build a city on Mars? According to Elon Musk over the weekend, it could be the most expensive construction project in human history — and cost up to an eighth of the value of the entire global economy.

The SpaceX CEO’s vision includes not only sending the first humans to Mars, but to use that mission as a starting point to build a permanent settlement. Assuming all goes to plan, Musk believes that a self-sustaining city could take shape as early as 2050.

What happens after that point is anyone’s guess. Inverse has spoken to experts from a number of fields, who have flagged a series of issues those first inhabitants will need to address. They could mutate and develop new physical attributes, they could find the city’s confines stifling and develop a national identity, and they could develop a new, ground-up economy.

The bottom line: The world as we know it — of complex global supply chains and countries playing to their best Ricardian advantage — is rapidly transforming into an atavistic place of trade barriers and bellicose rhetoric. If countries increasingly retreat into their nationalistic shells, no amount of fiscal or monetary stimulus will be able to head off the inevitable economic and financial consequences.

Global financial system.

In the 1990s farmed fish (aquaculture) accounted for about one-quarter of global seafood production according to the UN Food and Agricultural Organization. Now, with demand rising and the ocean’s resources being steadily depleted, aquaculture has overtaken wild fishery, globally producing more than 100 million metric tonnes of seafood each year.

Artificial intelligence is increasingly used in aquaculture management to analyze water conditions, environmental changes and fish status. And nowhere are these emerging fishing industry technologies more important than in Japan.

According to a report by private research group Yano Economic Research Institute, Japan’s aquaculture market will reach JP¥20.3 billion in 2021, an increase of 53 percent from 2016. AI-powered smart fisheries will account for JP¥1.3 billion, a figure that is rising quickly.

Today, I was co-host of an online cryptocurrency symposium—taking questions from hundreds of visitors. A common question goes something like this:

Can Bitcoin be used in person—or
is it just for internet commerce?

Our panel had a moderator, and also an off-screen video director. As I cleared my throat in preparation to offer a response, a voice in my ear reminded me that it was not my turn. The director explained that another panelist would reply. It was a highly regarded analyst and educator in Australia. Realizing that that she was calling the shots, I deferred.

I was shocked as I listened to a far off colleague suggest that Bitcoin is not useful for in-person payments. I wonder how he explains this to the grocers, tailors, lawyers, theme parks and thousands of retailers who save millions of dollars each year by accepting bitcoin—all without risk of volatility and even if they demand to instantly convert sales revenue into Fiat currency.*

Continue reading “Spending Bitcoin in person is easy (What happens in background is elegant)” »

After eight weeks of huge Hong Kong street protests against Beijing’s rule, the People’s Republic is massing police and soldiers just across the border. Message: If the protesters don’t quit, a bloodbath is coming.

Beijing has also started denouncing the protests as the work of American provocateurs. That’s so the regime can paint its Tiananmen Square-style crackdown as a battle against “foreign influence,” not a smashing of Chinese people who decided all on their own that they’d rather be free.

A quarter-century ago, the West wagered that welcoming China into the world economy would seduce the Communist Party into allowing ever-more freedom. That bet’s been lost.

With a seemingly infinite amount of knowledge available to us at the tap of a smartphone, we all take digital information for granted. But when it can be replicated at zero cost, how do the economic laws of supply and demand work, especially in the context of using digital currency?